imagine Lain with her Wired alter ego in the real world.
imagine she published a bunch of weird-ass software, released a music(?) CD that sounds different from literally everything else, and destroyed entire forums with her presence.
that happened.
Netochka Nezvanova: a thread.
Other urls found in this thread:
max-archive.bek.no
xchange.re-lab.net
openculture.com
vice.com
modwiggler.com
native-instruments.com
web.archive.org
chadmckinneyaudio.com
mitpressjournals.org
hudba.de
web.archive.org
news.ycombinator.com
salon.com
nettime.org
meatballwiki.org
dvara.net
discogs.com
web.archive.org
brainwashed.com
discogs.com
nettime.org
books.google.com
circadian.net
web.archive.org
web.archive.org
ima.or.at
twitter.com
twitter.com
as I had mentioned, she also went by the names '=cw4t7abs', 'punktprotokol' (German: 'point-protocol'), '0f0003', 'm2zk!n3nkunzt' (a respelling of the German 'Maschinenkunst', or 'machine-art'), 'integer', and 'antiorp'
however, for the sake of simplicity, I will simply refer to her by her most common pseudonym: 'Netochka Nezvanova'.
nobody knows who she is. nobody knows anything about her. nobody knows her actual gender. I would refer to her by gender-neutral pronouns, but she demonstrated a preference for feminine pronouns.
as a matter of fact, 'Netochka Nezvanova' means 'nameless nobody'.
she got the pseudonym from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's first novel, a story about an orphan girl who is adopted into a wealthy family and quickly becomes best friends with her stepsister. one day the two girls are separated.
fittingly, the unfinished novel ends before they reunite.
She first appeared around 1998 (the same year Lain came out), with the application '0f0003 propaganda', which algorithmically generated animated graphics and electronic sound
the only thing I could find on it is an old MAX digest: max-archive.bek.no
there's also this
xchange.re-lab.net
her use of language seems to be a conscious attempt at the cut-up technique of William S. Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge. her Wikipedia page draws similarities between her activities and a West German film called 'Decoder', a cyberpunk film featuring Burroughs and P-Orridge.
'Bill Rice plays Jaeger ("Hunter"), an agent of the government in charge of suppressing dissidents, while FM Einheit plays a burger shop employee who discovers that by changing the background music from pleasantly calming to industrial "noise" music, he can incite riots and ...
a revolution against the looming power of the government.' (Wikipedia)
this is, of course, lifted from Burroughs' real-life method of getting revenge on a London coffee bar called the Moka Bar, which had snubbed him: openculture.com
Soft Cell, Psychic TV, Einstürzende Neubauten, and The The all participated in making the film's soundtrack.
more about the film here:
vice.com
her next piece of software, 'b1257+12', was a tool for sound deconstruction and composition. it allowed for altering loops in real-time using a large number of parameters that sometimes behave on their own accord.
the name refers to a pulsar 2300 light-years from the Sun located in Virgo. in 2015 it was named Lich, with its three planets being named Draugr (animated corpses from Norse mythology), Poltergeist, and Phobetor (Greek god of nightmares and son of Nyx).
this thread quotes Netochka herself on the software and discusses more of its attributes: modwiggler.com
this thread seems to indicate Netochka is/was male, was relatively normal but a little nutty, and also notes that b1257+12 could destroy your computer: native-instruments.com
more information, URL found in that last thread: web.archive.org
her next piece of software was titled '@¶31®�≠ Ÿ'. obviously I'm not going to get any search engine results for that, so let's just stick to the Wikipedia description:
'this software extracts random samples from a CD and creates a stochastical remix, accompanied by futuristic-looking graphics (according to the reference documents, it is intended for use with the krop3rom||a9ff release).'
in 1999 she released m9ndfukc.0+99 and k!berzveta.0+2, two Java programs that interpreted network data. searching their names led me to this thesis: chadmckinneyaudio.com
quoting from it: 'In the late 1990s Rebekah Wilson (and possibly other programmers and artists collectively) using the pseudonym Netochka Nezvanova and other associated names such as “punktprotokol” and “0f0003” created a stir on the internet through disruptive posts in 'mailing lists but also because of the interesting software that the identity was putting out (Mieszkowski, 2002; Nezvanova & Föllmer, 2002). The first programs released under the name included 0f0003 propaganda and b1257+12 (both released in 1998) facilitated the creation of 'multimedia works using algorithmic techniques. Soon after in 1999 she/it/they released m9ndfukc.0+99 and k!berzveta.0+2 which were programs written in Java that interpreted network data and were likely precursors to the transmediale award winning nm.81. nm.81 was an 'experimental web browser that rendered html code into a generative audio and visual environment, somewhat similar to Cathedral although more abstract (Cramer, 2005; Nezvanova, 2000).'
