The Furtherfield community utilizes networked media to create, explore, nurture and promote the art that happens when connections are made and knowledge is shared across the boundaries of established art-world institutions and their markets, grass-roots artistic and activist projects and communities of socially engaged software developers. This spectrum engages from the maverick media-art-makers and small collectives of cross-specialist practitioners to projects that critique and change dominant hierarchical structures as part of their art process.

This text will provide a brief background as to how Furtherfield, a non-profit organization and community, came about and how it extends the DIY ethos of some early net art and tactical media, said to be motivated by curiosity, activism and precision,01 towards a more collaborative approach that Furtherfield calls Do It With Others (DIWO). In this approach, peers connect and collaborate, creating their structures, using either digital networks or shared physical environments, making art that is made and distributed across a network. They engage with social issues whilst reshaping art and wider culture through shared critical approaches and shared perspectives.

As an artist-led group, Furtherfield has become progressively more interested in the cultural value of collaboratively developed visions as opposed to the supremacy of the vision of the individual artistic genius. This interest has led Furtherfield to develop artware (software platforms for generating art) that relies on its users’ creative and collaborative engagement (formally known as artists and their audiences) to make meaning. It explores the extent to which those who view and interact with work, including those from underrepresented groups, become co-producers in a network rather than ‘audience’. To explain what we mean, we will describe FurtherStudio, online art residencies, and VisitorsStudio, a platform for online multimedia collaboration, a particular strand of our activity that focuses on developing real-time online artware and projects. That is work created and distributed in real-time across the Internet.

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From A Handbook for Coding Cultures, d/Lux/Media

On Friday April 9 (2007) I was at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich for the opening of the Opera Calling project. Opera Calling is an exhibition and performance created by the Bitnik media collective and artist Sven Koenig, to be running at the Cabaret Voltaire till the 2nd of May.

Entering into the (maybe not very Dadaist…) refurbished space of Cabaret Voltaire, I follow the steps down to the crypt to visit Opera Calling. I first see a forest of cables and phone receivers: 100 white phones are attached to the ceiling while their receivers bounce down into the gallery space. Moving through the upside-down phone forest, I can see two computer screens in a corner, with information flashing. Occasionally, I can hear the familiar sound of dialling a number and a phone ringing. Listening to a receiver, I find that, most of the time, I can listen to the opera… That is not some recorded opera concert played back to the gallery visitors. If one is familiar with the programme of the Zurich Opera, s/he will soon realise that s/he can listen to the performance currently taking place at the Opera House! Of course, the sound is very ‘dirty’ but that Friday, we did listen to La Boheme -along with everybody else in the Opera House. The difference was that we didn’t pay for a ticket or have to visit the Opera House physically. Instead, the opera itself called out to reach us, visitors to the Cabaret Voltaire, and Zurich residents in their homes…

The artists describe Opera Calling as an intervention into the cultural system of the Zurich Opera. They have secretly placed bugs within the Opera House’s auditorium and redistributed the performances not through public broadcasting but through calling up individuals in Zurich on their landlines. As soon as the opera performance starts, a machine calls out Zurich phone numbers. If a Zurich resident replies, they can hear a computerised message explaining what they are about to listen to and then a live transmission of the performance in the Opera House. The gallery space visitors witness this interaction: they can see which phone number the machine is calling and what the outcome is: will someone answer? Will they hang up? Will an answering machine come up? Will the person on the phone listen to the opera? When someone at the other end of the line picks up the phone, the telephones in the exhibition, like the telephone at this person’s house, are connected to the opera.

Bitnik and Koenig talk about exploring the usefulness of an artistic production strategy. Opera Calling is a hacking project: it hacks through a quite rigid cultural and social system, aiming to open this up to the general public. Andrius Kulikauskas uses the term ‘social hacker’ in a paper published in the Journal of Hyper(+)drome to describe a person who encourages activity amongst online groups and is willing to break social norms. I suggest that this is exactly what the OC artists do: by performing a real but also symbolic act of hacking (the sound of the live opera transmission becomes so transformed that there is no way someone who intended to visit the opera in the first place would decide to go to the gallery and listen to the performance instead. In that sense, hacking into the Opera House becomes less a ‘stealing’ of the performance and more a symbolic act that makes a point around issues of open culture) the OC artists come up with an idiosyncratic solution to what they consider a problem: the ‘closed-circuit’ opera culture that seems to be preserving a class system due to the prohibitive for many, cost of the opera tickets.

Kulikauskas describes the hacker approach as ‘practical’, ‘nonstandard’, and ‘unexpected’ [ibid]. I think these adjectives very much describe the OC project: it employs simple, practical means like bugs built from cheap, readily available technology to perform what is a nonstandard action (how often does the opera call you at your home?…) with unexpected aesthetic outcomes. I thought that Opera Calling is an excellent project, as it cleverly appropriates the found content and social symbolism of the opera to create a new piece that can stand both as an artwork and as an act of social intervention. Within this context, it becomes completely disengaged from any negative connotations that it may carry and, to my eyes, at least, turns into a playful act of uncanny transformation and original creation. What I missed in this project is the involvement of the home audiences and gallery visitors in this action as something more than what they would be if they were in the Opera House – that is, audiences /witnesses. I think OC has potential in audience intervention, communication, and community building, which it cannot fulfil as a ‘sleek’ gallery-based installation. I hope to see many more ‘dirty’ versions of it in the future…

The story so far, according to an email update I just received (29 March 2007): `’For the last two weeks, Opera Calling has retransmitted ten live performances of the Zurich opera to 1489 households in Zurich. The Zurich Opera claims to have found and destroyed two bugs. With the Opera in frantic mode and an unknown number of bugs still to find, the *spectacle* continues…??_

The Sheep Market by Aaron Koblin

The Sheep Market by Aaron Koblin is a series of 10,000 simple images of sheep drawn by online workers. Stylistically, the sheep range from the indecipherable to the extremely detailed and cute. You can view the sheep on a web site, buy them on stickers, or have them fill your field of vision as part of a gallery installation. They serve as a metaphor for the sharecropping masses of Web 2.0 projects. And their production speaks of the future of art and creative production.

Like Pop Art’s mass production or the yBA’s outsourcing, net.art’s basis in the internet reflects the paradigmatic means of production of its age. net.art has struggled to create aesthetic and social value that makes use of a very effective medium for the creation and distribution of images and ideas. In doing so it is no different from Impressionist use of tube oil paint, colour theory, and train lines. Also similar to Impressionism it provides an illusion of difference and respite for an urban audience eagerly familiar with its subject matter. And again like Impressionism, the most successsful net.art break out of its immediate context to be of broader interest as art.

In the net era of web services, Amazon has launched a service called “Amazon Mechanical Turk” (AMT). Its name comes from the famous hoax chess-playing automata of the 18th century. Rather than clockwork and levers the original Mechanical Turk automata contained a human being hidden inside to plan strategy and to move the chess pieces. Amazon’s service also contains human operators rather than (computing) machinery. A program that calls AMT across the internet will eventually get a response from a human being who has accepted the task and will be paid a few cents for doing so. Human labour atomized and exposed through an API turns the old science fiction nightmare of humans being reduced to components in computer-run machinery into a market reality.

Aaron Koblin has used AMT to create “The Sheep Market”. Through AMT, clickworkers were asked to “draw a sheep facing left”. Sheep are easy to draw (try drawing one now and compare it to the ones in The Sheep Market). They can be as simple as a cloud with sticks for legs and two dots for the eyes. If you want extra realism, you can add a muzzle and ears. Their familiarity and benign cultural associations are a good source of artistic value. Many people like images of sheep. Since this is work for hire, the copyright and the ability to economically exploit the drawings passes to the person who has commissioned the work.

Sheep may appear carefree in art, but they are well-established symbols of the pastoral in art. They are tended by shepherds who reflect (or fail to reflect) the virtue of the much more sophisticated ruling class. They gambol about the country retreats of the nouveau riche in lands made great by being part of a powerful nation. The illustration of the values of the sophisticated by the unsophisticated (of the urban bourgeoisie by country yokels) is the social content of the pastoral. Pastoral reinforces the universal rightness of their audience’s values and an immanent apologia for wealth, power and inequality.

The pastoral might seem an outdated genre, but Julian Stallabrass in “High Art Light” describes the core of much yBA art of the 1990s as a kind of “urban pastoral”, with virtue illustrated in activities of the urban dispossessed rather than the labourers of the countryside. Damien Hirst has worked more literally with the pastoral tradition, playing against its traditions by placing a dead lamb in formaldehyde. Hirst’s sheep is advertising its fixation, illustrated by a pretty baa-lamb; it is a Fontainebleau scene for the Ditcherati. If Hirst and other yBAs have changed the form of the pastoral, they have not changed its social content or context.

The same is true for the sheep of The Sheep Market. They are vehicles for the virtues of the market as seen by people who will never have to toil in its fields. They are tended by atomized labour reduced to moments of payment in the dynamic market. The great thing about the market, we are told, is that there are winners and losers. Anyone can get rich. The clickworkers who accept twenty cents to draw a sheep are not employed by the project. They have no employers that they can organize to engage with or to negotiate terms with. The illusion of general choice in the market is stripped away in a race to the bottom of remuneration.

For the market capitalist, this is the epitome of the virtues of their sophisticated worldview reflected in the simple hicks who provide the clicks. The sheep of The Sheep market gambol across this landscape, fulfilling their historical destiny in a postindustrial virtual pastoral, their shepherds replaced with click workers. This is the future of unskilled technological labour. But the Sheep Market doesn’t seem to reflect that it may be the future of skilled affective labour and even of arts-managerial labour.

This is a possible nightmare future of affective labour and art. Be paid a few cents to rhyme two lines or to sketch a cup. The results will be worked into a number one single or a painting sold at Frieze. The current affective economy, filled with short-term placements and other barely break-even temporary jobs, is McJob based. Affective McJobs do not provide long-term-employment, a decent wage, or a stepping stone to a better job. But they provide employment for more than a few minutes at a time and for tasks broken down only to assembly line levels.

The Sheep Market is very succesful net.art. It takes the newest capabilities of internet-based systems and uses them competently to make art. This art is technically and operationally indistinguishable from the normal operation of the internet but creates an aesthetically and conceptually rich experience. The results are both a playful piece of art and a continuation of an artistic genre with more contemporary relevance than most people realise.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

In autumn 2006 the ELO — Electronic Literature Organization released the ELC1 — Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, including selected works in New Media forms such as Hypertext Fiction, Kinetic Poetry, generative and combinatory forms, Network Writing, Codework, 3D, and Narrative Animations.

One of the main common characteristics of all Web-based literary products is that they can be read (or viewed, listened, played with, used) in multifaceted ways. Accordingly the curation of Electronic Literature is challenged by ambiguity and heterogeneity on different levels. As broadly termed by the ELO itself, Electronic Literature is a form of cultural and artistic production on the Internet with important literary aspects that takes advantage of the contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer. Similar to what is not yet consistently defined as Digital Art, Netart, Internet Art, New Media Art, etc. the production of literary works on the Internet and/or by digital means ranges from terms like Computer Literature, New Media Poetry to Codework and Hyperfiction, mixing up genres with subgenres and single descriptions, very often transferring the description-methods of classical literature studies to a networked and online surrounding. Florian Cramer (1), a Germany based literature scientist, outlines in a very general way that the Internet is based upon a code which acts on the logic of the alphabet and therefore is finally based upon text. The Internet, for the author, is literature in its original meaning, a system of letters whose poetry can only be found by the reader. Despite this very general point of view Cramer also describes various levels of production and/or dissemination of literary texts: the Internet can purely work as a medium of distribution for literature or as a platform for collaborative writing and as a literary database. Not until text needs a software interface or is generated automatically or randomly programmed by rules, it is genuine computer-literature. Furthermore he locates literature on the Web to be understood on various levels: poems, written in programming languages like for example Pearl are readable in three ways. At first as a poem in a natural language, then as a sequence of machine commands and finally — once executed — as a poem in natural language again. (2)

The ELC1 represents an anthology of sixty works, curated by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland. It has been published both on the Web and on CD-ROM and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 2.5 License. With its aim to be freely accessible for individuals and organisations, each work is framed with a brief editorial and author’s description. Furthermore all products are tagged with descriptive keywords ranging from well known user-interface paradigm Hypertext and technological backgrounds like Flash and HTML/DHTML up to more historical literature-basics like Memoir, Combinatorial or Parody/Satire.

Some of the works like Study Poetry (2006) by Marko Niemi, a playful word toy that enables the readers to play poker with words instead of cards were especially created for the Collection. Only few of the collected works are dating back to the earlier years of the Internet like for example my body – a Wunderkammer (1997) by Shelley Jackson. This autobiographical Hypertext takes as its central focus the relationship between human identity and the body’s constituent organs. It uses the HTML hypertext form to revitalize the memoire genre focusing on one of the prominent themes in the digital realm: body and identity. Most of the works give a broad overview over the past six years of literary production on the Internet. The appropriated text Star Wars, one letter at a time (2005) by Brian Kim Stefans for example is the retelling of a classical story bringing each character in the cast steadily before the eyes of the viewer and therefore blurring the reader’s expectations from a text. Frequently Asked Questions about ‘Hypertext’ (2004) by Richard Holeton parodies a form of academic discourse that sometimes takes itself too seriously. It springs from a poem composed of anagrams of the word “hypertext” and plays with the high seriousness that surrounded much early hypertext criticism. The so called wordtoy Oulipoems (2004) by Millie Niss and Martha Deed is a playful series of pieces which combine some concepts of combinatorial literature, as developed by the Oulipo in France in the 1960ies. Transferring this art historical background to the actual situation in the USA the authors create a suspense between electronic literature and its predecessors in experimental literature.

The ELC1 is an eclectic anthology of sixty works, including many different forms such as Hypertext Fiction, Kinetic Poetry, Network Writing, Codework, Narrative Animations. What is the main focus of the Collection and by which criteria did you select the works: genre, textuality, technology, a historical basis, …?

SCOTT RETTBERG (SR): I can say that our basic criterion for selecting works was “literary quality,” which probably meant different things to each of the three of us. We also agreed that there would need to be consensus that a work should be included. We were choosing from a limited universe of work. While we did encourage some people to submit, we were working with a pool of submissions. The other criterion was that we would need to be able to present the work on both the web and on CD-ROM. In composing the Collection, we were also thinking about trying to represent multiple modalities of electronic writing, and to achieve a balance among several different identifiable types of electronic writing, to give the reader a sense of the breadth of the field.

The article “Acid-Free Bits. Recommendations for [url:http://eliterature.org/pad/afb.html]Long-Lasting Electronic Literature[/url]”, published in 2004 by the ELO, is a “plea for writers to work proactively in archiving their own creations, and to bear these issues in mind even in the act of composition.” Do you think that preservation is already an integrative part of the creative process and not exclusively the task of the curator?

SR: Yes, I do, to the extent that people creating electronic literature can take certain steps, or work in certain ways, such as using valid XHTML if their work is in that format, and documenting their process, and making sure that their files are backed up and distributed to multiple others. On the other hand, some writers and artists have a sort of performance-oriented aesthetic, and don’t particularly care if their work lasts beyond a certain time frame. I do however think that more and more electronic writers are conscious of the many preservation issues involved in digital media artifacts, and are taking a more active role in seeing to it that their works last. Curators may or may not rescue works of electronic literature in the future. I think authors can and should do all that they can to prevent the obsolescence of their work.

Of course, preservation is an important aspect of the ELC1 as a project. At the very least, we know that there will be a couple thousand copies of all of the bits of all of the works on the ELC1 widely distributed and archived. While having many copies of a digital artifact does not assure that it will remain readable as technologies and platforms change, it does mean that those future archivists will most likely be able to access the files as they exist now.

