Yvonne le Grand – DIGITAL ART (1960-2000)

title

Nara Zoyd/La Zoyd’s Pataverse

artist

Yvonne le Grand

intro

Nara Zoyd is a virtual persona created by Yvonne le Grand. Born in a telephone cable in New York at the age of 25, Nara Zoyd virtually came to life on the collaborative filtering community website Firefly in the late nineties. Over the course of a year, Le Grand made a series of weekly episodes, called JOTs, about the life of Nara Zoyd, ranging from wild fantasies to fuzzy philosophy. During this year, Le Grand received over five thousand emails from Nara Zoyd fans from all over the world who followed her weekly online stories. Le Grand answered all of the emails, using the information in episodes again and sometimes even featuring, in Nara Zoyd’s online adventures, the people she was in contact with. In the weekly episodes published on the pages of the Pataverse website, connections with other sites and informative documents were often made through hyperlinks, causing visitors to respond to certain pieces of information and situations: “Words or expressions would lead to ideas, images to concepts encouraging loitering with intent.”³ Le Grand shared edited photographs of herself that served as a personal representation for her avatar character Nara Zoyd. During a conference in Wales, after already having created fifty episodes, Le Grand publicly came forward as the creator of Nara Zoyd. Since June 1998, the website of Nara Zoyd, La Zoyd’s Pataverse, has been offline.

biography artist

Yvonne le Grand (1961) is a Dutch artist and cultural anthropologist. She studied Interactive Media and Environment at Academie Minerva, Hogeschool van Groningen and graduated in 1997 with a dissertation on Nara Zoyd/La Zoyd’s Pataverse. Le Grand also holds a master’s degree in Social & Cultural Anthropology from the University of Lisbon (2009).

keywords

avatar, alter ego, virtual, website, digital persona, virtual persona, gender, online communication, online community

images

[caption id="attachment_436" align="alignnone" width="640"]

Yvonne le Grand, Nara Zoyd/La Zoyd’s Pataverse, 1996 - 1998. Screencapture https://web.archive.org/web/20010424204949/http://www.media-gn.nl:80/pataverse/verse1/epi3.html 11-12-2018.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_433" align="alignnone" width="640"]

Yvonne le Grand, Nara Zoyd/La Zoyd’s Pataverse, 1996 - 1998. Screencapture https://web.archive.org/web/19970430184928/http://www.media-gn.nl/pataverse/ 11-12-2018.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_435" align="alignnone" width="640"]

Yvonne le Grand, Nara Zoyd/La Zoyd’s Pataverse, 1996 - 1998. Screencapture https://web.archive.org/web/20010423190746/http://www.media-gn.nl:80/pataverse/verse1/epi28.html 11-12-2018.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_434" align="alignnone" width="640"]

Yvonne le Grand, Nara Zoyd/La Zoyd’s Pataverse, 1996 - 1998. Screencapture https://web.archive.org/web/20010418175308/http://www.media-gn.nl:80/pataverse/verse1/biography.html 11-12-2018.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_437" align="alignnone" width="640"]

Yvonne le Grand, Nara Zoyd/La Zoyd’s Pataverse, 1996 - 1998. Screencapture https://web.archive.org/web/20010427191752/http://www.media-gn.nl:80/pataverse/verse1/epi2.html 11-12-2018.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_439" align="alignnone" width="640"]

Yvonne le Grand, Nara Zoyd/La Zoyd’s Pataverse, 1996 - 1998. Screencapture https://web.archive.org/web/20010721220309/http://www.media-gn.nl:80/pataverse/verse1/wheel.html 11-12-2018.[/caption]

year

1996-1998¹

website

media-gn.nl/pataverse (not functional) web.archive.org

premiere

La Zoyd’s Metaverse² was launched on April 26, 1996.

