I was a bit put off by Yucef Merhi’s statement accompanying his sequence of flash works ~ Poetic Dialogues 1.0 currently online at turbulence.org.

In it, Merhi writes, ” In the last few years the propagation of Net Art has established a market for the study and exploration of this dynamic field of contemporary art. However, most of the works that are categorized as Net Art don’t make sense. Maybe this is just a reflection of today’s society, or maybe most of the net/contemporary artists are nothing but postmodernists.” Nothing but postmodernists! I fumed. I’ve always had this weird conception of words like “sense” and “meaning,” especially when they’re used in sentences like “This (work) makes no sense” or “This (object) has no meaning”; I’ve always thought they were cop-outs. The concept of “meaning,” I’ve always reasoned, is so much wider (and wilder) than common usage allows; everything means something, even if that “sense” falls outside the realm of the narrow confines of what is conventionally termed meaningful. Everything that seems at first glance to “not make sense” is a tiny crack looking out onto a world that admits much more than contemporary consciousness (shaped so slimly by corporate interests and ideological state apparati like education, church and television) often cares to acknowledge.

That said, however, I must admit that I like this work of Merhi’s. Poetic Dialogues 1.0 is a series of 18 different flash movies made with a wristwatch camera. In these movies, various people (grouped on the screen in threes) recite lines of poetry written by Merhi. The juxtaposition of the lines is what makes the piece move; in each incarnation of the screen, the user is given a haiku comprised of lines seemingly seeded at random. When the sequence has played itself out, the user can hit a “Play Again” button that refreshes the screen, loading three more portrait-lines for her perusal.
While I like the juxtaposition of the poetry itself (said poetry being pretty decent, if a bit contrived: lines like “She melts her rage to the night” are a bit too heavy on the old prophetic-poetic voice of the nineteenth century for my taste, but do tingle with a certain lyricism), I often wondered, watching the trio of faces load and reload, just how this piece fulfilled the “dialogue” portion of Merhi’s title.

Sure, it’s interesting to watch the faces, but these people are speaking Merhi’s lines, not their own, and other than the fact that the piece seems to seed the lines at random, it does no surrendering of ye olde tyrannical authorial control. And why bother with these faces, really, if all they’re contributing to the piece is Merhi’s poems? Is it the individual phrasing Merhi’s after here, or is it the chance to show off a little technological gadget (the watch-camera)?

Yes, the piece is entertaining; but, if you’re going to start a statement with the complaint that much of current net art “makes no sense,” why bother with randomly-seeded juxtaposition at all? If, in fact, an artist wishes above all to “make sense,” wouldn’t it be a safer bet to proceed in a more linear fashion (not that this work is “nonlinear”), rather than risk the chance of the output courting chaos by allowing the machine/event to determine the work’s form? Perhaps Merhi’s statement was delivered tongue-in-cheek; perhaps Merhi is really bemoaning the fact that too much net art is too conventional. But if this were the case, why does authorial intent play such a huge part in this work?

Though Merhi’s Poetic Dialogues 1.0 does seem to fail when it comes to any true dialogue between the user and the piece, it does raise these questions…which, after all, is what online art should do.