Each single composition is presented with an additional author’s description. Did you select the works in a networked process with them: did the authors participate in the process of filtering and presenting? Or do all works derive from the [url:http://directory.eliterature.org/]ELO’s directory[/url], the descriptive guide to over 2300 e-literature-compositions?

SR: The authors chose to submit works, and with each work submitted, we asked them to provide a short description. This was a separate process from that involved in the ELO directory. The editors then provided an additional editorial description for each work, and we assigned each work a set of appropriate keywords. We hope that this project will in a way serve as a pilot for a new approach to classifying works within the Electronic Literature Directory as well. The field has changed substantially since the Directory was launched, and we’d like to see it shift to a somewhat less hierarchical, more emergent system of classification, using keywords or tags, as well.

One of the principles of the ELO is to promote a non-proprietary setting for e-literature that facilitates cross-referencing, mixing, and institutional networking. The Collection is licensed under Creative Commons on the Internet and additionally provided by DVD. Who do you want to read/use the collection and how do you want it to be read/used?

SR: Essentially, we want everyone who might be interested to be exposed to this work. In designing the project and in releasing it under a Creative Commons license, we are encouraging people to share and redistribute it for noncommercial purposes. While I would say that the target audience is very broad — “readers” — we were thinking in particular of how the project might be utilized in classrooms, and perhaps included in library collections. That’s part of the reason why it is released on CD-ROM in a case appropriate for library marking and distribution, in addition to its web incarnation. Our hope is that people will enjoy experiencing the works individually, and will study them in classrooms around the world, and will also perhaps be inspired to create and share new work of their own.

According to Trebor Scholz, on the Internet “curators become meta-artists. They set up contexts for artists who provide contexts.” (3) Which different contexts are necessary for E-Literature-works to be presented in an appropriate way: the original space, a curator’s and/or artist’s statement, the source code or technological background, …?

SR: That’s tough to answer in a general way, as each work, and each presentation of each work, is different. For instance, there are at least two types of Electronic Literature that are not included in the collection — installations and network-based works that integrate real-time data. Many works of Electronic Literature are also presented as a kind of live performance as well — for instance I’ve seen Talan Memmott present Lexia to Perplexia using only a chalkboard. So it’s difficult to say what is and what is not appropriate. Most works of Electronic Literature don’t have the same type of life as works of print literature do, in one or a series of fixed editions. Rather they typically are revised over a longer period of time, and presented in a variety of contexts. Something like the ELC1 is more of a snapshot of a moment in time in the life of the field and in the lives of the individual works included.
I think the types of documentation you mention above are all important tools for readers. The more context, the more documentation available to the reader, the better. In the case of the ELC, with each work we include a short editorial introduction, a short statement by the author, technical notes, and a descriptive keyword index. While one can imagine more comprehensive critical editions of individual works of electronic literature, for an anthology of electronic literature, I think that’s a pretty good basic set of context-establishing tools.

Do you think that E-Literature can be shown in a classical art-institution like a museum, a gallery or even a library? Or is it rather a form of cultural artefact, exclusively produced on and for the Web?[/url]

SR: Yes, I do. In fact I have seen Electronic Literature successfully presented in all of those forums. While the Web is the main venue for the majority of Electronic Literature, I think that it is important to see it exhibited in the kinds of venues in which we have been taught to appreciate other forms of art and literature as well. These works are the products of a dialogue not only with other forms of digital artifacts, but with historical art and literature as well. I think many of the pieces in the ELC1, for instance, owe clear debts to 20th century movements such as dada, surrealism, and post-modernism. It makes sense to see them in the same contexts as other kinds of art and literature.

Are you already working on Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two? If so: when will it be published and what will be the difference to Volume One?

SR: Right now we’re working on getting funding together to produce and distribute #2. The editorial board will rotate with each iteration of the ELC, so I personally won’t be involved in editing it. We hope to produce the ELC on a biennial basis, so I anticipate that the next one will emerge in 2008. I anticipate the call for works will go out sometime in the second half of next year, along with the announcement of the second editorial board. I’d encourage people who think the project is worthwhile to [url:http://eliterature.org/membership/]join the ELO[/url] and make a contribution in support of it.

Which of the sixty works is your favorite one and why?

SR: I’m fond of a great deal of them, and couldn’t pick a favorite. I value different works for different reasons, but haven’t regretted the time I’ve spent with any of them. The Collection as a whole is an awesome tool for me as an educator, as it includes several works that I have taught in the past, and has exposed me to many that I will teach in the future. It’s a kind of semester-in-a-box for those of us who teach Electronic Literature.

Thank you very much for the interview!

Scott Rettberg is the Director of the Center for Digital Narrative and a professor of digital culture in the department of linguistic, literary, and aesthetic studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. Prior to moving to Norway in 2006, Rettberg directed the new media studies track of the literature program at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. Rettberg is the author or coauthor of novel-length works of electronic literature such as The Unknown, Kind of Blue, and Implementation. His work has been exhibited both online and at art venues, including the Venice Biennalle, Beall Center in Irvine California, the Slought Foundation in Philadelpia, and The Krannert Art Museum. Rettberg is the cofounder and served as the first executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Literature Organization, where he directed major projects funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Rettberg is the project leader of the HERA-Funded ELMCIP research project, the director of the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base: http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase, and the leader of the Electronic Literature Research Group. Rettberg was the conference chair of the 2015 Electronic Literature Organization Conference and Festival: The End(s) of Electronic Literature. Rettberg and his coauthors were winners of the 2016 Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature for Hearts and Minds, The Interrogations Project. His monograph Electronic Literature (Polity, 2018) has been described by prominent theorist N. Katherine Hayles as “a significant book by the field’s founder that will be the definitive work on electronic literature now and for many years to come.” Electronic Literature was awarded the 2019 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature.

https://www.uib.no/en/persons/Scott.Robert.Rettberg

From a strict physical, corporeal point of view, ubiquity is an ontological impossibility. For as much as one would like, being in two places at the same time, for instance, the city of New York and the city of Baghdad, is not possible to accomplish. Only electrons, netart and god have the uncanny ability to present themselves in several places in one given moment.

You Are Not Here departs from and builds itself from this inability. Developed by Thomas Duc, Kati London, Dan Phiffer, Andrew Schneider, Ran Tao and Mushon Zer-Aviv and inviting people to “explore Baghdad through the streets of New York”, YANH presents itself as an urban tourism mash-up. Not only you can be in two places at the same time (the ubiquity concept we departed from), but also both those two places get interconnected in a psychological enactment of a meta-city. The underlying mechanism is pretty simple: users (the so-called meta-tourists) are invited to download and print on one side of a sheet of paper a map of New York and on the other side a reversed map of Baghdad. As soon as that task is accomplished the exotic sightseeing can begin. Scattered around New York are YANH street-signs that provide warned explorers (those who printed the map) as well as random passers-by the telephone number for the Tourist Hotline, where audio-guided tours of contemporary Baghdad destinations in NYC can be listened.

New Yorkers get the opportunity to know Baghdad like their own city. This sentence is everything but a random consequence of YAHN. The idea behind such a phrase isn’t without a purpose. But let’s leave the more immediate, political (some would even say critical) agenda of this project for later. Let us first think of psychogeography not only as theoretical concept but also, and in this case, as a tool. A tool that allows people to appropriate their own cities and break the coded urban space imposed by the established power. Resistance is a key word in this project and the authors are the first reclaim that as a main aspect of it. Mushon Zer-Aviv stated in an interview to We Make Money Not Art that “we were generally dissatisfied with the way mainstream media communicates terms like ‘Baghdad’ and ‘Iraqis’, we were feeling these terms have lost their human scale. YANH attempts to allow a one-to-one scaled experience of Baghdad”?.
So what does YANH allow? What does it do for the average New Yorker willing to take the proposed tour? It allows for a new layer of meaning to be added to the way New York is perceived. The similarities with Shiftspace, another project by Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv, are to be noticed, but now, instead of adding layer after layer to online space, it is a physical space, that of New York City that is enhanced with additional layers. But what is enhancing the glamorous city that never sleeps? And while asking this question the critical discourse mentioned earlier arises. It is not Paris or London the cities being overlapped and that we are exploring while going from one touristy spot to the other. It is a destroyed and plundered city. It is a rundown city. It is Baghdad. And in this lies the strength of the project. A New Yorker visiting Baghdad as a regular tourist, with a map in his or her hand and audio information of all the must-see monuments while walking around New York. Due to the contemporary tensions and conflicts existing in Iraq, and their connection to the USA, one cannot stop thinking of the irony stemming from the implicit dialectics between western tourism and (western) colonialism in a postcolonial world. More than overlapping two existing cities in order to create a subjective, psychologically driven experience of a meta-city, YAHN attempts to raise a politically engaged, irony driven portrait of the tensions of the conflict in Iraq by tying together in the same emotional web both capitals of the two empires. The one who is colonizing and the one being colonized.

Visits of Gaza through the streets of Tel-Aviv and of P’yongyang through the streets of Seoul will be available in a near future.

If you go to http://www.biomapping.net, the first (moving) image you see looks like an aerial view of a spiky fence enclosing a small area of Greenwich (London) implanted onto a Google Map. Two red dots at the opposite ends are labeled ‘Yachtclub Sneaky Drink’ and ‘Busy Traffic Crossing’.

This is a visualization of an individual experience of Christian Nold’s Bio Mapping Project. Christian started working on Bio Mapping in 2004 by building a Galvanic Skin Response sensor/data logger and connecting it to a commercial GPS unit.

To me, the word Galvanic has an echo of school days – in the 1780’s, Luigi Galvani experimented with dead frogs and electric charges, convinced that electricity was the invisible principle of life itself. The Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) is one of the parameters at the bases of lie detectors – it is a reading of the conductivity of an individual’s skin. Increased or decreased by changes in the activity of sweat glands, it becomes an indicator of the activity of the sympathetic nervous system. In short, it signals emotional arousal.

Christian is interested in creating situations in which quantitative data can be reconnected with the corresponding qualitative individual experiences, as well as their geographical position in the world. Once the sets of data are downloaded and processed through Visualization/Mapping software, the resulting three-dimensional maps bring together the answers to three questions: How much, Why and Where.

With this information in mind, the short digital video at http://www.biomapping.net reads as a map of the variations in respect of the emotional state of an individual as she/he moves along a certain path at a certain time. As external observers, we do not know if this person is or was aware of her/his emotions at the time when they were aroused. After a stroll around a designated area wearing Christian’s device, the data collected is downloaded, visualized, and then participants are invited to mark the map of their walks, with their remembered corresponding experiences.

This makes me think that if awareness was not present at the moment of experience, Christian’s project promotes its development. On the other hand, for those who have a good sense of their emotional state at any given time, it can be very interesting to compare it with this particular graphic representation.

Bio Mapping repositions the body as a social tool. It makes visible emotional reactions to places, other bodies and situations as physiological changes. To work at its best, it requires a balance of abandonment and awareness.

How does this practice compare to that of the historical figures who walked the streets of the city in the nineteenth and twentieth century? Bio Mapping moves the centre of the exploration from the singled out individual artist to an expanding set of relationships among a multiplicity of bodies of equal importance. The project develops through the collection of and re-elaboration, of data from different locations and participants. As individuals often take part in groups, the discussions following the walks are a crucial stage of fusion of research and practice.

At the centre of this web of connections, Christian Nold sharpens the tools and invites others to make the work with him.

As a project, Bio Mapping lives in the moment of its happening, as well as in its representations and successive re-experiencing. Taking part in Bio Mapping does not make you into a passive tool or source of information. You are invited to contribute with your capacity to elaborate, as well as your body, becoming part of an expanded, conscious feedback loop.

To explore where Bio Mapping sits within the wider picture of Christian’s practice, surf http://www.softhook.com.

Andy Stringer – The Destabilisation Of Perception.

TheSpace4, Peterborough, 10 November 2006 – 12 January 2007

Andy Stringer’s show at TheSpace4 in Peterborough consists of a series of large-scale abstract paintings. The labels and the catalogue identify these works as paintings, and they are areas of liquid pigment on substrate laid down with a flatness that Greenberg could only have dreamt of. These paintings are in fact wide-format inkjet prints of images created on computer using imaging software.

Artists who pursue abstraction through new technology are often accused of technological determinism. This is a naive criticism, ignoring the historical relationship of art to technology and of technology to culture. Technology is a product of society. Its emergence both reflects and marks an age, it is index and indexed. J David Bolter’s theory of determining technologies explains how societies regard their humanity in metaphoric terms of their highest technology, whether that is fire, pottery, steam or computers.

Art has used the newest technology creatively since our ancestors first used fire and its by products to make art, and up to the point where painters started using acrylic, alkyd, and silk-screen printing in the 1950s and 1960s. These aesthetic technologies afforded new spaces of expression, and reflected the determining technologies of the age. But in the mid-1970s, with the first commercial Paintbox systems became available, the mainstream of fine art suddenly diverged from technology. Painting became technically conservative even as its theory became ever more radical. With a few notable exceptions such as Richard Hamilton, painters did not engage seriously with the possibilities afforded by the new technology.

As Paintbox technology has become more cheaply available in consumer software such as Photoshop, and high-quality large-scale physical output of digital images has become an industry of its own, this failure of engagement has become ever more mystifying. Harold Cohen, a world-class abstract painter before he switched to writing software to generate images in the late 1960s, has said that the range of colour available from his current large-format inkjet printer exceeds that of his old oils. It is a wonder that painters do not throw away their palettes on hearing this rather than limiting themselves to their ochres and umbers.

Even when a painter such as Fiona Rae prepares her images in Photoshop, she sells inkjet prints of the results as preparatory sketches, rendering the finished image in the once-new technologies of oil and acrylic on canvas. The market and the supposedly anti-market critical theory of art both demand technical conservatism. This conservatism puts art at odds with society in a way that makes it socially irrelevent. Ironically this is the same fate that technological determinism is supposed to hold for the unwary artist.

It has fallen to graphic design to embrace the new image-making technologies. Graphic design is in many ways the successor to courtly art for the democratic age of the mass media. It uses highly developed image-making skills and technologies to depict not the king but goods and services sold to the masses in a business culture. The art that we often remember from the past is art made by and with such skills and technologies when they are given a space of freedom for the person exercising them to

Andy Stringer has put the skills and technologies of a graphic designer to use in order to make art. He calls his images paintings. This may be seen as a provocation by those for whom the technology of painting remains frozen in the new developments of fifty years ago, but it is an entirely defensible claim. As well as being areas of liquid pigment applied to a flat substrate these images speak of the history and concerns of painting. They are at the very least functional equivalents to paintings; they have the hard-won compositional density and the feel of the distillation of visual experience of the best abstract painting.

The images are created on a Mac in Photoshop with a Wacom tablet and occasional support from Illustrator and Painter. They are then produced as seven colour large-scale inkjet prints on gloss paper mounted on board. This is a graphic design workflow, indistinguishable from those used to produce exhibition stands or point of sale displays.

But the images that are the content of this workflow have not been created to lead to an external message, or to seduce the buyer of products or services. Despite their occasional use of structural or spatial devices familiar from the best European graphic design they generate a very different context. They lead to themselves. They are reflexive. They are intended as art not ephemera. They must withstand and reward prolongued scrutiny, give the eye work to do, engage the viewer.

And they do.

Stood in the middle of a room of these images you can see how the overall composition and motifs of each relates to the others. Forms that refer to forms in other images emerge, sometimes in positive, sometimes in negative. Move closer and the complexity of the forms between or sometimes making up those compositions become apparent.

