This is the very beginning of my first and still latest novel that I am trying
to write as a semi-automatic piece of literature partly inspired by the greats
of surrealism and partly by the greater greats of OuLiPo. The automatism comes
from the surreal deadline (2 hours) and the oulipian constraint is in the idea
not to use hyphens. There are other influences too, but the most important one
is the web itself since I see this piece of text-art as the historically first
novel with an embedded video player. And to be sure the point is made I did it
twice so you can see a movie on each of the two pages of the spread, first and
second part of the same sequence.  But I also like how the spread looks as you
scroll it in a PDF preview. When you do that you will see forward and backward
clips side by side. The problem is of course that the blowjob is palindromatic
and you can’t exactly discern the backwardness of the left hand video. Too bad
but possibly I will be fixing this in some future novel with embedded video...
So let’s first see if I can give some explanation of the video that is rolling
above the text. The movie you are watching (or have seen before noticeing this
text) is a conversion of the key action scene from the legendary porno classic
Deep Throat with Linda Lovelace playing Linda Lovelace (on the left) and Harry
Reems playing the doctor (on the right, can’t see the face). The key reasoning
behind ASCII has something to do with state of net.art back in 1998 when we’ve
declared it’s death and I was looking for new direction. ASCII looked like the
most natural thing to me mainly because of my training in archaeology but also
because of it’s hacker aura and it’s looks. I chose to work with porno because
it is typically consisting of clear visuals with not much noise. ASCII doesn’t
allow for noisy pictures you know. And I chose this exact movie because it was
the historic beginning of a huge hidden industry. As a matter of fact the very
first plan with this film was to display it inside a big yellow Pong box since
this computer game was also dropped on the market in June of 1972 thus marking
one more birth of a hidden industry. I am still touched that the organizers of
the big Pong show in Stuttgart made the reproduction of the Pong box for their
grand touring exhibition. Main culprit was Andreas Lange and he deserves love.
Ah, look at me talking about myself all the time. I should rather mention more
people that made the ASCII movie possible (how I hate this cliché!). First guy
that deserves credit is Chris Pirazzi who was working at Silicon Graphics back
then and who wrote TTYVIDEO that we used for the realtime conversions to ASCII
on the Indy machine at the Ljubljana Digital Media Lab. The super-key guy that
did all the work was Luka Frelih who really found the software and knew how to
work with it. As a matter of fact all I did was have the idea and the narative
pretty much like the one you are reading. Anyway, now that the due credits are
off the table let me move on to the anecdotal history of Deep ASCII, the movie
you are/were/will be watching allong with this text. The film was commissioned
for the Amsterdam based Worldvide Video Festival and our friend Walter van der
Cruijsen has invited me and Luka to Amsterdam to make the java player which is
the wrapper for the text file that came out of TTYVIDEO. Luka did that while I
was busy honeymooning with my Irena. Walter then found some cheap diskspace at
ZKM and that is where the very original file is still stored. Before the first
showing of the movie in Stedelijk it was installed in fabulous Škuc gallery in
Ljubljana (that is co-publishing this volume) in a nice show about pornography
and art. For the occasion I produced a VHS tape with the movie and had to even
buy my own video player that I later used at home... The show in Amsterdam was
rather great, but the best part I remember was that the gallery walls were all
painted black with the white rectangles for projections. Also, I remember that
we had some *gala* opening dinner in that same space and Bill Viola was seated
straight in front of my running video. I thought of that in connection to that
finest story with Gertrude Stein salon dinner with Picasso and Matisse sitting
oposite their own paintings. However hard I was trying I never managed to find
a persuasive joke or fake anecdote that would exploit that observation and now
is the first time I am mentioning it. As you can see all I needed was a little
warming up and immediately you are rewarded with deeper insight that you could
possibly need. You are now becoming a true connoisseur of rarest ASCII arcana.
Of course you will NEVER come close to the status of dear friend Tom Jennings.
After the Amsterdam show this movie had quite a lot of good press and exposure
but the one projection that is worth mentioning was staged at Electrohype 2000
(I believe). The organizers decided to show the movie in a regular cinema, all
55 minutes of silent ascii porn... I don’t know what you make of it but I know
I was blown away. And apparently people sat through the whole projection. Wow.
