Pixel Patchwork: a Digital Folk Art?

This paper is about a novel form of grassroots playful performance on the Internet. In a channel (chatroom) called “rainbow” on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), participants communicate in real time mainly via images created from letters and other computer keyboard symbols. Images are “tokens for interaction,” both “art” and “communication.” The paper reports on six years of participant observation of this group. Materials analyzed include screen captures of images, semistructured interviews with players, email correspondence with channel leaders, and postings to the leaders’ email list. Despite several seemingly anomalous aspects of this art, close examination of its formal and iconographic features, the social context in which it is created, shared, and displayed, and attitudes and practices regarding intellectual property issues argue for recognition of rainbow art as an emergent form of digital folk art. ********************** “Folk art”...is the expression of the common people, made by them and intended for their use and enjoyment. It is not the expression of professional artists made for a small cultured class...It does not come out of an academic tradition passed on by schools, but out of craft tradition plus the personal quality of the rare craftsman who is an artist. Horace Cahill, American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750-1900, 1932. Folklore is true to its own nature when it takes place within the group itself....folklore is artistic communication in small groups. Dan Ben-Amos, “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context,” 1971. People who know a community’s tradition can separate the general properties of a style from its handling by an individual....Works of art are never anonymous inside the community; they become anonymous when they wander. Within the community there is no need for a signature. Henry Glassie, The Spirit of Folk Art, 1989. This paper is about the activities of an online group that, unusually, communicates primarily via images rather than words. At first glance, but only at first glance, I suggest, the subject seems far from the concerns of folklorists. In a channel, or chatroom, called “rainbow” on one of the major networks of servers 2 Pixel Patchwork: A Digital Folk Art? Draft; please do not cite. ©Brenda Danet, December 2003. for IRC—Internet Relay Chat, a popular chat mode-participants greet and honor one another in real time in a form of ritualized playful performance, via images created from the elements of text—letters and other symbols on the computer keyboard. Despite its novelty as an online, digital phenomenon, this form of visual expression has much in common with traditional crafts such as embroidery, weaving, and especially quilting. As in traditional quiltings, individuals gather to assemble “patches,” except that here, the participants are geographically dispersed and can’t see one another, and the patches are intangible and “stitched” together in time, rather than space (Danet 2003). This activity also echoes earlier forms of play with writing, including micrography—tiny writing used to create images and designs, concrete poetry, in which the text of the poem is laid out to create a visual image, and teletype art. In the first half of this paper I will summarize the distinctive features of this art. In the second half, drawing on this overview and other materials, I will argue that-despite some glaring anomalies that seemingly argue otherwise--we should view IRC art as an emergent form of digital folk art. More generally, the paper aspires to show that these case materials are a useful means to rethink the meaning of “folk” phenomena in the age of the Internet. 3 1 This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting, American Folklore Society, Albuquerque, New Mexico, October 8-12, 2003. For general information on the history of IRC, see Senft (2003); http://www.irc.org/history.html; http://www.mirc.co.uk/help/jarkko.txt. 2 For an overview of the latter types of play with writing, see Danet (2001), chap. 5. 3 For a relatively early attempt to survey online phenomena of potential interest to folklorists, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1996). See also Dorst (1990); Mason (2001). Pixel Patchwork: A Digital Folk Art? Draft; please do not cite. ©Brenda Danet, December 2003. Although IRC art has been featured in other IRC channels and networks, it has particularly flourished on rainbow on the Undernet. The full name of the channel is #mirc_rainbow. “MIRC” is the name of the shareware program that enables participants using Windows 95 or later to take advantage of color and other features not available in text-only versions of the software. Participants are mainly of blue-collar background and generally of high school education. Most are Americans living in the South, West, and Southwest, but there are also players from many other countries. About 60% are women, and 40% men. Thus, while women predominate, men also feel comfortable in this environment. All ages are represented, though the majority are in their 30s, 40s and 50s. The first leader was a male; the second and third have been females. METHODS AND TYPES OF DATA COLLECTED This ethnographic, interpretive research draws on six years of participant observation on rainbow. The channel was created in May 1997, when a group of 4 4 The Website of the Undernet describes it as “one of the largest realtime chat networks in the world, with approximately 45 servers connecting over 35 countries and serving more than 1,000,000 people weekly” (documented October 30, 2003). See http://www.undernet.org/. 5 There is no substitute for viewing IRC art deployed online in real time. To do so, download and install the shareware program ”mIRC” at http://www.mirc.co.uk; log on to an Undernet server, and then type /join #mirc_rainbow. There are two other programs that enable use of color on IRC: “IRCle” for the Macintosh (see http://www.ircle.com/, http://www.ircle.com/colorfaq.shtml) and PIRCH for Windows (http://pirchnevada.tripod.com/pirch.html; examples at http://pirchnevada.tripod.com/free.html). Sporadic explorations of both suggest that these programs are less popular, and that IRC art is much less developed in them than in mIRC. 6 More details on the players’ background are available in Danet (2001, p. 248-252) and Danet (2003). Pixel Patchwork: A Digital Folk Art? Draft; please do not cite. ©Brenda Danet, December 2003. dissatisfied players on another Undernet channel, #mirc_colors, defected to start a new channel. Some 5000 images were captured during participant observation online. Another 1500 were documented from sets distributed to the players. This paper also incorporates materials from semi-structured online interviews in summer/fall 2002 with 36 “ops,” operators--individuals who help run the channel, and from postings to the ops’ mailing list and memoranda and private email from group leaders. While hundreds, probably even thousands, have participated since the channel was founded, I estimate that as of summer 2003, there were about 75 “regulars,” about two-thirds of whom are ops, many of them among the founders of the channel in 1997. Most, but not all ops are also artists. In this paper I attend to formal and thematic features of the art, to the sociocultural context in which it is created, shared and displayed, and to the functions of this activity for the players. 