The more complex passages of each piece, where many lines overlap and create areas of colour following the PostScript even-odd rule, are as determined as the large-scale gestural marks that speak of hand on tablet. This is art made with undo available, every mark has been evaluated and kept because of its contribution to the effect of the piece. The different layers of the image and the interaction between paths stroked in different translucent colours as they pass over and under other elements of the image interact in complex and highly determined ways that reward close and sustained examination and cross-referencing with other works.

This is different from the complexity of scripted “generative” art, often made with Processing for example, where an all-over composition produces random interactions that succeed statistically rather than intentionally. The density of Stringer’s images is built by hand. Even the rendered elements such as ripples and gradients have been generated and edited and placed with precision.

If you look even closer you can occasionally see the fine structure of the representation of the image. Some of the thinnest arcs stretch to become dashes of pixels, whereas gentle gradients show only the tiny stochastic dots of inkjet ink under close observation.

The seven colour printing method used to make these paintings means that they cannot be adequately reproduced by standard four colour printing, in a catalogue for example. The unreproducability of painting has always been held up as a means of its resistance to Walter Benjamin’s mechanical reproducability. These are paintings that are mechanically produced and reproducable, but resistant to mass production and mass consumption through the media as easel painting used to be pre-Damien Hirst. This is work that has to be seen.

What marks Stringer’s work out is the masterfully, painstakingly constructed and endlessly rewarding complexity and balance of the composition of his images. Although these images are produced using what is still, surprisingly, unorthodox means, they are both very contemporary and a continuation of the historical themes and concerns of abstract painting. This keeps painting as an open area of inquiry. Stringer’s work keep painting relevent and rewarding for a contemporary audience.

GROUNDED Unearthed

GROUNDED, the recent exhibition at E:vent in Bethnal Green, which has in the past few months relocated from the basement of its converted warehouse, artist-community home into a lovely space on the main floor, had what was perhaps the shortest press release of all time:

The group exhibition GROUNDED brings together a diverse range of international artists. It aims to show work that deals with processes of modeling and simulation, activities that form the conceptual backbone of digital culture. However all of the artists involved are tackling this subject with an array of practices that are firmly rooted in physical environments, from architecture to installation thus addressing important elements of digital culture with essentially non-digital means.

Short but powerful, I think; quick and more or less to the point, and it certainly introduces many interesting questions. As the same press release, pinned to the door along with a checklist of works in the exhibition and a little map of the space, comprised the only contextual material to be found, it also provides an interesting lens through which to consider the work here, as one would have done in the exhibition itself.

GROUNDED was organised around this idea that modelling and simulation are central to, and indeed constitutive of, digital culture. This is an interesting claim and quite bold. I am initially inclined to take issue; however, I suppose when considered from a certain angle it’s true any digital thing, whether image, sound, environment, or interface, is really just a simulation, an avatar composed of zeros and ones. Appropriately then, I found the work that asserted and interrogated this notion the most interesting.

Boys in the Hood (2005), by Axel Stockburger, the Austrian artist and theorist who also curated the show, is a positively transfixing video portrait of several young men who narrate confessional-style what we come to understand as their experiences within video games. One talks about taking a girl out on a date who proceeds to jump out of the car and shoots up some bad-guys; another describes the atmosphere of the city he wanders through, mentioning the differences between it and Vice City, the setting for another Grand Theft Auto game this was my first clue to the fact that it was indeed a gaming experience being described and not a real one. The simulation is so complete that it often throws their identities into doubt; a fairly normal looking English guy talks with conviction about spraying bullets all over the place, and you begin to wonder whether it’s him or you that’s living in a slightly parallel universe.

Another highlight was Jonathan Quinn’s beautiful Chair and Weights (2006), a work so subtle that I walked into it (oops!). I was watching Josh Maller’s La Construction du Ciel (2005), a video of an airport covered in so much snow and fog that the airplanes are necessarily immobile, grounded; the empty, snowy landscape looked very much like that around the airport in Denver, my hometown in the States. Though the space was a bit too bright to see the image properly, I was intrigued, and even more so once the director told me it was a film of a model; this was one of those times when a bit of contextual information might add to the work, though perhaps it does detract a bit from the absorbing inscrutability of the image. Anyway, I saw something glimmering on the wall, and I was prevented from walking toward it by fishing wire blocking my path. I heard a little jingle from the weights suspended on more wire overhead, and followed it down to a dainty little chair traced in orange thread suspended between transparent filaments. I soon discovered that the whole work was a complex system of counter-balances, with strands supporting the chair stretching up the walls to ceiling and several metres to the corner, a strikingly simple low-fi metaphor for the complex of carefully woven data threads underlying every simulated digital image.

Nicolaus Gansterer’s Eden Experiment, No. 1, a mini terrarium blasting heavy metal music at some unsuspecting little plants, was slightly less convincing in the context of the show as a whole, though his surrounding pseudo-scientific drawings of ‘natural’ systems were fantastic. My personal favourite depicted memory and knowledge belonging to a genetic system of sorts where everything, even tiny falling people, is filtered into a historical root system, an expansive commentary on the production of historical knowledge that reaches well beyond its tiny scale. I was even less sure about the relevance of the final two works to the exhibition’s thesis: Douglas Fishbone’s Blue Lobster Beard of Bees L.A. Riots Sock-Rat-Tees (2006) a disparate collection of photographs of the things listed in the title (apparently a story-board for his performance at the opening, which I’m afraid I missed), while Nicolas Jasmin’s static-shot video (2006) depicts a food stand on wheels, silent at the side of a road that you can hear but not see, but with a sign shouting ‘The Winners’,? which is also the title of the work.

So does GROUNDED succeed in using “non-digital means” to make a case for the centrality of simulation and modelling in digital culture? I’m not so sure; I can admit to being a bit ambivalent about asking the question, as I can appreciate Stockburger’s evident effort to resist curatorial determinism in the minimal mediation. Nonetheless, he asserts quite a hefty thesis, and as I said at the outset, I found those works most intriguing which adhered closest it; the others deterred a bit from what is quite a fascinating and expansive point. I must also take issue with press release’s claim about the “diverse range of international artists”; five of six artists are Austrian and all are men. Surely there are women and non-Europeans who are similarly engaged with questions relating to the exhibition’s central question. This is important to note, because if the exhibition itself is a model of the community engaging with this issue, it appears quite a homogeneous one. So though I found the work uniformly quite good, I suppose, contrary to my usual opinion, I would have preferred for Stockburger to push the point about simulation a bit further. To do so would have allowed a more thorough interrogation of the virtuality of digital space, and of the simulated communities, social relations, and experiences created there.

Open Source Embroidery: Jess Laccetti Inquires about Ele Carpenter’s Latest Work

“‘The Open Source Embroidery’ project brings together programming for embroidery and computing. It’s based on the common characteristics of needlework crafts and open source computer programming: gendered obsessive attention to detail; shared social process of development; and a transparency of process and product.”

Jess: By way of introduction, can you say a bit about ‘Open Source Embroidery’?; how you happened upon the idea, how it developed, and what was (is) a key lesson learnt in the creation of this project?

Ele: One of the lessons here is that there is such a thing as a zeitgeist, developed through the small world networks in which we work and socialise. From my point of view, the ‘Open Source (OS) Embroidery’? project is s synthesis of ideas and experiences involving many people over the last few years, who I hope will all take part in the project. At the moment I’m researching the theory, and testing out the practice for myself, in discussion with Sneha Solanki. The plan is to set up OS Embroidery groups to skill-share craft and computer programming skills. I’ve written about this on my website – click on the ‘research’ button of www.ele.carpenter.org.uk

So the project has many aspects: It is a collaboration with Sneha; a facilitated social network; and a skill-share experience based on sharing rather than ‘training’. It’s also a way for me to make things that are useful in articulating my research valuing objects as social processes, whether this is embroidery or software. I think the shift from purchasing a ‘finished product’ to investing in an ongoing developmental process is really valuable to how we rethink patterns of consumption, production and distribution. We need to find ways of connecting programming back into a craft culture.

I was invited to take part in an event called ‘Reunion’ organised by B+B at Wyzing Arts, last year (2005). The weekend was designed to bring together artists and curators from former Yugoslavia and the UK, who had an interest in socially engaged art practice. (Actually the group represented either political art or socially engaged art practices. There is an important distinction here. I think that there was an assumption that political art and socially engaged art have something in common, and the terms are often used interchangeably. In reality they are completely different approaches to practice. But we can talk about this later.)

Anyway – the Reunion project was the catalyst for me to develop a visual social participatory project that articulated my research interests. Although in the media art world my research is understood, outside of that – no-one knows what I am talking about. The reality is that most people have never heard of open source. I wanted to develop something accessible, do-able and intriguing that would function as a tool for conversation, and that anyone could take part in. The project also had to integrate my social and political interests as a conceptual model. So I looked back over my points of social engagement which could be useful in creating a space to discuss technology without alienating people with very little knowledge (myself included).

Hearing Natalie Jeriminjenko speak at the Interrupt Conference at IDAT in June 2003 was quite revealing for me. It was the first time that I heard about an alternative to the military history of the internet. Going further back to when I was Curator at NGCA in Sunderland, Sarah Cook introduced me to the work of Mandy MacIntosh, and we showed her knitted face masks in an exhibition called ‘Use nor Ornament’ and the knitting patterns were available on the web.

I’m interested in how popular knitting and craft skills are becoming. Young women are reclaiming the social and DIY values of knitting, and trendy ‘Stitch and Bitch’ knitting circles can be found in most cities in the US and UK. It’s as if women have a renewed value of the female space, and found a comfort zone for dealing with all sorts of other issues. The feminist rhetoric however, is very subtle, and groups form and are maintained for many different reasons. I went to a wonderful knitting group run by Holly Mitchell and Hannah Kirkham, at their social art projects in Fingertips bookshop in Newcastle, 2004. Around the edges of the room were re-used computers which they had been setting up as part of Access-Space’s ‘Grow your Own Media Lab.’? As I knitted a very simple scarf I knew I wanted to do something that linked these two paradigms of production.

Then I read about Ada Lovelace, Sadie Plant, and an aspect of cyberfeminism that seemed relevant to me. Without knowing much about it – I’d always been a bit suspect of the internet as a form of liberation because women could hide their gender. It reminds me too much of Margaret Thatcher. Also I’m not really interested in technology as an extension of the body, or the net as a form of disembodiment. I’m not saying it’s not a relevant debate – but I’m working on other things.

The way in which people explain the principles of open source is to use metaphors such as a recipe or accessible instructions (see cubecola at the Cube Cinema in Bristol). In 2002 Sophie Horton took part in Labculture and made a short digital video about the relationship between the code of crochet and architecture. We showed it the Rethinking Time exhibition at Peterborough Digital Art in March 2004.

So the B+B Reunion weekend was to be my ‘test – run’.? I took a bag of scarves, embroidery threads and needles with me to Wyzing. Whilst the group sat around and presented their projects, I was busy stitching away. I didn’t get much of a response – and I realised how completely ‘new media’ these ideas are. Most people don’t really understand the link. However, during the open day to the public, several people came and talked to me about what I was doing. The conversations were certainly valuable but I only managed to get one person to do some embroidery. I realised that it was going to take a far greater ‘comfort zone’,? focused time, and a self-selected group of participants for this project to really work. Also I needed to have some visual examples. It also needed to be developed with someone who knew something about programming, or at least html. And I needed to have a go at some programming language and learn html for myself.

In February 2006 I took part in the ‘Hack the Knowledge Lab’? at Lancaster university and had a basic introduction to Python by Simon Yuill. Then I started learning html with Sneha Solanki, which gave us an opportunity to share our ideas and plan to work together on the ‘Open Source Embroidery’ project. Sneha has the programming skills and technical knowledge and the same interests in creating horizontal learning relationships.

As an independent curator, this is the nearest I have come to making ‘art’? since my art-school days in the early 90s, and I’m really excited! I’m not really interested in the artist/curator debate, or the art/craft debate – the project is all of these things in different ways. The form and content of what people make is completely up to them, and owned by them. Sneha and I are thinking through the structure of the project to keep it mobile and useful for people. So far everyone I’ve told about it wants to take part, so we really have to get our skates on…

Jess: Thinking of temporality and the digital medium often brings to mind an always already present(ness) or “real-time” quality to interactions. How would you situate ‘Open Source Embroidery’ alongside this kind of notion of temporality?

Ele: I’m interested in the real-time aspects of technology, and the social networks which have to be developed for it to become meaningful. For example a website exists all the time, and we think of it as being ‘virtual?’ or ‘out there’.? But actually it’s on a server, the information is in a pile of plastic, microchips and circuitry: it’s real-time, which we are abruptly reminded of when servers crash or are closed down. At the same time a website can be rarely visited or used, unless its part of a social network. My own personal observation is that these networks need to operate both on and off-line to be maintained and developed.

To build a website or to make a piece of embroidery or knit an item of clothing takes time. The crafts used to be a form of social or meditive recreation, which has been replaced by shopping or watching TV. Much of our recreational time is spent trailing the shelves endlessly searching for the right product, then we crash out in-front of the tv to watch the adverts about what we need to buy. Rather than buying a black box of tricks, or a complete jumper, ‘OS Embroidery’? offers the opportunity to start to rethink patterns of consumption, recreation and learning. The ‘investment’ in OS is in the time it takes to develop or maintain the software or clothing.

In both instances the production process is a form of social interaction, which is where OS Embroidery comes in.

Jess: You say that OS Embroidery is a form of social interaction, how might this kind of interaction be different from political art?

Ele: In terms of communication, social interaction is the opposite of ‘Political Art’. My definition of ‘political art’ is an object based practice which carries a direct political message. It doesn’t work because it’s either preaching to the converted so people ignore it; or it’s preaching to people who think they are converted, so they ignore it. And people who completely disagree with the message just ignore it anyway. Sometimes it can be very witty and everyone can admire the irony. But I always feel quite bored with political art – I’m not learning anything. I use the category of ‘Politicised Art’ to describe work that is aware of its political and social context, and finds ways of revealing the invisible, interrogating the context, and exploring the relationship between the form and content of the medium or platform.

Social interaction is about pleasure, sharing time, ideas, and planning the next social event. It can also be about disagreement, debate, and the politics of transforming conflict into something creative and useful. It’s live, present, visible and tiring. Sometimes it’s nice to go and look at art.

Jess: How does the collaboration involved in ‘OS Embroidery’? help participants negotiate between centralised control and decentralised author(ity)? How do you as originary “author” negotiate your role?

Ele: The aim of the OS Embroidery workshops is to organise a structure in which people can develop their own projects. The ‘centralised control’? is the initiation of the structure, after that people can make their own work, form their own collaborations, and set up their own groups. The ‘decentralised’? authority might cause a problem if users or funders try to conceive of the project as ‘training’, then the woolly social process might seem a bit slow and unfocused for them.

The project is also a collaboration with Sneha Solanki, so we’re bouncing ideas back and forth as we go. We’re the initiators of the project, and its part of our creative practice, but we don’t ‘own’? the work or idea. Anyone can set up an OS Embroidery workshop or event, and they can call it what they like.

Jess: At the BlogHer 06 conference this past July, we found that many of the women there (it was mostly women who attended) who were using technology were self taught and learnt via collaborative means, and you mention that you decided to learn html for yourself. Can you share with us your introduction to technology and how you continue to develop that expertise?

Ele: I think most programmers are self-taught, men and women.

In chronological order my introduction to computers and the Internet goes something like this:

When I was curator at NGCA (Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art) back in 2000 we paid a design company a staggering ?4,000 to create a ‘Dreamweaver’ website. And it was awful – it looked like a commercial site and wiped us out financially. The designers had absolutely no idea how to integrate creative / interactive / or artists sites into the gallery site. Like most gallery websites they simply transferred the marketing print online, and added an archive. I was horrified, but didn’t really know what the options were, or what the real issues of time, design, etc were.

