I wanted to keep the forms of shopping intact so that people would move through the artwork as though they were shopping, but so that they would not be shopping 'for' anything - or, to put it another way, so that they would be shopping for nothingness itself. I was interested in having the artwork exist on a parallel plane with commercial shopping sites: I wanted to try to extend some of Catalogue's functions to effect change in other systems, to send small interventions outward, into the 'real' world. You could think of it as a catalogue of imaginary objects operating in a real system. Shopping began to seem like an interface between the real world and the imaginary world, via desire. When beginning Catalogue: Spring 2003 the Russians began popping out of nowhere: this work has some props to give to early net.artists like Shulgin and Lialina, as well as to Viktor Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarisation in 'Art as Technique' when he wrote 'art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important'.
I started looking at Boris Pasternak's experimental autobiography "Safe Harbour" where I found a kind of delicious fatal wisdom and an unquantifiable materiality : everything in it is a tangible mass noun that seems to contain the world. It influenced me here because it introduced a fresh & complex relationship to commodities. A friend of mine who was born very early in the 20th century would sometimes say of a thing that it was "So Russian and so full of soul". I'm also thinking of it in the context of found structures: for a while I've been working with the idea of extending the old concepts of found material and found objects to the notion of complex structures, like systems. With Catalogue: Spring 2003 I've tried to take the structures common to online shopping sites and to use those forms to examine some of the things that go on during the shopping process - both culturally and mechanically. The other concept that I think is applicable here is 'aleatory', meaning that an element of chance or unpredictability has entered into the composition of the work as it was being written, and in that chance also functions in the experience of the artwork. I think online shopping has a bit of that --the experience of floating through a metaworld filled with words and pictures leads to random associations. It's also a useful term here because in aleatory work the forms are subject to partial transformations from one experience of them to another - I think this operates in net.art generally, as well as in shopping, and there is an idea here that although this is meant as an exploration of form, the form is a little bit open ended, fickle, and indeterminate.
---- Kate Armstrong, Spring 2003
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