software

HTML, domain name (+ browser)

functionality

The work is interactive in the way that clicking through the site reveals new pages, hyperlinks, informational documents, and images. Visitors could also interact with Yvonne le Grand as Nara Zoyd through email.

part of collection

production

The website La Zoyd’s Pataverse was created in HTML code.

hardware

Any device that can connect to the internet.

technical specs

HTML website, e-mail, and use of the Firefly platform.

intention artistquote by artist

related work of artist

quote

“The Verse isn’t a role playing game, but some kind of platform to develop communication online. I want to try to create an environment that invites people to speak up. I envision the Verse as some kind of ‘mind-bar’, with Nara as the bartender tending to drinks and conversation.”⁴ “I was a virtual virgin when I started out on the web, in September 1995. And hardly knowing how to switch on a Mac, I found myself wondering why ‘surfing’ the web was considered the hottest thing since the invention of the wheel or the steam engine. Was all this browsing yet another sign of anal retentiveness, collecting mind numbing quantities of information for the sake of collecting information? I could see the enchantment of hypertext, IC, MUD’s and MOO’s. But what was it with the web that I failed to see? However, first things first. My whole life I have been intrigued by alter ego’s, double identities, schizophrenia, and everything that had to do with multiple realities. As a kid I spent days inventing new names for my self. From ‘Phoebe’ and Nanda’, to ‘Bonita Tattaglia’, when I was quite a bit older. Nara Zoyd was born out of necessity: to create a part of me that could paint. (During my previous study, I had to paint, which I couldn’t.) So, I made up this flamboyant persona from New York City (NYC) that could paint like hell. Learning html and attempting to produce some text, I felt a strong need to tell stories. To overcome my writing inhibitions, I found myself using again the outspoken Nara. Soon the first high-energy-dispatch jumped off the screen - JOT o, the pilot. In it, I had cooked up the birth of an avatar that was living in the net. It was the idea for the Verse in its most rudimentary form. This basic idea was that Nara would do a series on the web with weekly updated episodes she called JOTs. She would collect and integrate bookmarks/links, based on the content of the JOTs. After a year, a body of seemingly random information would make up the haphazard dic⁵. All this would serve as a platform for readers to enter into communication with Nara. However, it took me 6 weeks to get a workable structure, and ‘la Zoyd’s Metaverse’, as it was then called, was born on 26 April 1996. Sometimes you need a baud of serendipity to change your views. Mine came, when I discovered Firefly, and sensed the possibilities of communication through chatting, I started to see a chance of making the Verse interactive. To attract readers I created a guestlist on Firefly, where people could leave their email address, so they would receive an invitation to the ‘official’ opening of the Verse. On this list I had 38 names and they all got an invitation in html, that led directly to the Verse. After 2 weeks being online with the Verse, the emails started pouring in. The full title of the Verse, is a story in itself. Initially it was called: ‘my private cyberspace’. This was in reference to the 1991 film ‘My Own Private Idaho’, directed by Gus Van Sant. When I had read ‘Snow Crash’ and liked Stephenson’s definition of cyberspace, I changed the title to ‘la Zoyd’s Metaverse’. I was happy that I wasn’t using the term cyberspace in the title and I even went as far as to strip the Verse of any allusion to cyberspace, replacing the word by metaverse. Then, one day, the shrimp came into my office with a piece of tantalising information. He told me I should check out Alfred Jarry and his ‘Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysicien’. I searched the web, and was overwhelmed with what I found - pataphysics, an imaginary science of imaginary solutions. That is when I cooked up the word ‘pataverse’, the realm of imaginary life. And ‘la Zoyd’s pataVerse’ it has been ever since.”⁶

