July 8, 2002 Sept. 11 Attack, Depicted With Electronic 'Pigment' By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
After a day off, the Internet artist Eryk Salvaggio returned to the electronics superstore in Salem, N.H., where he was working as a television salesman. It was Sept. 12, and he was immediately immersed in a sea of TV screens — 126 of them, by his count — that were tuned to news reports of Sept. 11. Every few minutes, he was surrounded by scenes of a jet crashing into the World Trade Center. Mr. Salvaggio said that the repeated showings of the video inured him to its full horror. He became desensitized, he said, and "I had this feeling that I shouldn't be feeling that." So he began to consider how he might restore a sense of human tragedy to what, through media overload, had been reduced to just another video clip for him. "There had to be a way of connecting this image to what it actually meant," he said. Mr. Salvaggio's solution can be found in "September 11th, 2001," a powerful digital artwork that he put online last month in the Net-art section of his nonsensically titled Web site, www.salsabomb.com. The new work is based on a sequence of 20 still frames taken from a video of the United Airlines jet flying into the World Trade Center's south tower. To reclaim the imagery's human dimension, Mr. Salvaggio has digitally composed each frame not from tiny dots of color, as is usually done, but from names culled from a list of the 2,800 dead and missing victims of the New York attacks. For each video frame, the screen is striped with 55 horizontal rows of 10 names, and Mr. Salvaggio used computer software to color segments of individual letters, recreating each scene. While it may appear that the grid of names has been superimposed on the video image, the tinted segments of each letter actually rebuild the image for the eye. Thus, as the frames automatically advance, the speeding plane, the smoking tower and the yellow flames of the underlying video are readily discerned. But it is the victims' names that stand out. This may sound like digital pointillism, but the overall effect is closer to concrete poetry, in which words are arranged into shapes on a page in order to augment their meaning. A poem about rain, for instance, may be presented in the form of a water droplet. Here, though, the names emerge from the twisted steel and pulverized concrete of the World Trade Center to form a visual elegy. Relatively few online projects have been inspired by Sept. 11, and Mr. Salvaggio's work is among those that are as much art as memorial. As the nation's museums prepare to observe the first anniversary of the attacks, Mr. Salvaggio demonstrates that it is possible for artists to respond to these events without succumbing either to sentimentality or to sensationalism. Joy Garnett, a New York painter and editor of Newsgrist.com, a new-media-art newsletter that has monitored artists' reactions after Sept. 11, said: "Eryk's piece is more about how we internalize things. It's like a vestige, a hazy but definite reminder of a wound, like a ghost pain. It's a short narrative dream, much like any painting or a short art film." Indeed, Mr. Salvaggio's work is almost painterly in its execution, and it functions in a way that is deliberately different from many digital artworks. Internet pieces generally depend on their interactive elements, which invite viewers to point, click and otherwise participate in them. But once a visitor enters "September 11th, 2001," the frames advance at a slow-motion rate that is determined by Internet connection speed and the amount of traffic on the site, not by the viewer. When the sequence is completed, it begins anew. Although video artists have often manipulated footage of historical events to alter its impact dramatically, the experience here is contemplative, as if one were standing before a painting. Mr. Salvaggio's painterly approach is rooted in one of the technologies he used to produce the work. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or Ascii (pronounced ASK-ee), is a coding system that assigns numbers to English-language characters. Developed nearly 40 years ago, the system allows diverse computers to exchange textual data in a common numeric language. From Ascii's advent, computer jockeys also used its characters to depict and transmit drawings, from a smiley face, :), made by juxtaposing a colon and a parenthesis, to elaborate renderings of, say, unicorns made from letters selected solely for their rectilinear or curved properties. In recent years, some Internet artists have used Ascii in their work as if it were the raw pigment of the digital age. Some, like the Barcelona-based duo Jodi.org, employ it as a visual reminder that their work is computer-based. Others favor its crude aesthetic, which provides a counterpoint to computer-generated graphics whose primary goal is to look as realistic as possible. "Ascii works as a shortcut away from the usual traps," said Vuk Cosic, a Slovenian artist who has a gallery of Ascii-generated works at www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii. Ascii-made works tend to be defiantly coarse rather than hyper-realistic, and the characters from which they are made usually convey no textual meaning. But Mr. Salvaggio has expanded the genre, making the names in "September 11th, 2001" as important as the underlying images. Mr. Salvaggio said, "I like Ascii because it represents the form with a breakdown of language. Most of the time, it's just random letters and numbers. You have this image made up of these meaningless symbols that we use to communicate. But in this particular case, the language is staying intact." By the end of his workday on Sept. 12, Mr. Salvaggio knew how he wanted to proceed. But he was concerned that, by appropriating the images so soon after the attacks, he might appear to be trivializing them. So he waited until May to begin to produce the work at his home in Ogunquit, Me. Searching the Web, he found a copy of the video on a European news channel's Web site — its logo appears as a blood-red smear in the lower-left corner of the screen — as well as a list of the victims' names. Mr. Salvaggio, 23, said there was another reason he had waited to create the work. The attacks forced him to reconsider what he was doing with his art. Many other artists did the same. As a result, online works that were inspired by Sept. 11 have arrived in limited numbers, despite the Internet's ability to deliver them to a worldwide audience as soon as they are completed. Ms. Garnett explained: "Emotionally there is still an incredible amount of material to confront and digest. Just because the medium of the Net is immediate does not mean that we should be able to internalize and produce in pace with it. As humans, we are slower than all of our technology."