Partly through meeting Sarah Cook, and partly through my own curiosity I found out about things like net.art and later hacktivism. I also went to see Beryl Graham’s ‘Serious Games’? exhibition at the Barbican, and at the Laing Art Gallery. The work was seeping into visual art exhibitions, and I kept being emailed links to work online. I was so relieved to find that there was a whole network of artists interrogating the medium, and not simply using the web as an international noticeboard. I had a sense that the terms of engagement: interaction, participation, and collaboration, were being discussed and articulated through new media in some very sophisticated ways.

When I started working with CRUMB as a doctoral researcher in 2004, I had no knowledge of programming or computing other than Microsoft word, Excel and email. Now I have a basic knowledge in that I’ve heard of Java, had debates about Flash, heard Gilberto Gil talk about Open Source in Brazil, and have read Eric Raymond’s ‘Cathedral and the Bazaar’? as well as a stack of new media art books. But none of this teaches you anything about programming. You have to sit down at a computer and learn how to make it do things… its very time consuming (like embroidery) and you get stuck often.

Working with Sneha I realised that programming is not really a different ‘language’? – it’s all in English, it’s just the grammar that’s different. It’s like learning any grammar, you can have lessons, but you have to go out into the world and speak it in order to learn. I quickly discovered that Dreamweaver (for my purposes) is simply a programme that creates html shortcuts. Rather than buying the software I could make my own html website very quickly, and for free (apart from the ?2.99 cost of a domain name). I loved the simplicity and quickness of it. However, the hand drawn diagrams were created by other people and are actually activated through Dreamweaver. I’m not sure if they would be possible to create in html. And html isn’t really a language – it’s a markup, which is different, although I’m not sure how.

I had two websites – www.riskproject.org.uk and the longweekend, and then I wanted my own website. The different sites were created by 2 different people and I needed to connect them all together and learn how to add content myself. So once I’d got to grips with the principle of the internet based on hypertext, and that html (hyper text markup language) could be used to create content and make the hyperlinks work, I knew that there was another option to paying someone a vast sum which I don’t have. I asked Sneha to work with me because I respect her approach to technology, and knew that if we spent some time together we might decide to collaborate on a project too. So working together wasn’t just about learning; it was about sharing ideas.

My technical reason for taking part in OS Embroidery workshops will be to find a way to get to the next stage, to start learning something like Python. At this stage it’s about understanding what it is we are talking about, and then we can plan what it is we want to do with it. Conceptually, bringing together the polarities of form and gender seems to be a good starting point.

Jess: Finally, what would you say makes a collaborative effort function and how might this feature in creating or encouraging social change?

Ele: We learn through social interaction and collaboration. But we often assume that these things come “naturally”.? Good social interaction usually needs a clear structure or boundary so that people know what’s going on and feel comfortable. A good host or experienced facilitator really helps.

Several of these issues were picked up in the conversation about ‘Collaboration’ on the Game/Play Blog. Socially Engaged Art practice (using new media or not) often assumes that the engagement of the work (interaction, participation and collaboration) is, and includes, the mediation, analysis and contextual development of the work. This assumption leads to a lack of critical analysis from an objective viewpoint. Michael Samyn describes the same problem with interactive computer artworks:

“Second, authors of interactive pieces often use this myth of users-as-creators to excuse themselves from making any statements or adding any content. This is very convenient since in the context of contemporary art, expressing an opinion seems to be considered politically incorrect”.?
Michael Samyn Aug 8 2006. Game/Play Blog Conversations / Collaboration. http://blog.game-play.org.uk/?q=node/34

We also need to unpick the relationship between the group dynamic and the project outcome. Ruth Catlow warns of the dangers of collaboration:

“Collaboration can seriously damage your objectivity as an individual. This may be one reason why collaborative projects are sometimes treated with suspicion and disdain in academic, empirical and hierarchical frameworks”.?
Ruth Catlow August 9, 2006 Game/Play Blog Conversations / Collaboration. http://blog.game-play.org.uk/?q=node/34

Ruth seems to be suggesting that a group process can be subject to the downfalls of “crowd behaviour” (Heath&Potter, 2005) where the energy of the crowd can takeover individual autonomy in terms of negativity or euphoria. This can lead the group to sing the praises of a weak project outcome.

However, if we apply the rule of consensus decision making (www.seedsforchange.org.uk) then the logic is that a properly inclusive group process should engage the best ideas and properly focus specific skills on specific tasks to create a jointly owned successful project outcome. The idea is that if people have true input to the process, they will take full ownership of the outcome. If properly facilitated a group collaboration should produce robust outcomes. However, in all collaborative art processes (new media, socially engaged art, visual art) there is a massive gaping hole of experience and training in facilitation, mediation and consensus decision making.

Ele Carpenter is undertaking post doctoral research with CRUMB (Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss) at the University of Sunderland. Her curatorial practice-based research is focused on socially and politically engaged art activism with and without new technologies. Research outcomes include: the RISK project, 2005; the Open Source Embroidery Project, 2006; and thesis due to be completed in January 2007.

About one year after the release of Google Will Eat Itself the artists PAOLO CIRIO (PC), ALESSANDRO LUDOVICO (AL), Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx (both UBERMORGEN.COM (UC)) out foxed Amazon.com, the second global Internet player. The results of the Media/Art-event Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime were presented to the public on the 15th of November 2006. In the following interview the Amazon Noir Crew talks about the framework of the project, its coding and art historical background, the official feedback and copyright issues.

Crime, thievery, betrayal, the bad and the good guys and a final showdown with the blistering sun: Amazon Noir refers in its title, narration and visualisation to the 1940/50ies Film Noir and crime fiction. Why did you settle your newest project in this genre and who are the good guys, honestly?

UBERMORGEN.COM (UC): Dating back to “the digital hijack” with etoy — using movie scripting and film plots are very usefull aesthetically and technically for digital actionism (media hacking). Noir is symptomatic for labeling art forms in retrospect. We were also dealing with German Expressionism at the time and from there it is not far to Film Noir. The combination of the two is best described in the dialogue of Amazon Noir.

ALESSANDRO LUDOVICO (AL): A supposed “crime” related to books could refer recursively to Noir (that is a tale about crime in a certain style), so it was the perfect genre to involve in such a project. The good guys won in the end. But this is not happening in any Noir, as you probably know, and the twists are always possible.

PAOLO CIRIO (PC): The hype of the spin against piracy that come from media propaganda is ever focused on the criminalization of downloading and share content under copyright. The main controversial consequence of increment of sharing of content is the lucrative exploiting by the corporations, like actually Napster or the big business of the devices for playing MP3 and DviX. So we are the worst guys of the scene: we have done a big crime and in the end we have betrayed our action, with a deal with the enemy. It’s a representation of the actual ambiguity about copyright issue, where in any case it seems that anything has a right moral or ethic roots.

Despite all storytelling, Amazon Noir is a socio-technical piece/process of art. What is the coding background of the “sophisticated robot-perversion-technology” ab/using Amazon.com’s Search-Inside-the-Book-feature? Did you select the books acccording to certain criteria?

UC: No, the books were auto-selected by keywords — we entered a list of 23 keywords to the machine, from then on it was tripping by itself. The books were then selected, downloaded, stored and redestributed by the machine.

AL: And some of the selection was surprisingly fitting into the core project spirit. For example “Steal this book” by Abbie Hoffman turned out as one of the first results.

PC: The background of our robot-perversion-technology was a system of four servers around the globe, everyone with a specific function: one in USA for a faster sucking of books, one in Russia for injecting books in p-2-p-networks and two in Europe for schedule the action with intelligent robots. The main goal was to steal all 150,000 books of the Amazon.com’s Search-Inside-the-Book-feature, and then use the same technology of us for stealing books from the Google Print Service. It was just relative of the number of clusters of robots we could use. After the deal with Amazon we can invest money in order to improve our project.

According to a press release from Edith Russ Haus, Amazon Noir is based upon the tradition of happenings and seen as a performative media event, which includes the reaction of conventional media in its concept. Already any reactions from Amazon.com or any other part of the show: media, press, lawyers, … ? What kind of responses do/did you expect?

UC: We do not expect anything. The setting is experimental and our research carries us into unknown territories, socially, economically, politically and in terms of media (mass media, Internet, mobile communication). It was striking that the project was fully running on a technical level (underground) and hyped on a mass media level (overground) but there was a vacuum in the middle. We have not released the project until Nov 15 2006 — but by then the project was over. This release strategy was totally new to us.

AL: We’re not interested in generating a media hype, but in researching and then sharing innovation on both conceptual and technical level. Amazon Noir was an experiment in many senses. Among them the secret exploit of one of Amazon mostly used technology was done via a special software and then the incoming files where framed as results before any public mention. When people have known about that everything was already done.

PC: Yeah, in the evolution of the net-art projects of historic groups like RtMark, CriticalArtEnsemble (CAE), ElectronicDisturbanceTeather, we are the synthesis of the best of their core style. We play in different stages: on the net, on the old mass media and in the streets. We engage in our show different actors: the audience, media, art and legal system. Every layer of our complex society is in the scenography, because now happenings should be in the anthropological space of our contemporary culture. So I like this quote of “Digital resistance”, of the CAE: “The aim of The Living Theater to break the boundaries of its traditional architecture was successful. It collapsed the art and life distinction, which has been of tremendous help by establishing one of the first recombinant stages.”

Amazon.com, in both senses, deals with books, one of the exemplary non-material good of our time. In the late 1960ies Conceptual Art was controversially charcterised by the term dematerialization. Regarding works like Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir from this point of view, the term dematerialization gets an ambiguous kind of meaning: Are you — asked provocatively — dematerialising economics by art or even rematerialsing art? Do you see yourself as Conceptual Artists?

UC: Yes. We see part our work in the tradition of Conceptual Art. For the dematerialising part of your question, click-economy and global finance already work on extremely abstract levels. We love to short-circuit and to lay out very basic instructional text (code) as the core of our projects. The Computer and The Network create our art and combine every aspect of it. UBERMORGEN.COM is metaphysically influenced by Lawrence Weiner and practically enhanced by ever reinventing Madonna, Jean Tinguely, the Nouveaux Realistes and by the hardcore Viennese Actionists.

AL: The material/immaterial dilemma is at the base of digital, but after so many dematerialisation analisys, now it seems that to re-materialize stuff is an art trend. What we do is to re-materialize digital paradoxes and de-stabilizing potential markets in a “conceptual” economy.

Copyright/left, GNU, Creative Commons, All Rites Reversed — The discussions about the actual restictions of the copyright are multifaceted and emanate from many different points of view. Where do you — as artists, writers, producers of intellectual, non-material goods — see the most striking clash between intellectual property and commodities in their original meaning as industrial property?

PC: The second step of the materialization of the books in printed copy is with Print on Demand technology and the distribution of these in public space of poor countries will be a concrete example of commodities. When a common good has been given to people for free or for a cheap price, the society have to earning. Every day we see the rampant privatization of commons, as soon as people become more poor and ignorant. The latest movements of CC, Wikipedia, P2P free networks, etc. are a needed resistance in a world where the use of cultural content is ever less a right but ever more a business.

UC: One of UBERMORGEN.COMs ongoing projects is called “Chinese Gold”. It mixes up the “virtual” (the game) with the “real” (money). In China there are many Online-Gaming Workshops that hire people to play online games such as World of Warcraft (WoW) day and night. The gaming workers produce in-game currency, equipments, and whole characters that are sold to American and European Gamers via Ebay. These people are called ÑChinese Gold Farmers”. The future is now! See the image series.

One final question to all of you: What was the last book you ordered on Amazon.com? And was it your last?

UC: Anne McCaffrey, “All The Weyrs of Pern”. Yes, we stopped downloading books the moment the contract (sale of the software) was signed with Amazon USA. Thanks for your Qs. Amazon Noir is a project by UBERMORGEN.COM, PAOLO CIRIO, ALESSANDRO LUDOVICO, 2006

AL: Mine was “Amazon.com: Get Big Fast” by Robert Spector.

Thank you very much/grazie mille for the interview!

—

About the Amazon Noir crew:

Paolo Cirio http://www.paolocirio.info
is a Turin/Italy based Media activist, born in 1979. He studied Multimedia, Art, Music and Performing Arts at the University of Torino/Italy and completed his degree with the topic “Net-Art as model of new performance”. He is part of the software-art collective [epidemiC] and organises art happenings with an activist background. He works as a webdesigner and developer as well as art director.

Alessandro Ludovico http://www.neural.it/english
is a Bari/Italy based writer, critic and publisher, born in 1969. He is one of the founders of Nettime and the European Peripheral Magazine as well as editor in chief of the magazine Neural from 1993 up to now. He edited the Virtual Reality Handbook (1992) and the Internet.Underground Guide (1995). In 2006 he co-edited “The Mag.net reader. Experiences in Electronic Cultural Publishing”.

Lizvlx http://www.ubermorgen.com
is a Vienna/Austria and St. Moritz/Switzerland based artist, born in 1973. She studied Commercial Sciences and Market Research at the University of Economics Vienna/Austria and is the founder of 194.152.164.137 as well as the co-founder of UBERMORGEN.COM. Lisvlx lectures at conferences and universities around the globe. Her media-portfolio includes publications from CNN to Bulgarian Newspapers.

Hans Bernhard http://www.ubermorgen.com
is a Vienna/Austria and St. Moritz/Switzerland based artist, born in 1971. He studied Visual Communications, digit Art, Art History and Aesthetics at the University of applied Art Vienna/Austria as well as in San Diego/USA, Pasadena/USA and Wuppertal/Germany. He is founding member of the etoy.CORPORATION and UBERMORGEN.COM. He works as a professional artist and media researcher.

The contradictory overlap between diversity and similarity of languages and their corresponding cultures is the initial point for the project PHONETHICA by Takumi ENDO and Nao TOKUI.

More than 6.5 billion people on our planet share approximately five to six thousand languages. Nevertheless, every single individual owns a speaking equipment, which enables him/her to produce the same sounds in every corner of the world. Consequently, there exists some coincidental similarity within the different idioms. Looking at languages in this specific way, it must be concluded that phonetic rather than semantic aspects of languages result in an overlapping of language phenomena in different cultural backgrounds.

The multifaceted research on so called homophones — words that are identical in sound and sometimes even spelling in various languages but carry a different meaning — is the basic idea behind PHONETHICA. Still, the project doesn’t understand itself as a protective tool for disappearing languages. It is rather meant as a database for a wider social movement, originating from one single point of common “understanding”. Anyhow, the project developer Takumi ENDO would especially like “native speakers of minority groups, linguistic researchers and children all over the world” to use PHONETHICA.

The idea for PHONETHICA was already created in Paris and Tokyo in 2004. The investigations on the matter began with a wide range of interviews with scientists and artists, as well as with the development of an algorithm (SEAP), a language database (WODI) and a multimedia encyclopaedia (SOME). All three technical features, finally combined to the software PHMS (Phonethic HomonyM Search), are based upon IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, used for the phonetic standardisation of any spoken language. Since then, PHONETHICA has been developed and presented to the public in form of the interactive installation RONDO, at the moment displayed in Tokyo as an annual permanent installation. At the very beginning of 2007, PHONETHICA will be published as an online tool for a broader public.

If any given word is submitted to the interface of PHONETHICA by a user, it will be translated into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and compared with all entities of the language database WODI. If one or more words share approximately the same sound-information as the submitted word, the result is located and shown to the user in form of three dimensional graphics, including a variety of layers.