influence

“While I was studying for a semester in New York at the Visual Arts department of S.U.N.Y. Purchase, in the Spring of 1994, I attended a course called the ‘Graduate Seminar’. This course ended with us students writing a paper on ‘what moved you as an artist’. I wrote a paper called ‘Art as Food for Cerebration’ [...]. In the paper, I use Nara to bounce off my ideas on why I wanted to make art. The paper is not a brilliant artist’s statement, but it reveals the seeds of the Verse before my first acquaintance with the net or even the word cyberspace. My fellow grad-students, after having read ‘Art as Food for Cerebration’, introduced me to a - for me - new literary genre - ‘cyberpunk’. The first book I read was ‘Neuromancer’ by William Gibson, and I have been hooked on the genre ever since. I loved the fast paced language, the invention of new words and the technical voodoo. Reading Neal Stephenson’s ‘Snowcrash’, coincided with my rising interest in the web. Through his mindblowing descriptions of cyberspace, that he coined Metaverse, and his metaphor of avatar, as being a representation of a person in cyberspace, I visualised Nara to become my avatar on the web.”⁷

context

We can position La Zoyd’s Pataverse within the emergence of internet-based art and in the broader context of projects that explored gender, identity, and alternative personas during the same time period, such as work by Debra Solomon. In 1996, Dutch artist Martine Neddam set up the interactive website mouchette.org, with the virtual persona Mouchette. This was in the same year that Le Grand created La Zoyd’s Pataverse, and might have had an influence on her work. Le Grand’s work also coincides with the grrrrls scene and cyberfeminism.

LITERATURE

AVATAR of Postmodern Times and Multiple Identities, paradox.nl (pdf). “Nara Zoyd.” IFFR, 2 Sept. 2017, iffr.com. “Nettime-Nl: Exploding Cinema Programma, Rotterdam 28 Jan t/m 7 Feb.” Nettime Mailing Lists, 20 Jan. 1998, nettime.org. Hulzebos, Bram. “Nederlandse' Digitale Diva' Verovert De Wereld.” Historische Kranten, Erfgoed Leiden En Omstreken, 24 July 1997, leiden.courant.nu. Le Grand, Yvonne. “La Zoyd's PataVerse.” Hanzehogeschool Groningen, 1997, academia.edu. Poppe, Ine. “Het Zevende Zintuig.” DBNL, DBNL, dbnl.org. Poppe, Ine. “Walvissen Op Zolder.” NRC, NRC, 4 Apr. 2002, nrc.nl. Schulz, Deike. “Deike Schulz: Back in Life, Back in (Cyber)Reality Anno 1997.” Nederlands MediaNieuws, nederlandsmedianieuws.nl. Vries, Fred De. “'Waar Houdt Nara Op En Waar Begin Ik?'.” De Volkskrant, De Volkskrant, 14 Apr. 1998, volkskrant.nl. Westendorp, Laura. “Nara, Feuilleton- En Internetvrouw, Gaat Liever De Diepte In.” Trouw, Trouw, 27 Aug. 2016, trouw.nl.

part of active discussion

scene artists institutes

Casco, Paradox

footnote

¹Nara Zoyd’s series ran from April 1996 until March 1997. According to het Leidsch Dagblad from July 24, 1997, the website La Zoyd’s Pataverse could be visited until June 1, 1998. Source: Bram Hulzebos, “Nederlandse' Digitale Diva' Verovert De Wereld.” Historische Kranten, Erfgoed Leiden En Omstreken, 24 July 1997, leiden.courant.nu. ²In her dissertation, Le Grand speaks of metaverse instead of pataverse. ³Yvonne le Grand, “La Zoyd's PataVerse.” Hanzehogeschool Groningen, 1997, academia.edu, pp.2 ⁴Yvonne le Grand, “La Zoyd's PataVerse.” Hanzehogeschool Groningen, 1997, academia.edu. ⁵Haphazard dic: the random encyclopedia of links that underlies the Verse. ⁶Yvonne le Grand, “La Zoyd's PataVerse.” Hanzehogeschool Groningen, 1997, academia.edu, pp.1-2. ⁷Yvonne le Grand, MFA dissertation, 1997, pp. 3-4.

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