The Internet has put new venues and distribution channels beyond the control of classical communication systems—the entertainment industry, the art world. Of course the Internet is a system too but it’s sufficiently inchoate that, for the moment at least, within its context such designations as “artist” and “entertainer,” “good” and “bad” turn fuzzy; once again technological innovation has unsettled categories. To be an artist of this new medium first involves, then, innovating forms and practices that are authentic to it; these, to be authentic, will be mapped onto the distinctive freedoms the Internet bestows.
In their creative partnership Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant pursue this goal at, appropriately, both the macro and micro levels. Ciraldo has spoken of “treating the IMDb [Internet Movie Database] as a medium,” and the production model that he and Swant are constructing is indeed aggressively protean. The duo has created YouTube music videos that have drawn over twenty million viewers. They’ve co-directed two documentaries—one of a post-modern ballet danced to William Shatner’s sprech-singing, the other an “industrial,” commissioned, about prison life. They’ve co-produced a comical exploitation flick filmed in Super 8. For the past five years they’ve toiled away at a version of Hamlet shot entirely before a green screen. They contribute to a late night experimental television program broadcast monthly to the Milwaukee market. (Their decision to work from Milwaukee—a city where a creative mind can advance without concern for the approval of powerful cultural gatekeepers—promotes their production model’s flexibility.) Each project delivers as business stratagem and self-amusement. Ciraldo & Swant do not participate in the romantic tradition of the tortured artist; they measure success in the populist terms of showbiz and the Internet. Granted, in those projects over which they’ve exerted complete creative control their stuff does display a consistent look (a stripped down, Internet-friendly artifice derived from video games and cartoons) and method (they identify formal and thematic conventions of popular TV and film product, then modify or warp these to deliver something smarter, wilder and more transparent), yet we shouldn’t locate their real innovation in these; ultimately the subject of their videos and films might have been any subject, the style of them any style. Their real interest—their real medium—is, as Ciraldo’s remark indicates, neither film nor video but, rather, the vast, globe-encircling media-scape that these popular formats engage (and of which the Internet is most emblematic). They aspire to be players without sacrificing the spirit of play.
Are they artists? They appear ambivalent. Ciraldo, who brings a computer programming background, resists the art world’s elitist bent. Swant, although more comfortable with art’s aims, shares his partner’s preference for using cultural languages that can reach as many people as possible. Still, calling them “entertainers” is too simple. Their attitude toward entertainment product is too conceptual, detached and ironic. If they are artists, they arrive at their version of artistry by manipulating entertainment’s texts and tones to create smarter entertainment—a paradox, and one arising from the new conditions of the Internet, within which context it seems altogether at home.
-David Robbins, Artist/Writer