The title PHON-ETHICA already hints at the vast amount of informational material, which gets to be distributed via PHMS besides phonetics: socio-cultural knowledge, the culture and race of the people who speak the languages, the environments in which they live, the types of food they eat, the kinds of songs they sing, their history, religion, economic and political situations. Furthermore, information on grammar, vocabulary, orthography, phonology, writing and numbering systems of the concerned language is available.

Our society’s fragmentation of knowledge has led Takumi ENDO and Nao TOKUI to create this new form of multimedia encyclopaedia. Topics are no longer explained by static definitions as it is the common case in regular dictionaries but rather via an organic synergy between technology and art. Takumi ENDO, the project’s director, argues: “The implication of this project is the possibility of creating an alternative (counter) value system in a world which has become too structured by entrenched and fixed systems of meaning.” With PHONETHICA the artists are — in some respect — creating their own multimedia cultural code which is at “the search for the perfect language” (Umberto Eco) and thereby perhaps returning the user to Babel.

——–

About Takumi ENDO, director – http://www.inexhale.net
Takumi Endo is a composer and a media artist. He began his activities in 1993 and his works have been presented all over the world from Japan to Austria. Currently he is based in Paris.

About Nao TOKUI, co-director/programming – http://www.naotokui.com
Nao Tokui is an artist, dj and engineer at the International Media Research Foundation in Tokyo. He explores new relationships between music and human beings with focus on generative algorithms and the computer-human-interaction.

Project blog: http://phonethica.net
Display in Tokyo: http://www.ntticc.or.jp
Video presentation (YouTube): http://linkme2.net/an

Schedule:
Mattias Petersson 20.4-26.4
Daniel Skoglund 26.4-2.5
Lise-Lotte Norelius 2.5-7.5
Sten Hansson 7.5-12.5
Ida Lunden 12.5-17.5

Sound is more central to nonTVTVstation than you might think. Many of the pieces we have shown focus on the sound, and the visuals have been static, just illustrations or generated by sounds.

This can create an interesting situation when the nonTVTV station is sometimes shown at sites built for silent art. The sounds require a different kind of concentration and perception, and noisy surroundings can negatively affect a fragile and minimalistic piece.

Still, the sound art we have transmitted has been very successful. Sound has leaked out in the museum rooms, making people curious about where the sound comes from and leading them to nonTVTVstation screenings. In that way, the sound has reached out, independent of architecture and frames, in another way than the images.

Here, we want to focus on sound and experimental music by inviting five Swedish composers working with experimental and electronic music. They will, for the nonTVTVstation, make one shorter project each.

2nd Upgrade! International Meeting – Oklahoma City

In 1999, New York based media artist Yaek Kanarek and a group of new media related friends met in a bar in New York City. After this first meeting, they began gathering on a monthly basis. Those gatherings got more and more people and realizing the potential of these events, Eyebeam was approached in order to start hosting what became known as the Upgrade! New York. That was the beginning of what is now an international network of gatherings concerning art, technology and culture. Counting with twenty-two nodes, from all five continents, and still growing, the Upgrade! network (and maybe, most importantly, community) has a decentralized, non-hierarchical structure that allows local nodes to take action according to local interests and available resources. Last year, six years after the first meeting, the one that set everything into motion, Eyebeam hosted the First International Upgrade! Meeting, where all the active nodes (ten at the time) gathered, discussed the importance and goals for the future, and maybe most importantly, presented documentation of works by over one hundred artists who had participated at the Upgrade!’s local nodes.

This year, the Oklahoma City node will host the Second International Meeting. Having the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) ideology as its theme, as well as a metaphor for the functioning of the Upgrade! network, this city in the middle of the United States of America will witness, from November 30th to December 3rd, a worldwide meeting of new media artists, curators, critics and theoreticians. Over twenty nodes will be present and have been preparing specially for the occasion a program that will feature exhibitions, performances, lectures, workshops, screenings and debates. Spreading all over the city, in spaces like Untitled [ArtSpace], IAO Gallery or The Oklahoma City Museum of Art, the Second International Upgrade! Meeting will feature a wide variety of projects dealing with or exploring the concept of Do-It-Yourself.

To name just a few examples of what will be going on, from Berlin there will be a lecture about two projects aimed at turning visitors into active users. Boston is preparing a lecture on recent networked art projects engaging viewers with interplay of the physical and virtual world, as well as a net art show called DIY or Die. Chicago will be giving a workshop on investigating local water quality using artist-developed visualization software. Istanbul will be taking a screening of short videos by Turkish digital artists, a lecture about cultural technical, political and artistic systems of control dealt with in Istanbul and also a presentation about ctrl_alt_del, Turkey’s first sound art festival. Johannesburg will be addressing the issue of new media arts in Africa through a lecture and Lisbon will be showcasing a series of interactive installations and performances as well as a workshop on hacked turntables. Montreal is preparing a sound-listening lounge where participants can listen to experimental audio works from artists across the world.

These are only a few of the projects presented at the Upgrade! International. The list goes on and other nodes will have their own views on the concept of DIY and how it can be articulated within the frame of such an art event, organized by one node but closely helped by and featuring contributions from all the other ones, in what can be thought of a nomadic, global new media art festival.

For more information, please visit the Upgrade! International at http://www.theupgrade.net/
or Upgrade! Oklahoma City at http://www.1ne3.com/upgrade

F.wish is a new online project commissioned by Folly by Boredom Research based on the Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees. In Hong Kong near the Tin Hou Temple you can visit these trees, write your wish on a “bao die”, tie it to an orange and throw it up into the branches. If your wish is caught in the branches it is said to come true. The tree used to be a camphor tree where a tablet for worshipping Pak Kung was placed before it withered and became hollow. The myth goes that a worshiper prayed to the tree to fix his son who was slow in learning. The granted wish led to many more wishes being made of the tree.

F.wish has the same warm and friendly characteristics of all of Boredom Research’s work. Processing has not so much changed the style of their work but added to it allowing a greater amount of diversity than what is possible using Director, which although respected has been shied into being seen as a multimedia presentation platform that lacks the support of Java and Flash, especially on the internet. Some of the animated elements in f.wish move with a fluidity this author knows very well: the increasingly popular physics library for Processing. The “bao die” have been given a playful elastic nature and the text seems to drift in a blow away delightfully. I sent some questions to Boredom Research about their new piece and they were kind enough to give me some very exhaustive replies.

FF: Have you been to Hong Kong then? Or perhaps did this come out of some other kind of research?

BR: We visited Hong Kong in August 2006 during which time we were developing the Folly project. The premise at this time was a landscape as a contemplative space for users to explore. Also, we had been researching the eastern practice of Omikuji which are random fortunes written on strips of paper or ribbon found around shrines often on trees. And the perhaps similar custom of writing a prayer on a specially-prepared wooden block called an Ema which is then tied to an ad hoc scaffold. We became interested in how these ritual environments were carefully arranged in an attempt to be conducive to losing yourself in thought and contemplation.

Our Hong Kong travel agent became immediately besotted with our two year old’s golden curls and clung to us with the vigour of a very hungry leach. In-between telling us that he, as he pronounced it, would “like to bitch him” he also gave us the hard sell on their key tourist attractions. The Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees were on his list. When we realized that “bitch” was “bite” badly pronounced and hopefully, meant metaphorically, we relaxed and looked at the brochure. We wanted Folly’s online environment to be a space where a visitor would not feel prohibited to leave a message or explore. So when we read about the Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees we immediately became inspired by this notion. The trees have motivated millions of people worldwide to visit and leave their desires hanging from the branches.

On our return, we started researching the history of the wishing trees – a Banyon tree is very sacred in South Asia and over the years they have been renowned as attractive meeting places for village communities. Hence, the Banyon tree name originates from “banias” (merchants who used to do business under the shade of the trees.)

It was also the aesthetics of the Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees that appealed to us, the paper that hangs from the branches is a deep crimson colour and when the tree is laden with wishes they take on a magical form – its like the tree is blossoming with peoples wishes. We were keen to recreate this beauty within our online environment.

FF: I’m betting it’s been put together in Processing. I recognise some of those physics simulations in f.wish. Does f.wish use traer.physics or are you using stuff of your own.

BR: F.wish has been produced in Processing & yes we did use the traer.physics library.
Which to our untrained eye looks like every other we have seen, so, we’re not sure how you can tell. We wrote our own to do the particle bit but springs became a problem. Could be because we didn’t have a 4th order Runge-Kutta integrator and as we have no idea what a 4th order Runge-Kutta integrator is we used Traer.

We also used Michael Chang’s Vector Library and a script that I think was modified from Yonas Sandbæk savetoweb and hashVec by Flux. The java applet communicates to a PHP script which writes the wishes to a MySQL database.

FF: Do you draw those nice backgrounds yourself or are they generative?

BR: We built all the software in Processing to generate the plant form and the text ribbon.

We did spend sometime playing around with other software which could create plant-forms i.e. ContextFree and TreeGenerator but they failed to give us the gnarly qualities we were looking for.

The tree is grown using the principles of an L-system but built around periodic oscillations modulated to a fixed number each new branch is spawned at the angle of the last branch section + 180 degrees + a fraction of the branch length. Branch sections are added with a scaled rotational increment.

The ribbon was drawn by hand using a multi line tool we made in processing (it took many attempts before we got the one we used.)

FF: Did you approach Folly or did Folly approach you? ?

BR: Folly originally approached us, they were keen to commission some artists to produce a work that would utilise their data management system. Folly’s primary interest was to further develop an online audience. We immediately started to think about online forums and how they are good illustrations of a process where threads develop over time. However our interactions and experience of them are experientially impoverished; focused entirely around efficiency and functionality. Despite this focus they soon become overblown and difficult to manage and navigate.

F.wish is really only a sketch. The full project will extend upon f.wish as a multi-user navigable landscape that explores the ground between standard computer gaming models and traditional forms of artistic representation. We hope that this investigation might lead to a way of navigating the potentially unruly space of an online forum in a way that is both conducive to consideration and comment as well as responding to our inbuilt ability to navigate by landmarks.

FF: Any other work on the horizon?

BR: apart from the above mention extension of f.wish and realSnailMail (www.realsnailmail.net) which we hope to be operational early next year we are working on a new body of work that continues where we left of with “Ornamental Bug Garden 001” Moving from lingo to Processing has profoundly changed the creative possibilities for us and we are very excited to be re-engaging with this work.

_The Lost Biology of Silent Hill_

/join Silent Hill

/The game Silent Hill [all 5 versions] attempts to restitch game-genre predictability. The versions progress using suspense/dread evocation as their primary engagement tool. Various game elements produce this introspective thrill-connection through the use of sound biting [almost literally], sinister environ expectancies [limited visual negotiations through fog/blackness], rotten materiality [decay + dereliction] and puzzle elements designed 2 provoke survival adaptions [fight-or-flight responses].

/The film Silent Hill [2006] successfully attempts to move the immediacy of the immersive game experience into cross-genre territory. The movie stretches a step beyond cinematic conventions and is celluloid-breaking in terms of reflecting game construction rather than a traditional hollywoodised willing-suspension-of-disbelief. The film is completely goal – rather than story – directed with little emphasis placed on a typical film narrative stream to restrict it. Silent Hill plays out essentially through game projections and is incrementally driven by a mixture of anticipatory/reactive adrenalin spike-&-pump. There is no predictable hero[ine]-rite-of-passage evident; the denouement isn’t a round-house-kick in terms of colour-by-number conclusions.

/The “characters” in the film perform as a cinematic version of game NPCs [Non-Player Characters] with little emphasis placed on foregrounding or complete character development [as such they are essentially Non-Character Players that are hardly distinguishable from the secondary monster-characters that inhabit the Silent Hill universe].

/The film rewrites conceptions of ordered biology via flipping gender stereotypes and visceral/genetic re-orderings. Rose [the mother protagonist] is not the biological birth mother of Sharon; Rose also adopts a type of hero’s role most commonly reserved for cinematic leading men. All the central characters are female – Rose, the police officer Cybil, head of the religious sect Christabella, Sharon, Alessa, and Dahlia, Alessa’s mother. All female characters embody gender shades normally reserved for traditional male-hero stereotypes. Rose’s husband Chris is represented as female-passive in his repeatedly thwarted attempts at saving his wife and child; at the movie’s conclusion he is reduced to entrapment in an internalised space portrayal [ie lying asleep on the couch while waiting for his wife and daughter to come home from their “journey”. Another example of this rewritten biology is evident in the forms of the monster encountered – mutated babies on fire, mutilated femme-fatale nurse parodies, bound and gagged masculine-penetrative creatures [pyramid-head or the janitor] and subconscious manifestations of humans as part insectile/animal hybrids.

/Silent Hill unwinds within comprehension/reality layers designed to mimic a sense of game-based goal progression/learning curve. These reality layers are tiered in such a way as to provoke curiosity within the viewer similar to that experienced in an unfolding game dynamic. “Scenes” operate more like game video inserts. These cinematics forward the cardboard plot as opposed to provoking a sense of seamless continuity. The layers interweave to create the film’s primary story-stream. This stream seems difficult to distinguish and deliberately designed to obscure narrative markers throughout the film. The layers add to the film echoing a type of feminist theory mixed with a type of sinister Lewis Carrol/abortive Alice-In-Wonderland make-believe. As Rose + Sharon are about to embark on their journey in Silent Hill, they lie in a field with their backs to a tree and fall asleep. Once awake, they set out to find Silent Hill – a looking-glass moment; the one that triggers reality-splicing [Silent Hill as ash, Silent Hill as darkness, Silent Hill as tangible reality]. There are also many other intertextual references layered within the film such the Midwich School [ref: Midwich Cuckoos] or Bachman [Richard Bachman, a pseudonym of Steven King] that add to this layered reality.

/leave Silent Hill

Main image: Silent Hill. (2023, October 20). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hill_(film)

Interview with MACHFELD, VISP Project

The Austrian art duo MACHFELD (aka Sabine Maier & Michael Mastrototaro) were founded in 1999 and investigate a variety of areas of art-technology practice, including net art, experimental film and interactive installations.

Their “VISP” project is a kind of bio-history of computer viruses and email spam, told through artistic practice and visualizations. MACHFELD’s consideration as to the historical and creative significance of what are normally considered sources of breakdowns or failures within computer networks is a unique lens through which to understand the imbricated character of technosocial assemblies.

The duo shared their insights on the creative implications of computer viruses.

http://www.machfeld.net/visp/mailbox/index.html

Q: The VISP project page starts historically, telling visitors about one of the earliest computer viruses “in the wild.” Besides being earliest, this project has other interesting characteristics, including the physical character of propagation. Notably, this virus had much less of a digital network upon which to spread – the infection spread by human carriers. What can you say about this mode of propagation in relation to Internet-era viruses? Are there ways in which your visualizations represent networked propagation that might appear different when a virus, like Richard Skrenta’s Elk Cloner, has to cross the human-machine barrier? What can you say about this mode of propagation – through human carriers – in relation to Internet-era viruses in which the network is the spreading vector?

A: The purpose of this artistic project was to investigate the spreading, and frequency of Computer Viruses. Typical for this theme is, that Computer Viruses are not mutating during the active live. The “mutation” is made by a Coder and represents for us the new lyric of the digital age.

Q: Are there ways in which your visualizations represent networked propagation that might appear different when a virus, like Richard Skrenta’s Elk Cloner, has to cross the human-machine barrier?

A: The barrier between human and machine is from a cybernetic point of view very small. It is the cooperation between both of them to make the data living. From the view of a spam maybe the only barrier could be a good firewall.

In our visualization we create an artistic output form the collection of computer viruses on our project-server. this data is transformed to nano and mail-box (two very smooth visualisations by alessandro capozzo). In our project we create different outputs related to the theme of computer viruses and spam.
In our interactive installation IVI we break this barrier on a visual level. We extend the medium video by the support of image recognition. The complex interaction between the media and the human body creates a new platform of experience. The recipient will be a visual part of the interaction between machine and human. Substrate of the emotional level is the visual representation of viruses. When the recipient play with the projected picture the human will activate behaviour of biological patterns. the family instrument of the own body becomes the test tube of visual perception.

