Postmasters: Ken Feingold

Ken Feingold (www) / JCJ-Junkman

Originally created for the CD-ROM publication "artintact3", to be published in 1996 by ZKM Karlsruhe and Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern with an essay on this work by Erkki Huhtamo. The central figure on the screen is the image of the ventriloquist puppet-head I used in an earlier work, "Jimmy Charlie Jimmy" (1992), a worn-out relic with a glazed eye and peeling skin. The initial screen reveals this head floating against black, surrounded by a whirling storm of ever-changing, appearing and disappearing "buttons" of many varieties. If one manages to "click" on one of the buttons, a piece of concrete sound is heard, and the puppet head begins to speak, moving his mouth and repeating phrases. Sometimes a click will silence him. There is no beginning and no end, no other levels, no score. It is "interactivity" reduced to a zero-degree, as thousands of narrative fragments displace each other, fueled by a raw desire to "get something".

All of the "buttons" and sounds in the work were made from archive files found on the Internet - debris, more or less. The choices presented are made significant only by one's ability, or inability, to catch them. The emotion produced is that any choice will do, and so the work becomes a very peculiar game. Through this coming together of clicking mania and network debris, one finds his speech patterns evoking something like a "personality", but since there is no fixed voice, it is something of a meta-personality, a cutup. Its program is driven by approximations of randomness.