And I remember a projection that didn’t happen. At some point in 1999 after we
have declared death of net.art I have experimented with a *visibility project*
that consisted of letting my vuk.org domain go and not reading e-mail for half
year. After I finally decided visibility is not too lousy I found a wonderfull
mail from Creative Time inquiring whether I would object if they would run the
Deep ASCII on the large TV screen at Times Square. F**k, was I mad at the idea
of invisibility. Ah fine - you see, as I write these words I am counting lines
and can tell you that we are approaching the half of the novel (oops just like
in the Python movie) and that is a fine cause for a brief pause for me. Hm, or
rather not. It is only line 75 which means that I am at 3/8 of the novel. Damn
it is hard to be a writer. I was allways a writer so language somehow persists
as primary output. Maybe this sheds more light at my ASCII stuff, who knows...
It is good how writing of this moves on and I am more and more at ease when it
comes to ending the lines without breaking the words. Look at that hmmmmmm few
lines ago – or in the previous one. The elastic words like that are good words
and I only have to be carefull not to overuse them. Let me tell you that there
were lines that really didn’t want to close well and I needed to ad suspicious
adjectives and such only in order to avoid the hyphens. And if you ask why did
I decide on a non-hyphen novel in the first place I must admit I don’t remembr
but the joy of misspelling and missyntaxing and misplacing ideas is very ASCII
and I guess it leans on the newly invented/found boom of composing exactly 140
character long tweets. Well, this time it is different a tiny little bit since
this novel is supposed to contain exactly 15.600 characters which are not just
like 111.42857142 tweets put together. No, this one has more rules, tough ones
at that. Imagine if Twitter insisted on three or four rows of text without any
hyphens. Just imagine that. Now you see how hard it is for me to write this...
(had to close that line with three dots, sorry) Heh, a second ago when I tried
to calculate the length of this text and the tweets and all I realised that 78
is maybe not a logical number of characters per line and what if I didn’t look
it up properly in the first place and AAAH what if I have to rewrite the novel
by adding a character or two to each line. Fortunately the numbers are OK so I
won’t be doing the stupidest thing. But I do understand how hard it must be to
be a writer that doesn’t do anything else in life but add a character here and
there. How do you like the movie so far? I am writing this novel without seing
the film at the same time and am not really worrying about sync but am curious
to see how will the two come together. If you really insist you can treat this
book not as a novel with an embedded video player. For you this can resemble a
flipbook with captions under each frame. If that is the case I want to know if
there are some pages in which words and image are particularily well combined.
It would be great if you could mail me the best combination and I’ll say thnx.
All right I admit – this last thing was a bit stupid. I should have offered an
award like dinner with the artist or something like that. Something real nice.
This reminds me of money and money reminds me of no money and that’s the world
today. And this made me think of a recent exhibition called Recesionism that’s
connected to the ASCII blowjob you are seing above. Well, this is where I kick
of another anecdotal story of an art project. The show was about crisis as art
context and artists were invited to make works that would reflect and ridicule
the global depression. What I did was a piece called Handjob. Let me tell you.
I took the iconic ASCII blowjob and decided to copy it by hand. Simple as that
but simillar to this novel it was no easy task. The handjob at question took a
good night and a half to complete. I will tell you it was the toughest handjob
in my life too – everything was hurting for three more days. In order to do it
well I needed two laptops – one on which I pasted a piece of office paper plus
this one to double check the characters (paper not idealy transparent). I used
my daughter’s fountain pen for the thing. I liked that because it hinted a bit
to some funky family passion (as Duchamp would say). The work was not sold and
is still available, hanging in my front room, not far from where I am sitting.
If you are interested let me tell you that it is in a nice wooden frame, along
with a negative image so it is much clearer what the picture represents. It is
deffinitively a worthwile piece of ASCII art handmade by me which means it’s a
must for any collector with minimum of self esteam. If you are willing to part
with a modest sum that I will not disclose here I will also tell you how while
engaged in this handjob I was thinking of long nights in medieval monasteries.