5 7 My database also includes images from #mirc_colors, collected during the first three years of the study. Colors closed its virtual doors in December 2000. Thus, images collected during an additional three years are from rainbow only. Many colors participants were active on rainbow simultaneously, or moved to rainbow, bringing their art collection with them. Thus, I speak in this paper of rainbow art, though some images were originally created for colors. I will sometimes use the alternative expression “IRC art” for the phenomenon more generally. All illustrations in this paper were documented for rainbow. Pixel Patchwork: A Digital Folk Art? Draft; please do not cite. ©Brenda Danet, December 2003. FEATURES OF RAINBOW ART From ASCII Art to IRC Art IRC art is an elaboration of an earlier form of text-based computer art called ASCII art (Figure 1). “ASCII” (pronounced AS-kee) stands for “American Standard for Information Interchange,” the text-transmission protocol for the Internet that was established in the 1960s. ASCII images are made from the 95 basic typographic characters that we use in plain text across operating systems, as in email. Since the 1960s, tens of thousands of ASCII images have circulated among hackers, computer geeks and professionals, and, increasingly, among ordinary people, too. In the 1980s BBS (electronic bulletin board) subscribers exchanged ASCII art images, and many BBSs featured colored images on their opening screens. Today, large ASCII art collections are stored on the Web. Created 8 A more detailed exposition of the features of this art and its partial resemblance to traditional quilting is available in Danet (2003). An earlier report on the first three years of fieldwork was presented in Danet (2001), chap. 6, also available online as the sample chapter at http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msdanet/cyberpl@y/. Stark’s Website is now usually inaccessible because of the large number of people trying to access it; earlier versions of the site are archived at http://www.archive.org/; to view her site, enter http://www.ascii-art.com/. A partial, text-only version is at http://www.geocities.com/joan_stark/. 9 See http://www.usefulcontent.org/adlocum/dest/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?ASCII; http://www.instantweb.com/D/dictionary/foldoc.cgi?ASCII. 6 10 Colored images were created via a DOS-level variation of ASCII art called ANSI art; see, e.g., http://www.mjbdiver.com/ansi/; http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/4219/ansi.html; http://www.geocities.com/jeff_robertson/bbs/gallery.html; http://ansiart.org.ua/gallery.php?picture=151; Danet (2001), Plate 5.2. Greater computer skills are required to create and display ANSI art than IRC art. There is continuing interest in ANSI art among computer underground artists; the iconography of this art is very different from that of IRC players, often featuring lurid imagery with sexual content and violence. On computer underground art generally, see http://www.acheron.org. Pixel Patchwork: A Digital Folk Art? Draft; please do not cite. ©Brenda Danet, December 2003. mainly by males until the 1990s, much of this art continues to be stereotypically male, featuring aggressive themes (Figure 1). Since the 1990s we also encounter softer, more sentimental works, especially by newly active women (Figure 2). As we will see, IRC art has followed in the second direction. Figure 1. Stereotypically male ASCII art, artist unknown. Figure 2. Feminized ASCII art: “Teddy with heart,” by “flump” (Haley Jane Wakenshaw). 7 11 See, e.g.,”The ASCII Art Dictionary,” http://www.ascii-art.de/; “The Great ASCII Art Library,” http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/Marina/4942/ascii.htm; Christopher Johnson’s ASCIi Art Collection, http://www.chris.com/ascii/index.html; StarTrek ASCII Art, http://www.calormen.com/Star_Trek/ASCII/. For a discussion of mainstream vs. underground ASCII art, see http://www.thuglife.org/start/styles.shtml. Pixel Patchwork: A Digital Folk Art? Draft; please do not cite. ©Brenda Danet, December 2003. Both Abstract and Figurative Images Unlike its predecessor, ASCII art, which is almost always figurative, about half of IRC images are abstract (Figure 3). Whereas abstract artists create their own designs, most figurative artists appropriate and adapt designs by ASCII artists, notably, those of two women artists active in the 1990s, an Ohio housewife and mother of four named Joan Stark, and a young English woman living in the Netherlands named Haley Jane Wakenshaw (Figure 2 is her design). Figure 4 was adapted for IRC by , an Illinois housewife, from a teddy-bear design by Joan Stark. Appropriation involves more than mere copying. In this instance, the artist has established a demarcated space around the image, introduced color for both image and background, designed a complementary border, and added a mini-text at the top, “Huggles—with love.” 12 In the published version of this article, illustrations will be in greyscale only; since color is very important in a number of respects, I plan to make multicolored versions available on my Website, with the journal’s permission. 13 All nicks of players mentioned are given in angle brackets, just as they conventionally appear online on IRC. For Stark’s art, see the URLs in footnote 8. Art by Wakenshaw, also known as “flump,” may be viewed at http://www.bornsquishy.com/flump/. 8 14 In ASCII art displays on the Web, individual images seemingly “float” in undefined space, aggregated into larger files. See my discussion of these aspects in Danet (under review). Pixel Patchwork: A Digital Folk Art? Draft; please do not cite. ©Brenda Danet, December 2003. Figure 3. An abstract design by <[blu]>. Figure 4. Teddy bear adapted for IRC by by , original design by Joan Stark.