Q:What makes a digital virus compelling to visualize?

A: To be invisible is very important if you want to spread out a computer virus to the world wide web.

Is it the character of the code that you visualize?

The character is not visualized; it is the spreading and frequency of Virus and Spam.

The “spread”? Its means of transport? Mutation?

The spread means the spread means the spread the spread the spread.

How do you find the metaphor of virus, which once was firmly rooted in the biological realm, useful for the digital realm?

Biological viruses are disturbing cells. Computer viruses are disturbing Data.

In the biological view the transportation of the virus information is going through the air maybe through blood.

The digital version is walking through mail-programs ore use search technology to find new victims.

Q: How does the metaphor shape the aesthetics of your project?

A: Similar to biological viruses our project mutates during the artistic process.

In this regard, one can see the result of this video projections and net installations as mutation examples.

The artistic duo may be playing in fertile ground. Metaphors that link together life in its various meanings with the activities of digital media and networks have a particular significance, partially to help humans understand how digital systems operate. Artificial intelligence and artificial life are but two of the conceptual metaphors that became bold enough to confuse metaphor for reality. Artificial life shows “signs” of life only because the metaphor is pre-loaded to do so. Computer viruses, as metaphor, behave similarly. Viruses are symptomatically linked to their behavior – viruses are viruses because the metaphor is powerful. Computer viruses have the benefit of exhibiting the debilitating traits of some of their more pernicious biological kin and thus travel well as a description of the misbehaviors the infected device exhibits. Machfeld chooses their metaphors well. They show us how language – visualizations, in this case – can reveal invisible characteristics of the world. By using our digital instruments to make the illegible legible we can learn how to change the way we see the world and, thereby, reconfigure the way we occupy it, hopefully towards a more habitable, sustainable near-future.

Blogbot and productive inertia

Sometimes silence is unbearable. Alex Dragulescu’s graphic novel What I Did Last Summer inundates our screen with words that we can almost touch. The phrases are intermittent, fragmentary, irrevocably silent – “I don’t ask why” – “Now, you’ve got all that on” – “I read the Stars and Stripes” and “These are textual bombs”; scattered sentences harvested by Dragulescu’s software agent Blogbot. The phrases are actual extracts captured from the famous war blogs My War[sub]1[/sub] and Baghdad Blogger[2], two of the most famous blogs written by participants and witnesses of the war in Iraq.

The experience of reading What I did Last Summer is different from more orthodox hypertext experiments. In fact, Dragulescu’s novel is presented as a game whose goal is the experience of textual bombardment. Captions appear in syncopated succession, overlapping and wiping out precedent sentences. Some of these phrases linger before our eyes before disappearing behind fumes. This is a game in which we have no chance of reaction, no say and no option. Ironically -or not- the novel seems to evoke the same sense of fatality that results from watching CNN’s green screen the first days of the bombing of Baghdad.

Dragulescu reinforces the game aesthetics of the novel by reproducing military and civilian units of Civilization 3. These “protagonists” emerge, fight, and die randomly. The figures are highly impersonal, but easily recognizable to those initiated in the well-known Civilization. Nonetheless, they feel uneasy, too trivial once contrasted to the density of the text. They are inert as much as we are before the events but, being less than puppets, they do not let us intervene. They condemn us to passively witness.

In line with the cadavre esquis

The fascination with automatism in art has a long history. It became particularly relevant during the early 20th century among Dadaist and Surrealist groups who sought to demolish the bourgeois ideal of the creative genius. Involuntary, hazardous, mechanistic movements were systematically explored to bring to the fore the irrational residue. In this exploration technology often promised the means to test the limits of Western rationality. Indeed, in Dadaist and Surrealists experimentations with automata, photography and film, technology is both celebrated and questioned. Technology was seen as enhancing human capacities as much as destroying and confining humanity. If technology was a crucial instrument of rationalization, it was also perceived as a means that could easily get out of control. Dadaists and surrealists witnessed the irrational side of warfare technology and they were both captivated and horrified by it. As Hal Fosters explains: “rationalization not only does not eliminate chance, accident, and error; in some sense it produces them. It is around this dialectical point that the surrealist satire of the mechanical-commodified turns”.[3]

In a surrealist vein, Blogbot explores the creative -and political- possibilities of technological automatism. In a new turn of the cadavre esquis, the famous surrealist game that consisted of writing a sentence in a piece of paper, folding it, and passing it to the next participant to obtain a collective surrealist text, Blogbot harvests words written by others and combines them according to a keyword-matching algorithm. The resulting text is the new cadavre esquis; a collage that rejects authorial intention and reveals chance as an intrinsic element of technological rationalization.

If Blogbot is an artifice of chance, it is also a political commentary. The software is described as an “agent” that “crawls the web and takes snapshots of weblogs”.[4] The image evokes a soldier on a secret mission; a mission that involves the discovery of an underlying truth. This is the logic of the gambler that sees sequences and rhythms in chance. This is the logic of warfare that reduces complexity to a zero-sum game. The truth awaits us; we only need to make the right connections and – voila . In Blogbot this hope is smashed to the ground by introducing connections that only reveal our own impotence to make sense; a snapshot of the irrationality of our old ambition to control events through technology. It is here that I see the politics of Dragulescu’s work.

This is why silence is so heavy in What I Did Last Summer. It is the silence of impotence before automatism, chance, inertia and information overload. The most compelling aspect of Dragulescu’s work is that this inertia can be turned into an aesthetics that, far from being sterile, moves to reflection.

[1] http://cbftw.blogspot.com/. The blog was created by Colby Buzzell, an American soldier deployed in Iraq.
[2] http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/. The blog was written by Salam Pax, the pseudonym used by a resident of Baghdad who witnessed the beginning of the war in Iraq.
[3] Hal Foster, “Exquisite Corpses”, in Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993), 150.
[4] Blogbot’s description in http://www.sq.ro/blogbot.php

disturb.the.peace [angry women]

Can anger be beautiful? Can rage be aesthetic? The collaborative net-based installation site D/tP disturb.the.peace [angry women] thinks so. What after all is more powerful than an angry woman but a group of angry women doing art?

The infamous ‘angry young man’ epitomized by the likes of James Dean and Marlon Brando in the cinema of the Fifties hasn’t really been mirrored in a feminine glass. Polishing a reflection on angry women- young or old is the aim of this site that Hollers back and out into the future with bravado. Curated by Jess Loseby, submissions to the site are ongoing and the bar has been set high by the founding fems who grace the inaugural page.

Unlike the objects of anger that angry young men became, these women are agents of art. There is no masculine brooding but plenty of powerful insight. Helen Varley Jameson’s charming line drawings, evolve with a click of the mouse, Her graphic question ‘what makes me angry?’ morphs into a symbolic response.

For Maris Bustamante, the brooding male is a hopelessly trapped woman; in a hilarious self-portrait she is dressed up as a polystyrene Tarzan. Anne Bray’s visceral red rage poetry driving across a black background serves as a grisly counterpart to Bustamante’s humor. Bray’s murderous words are in synch with her fellow furies.

Other Artists modulate the rage through wry imagery and sound. Annie Abrams- her finger on the pulse as ever- has put forth a florid soundscape to accompany a scroll down self-portrait of a moment by herself on the toilet. Her pose brings to mind Rodin’s Thinker buttressed-literally by all the toilet paper a girl could ever need piled high behind the loo. From the bathroom to a deconstruction of Barbie, the levity unfolds; Juliet Davis offers up the anti-Barbie for online playtime; ‘pieces of herself’ allows the user to discover the pieces of a character that ‘needed to find herself’. Opening doors and activating parts of the herself’s body is eerily delightful. Davis Herself seems to spring into action in Maya Kalogera’s piece Angry? Not at all. Kalogera ups the humor quotient and then some with a terrific parody of the yawn of video gun games that flood the Internet. All of a sudden Charlie’s Angels are feminist innovators.

Visiting D/tP disturb.the.peace [angry women] more than once pays off. Like poetry the power of these works shifts with the viewers state.

There are several other grimly funny works on the site. However, having returned to look three times of the course of as many weeks, the most striking work has to be the murky, disturbing film by Barbara Agreste. Titled, ‘reptilica/women’ it is sublime in its use of sound, color and violent delicate scratches on the film. A cruel and extremely crisp aesthetic of abstracted rage the film is reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois muffled creatures and massive phallic objects- not to mention the seminal spider. Unlike the objects of anger depicted by the likes of Marlon, there are no coulda been’s here. These women are ALL contenders. Girl, Woman, or Crone, the artist’s in this collaboration are well past being scorned. Their anger transformed is the edge of a new aesthetic. D/tP disturb.the.peace [angry women] merits a good long viewing with some Grrrrl music blaring.

http://www.d-t-p.tv/

All phenomenon have the potential of being converted into infinite data-streams which become an archive of knowledge through which it is possible to organize social behavior.

Vholoce is one project in a long line of projects which seeks to creatively engage the ubiquitous data-streams that are flooding our virtual world. The rising flood of data is useless without sensible display. Visual (and sonic) display of digital data is a fundamental contemporary issue. But what is sensible display? Using a data stream as a basically random source for visual display is one way to play with the stream. The syntax of visual display (possibly) becomes the site for expression by the creative producer. The data-stream source, the method of (and reason for) display, and the overall creative process need to be interrogated in order to find the basis for the type of digital engagement.

For the visual consumer, is it worth learning somewhat arbitrary visual display systems if the only outcome is the time-intensive distraction of indoor eye-candy? Maybe that is the norm in this era of time-intensive gazing ‘out’ through indoor ‘windows.’

What did the Creek tribe’s word for cloud (or cloudy), vholoce, refer to? That which crosses the sky? That which brings rain, that which changes the colors of the world as it passes, that which clings to the ground in the morning? That which dances around the sun, that which covers the sky, that which imitates the forms of all things, spirits? What did the word mean to them, how did it operate in their system of being — as an evocation of life, or merely tacit knowledge? I wonder how a member of the tribe, in centuries past, viewed language. What function did that abstracted vocalization take on in the continuum of being in the world. Did the Creek have written language? Most likely they transmitted important knowledge through oral narrative. Did they value re-presentations of their world more highly than the world itself? How did they re-present a world that was simply an extension of the continuum of embodied presence?

The Creek definitely did not have windows, and except for sitting inside some kind of hand-built enclosed structure they could not escape the weather. They could not see the manifestations of the weather when inside. Hear and feel, yes, but not see. They generally experienced weather as a full-bodied set of sensations.

In places and times other than pre-Colonial North America, I may sit inside and watch the weather outside the window. There is a word in Icelandic gluggavethri meaning window weather. This suggests a kind of weather where it is much more comfortable sitting on the inside of the window than on the outside. Windows came to Iceland early, but glass was a premium commodity, so the half-underground sod huts of early Iceland might have only one 15 x 15 cm window set in a wooden door at one end of the hut. Better to be watching out this window than experiencing the full-bodied wrath of a winter storm, a rok, a storm with the power to remove life from the body. By putting the sheet of silicon dioxide between the body and the storm, a sort of virtual world appeared — one that could be seen but not felt. Toasty warm inside with the sheep, blizzard outside. A virtual situation is one where the full range of sensory contact is attenuated through some technology.

Science is a collective process of observation of the world along with the creation, testing, and refining of reductive models against what is observed. Science is not data. Data is a by-product of science. Technological development (not science) brings us devices which read the sky and other phenomena. The data is the detritus of automated observation, the excretions of these data collecting devices. The data coming from measurements of atmospheric systems is not science. Humans construct devices to read the world because they do not trust their own sensory input: if they miss something, or make a mistaken reading, they might die. This reading process is a reductive process, a mapping, it is not the phenomena itself. We can read material aspects of the atmosphere, even the microscopic constituents of the flux of things that we toss into suspension in it from our technological development. The notes from these readings are, at first, analog corollaries to what is being read, in a temporal or spatial framework. Voltages, deflections, alterations, charges, changes in time — distances, depths, widths, heights, volumes, masses. With the weather, the changes are in thermal activity, velocities, pressure, precipitation — generally changes in the states of the envelope of high-energy particles that surrounds the harder stuff that we walk upon.

So, it is worth pointing out that there are several levels of synthesis or removal happening here? First there is the flux of weather itself, then an analog device is used that reacts with that flux of energies. The change in the analog device is most probably measured electro-mechanically. The results of this electro-mechanical deflection is converted to an electronic signal which is then converted to a digital numeric value. This number is then related back to the original analog device and calibrated to give a ‘sensible’ number — that is, a reading that we might make sense of. These numbers are then compiled and posted via a global network to end users who might read those alphanumeric codes to ascertain whether or not to go outside or to carry an umbrella if doing so: rather than poking a head out the window and taking a sniff, a look, and making a prognostication as to the future.

Reading is as critical in our system of social control as is writing. Now we have machines that are reading and writing for us. What does this mediation bring us? What are the lessons of the mediated narratives? Are they the same as the narratives of the stories told to us by others? Are they the same as the knowledge gained by direct sensory experience and insight?

We now store these stories as data in data spaces. Volumes of data packed as zeros and ones on a magnetized disk. Zero and one stories. We can retrieve these stories and tell them in time, as a narrative, or out of time, as a simple data space fly-through. Either way, they form streams. These data streams flow in the culture-scape.

The sky feeds us one temporal way, the screen feeds us another:

Watching cloud streams flow in the land-scape brings a knowing that indeterminacy is a ground state of being. Watching water streams brings us to dreams of the unknown — that-which-will-become. The sky is the present, when we allow the radiation from the stars to leak into our body system. It is an arrival in the moment that carries us into the future.

Watching data-streams flow in the culture-scape brings a knowing of social relation. Watching data streams brings us to dreams of that-which-has-been made. Data streams surround us, bind us in visible waves. Susserations that sooth the harsh realities of the day. Mediation is about the past. When the weather system is in rising chaos, who wants to watch? Better to close the door, latch the window and watch the silicon dioxide screen. The Outside is dangerous. Unpredictable.

Tijuana Calling: an exercise on virtual coyote tactics

“I carry the border with me, and I find new borders wherever I go”[1]

An insight into border-crossing in a borderless space, Tijuana Calling is an on-line exhibition that features five commissioned projects by artists living on both sides of the border Mexico-U.S. Presented in October 2005, the exhibition is one of the “scenarios” of inSite_05, a network of art practices that explore the cultural and sociological nature of the Tijuana-San Diego borderland.

Curator Mark Tribe, founder of Rhizome.org and the man behind Tijuana Calling, defines the net-based works as “playful disruptions”? that address urgent issues such as migration flows, cultural translation, surveillance and hybridity[2]. Indeed, the common thread that connects Turista Fronterizo (Ricardo Dominguez and Coco Fusco), Tj Cybercholos (Fran Illich), LowDrone (Angel Nevarez and Alex Rivera), Corridos (Anne-Marie Schleiner and Luis Hernandez) and DENTIMUNDO (Ricardo Miranda Zuatiga) is the commitment to pollute cyberspace through an intermittent translation of the borderland experience.

Beyond Celebration
In ‘The Free Trade Art Agreement’/’El Tratado de Libre Cultura’, Guillermo Gasmez Peata denounces the uncritical celebration of border-crossing by members of what he calls the “global transculture”[3]. To resist the depoliticized -or silently politicized- fascination with liminarity, while counteracting the oppositional politics of neo-nationalist groups, Gasmez Peata proposes border-crossing as both tactic and cultural translation. The borderland artist becomes, then, an intellectual coyote, a smuggler of cultural practices whose goal is to contaminate, interrupt and confuse the “translucent” waters of the global transculture. It is this border-coyote tactics that pervade Tijuana Calling.

