A Map to Reach the Impossible: on rhizome.org

“A map to reach the impossible” Interview with Joan Leandre
Domenico Quaranta

Joan Leandre defines himself as a “media interpreter”. Active as a video artist in the field of independent media from the early 1990s, he won international recognition from 1999 thanks to retroYou (RC) (1999 – 2001), a progressive modification of the parameters used to construct the 3D graphics of a car racing video game. With retroyou nostal(G) (2002 - 2003) he goes on to violate a flight simulator. In both these cases, Leandre seems intent on translating a rather conventional generator of reality into a blender of illusions. In both, he detects a powerful ideological machine in the software to subvert and re-write. The Dr Strangelove of computing, Leandre loves the bomb and knows its mechanisms well enough to transform them instantly into the workings of a multi-layered ambiguous narrative, esoteric and seductive at the same time.
This is what we can see in his latest project, In the Name of Kernel (2006 – ongoing). The kernel, the heart of every operating system, becomes the myth around which coagulates a symbolic event combining travel literature, the alchemy tradition and science fiction, terrorism and conspiracy theories, programming and mountaineering, 3D modelling and satellite mapping, hallucinations and revelations. A high definition metaphor for those who love the clear air of the high peaks.
As the previous ones, the project raises a number of questions. We just asked Leandre a few of them…

DQ. You spent about ten years of your life on a flight simulator. Why? If you are interested, as the Babylon Archives cycle seems to show, in the intersection between military research and entertainment, why not choose an FPS, as many other artists did?

JL. It’s been a while of calmly going back and forward, most of the time not in the screen. You could say, one was waiting for the right moment, let things become by themselves, in a way. I don’t have a special fetishistic need for stuff like that or any other… I mean, most of the tools we all use are produced in the intersection but that doesn’t mean you have to spend your energy only on that as a closed territory for research or as a personal manifesto. The job was already done with the Babylon Archives series together with Abu Ali or Velvet Strike with Anne Marie Schleiner and Brody Condon, it was a deep immersion by the time, no need to continue that way anymore. But eventually links between what you do at different times are not so easily breakable, there’s always something there. In a given context it’s good to take the whole thing so don’t exactly know where is going to lead… and occasionally run away from your own knowledge and from the common principles that are already assumed. That warms up your attention. FPS has become a convention, entertainment is a convention very often used without even thinking what comes after the single fact of playing. That is the next step after the game, the last border of the game. There’s enough sameness around in the sense of cloned stuff, the speech of convention were every single word comes in the official dictionary, we might need some intoxication. I’ve been trying in several occasions to intoxicate software itself. In the case of the Iron Bird Song the starting point it’s not so crucial except for being a simulation software with not much words in it. Actually if there’s entertainment software that goes beyond the line of just play (the line of the game) one of them could be a simulation software. So looking for trouble again I used to feel some sort of quietness when watching aircrafts flying on auto pilot mode, I use to go and then come back and everything seemed to be the same perhaps over the Atlantic Ocean… maybe some unexpected clouds down the horizon. Time was very slow like physical time in some circumstances. I felt attracted by this artificial sense of time which you can accelerate or slow down at your will. Then I’ve been trying not to think too much about all that is said so many times about the flight sim itself… you know in relation to the historical events, which have become some sort of very tragic spectacular comedy, I only considered that too just avoid it, I also wrote about it before. I would like to forget, simulation allows you to get drunk while landing a 747 aircraft. You might think you make your dreams come true in a simulated layer next you see how ruined is your life. No need words over the world.

DQ. Putting together impressive visual output and hard code writing, hyper realistic 3D imagery and text-only documents, In the Name of Kernel seems to grow at the intersection between two previous projects, nostal(G) (2002-2003) and nostalg(2) (2002-2004). Can you tell us something about them? And first of all: what’s the meaning of “nostalg”?