'nm.81' was also known as 'nebula.m81'.
through the citations I was able to find:
1. this paywalled paper by Netochka herself: mitpressjournals.org
2. an interview seemingly lost to time: hudba.de
3. this chapter of a paper which seriously reminds me of old Ccru work by media theorist Florian Cramer web.archive.org
(h/t Hacker News: news.ycombinator.com
the Mieszkowski reference simply refers to the most mainstream piece about her, this article in Salon: salon.com
(which I feel I can't provide without her rebuttal: nettime.org
a good summary of her Internet antics can be found in her MeatballWiki article: meatballwiki.org
a short interview with N.N. is found in this cyberfeminist article, which highlights the queerness of her performance of gender: dvara.net
now, you see increasing references in these articles to Rebekah Wilson and the Hafler Trio. these are both music acts connected to N.N..
Netochka's first release was not software, but rather music.
the album was 'krop3rom||a9ff' (1997), allegedly made entirely with a Kurzweil K2000; spanning 97 tracks, most of them only a few seconds long, the album was hailed as something unlike anything ever created.
discogs.com
web.archive.org
(by the way, up until today, that Discogs page featured a copy for sale; I bought it, so you'll have to find another place if you want your own copy.)
it was reissued a year later with new material by the Hafler Trio, which is where they come into play.
discogs.com
(there's one for sale there. if anyone buys it after reading this thread, can they please let me hear the extra material?)
also in 1997, she created a composition for tape titled 'A9FF' which was performed by - guess who? - Rebekah Wilson at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand in February 1998.
some of the emails sent by Netochka come from New Zealand, lending credibility to the hypothesis that Rebekah Wilson is at least one person behind the N.N. persona.
in 1999, Netochka Nezvanova released another CD, '8'|sin.x(2^n)', using mp2 to encode both audio and data.
nettime.org
searching for a comparable announcement of 'krop3rom||a9ff' led me to this (by
@glovink
), which says that the way she writes and generally does things is an attempt, as Nick Land would say, to 'hack the Human Security System': books.google.com
the last two software releases by N.N. were in 199. the first was !=z2c!ja.0+38, an application using Mac OS's QuickDraw technology to create dense visual textures from the user's keyboard input.
the final program she released was the celebrated NATO.0+55+3d, one of the first applications to allow real-time video manipulation. it was widely used for VJing and accompaniments to live electronic music.
she thus occupies a major role in countercultural history, tying together the hacker subculture, the demoscene, performance artists, electronic/industrial musicians, and so on, firmly embedding herself in a huge web of magic, mystery, and intrigue
after that she completed four more projects:
1. a trilogy of theatre performances in collaboration with Israeli singer Ayelet Harpaz based on three haiku by Masaoka Shiki
circadian.net
2. '‘Poztgenom!knuklearporekomplekz’, a track that appears on ‘Strewth! An Abstract Electronic Compilation from Australia and New Zealand’
3. the 2002 composition ‘La lumière, la lumière .. c'est la seule ..’ for viola, piano, percussion and electronics, commissioned by Ensemble Intégrales and performed between 2003–2005 in Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany
web.archive.org
and finally,
4. ‘A History of Mapmaking; or, Aerial Photography and 31 Variations on a Cartographer's Theme’, for amplified cello and light controller, performed by Rebekah Wilson in Auckland, Ljubljana, Berlin, and Linz from 2005–2007
web.archive.org
after that, she seemingly vanished. nothing was created by Netochka Nezvanova after 2005, nor performed after 2007. there were 3 tweets from the account
@m9ndfukc
in 2009, but that seems to be it. a decade of artistic and software work, apparently abruptly finished.
but there's a twist here that even I didn't anticipate.
remember what I said at the start of the thread?
it was wrong.
did you catch this paragraph in that last link?
that's right. Netochka Nezvanova was Rebekah Wilson all along. or, rather, Rebekah Wilson was Netochka Nezvanova, even legally changing her name to Netochka Nezvanova at one point.
ima.or.at
so instead of ending this thread with mystery and a slight sadness that her websites are gone and much of her work is lost, let me say this:
Rebekah, if you somehow stumble upon this and read it, I want to thank you for your amazing work. Even your flaming. You've changed the face of art forever and I'm glad. Even if all the info available online about you disappears, I'll remember the first time, years ago, I clicked on an article about you, read about your work, and thought to myself, ‘I want to do that. I aspire to that level of creativity.’
Thank you.
Rebekah Wilson, a.k.a. Netochka Nezvanova: the end.
Oh user! Don't like to learn? Maybe you should read, it's not just about lain you silly guy.
>some dumb tranny made dumb programs
who cares
interesting thread, keep posting
I like this a lot
imagine missing the whole point of the show while simultaneously being this late to the lain cult larping fad
holy reddit
do you know where i could find her music?
kys OP this isn't even your thread
twitter.com
Lol
lmao
this is actually an interesting thread though
watched Lain few years ago, I still don’t understand it