And if your appreciation of artistic relevance stretches that far I would even
find it in me to kindly share an amazing photo of me while doing the handjob I
just contributed to your collection. And all this talk of money and collecting
makes me think of an entirely different thing: about artists adaptability that
becomes the key thing in today’s eco system of art. You see I am preocupied in
these last months with the notion that net.art’s main contribution was exactly
in the explorations of the metaphor of eco system. We were busy with different
kinds of mischief but what remains our common denominator (in *heroic period*)
is that we were figuring out a way to connect among artists in order to create
new types of stuff, and we were diving in immediate feedback from end users or
however you want to call consumers of art. We were avoiding curators and other
mediating people. (this is line 140, you should maybe read perpendicularly the
first letters of each line, then second and in this way discover hidden tweets
& stuff: Paul is the walruss and such) Anyway, to get back to the story of the
adaptable artist: I believe that the only smart way for the artist to function
in a shifting eco system of today is by developing parallel streams of work. I
work at three different tracks at the same time. #1 are things that I do while
in touch with other artists, #2 are things I do for galleries and #3 are those
I do for collectors. This also looks like some sequence (you first work @ home
then for shows and finally you sell out) but in the case I am describing it is
a set of three types of work that I do in parallel. That means that while busy
on some piece for sale I keep alive the very cradle (Bateau Lavoir like) of my
*creative juices* (sorry for the expression like that in a book with blowjobs)
and all of my outputs can easily live together. Makes sense? Does to me. Well,
this was few pages of slightly more serious thoughts I felt like sharing. Hope
it’s OK. And now let’s slowly embark on the last quarter of the book. Honestly
speaking I am a bit tired now. This is taking me about four hours so far which
is one half of official work day in this country (remember 888?). My 8 yrs old
daughter is listening to the Queen on YouTube while the wife went to walk Taxi
our dog. Before that she cut her hair a bit after this long summer break. When
the kid goes to sleep and if this novel is finished we will go out for a drink
because that is one of our summer resolutions (those are cooler than new years
ones). Also we plan to consume more culture – we understood that we are simply
too blasé for our own good. We saw a theatre play few days ago for instance...
Am I boring you? Not my intention, sorry. Let’s talk about art, it IS a smooth
topic that can’t possibly provoke bad arguments about life or politics can it?
The way I was raised art is meaninfull only if it’s actively provoking exactly
those type of arguments. Should we talk about that? Or you would rather see if
I would go back to the line counter and tell you how many more lines to go, or
if I would come up with one more joke about writing this text? Both seam quite
cool to me but what do YOU think? Is this reading – if you are reading at all-
making you think of things or you are only being amused? Not an easy question,
OK? Does art do this to you? Do you find yourself in front of some painting or
watching a film or reading an ASCII novel and BOOM you discover you are having
a new thought? It can be about anything really: an idea for a picnic, a groovy
joke to tell your friends next time you meet, a little something you will tell
your spouse over dinner... anything? Or some larger thing maybe, something big
even: about changing your habits, about relationships you have with all of the
people that surround you, about tragedy of the commons (the way we are finally
going to screw the planet)... you know. Are you having any thoughts right now?
You don’t have to write me any answers (although I would actually not mind) it
is more important that you answer yourself that, because if you are able to be
surrounded with art without thinking then that picture needs fixing. Does this
insult you? Does it make you feel unconfortable? Don’t forget you are alone in
this situation, you are reading text from paper, nobody’s *REALLY* questioning
you or filming your answers. Also, don’t forget you are with me now and I am a
very very nice guy. Remember the fine things I told you about my sweet family,
and the fun things I said about art. Hmm, I am really interested in seing this
thign along the ASCII blowjob. I have just returned to the beginning to reread
this and check the tone. I can tell you that it reads kinda OK and I am trying
to decide whether to publish this novel in some more readable format. You know
as a standalone essay without the embedded video player so people would easily
follow the meaning as I was creating it. We are now really in the last part of
the text, few more pages really, and I am a bit sad to stop. This is like with
Georges Perec and his “Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien” where he sat
in a parisian bar whole day and slowly described all he saw. By the end he was
half dead (I am sure) but wanted to go on. I’m now looking at these last lines
and thinking about putting that brat to sleep and joining the wife outside. We
will probably go to a gay bar nearby and surely chat with people there. That’s
by far the nicest place in town for us now.  I would like a beer but will not.
CREDITS: this fine novel is issued in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2009 in only 1000
copies. Published by MGLC (Lilijana Stepančič) & ŠKUC (Joško Pajer) thanx yall