JL. Both sides of the mirror are reflective. There’s a crossroad where things are in coincidence, that’s good if it happens by itself. nostal(G) main axis consists in the operation of reducing a very heavy complex software to the minimal expression. That is on a software simulation the geography is gone except for a location 100.000m high, the physics are reversed and the graphical interface is reduced and recombined. You could say it has become the simulation of a world collapsing in itself through the physical hacking of the program. But nostalg(2) goes to quite the opposite direction, it is the amplification of a modest terminal application to the level of a unknown very cryptic sort of swiss knife software. It is composed of a DOS terminal programs series base on the use of old programming resources, it is a compilation of terminal applications for windows dealing with system interruptions and archaeological software stuff such as .bat virus from the 80’s and the heritage of the early NFO and Demoscene. The main argument here would be playing the limits on a corporate software environment is just fun, not to become lethal for a modern OS but enough to be included in the black definition lists of AV applications. Some of the nostalg(2) .exe(s) are not usable anymore because of their ephemeral nature or because they don’t like your OS environment anymore and that is all about the velocity of these days. The whole series is located in this sort of very unstable context. Again, by it´s own definition the series is very ephemeral in time. I thought, better let it go, there’s stuff I compiled time ago which now is really unknown to me, I don’t even know what payloads they can trigger on a given machine: they might sleep in your system for 300 years and then sometime in the future they might wake up and trigger a great brute force event. That makes no sense, I love it. Most of those small modules are existing in the system as they are the system running mad. The consecutive fear is the usual approach to computers for most of the people around. Some of nostalg(2) is very much related to the recovery and assembling pieces of almost vintage C code written by others, those you can find in forums. Others are written from scratch with the goal of compromising data itself. The series looks backward to understand forward, the roll of the programmer here would be something closer to the practice of an archaeologist collecting forgotten data.
nostalg starts before transformation, some sort of memory of something which will never be the same anymore, not even in a descriptive or metaphoric way. The whole thing would be about a mood, it’s not so much about the construction of a transparent conceptual icon but about the memory of instants gone… remembering those winter rainy days in the screen… like to transfer something from the times when computing was just an impossible dream, when hard drive space still did matter so to speak.

DQ. I would rather say that your “user unfriendly” approach must be understood in this context. I mean, usually “user friendship” is just a way to control the user, and the way he interfaces with the work. Since retroyouRC, all your work can be accessed under a huge frame of information, code, apparently useless tutorial, fragments of narrative. The user must navigate a lot, understand what’s noise and what’s information, put together the pieces and build up his own narrative. Am I right?

JL. Of course this sort of friendship is very often the worse enemy for the average computer user, specially if we talk about this euphoric understanding of technology where the machine is promised to be almost self sufficient. You get the promise that comes from the monopoly of the “happy software” industries, your OS will do it all for you, this perception has become massive. It should be refused by all means. Now you got millions of almost blind, bewildered users and that is one of the problems when trying to migrate to an open source OS for instance… then you are the driver, not the machine… she is waiting for your input. The illusion is gone. We should not forget the times when using a computer was something for specialists, now millions are siting there for hours most of the time with fear or at least ignorance of what they are really dealing with. Perhaps in this context unfriendly means to be aggressive against the main stream corporate monopoly of computer interfaces. Confusion and fear is the common rule, confusion is part of the story as the story is sometimes just noise, the unthinkable mess leading to the open air. Let it exist by itself, some unfinished stuff here and there which one recovers after years. You then find what is there as something circumstantial but not casual. All together would work as a container hosting data which reflects some sort of cryptic anti-pessimism in strong opposition to a euphoric permanently updated world. It might look as some ironic approach when very often these days irony is counter-revolutionary. The key could just be to keep a real exalted consciousness which allows you to develop your life in a state of permanent observation and then participation. All of course with the goal of not to capitulate to mono culture in a moment when mainstream and counter imagery is so mixed that it conforms into one single mass self-consumed environment. Yes, they should take their own conclusions… about learning to navigate the mess.

DQ. nostal(G), like retroyouRC, has often been described as an aesthetic subversion: you take a game - being it a car racing or a flight simulator - and you turn it into a futuristic painting. Can you explain the work from an aesthetic point of view?

JL. It might be convenient not to understand things only from either an aesthetically or conceptual point of view, it could be that this duality is a convention with a visible path to follow. You go climbing not looking for the summit but for the time when you cross the fixed track without ropes and then you are confronted with the fact you should pay 100% attention to every single segment of your way. It’s not so much about going up or down or side to side so to speak but to just load yourself with a good amount of serenity otherwise one would be in danger, specially when a single direction is assumed as the only one possible, without considering other options. This attitude would probably be crucial nowadays when being there the first one is in my opinion not the first objective anymore as more people would be behind you, as more people will get there sooner or later. Eventually not everyone is ready for this sort of approach but everyone should if we really wish to keep in health what we have in this world. So those mutations of corporate software come with a main implication: the single act of reversing a preexisting object, aesthetic comes later as an enjoyable game which could never happen at all before, which is one of the thousand possible consequences of the intervention and that is consecutive with the nature of computing, that one which cancels the input from the player and makes the machine run by itself. That is for me where the real game starts, after discovering how to ride the software out of the track. The so called aesthetic experience is assumed to deal with sensorial perception, what about the stuff you don’t see: the mutation of the structure of the program, the names of the files, the reversed .exe application, the physics of the software… all of this decoding and recoding experience… and yes that is less common to notice and understand, perhaps because of this monochrome approach to the machine-bunker. The touristic approach to the machine.