In Turista Fronterizo, one of the three on-line games featured, border-crossing becomes a matter of hazard and survival. Presented as “a virtual journey through the San Diego-Tijuana borderlands”[4], the work is organized as an on-line monopoly. However, the difference between the on-line version and the original board game is that in Turista Fronterizo participants are invited to cross the border in the shoes of either Mexican or American avatars. However, in open defiance of the virtual myth of identity play, these avatars are conditioned by their ethnic, economic and political realities.

Also on a playful vein is LowDrone: The Transnational Hopper, an on-line game that simulates the crossing of the San-Diego/Tijuana border in an “unmanned airborne lowrider”.[5] The LowDrone, a gold 37′ Ford mounted on a velvet pedestal and equipped with wings and chrome plated turbines, takes off from Tijuana and attempts the crossing of the border at low height. The game consists in a simulacrum of the failed flight, accompanied by radio updates of new methods of border patrolling. As in Turista Fronterizo, there is little that can be done to change the fate of the border-crossing enterprise.

The third of the on-line games featured, Corridos, proposes a drive along a tunnel connecting downtown Tijuana and the San Ysidro mall in San Diego. The game, inspired in the narcotunnels discovered in both Mexico and the U.S., invites participants to experience the illegal exchange of humans and goods for which the San Diego-Tijuana border is famous. The recreation of the sites is based on actual plans of the area translated into digital form.

On-line games are not the only form of “playful disruption” imagined by the artists participating in Tijuana Calling. Tj Cybercholos, for example, is a project of tactical literature and exercise in cyberzapatismo. In Tj Cybercholos, Mexican artist Fran Illich created a space for the hypertextual narration of border experiences. The original work has developed into an autonomous server, Possible Worlds, whose goal is to webhost artistic, social and political projects under the Zapatista motto of cooperative and autonomous land use.

Finally, DENTIMUNDO: Dentistas en la Frontera/Dentists on the Border Mexico/U.S.A is a website about border dentistry. According to the site, there are 3500 dentists in Tijuana waiting to take care of American “tourists” in search of dental treatment. In an ironic reference to Doctors Without Borders, DENTIMUNDO provides visitors with an updated medical directory, travel tips and the possibility of downloading “Corrido al Dentista”, a corrido song that humorously comments on an often silenced aspect of the Tijuana-San Diego border crossing.

Virtual Coyotes
According to Gasmez Peata, the intellectual coyote oscillates between “nomadic chronicler”, “intercultural translator” and “political trickster”[6]. This continuous metamorphosis allows the intellectual coyote to speak from multiple sites and realities. Border-crossing becomes, thus, a way of interrogating reality that neither negates nor essentialises difference. It is also, as the case of Tijuana Calling proves, a playful reminder of the pervasive and arbitrary nature of borders and of the creative possibilities -and obstacles- that face those daring to cross them.

[1]Guillermo Gasmez Peata, “The Free Trade Art Agreement/ El Tratado de Libre Cultura”, in The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems & Loqueras for the End of the Century (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996), 5.
[2]See the Tijuana Calling site: https://insiteart.org/insite-2005/scenarios/tijuana-calling
[3]Gasmez Peata, 10.
[4]See https://www.marktribestudio.com/tijuana-calling/turista-fronterizo/
[5]See http://www.lowdrone.com
[6]Gasmez Peata, 12

Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking
Nicolas Collins
Routledge, 2006
ISBN 0-415-97592-1

In these days of digital music production “laptop performers, GarageBand, audio programming environments (Max/ MSP, PD, supercollider) & iPod DJs” it’s very easy to forget the simple facts of electronic music. We forget the hidden ugly component parts of our pretty iMacs & Viaos, resistors, capacitors chips & electrical current, which enable us to run our software or download bit torrents were once the direct (analogue) source of sound.

Early electronic music (& the recording of music itself) was born of experimenting artists & engineers, patiently listening to the bleeps, swoops and crackles of electricity as it flowed through components loving soldered together by hand. The early pioneers of electronic music had to build their own instruments from scratch, finding new sounds as they went, inventing entirely new musical languages & forms, pulling new sounds from the ether.

In Nicolas Collins‘ book “Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking” we shake off the bounds of mass produced software, of expensive consumer electronics and re-enter the exploratory worlds of early electronic experimentalists such as David Tudor & Alvin Lucier, riding the pulsating waves of sonic history through to contemporary hardware hackers & instrument builders such as Xentos ‘Fray’ Bentos, Phil Archer, John Bowers & of course Nicolas Collins himself.

What an enlightening journey it is too. After a few weeks with the book & and a few pounds worth of electrical components you’ll feel like the next Leon Theremin or Robert Moog!

In Collins’ book we find (several) lifetimes of sound-making knowledge. Information gleaned through years of sonic-tinkering is shared freely (well for a small cover price) & explained simply (almost geek free) wrapping practical creative experimentation within insightful artistic contextualisation. Collins selflessly shares with us the intimate detail of producing sounds, upon which his own notable career as performer & composer of electronic music has been built.

Another major key to the successes of this book lie in Collins’ years of experience teaching students within an art school context. As Professor of Sound at the Arts Institute of Chicago & as a freewheeling travelling lecturer he has tried, tested and honed this book over the years. His practical experiments have been road tested by creative arts students the world over before hitting the printing press & this refining is instantly noticeable. With no knowledge of electronics & practically no knowledge of sound-making you’ll be producing your first sounds within moments of reading the first few (short) chapters. Collins’ emphasis is always upon the creative outcome, giving the reader the freedom & just the right knowledge to experiment under their own steam. It is refreshing and rare to find a practical manual for creative production so direct & engaging because of the instant results it enables & the space for individual creativity it encourages. Just once I’d like to see a software manual that encourages just one gram of the experimental sprit Collins’ book does.

However, despite its instantaneous results & simple friendly explanations this is no Dummy’s Guide. Collins never underestimates the reader, just because it is easy to understand it doesn’t make it lightweight. Alongside the practical instruction & space to explore personal projects, Collins frames & contextualises well, with thoughtfully picked examples of artists, composers & musicians who have explored or exploited similar techniques. The usefulness of this contextualisation is enhanced and extended by the inclusion of an audio CD featuring many of the artists discussed & techniques explained in the book. Of course, the CD deserves a separate review all of its own, so suffice to say it is an excellent stand-alone compilation of “handmade” music as well as performing a supporting role too.

Reading the book from cover to cover, Collins years of experience teaching this material is clear. His timing, like any good comedian (and he is very funny), is perfect. He knows just when to drop in the right nugget of information, at a level the reader will understand & enhancing where the reader may take those ideas next. The reader is led through the start of a project, then through practical or historical/ contemporary examples of other artists work and then the reader is led to experiment & modify their creations. He is also expert and leaving out the right information. Too technical! Forget it, you don’t need to know that to make good sound is Collins’ mantra.

The structure of the book is such that it will appeal both to novice & experienced hackers alike. One can read the book from cover to cover to pick up all the basic skills & techniques or dip into certain chapters to develop specific projects. Both a “tool box reference manual” and a primer in all things electronic music, Collins starts out with basic information; suggestions for tools and materials & how to dos (the soldering chapter is very good if you’ve never done it before) before exploring different facets of handmade sound making.

Early chapters develop the reader’s ear for hidden sounds exploring re-purposed electronic devices such as radios & toys or listening into hidden electronic or natural sounds using telephone taps, handmade contact mikes or simple condenser microphones. Microphones so cheap you’ll be boiling them alive just for your aural pleasure.

Later chapters explore analogue (almost) synthesis through the making of simple oscillator circuits and audio processing & manipulation including distortion, gating & tremolo. Two chapters expand into visual hacking including video cameras & LCDs. The final chapter explores the interface between handmade sensors & devices and the digital world.

The chapters develop in a modular manner, so that following through the book one can build circuits which will link to the next project and so on. For example, three chapters covering building simple oscillator circuits progress through synthesis techniques such as low frequency modulation of one circuit by another or modulating an external audio source (e.g. CD, guitar etc). By the end of the book you will have entire personal instruments built, wacky bastardised noise machines patched together something like an analogue synthesiser.

Links

Buy the book at Amazon (or somewhere else!)

Nicolas Collins Website

Arts Institute of Chicago

Rapid Electronics – The Cheapest & Best Supplier of components in UK

Music From Outer Space – Build Your Own Analogue Synthesisers

An Interview with Jeanie Finlay

Jeanie Finlay’s Home-Maker begins with the questions “what makes a house a home, and how does this change if you can’t leave?” Entering the domestic spaces of seven people living in Tokyo or Derbyshire, Finlay centres in on the household as a way of uncovering individual interaction with public and private selves. Telling personal stories with the aid of house-hold objects, fragments of narrative, and new media technologies is a new way of thinking about portraiture. The successful blending of new media with Finaly’s key questions makes each reader feel as though she or he is a guest, sitting down for a cup of tea, immersed the detail of each room and voice.

Jess: Why concentrate on the home?

Jeanie: With Home-Maker I always thought that “the home” was a starting point for wider discussion, its a tool for talking about other things. For example if I went into each home and I asked the participants to “tell me all about their life” I would probably draw a full stop. As a stranger entering a space I think people found it easier to talk to me about their taste in ornaments and the possessions they surround themselves with. The elderly people I met were surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of accumulated stuff. Each item usually was a memento of a past experience or person.

Jess: I’m looking at the section on Aiko-San – Home for 26 years and am thinking of how the images seem to tell a slightly different story from the textual narrative. Whereas the written narrative seems more or less linear, documenting her home, and ending with her fear of the move to the nursing home, the images seem to zoom in and out of the story. Do you use image and text to oppose each other or perhaps to elucidate each other…or does it depend on the project/theme?

Jeanie: I think that every element in the film can and should help to tell the story, so sometimes I use images to reinforce the dialogue, sometimes to contradict it or sometimes to provide additional information that isn’t present in the interview. It also leaves some space for an audience to make their own connections between what I’m showing you and what I’m telling you. It does also depend on what I want to say!

Jess: I am especially interested in the images of Aiko-San; the one portrait-type shot and then a zoomed in image of her hands and her eyes. Does this imply an importance on the visual and tactile senses?

Jeanie: In all of the films I was trying to contribute to a 360 degree portrait of each person. The panoramic image and interface don’t allow you to see the whole room at any one time and I kept the idea of “reveal” in my head the whole time I was making the work. The panorama reveals the room, the interviews reveal more and the cutaway images show in close up additional details about their lives. In all my work I try and create a sense of intimacy and one way of conveying this is to put the camera closer. That is why the objects in the room are filmed in close up, as if they were an extension of the person. Each person was also filmed as if they were an object in the room. I put the camera so close to Aiko-San as I wanted the opportunity to look at her in more detail, and hopefully reveal more. In my new film Teenland I use a macro lens and jib so that I can film objects and subjects in extreme close up. I also feel this approach helps me to tell a small story that make up a whole home can be seen as a microcosm of living, tiny stories can give an impression of a whole life, close up details can contribute to the bigger picture.

Jess: Most of the images in this section seem to be cropped, making me feel like I don’t have a full perspective of the scene, is this intentional to illustrate the proximity of Aiko-San’s space?

Jeanie: I think that I used these as I wanted to look more closely. Aiko-San’s hands made me think of all the hard work she had done in her life, of her age and how they were less reliable than they were 20 years ago. Again with her eyes, partly it was to show more of Aiko -San, how her age was shown in her face, partly as I was thinking about all that she had seen. The cropping is all to do with the framing and putting the camera closer, no material was cropped in the edit, it is shown as filmed. I was very aware when I was filming that I was in an extremely small space and it was a way of isolating details to look at.

Jess: You say you were interested in creating a 360 degree portrait of someone…is this something specifically achievable with new media resources?

I’m also drawn to your use of the word “portrait.” I suppose I’m thinking of a two dimensional representation of someone (as in a painting) so does new media give something other than a 2-Dness?

Jeanie: A painting that I visited just prior to developing Home-maker was the Ambassadors by Holbein. As a child I had always loved the work as it initially appears to be a traditional painting, then on closer inspection additional narratives personal and political are slowly uncovered. When developing the project I kept thinking back to the painting, I wanted to create a high quality, intriguing panoramic image (the images are made up of 18 photographs seamlessly stitched together which create an odd photograph. When viewed as a flat everything is in focus and I sneak into some of the images as a reflection) but also offer an opportunity for the viewer to trigger and uncover hidden narratives linked to objects in the room, the stories that are maybe bubbling under the surface of the image. I guess in that way, the ability to add additional narratives and details is a characteristic of using new media in this way but I would suggest that a painting or photograph CAN be a full portrait of a person – the audience is just offered less information to work with. I particularly like the photographs of Rineke Dijkstra of teenagers on the coastline, although I know very little about the individuals in the shots I am drawn to a sense of personality, vulnerability, character. I hope in Home-Maker the panoramic images stand up on their own as portraits and that the additional video offers a different view.

Jess: In terms of post-modern subjectivity, (always becoming identities), is it possible to create a 360 degree portrait of someone, or is it that as we navigate through each person’s room/life we are given one object at a time which we (as readers) accumulate into a whole?

Jeanie: I’m not sure whether it is possible, my approach was always to concentrate on the smaller details and in doing so the larger picture, becomes clearer. It was always my aim to create an impression of character rather than tell any large story.

Jess: You’ve said that each of the seven people you were with had objects which represented memories for them. Is Home-maker, existing in cyberspace, a testament to the ethereal nature of memories?

Jeanie: Since I completed filming Home-Maker in 2003 four of the seven Home-makers have died. I have kept in touch with Roy, Moji-san and Emi-san and they contributed to the Home-Maker publication, describing how their rooms and their lives had changed since I last met them. Since Aiko-san, Florrie, Betty and Lilian have died it’s made me feel quite differently about the work – I am so used to their voices and image in making and editing the work and touring the installation to 4 venues, and I did find it very difficult to comprehend that they had died as in the work they are alive and well.

One of the reasons people gave for taking part was to  “leave a testimony, to tell their story.” I was always aware that each portrait was very much a capturing of a moment in time. Aiko-san left her home of 26 years 2 days after I filmed her so that she could move into an old people’s home. When she came to the exhibition in Tokyo she was very moved to see her home projected in the installation as it now only existed in boxes and memories.

With the House Clearance event at the end of the tour (Heaton Used furniture came in and conducted a house clearance at Hatton Gallery in the same way they would if someone had died) I wanted the work to “live on” on the web. I was surprisingly upset to say goodbye to the set and props as it felt much more like I had created a home for the work, and now with the dismantling it was just “stuff” again.

Jeanie Finlay
Jeanie makes interactive artworks which incorporate digital media and documentary. She often works in collaboration with members of the public, gd_page_image[0][fid]” 766 –rough interviews and online-questionnaires. Often exploring emotive themes, her recent work has examined such subjects as beauty, the home and love – with passionate and personal results.

Over three years, Jeanie photographed and filmed in the living rooms of housebound older people in Derbyshire and Tokyo to make Home-Maker. Through developing close relationships with her subjects, she created a series of highly personal and intimate portraits of a range of people and the places they call home.

Her latest project is a 60 min documentary for BBC4. Teenland which takes the audience behind the closed bedroom door of four British teenagers, revealing the small details that make up the wider narratives of their lives, infiltrating and exploring their spaces to find the stories hidden within.

Jeanie has made and presented artworks at key national gallery venues including Tate Britain, Hatton Gallery, Aberdeen Art gallery, Lakeside Arts and Angel Row Gallery as well as establishing a strong presence on the Internet. She has shown and made work in 3 different continents – including shows and screenings in Tokyo, Moscow, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Amsterdam, Berlin and Stuttgart.

