Ars Electronica entry

...Somebody (or some automated process - it's hard to distiguish in mails these days) send me a mail to invite me to enter the NKdeE in the NET VISION category of the Prix ARS Electronica 2005, which i did of course because the i don't mind getting prices at all and who knows i might get lucky. i mention it here because it forced me to explicitly formulate some descriptive statements about myself and the Cathedral. i repeat those statements here because they might be informative and they are ontologically part of the NKdeE process by their very nature:

Title of submitted project: Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends
URL of the work: http://www.vilt.net/nkdee
Year the work was created: 2004 (started)
Hardware / Software: Marie's Water Colours, Brico Boat Varnish, a pencil and a Windows XP workstation with Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Pro and Dreamweaver MX, Altova XMLSpy 2004,Adobe Photoshop CS, Electric Rain Swift 3D, Curious Labs Poser 5.0 and Maxon Cinema 4d 7.2. plus an Epson Scanner & a Sony Digital camera
Technical requirements for viewing: Browsers:MIE 6.0 or higher and
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 or higher are supported and checked (javascript should be enabled and later support for java as well)
Macromedia Flash Player 7.0 or higher required
Description of the work: The NKdeE is a process started in 2004 hoping to contribute to establish a usable cultural interface for efficient art production. It examinies the ways in which programming, media techniques and traditional art as processes can be interwoven with or opposed to the predominant processes in our world today.
Among other things, it takes the form of a website, a schema design for publishing multimedia, an application to publish multimedia and an online game. There's more text about it in my biography and at the submitted url itself...

Further material entered: 6 A3 printouts of incorporated paintings and a cd/dvd rom with printable material. I would consider entering more material but i would need some garantuees as to their safe return, because some items like the NKdeE maquette as seen on the vilt.net homepage are quite priceless

Artist biography:
Born and living in Belgium.
Studied Germanic Filology at the KUL (Louvain).

In 1979 i very much wanted to be a writer/ poet. I noticed i didn't have much to write about that made any sense, so i quit. I had a great time working in bars and kitchens for about 10 years.

From 1989 onward i did have (or at least presumed to have) something to write about that made sense, so i started to learn how to write decently.

When i got to a stage that i thought my literary work had reached some maturity (let's say 1996, the same year that i organised a small poetic manifestation in my hometown Louvain), i discovered that (trying to) publish(ing) it would render it meaningless in the fastest way possible. Instead i chose to make everything i wrote so far available on the internet, and started investing my spare time in researching ways to make text 'work' on screen. Gradually, partly because i thought the available techniques weren't up to it yet but mostly out of economic necessity my interest in making IT work the artistic way faded and i endulged myself in the day to day practice of producing commercial websites and multimedia products.

Nowadays i’m still active as a professional web-designer/programmer, but i have to admit i'm basically and inevitably a (modest) poet/writer trying to find ways to contribute to (ok- hang on, here come the big words):
- establish a cultural interface that could bring writing/authoring/ making art back to life as a meaningfull process and not keep it ‘virtually’ (sic) alive as the consumable object it generally is today, a poor parody that struts and frets its hour (nanosecond) upon the media stage and then is heard no more
- what I would call a global body of reference ( functioning as a sub-individual authoring processor/ freely available software-to-make-art-with propably in a form much like the www as we know it now – what it lacks now is mostly global consciousness i.e. self awareness of what it's doing as a process) for young artists to help them stop wasting time
- a process (urgently needed, like in ‘it should begin yesterday’) to rethink / critically evaluate the way we approach programming in a very practical and immediate way.