DQ. In In the Name of Kernel! there is a shift from previous projects, in the way you seem to leave the formal subversion of the software engine, and you are more interested in using it to create a narrative, a complex, fictional world. Can you explain us what you did with the Microsoft Flight Simulator?

JL. Again, I don’t see how to draw the limit between formal or beyond formal. retroyouRC was in the first place the interruption of a given entertainment software in the sense of letting the program go beyond the mainstream standards. Even more with retroyou nostal(G) the flight seem reduction project. In general we should avoid absolute slogans such as Art-Life which I think tend to fall in a academic terminology far from the physical or spiritual direct experience. That could be for instance the moment when you don’t know were to locate yourself then you learn to identify the trends and decide where to position yourself, if you don´t have a personal direct approach you don’t get it. About that, about trends and the fast consumption update, there is always a risk using tools that are dictated by the main streams. Probably we all take a risk, sometimes without even noticing it. Someone should learn to say no. And after all what is a formal subversion, it is either a subversion or not at all. So, I tend to believe in long term projects which sometimes are unfinished by the will of taking a good time to think and review what you do and of course by its own nature, because the goal would not be to produce an objectual product but to use it as a transport for understanding and to overcome things or of course you need money then sell good stuff. Time makes things go into their corresponding location. I guess it’s all about a balance, the narrative is always been there in opposition to the self running machine. Narrative creates an additional mood and a context in which other elements can exist, but it also exists by itself and it’s part of all this unknown perhaps organic structure. It’s been a while to really so to speak finish In the Name of Kernel! Song of the Iron Bird. One has been waiting for the right moment… too many variables could make the job evolve into a boring pyrotechnical exercise. First of all I learnt how to fly the big heavy birds and so recorded some of the best landings and takeoffs, then I reprogramed all flying aircrafts in the world to fly routes inside a given closed relatively small area. Thousands of aircrafts randomly flying over an empty land of may be 50.000 square meters. By the time aircrafts did lost it’s geometry in the way and became powerful flashing lights. So airplanes are only light emitters, big heavy ships and other weird stuff is falling from the sky over high resolution satellite data. Anomalies are everywhere in the Song of the Iron Bird. Locations are not casual but they are all intoxicated. In the Name of Kernel! Song of the Iron Bird puts together some weird distant representation layers all included in the original program, impossible events and unknown landscapes, it is the documentation of a software transformation which takes the form of a highly calm energetic mood.

DQ. Coming to the narrative dimension, In the Name of Kernel! is a complex hypertext in which mountaineering, autobiography, personal data, collected data, conspiracy theories, hermetic tradition all mix together. In the text written for the project, you – well, Mr. Kubasik – use some terms of the programming culture, such as “kernel”, “systray”, “wipe”, “shred”, “render”, “firewall” to name places and characters: the Kernel Peak, the Great Ice-Fire Wall, the Great Systray Glacier. I read it as a reverse engineering on Duchamp’s Great Glass: instead of using a chocolate grinder to tell a mystical/alchemical event, you use a mythological narrative as a metaphor of a computational process. Probably you’ll answer “no” but… can you help us to get into this metaphor?

JL. It is a map to reach the impossible. Thanks to Julie and Kurt, Reinhold, Herman and Juanito among many others who helped a lot in the last times with their visions. And thanks to Robert and Beni with whom we did and still do some climbing while my computer is rendering back there in the absurd city of Barcelona. Without them this mad representation of nature would have been impossible. I always wanted to climb a big mountain and still I dream every single day on this feeling of absolute peace when your body is so exhausted you almost are done. I remember last summer we were climbing a modest 3.400m mountain, there was a turn over the remains of the glacier and then you could see the summit peak… all those very tiny people slowly climbing the 45 to 50 degree final summit ramp… there was at least fifty people there going up… I was frozen, marked by this picture and by the fact of your own transformation when you reach your limit in a spiritual or physical way. We all missed the train. The Kernel Peak is a celebration of this instants when going beyond seems almost impossible, when there is a line of so many people going nowhere, when you forget why you are there (in the case you had before a reason at all to be there). I dreamed then on rendering a huge impossible mountain like Nanga Parbat, Lamba Pahar or Sagarmatha and stress my computer to its kernel peak.

DQ. Who is Kristopher Kubasik? Why, when I hear this name, I can’t but think to another strange name, that of Theodore Kaczynski?

JL. She is the one under a male name, she’s not such a myth like T. Kaczynski, but she’s there waiting in the shadows. I met Kris long time ago she promised me to write down a few words as I am really a very bad writer. I felt in love with her in a way.

DQ. In an age when “unmonumental” seems the keyword, and when, for example, an artist like Mark Napier is using software to generate a soft, malleable version of the modernist, iron and concrete skyscrapers, you seem interested in a new kind of monumentality: you call your MEGA NFO FILE a monument, but also the impressive 3D of the Kernel Peak, such as the amazing energy of the HD video, go in the same direction. In the Name of Kernel! is a monument: a monument to what?

JL. Almost nothing surprises me anymore in the sense of triggering a deep commotion. We live in the age of the ephemeral monument and fast consumption spectacle where sameness is all around, it is the the common rule and then may be someone is looking desperately for its own identity when most of the inner experience might be lost. Again, I always wanted to render a huge mountain I will never be able to climb. My only dream this days is to embrace the naked mountain and to feel a deep respect for it.  Monuments should have names behind, who needs to have a name behind a monument later in time surrounded by thousands of bewildered tourists blindly flashing at your remains. In the Name of Kernel is a triple serial project. It is composed of the Song of the Iron Bird, based on a reversed flight simulator, The Kernel Peak, a celebration of the impossible, and the NFO file. I call the last one the 7 Columns MEGA NFO File, and understand it as a monumental very small excerpt from the Disinformation Age. The 7 Columns NFO is an artificial emulation of a regular common NFO file as those have become in my opinion a very important computer history reference. It is a 150x120 cm print signed by a unique serial number. It is close to several topics related for instance to data property, privacy and identity on the net. That is as well a grotesque amplification of that, it contains personal data, encrypted data, listings of software installed in my system. It is about the limits of what is usually both accepted and banned in the society of disinformation. It is confronted to the Kernel Peak although both share common elements, although both are refereed in a way to for instance our isolation from the most basic elements in life. In this sense, the Kernel Peak would be the topmost imagery of a deeply impressive nature. It is referred to historical and contemporary approaches to the representation of nature, it is revealing its own synthetic nature. You got reduction and then amplification as opposites and complementary at the same time.

DQ. Coming to the video, two paths seem to cross the main narrative, focused on the sighting of some light globe UFOs during a flight mission: the vision from above of some relevant places, from Disneyland to Chernobyl; and a close look to a strange humanity made of puppets. This introduces another issue that seems quite relevant for your work: surveillance (from satellite surveillance to dataveillance addressed in the MEGA NFO FILE) and what we could call the politics of vision. Can you say something about it?

JL. Those are two different layers in the video among many others. I didn’t really think about it in terms of data surveillance as that comes very often out of the box and it might be obvious and understood almost as a must nowadays. I think about the Iron Bird, somehow as a glimpse of the future as much as a representation of machine pleasure. Perhaps the key point In the Song of the Iron Bird is the debris recovery from the simulator itself, hidden tiny objects such as the puppets you mention, hiding in the program libraries, too tiny to be seen, only present in some specific geographical areas, hard to see from high above. I took and resized them to a very big scale, made them visible. Same with other stuff, just took and slowly brought it to a higher scale. That is all, a balance between different recombined elements. There seem to be as well some sort of continuity, not at all a narration but a recombination transported by the video and audio streams. In words of Prefect Fatal Error: “I love my 747, she’s my personal queen. I love to let her fly automatically while smoking pod in the cop-kit. I ask then the passengers if they are into having a good ride and push the throttle forward. I take control and start a sharp descent into the landscape. There are a million flashing lights in the sky, all the aircrafts of the world flying in harmony. There are boats and cars falling from up-there and the smoky cabin tastes sweet. Passengers are now screaming of joy while we all together celebrate this piece of iron wonder. When we are back on earth we will show the picture of velocity and thank god for still being sort of alive.”

By Domenico Quaranta
From Rhizome
Editorial 10
Joan Leandre