To find out more about Jeanie’s work please visit https://www.jeaniefinlay.com

Article Written by Helen Varley Jamieson.

SCANZ, 3-16 July 2006
New Plymouth, New Zealand.

SCANZ (Solar Circuit Aotearoa New Zealand, www.scanz.net.nz) represented several firsts: it was the first Polar/Solar Circuit event to be held in New Zealand, and the first festival of its kind in this country, bringing together 25 artists from NZ and around the world for a two week collaborative residency. SCANZ provided the context for the first faces meeting in New Zealand, and it was also the first time a group residency had been offered to Avatar Body Collision our first opportunity for the four globally dispersed Colliders to actually meet and work together in the same physical space!!!

SCANZ was also cloaked with mystery, rumour and illusion, the line between truth and fiction often fluctuating and hard to discern. Were we really hearing a recording of the extinct? Why was at least one artist always struck down with a strange illness? What was making the wireless network at the accommodation randomly appear and disappear? And who was the loud snorer in Room 6?

Then there were the little entanglements with the authorities. The orchestrated litany of mishaps so beautifully performed by the Colliders was more than matched by the antics of our fellow artists, who reported close encounters with security guards at the Port, forcible ejection from a local bar for insubordinate activities, frantic emails with IP lawyers and reprimands from the fire service for experimental circuit bending with a smoke alarm…[

However, these exploits were not the main fare of the two-week residency “The meeting of the artists and the work was what it was all about, and a very interesting mix of artists had been brought together. We filled the evenings of the first week with presentations about our work, our brains close to bursting as we struggled to remember each other’s names, let alone the many fascinating projects everyone had been involved with over the years. As well as the opportunity to meet and work with the international artists, it was a treat to reconnect with other New Zealanders and for once, to have a decent length of time to hang out together and the resources to do some work. Many meetings and collaborations evolved during the residency.

An important meeting for me was with Becca Wood, an Auckland-based dancer experimenting with choreographing and performing over the Internet; we exchanged ideas, technologies and techniques and messed around with software and data projectors. It was also good to have ex-pat Adam Hyde there, in the role of chief network organiser but also presenting his latest project, Floss Manuals (have you set it up for the UpStage manual yet, Adam? : ) It’s hard to name a few people without naming them all, so I invite you to visit the [url:www.scanz.net.nz]SCANZ[/url] web site for a full list of artists and projects. A number of the artists contributed work to an exhibition at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery at the end of the residency, and during the event, numerous informal workshops were held.

The themes of SCANZ were connection disconnection and environmental response. For [url:http://www.avatarbodycollision.org]Avatar Body Collision[/url], our work mainly addressed the first theme, and our residency effectively became a two-week endurance performance on presence and absence. Once we had recovered from the intense disappointment of having to accept, a fortnight before the residency, that Karla and Leena were not going to have the funds to get to New Zealand and our well-made plans for our first-ever physical meeting might as well be thrown out the window, we wholeheartedly implicated every available technology and everyone around us into the elaborate tale of our Near Miss. With the aid of a blog Trip The Light Fantastic, email, webcams, mobile phones, [url:http://www.upstage.org.nz]UpStage[/url], PhotoShop and a few wily conspirators, we virtually brought Karla and Leena into the SCANZ environment. There are people out there who will insist they met them in New Plymouth last July…

At the same time as maintaining our extended performance, Vicki and I engaged with other artists’ projects, worked on our new show and prepared for our presentation on the final night at the launch of the exhibition at the Govett Brewster. We set up a shared workspace with Becca in a blacked-out gallery near N2, the SCANZ main work room and set about exploring the new experience of working in the same physical space. Even without Karla and Leena there, it was a very different working situation for me and Vicki to be in the same physical space – especially a space where there was a lot of other artistic activity going on around us. Sometimes, I found it easier to go back to my room and communicate over email and chat, but when it came to setting up the installation and the presentation, it was great to have Vicki there. Cyberformance can be a lonely process even when you are part of a group.

The faces meeting was a good opportunity for a break from the work; hosted by myself and Nina Czegledy, we welcomed the new faces and chatted informally with wine and snacks. Another escape from SCANZ was Second Life but while Vicki and Caro were having hysterics together, some strange bug prevented me from seeing or being visible to them, it became a sadly ostracising experience! More satisfactory was the [url:http://cheapmeatdreamsandacorns.blogspot.com/2006/07/watching-sky.html]Indian banquet[/url], created by a team of artists under the direction of Sara Kolzer; shared meals are always a highlight of such gatherings.

What began as a gloriously long residency period rapidly dissolved into a collection of digital photos and selective memories, and suddenly the final weekend was upon us. The annual [url:http://www.scanz.net.nz/disc_symposium.html]ADA symposium[/url] was incorporated into this weekend, although Vicki and I missed most of it while we were setting up for our presentation at the Govett Brewster that night. Besides revealing the final climax of our Near Miss and giving an UpStage performance on the theme of presence and absence, our presentation included experimenting with the installation element of our new show. This involves a webcam feedback loop, simple enough in itself but tricky to get everything positioned correctly. As we were setting it up in the gallery, a group of children came by and needed only the slightest encouragement to play with their too-brief-connection shadowy projected images. After the presentation, the audience encountered the installation as they left the auditorium, and proved to be less effective with a crowd, but still a lot of people stopped to play in it. When we reconstructed it a week later at [url:http://www.intimacyandinyerface.net]Intimacy & Inyerface[/url], the different environment made it into another experience altogether.

As SCANZ drew to a close, I wondered what it would have been like if Karla and Leena had really been there; how would we four have coped with the enormity of finally being together in the same space after 5 years of working remotely – at the same time as participating in an intense event such as SCANZ? It reminded me of running into Caro McCaw in Novi Sad a few years ago at the Transeuropean Picnic – the last place you’d expect a couple of kiwis to meet up randomly. We spent most of the weekend catching up with each other, which meant that we barely met any of the other artists. That might have been our experience of SCANZ, had we four collided there. Perhaps the best meeting place for the Colliders will be in a remote village, a long way from other distractions…

Some might think that’s a good description of New Plymouth, but I have to disagree. Having previously spent very little time in the Taranaki area, I discovered it to be an unexpectedly rich place. Watching the mountain come and go teasingly amongst the [url:http://bodycollision.blogspot.com/2006/07/mountains-of-information-to-process.html]clouds[/url], being honoured with one of the most meaningful [url:http://bodycollision.blogspot.com/2006/07/scanz-begins.html]powhiri[/url] I’ve ever experienced, and getting to know New Plymouth the Govett Brewster,  fine cafes, the beaches, Paritutu, these were just a few of the local features that gave SCANZ that extra specialness.

As we drove south with Vicki at the wheel of the Valiant, I looked back to watch a cloud-free Taranaki gracefully shrink and disappear into the golden sunset. Thank you, Taranaki, for your generosity, and thank you, Ian Clothier, Trudy Lane and the other organisers, for a most excellent SCANZ may it be the first of many.

Slippage, is an exhibition of net.art curated by Nanette Wylde, bringing together a group of 8 artists that include: Mez Breeze, Krista Connerly, Juilet Davis, Lisa Hutton, Paula Levine, Jess Loseby, UBERMORGEN.COM, and Jody Zellen. The exhibition presents an eclectic mix of work under the broad concept of ‘exploring and exposing relationships between intention, perception, control, experience, behaviour, memory, knowing and the unexpected’. There isn’t one specific theme that runs through the exhibition; it’s a collection of explorations of personal and social projects, that came about from an open call initiated by Loseby. The female artists exploring the theme of “angry women” have created an audio, visual mix of personal experiences, sometimes unexpected and far political and playful approaches to the concept proposed by the curator.

One project that touches on many of the different elements of the open, flexible and ad-hoc concept is, Jess Loseby’s disturb.the.peace [angry women]. It is a unique ingredient in the exhibition. Not only because it manages to sit well with the exhibitons’s original, fluid concept, but also because the work does not only reflect one individual creator’s voice alone. It is a collaborative project, that came about from an open call initiated by Loseby herself. The female artists featured in the work are exploring the theme of angry women and have created an audio-visual mix of personal experiences. Definitely worth anyone’s time due to the various imaginative explorations of the theme and the dynamic and expressive nature of the content. Some of the work displays unexpected shifts, reevaluating the notion of what an angry women actually is, declaring that anger can be many different things. The selection of artists featured in this project are; jess loseby, Anne Bray, Annie Abrahams, Barbara Agreste, deb king, Donna Kuhn, Elisabeth Smolarz, Evelin Stermitz, Girls who like Porno, Helen Varley Jamieson, Juliet Davis, Lilian Cooper, Maris Bustamante, Maya Kalogera and Regina Celia Pinto. It is an ongoing project with no specific deadlines, so if you are interested in showing a net-orientated work of art that fits with an angry context, and if you are female, perhaps you should contact Jess Loseby and offer to submit some work.

Another unique project is Mez Breeze’s Live Journal, with its use of language. Live Journal is an intriguing poetic discourse using computer programming syntax. Breeze’s stream of consciousness creates a staccato rhythm that stops and starts. With regular updates, the text reflects the everyday concerns of the artist. The statements, private classes and functions are, compiled one after each other to create a unique language that encourages the viewer to adopt an alternative approach in reading the material/work presented, which is much like trying to decipher code. Mez, is an interesting artist and has remained dedicated to her communication style since the early days of net art. “Written in her by now famous mezangelle language shows us one more time the possibility to use the Net as a non-linear reading tool and that coding can be artistically and culturally oriented, through its creative re-interpretation.” Tatiana Bazzichelli.

Social and political commentary is prominent with a number of the works featured in the exhibition. UBERMORGEN.COM, in PsychIOS Generator, is a playful commentary on the phenomenon of global pharmaceutical companies creating unnecessary drugs to treat apparent symptoms without addressing their cause. By selecting a series of options based on symptoms the PsychIOS Generator provides absurd diagnosis and fake prescriptions.

Also, taking a playful approach is Altar-actions by Juliet Davis, a tongue-in-cheek reality check on the modern wedding planning experience. Davis pokes fun at controversial issues by presenting interactive scenarios such as “make a better baby”, inviting you to create and customize your baby. Davis juxtaposes the absurdity with serious, factual information, best highlighted by a personal and engaging narrative describing the experiences of a student that Davis teaches from Sierra Leone, who has been directly affected by war in the region where the diamond trade in Africa plays a big part.

Not as slick but, also media-rich, which incorporates sound, video and text, Aqua by Lisa Hutton explores the relationship between humanity and water. While the concept is definitely imaginative and extremely poignant. In respect of its fluent referencing to natural catastrophes that have taken people’s lives and focusing on various connected social contexts from strong research. It seems to work at best in offering, informative in the context of art as information through a kind of networked clustering functionality. The interface’s execution slightly lets it down. The design and visual aesthetics lack the energy to inspire or fully engage the viewer. Which can distract one from getting its message across. Content-wise, and of course, contextually, it succeeds.

Exploring our relationship with other people in urban environments, the project for urban intimacy (PUI) by Krista Connerly is an online space that features a range of projects and ideas for ‘instigating intimate encounters and ‘border-crossing’ within an urban environment’. My favourite project is the urban parlour games, a series of games that can be played while you are out and about, encouraging its players to extend their brief encounters with other strangers. Connerly’s twist on childhood is in the form of Throw a Smile, a game I can imagine working well on the tube. Smile at someone, and if they return your smile, make them ‘it’ by throwing them a game card.

The mass media itself becomes a subject worthy of investigation for Jody Zellen in all the news that fit to print. Zellen has created a website that archives images and headlines from a year of newspapers. A selection of images on the homepage takes the user to a page containing a random headline juxtaposed with an image. Zellen’s motivation here is to question “what is real, what is important, what is of concern, what is not”. Using scanned newspaper print and well chosen images Zellen has, created a striking visual style. However, although there are instances where the headlines and images create profound statements, the repetitive nature of the work can wear you down. This is probably part of the work, in respect that we are overdosing through the mass consumption of perpetual news.

The visually engaging Shadows From Another Place by Paula Levine utilizes locative media to add a new way of referencing the ongoing war in Iraq. Levine sets the tone, stating her inspiration in the introduction to the piece: What if international gestures, such as acts of terrorism or war, were like boomerangs that returned to sites of origins with an impact equal to the one enacted? What would such actions look like if they landed in other backyards or our own?

By exploring the changes that redefine one land concerning another untouched by the traumatic forces of war, the project presents a series of web-based and site-specific maps. Using GPS, Levine has plotted the impact of political or cultural changes that have taken place in Baghdad and placed them upon a map of San Francisco. This is represented visually on the website where bomb sites in San Francisco have been marked out using longitude and latitude data. There is also a physical element that exists in and around San Francisco where geo-caches of project information contain the names of the U.S. service personnel who have died in the war since May 1, 2003 (the date that George Bush declared that major combat operations had ended). By employing the same technology used to target areas in Baghdad, Levine interrogates her immediate environment and creates a scenario that demolishes the distance from the place of the “other” to successfully “bring home” the impact of war.

This exhibition/project is to be congratulated for bringing together a creative mix of engaging works existing in the grey areas of language and social interaction. As well as the different levels of playfulness in dealing with subject matters, concepts, and audience interaction with imaginative shifts. Overall, it manages to encourage its audience to explore life, net art, media art and its themes to great lengths, in opening up artistic questions and notions in their practice, sharing questions and investigations.

Midiatatica.org and the cannibalization of Tactical Media

“Tupi, or not Tupi that is the question.“[1]

In his Manifesto Antropófago, Oswald de Andrade imagines a Brazilian modernism based on the cannibalization -and transformation- of European models. 75 years later, Miadiatatica.org continues this deglutition by proposing the translation of the tactical media movement to the Brazilian context.

Tactical media is the critical use and theorization of media practices for political and artistic goals. It is both a cultural and political response against the depolitization of technology, the deterritorialization of capital, and the increasing commodification of the arts. Tactical Media interventions range from performances to hackerism, and they offer a chance for micro-subversion, immediacy and intimate bonds between social actors. Critical Art Ensemble proposes a definition of tactical media as “the experimental wing of a(ny) given movement.”[2] In the case of Midiatatica.org this critical and experimental use of media is regarded as an alternative against mainstream artistic practice, global corporativism, and high tech media art: “One thing we had in mind while translating the Tactical Media Lab and its concept to the Brazilian reality was, throughout the entire process, never to close our eyes to such a context.”[3]

In 2002, Tatiana Wells, researcher and information architect, Giseli Vasconcelos, cultural agitator and web designer, and Ricardo Rosas, net critic and web master, launched Midiatatica.org, a mailing list whose aim was the organization of a tactical media laboratory in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The idea was to reproduce the Next 5 Minutes Festival’s format of Tactical Media Laboratories, which combined performances, exhibitions, lectures and debates.[4] To this end, the newly born Midiatatica.org subscribed to the 2003 Next 5 Minutes Festival edition, which would take place in Amsterdam, and whose goal was to spread the call for media oriented activism beyond the European borders. From December 2002 to March 2003, with neither budget nor governmental support, Midiatatica.org managed to mobilize 315 members who worked together in the production and realization of what it would be one of the first Tactical Media festivals in Brazil.

The festival Mi­dia Tatica Brasil gathered around 20 collectives that touched upon core issues for media activism: free software, the digital divide, copyleft, videoactivism, independent media. It also made explicit Midiatatica.org’s commitment to a low-tech version of media activism; the only possible version that can speak to the complex reality of a developing country such as Brazil.

Midiatatica.org and the continuation of the Cannibal project

More recently, Midiatatica.org has begun collaborating with Metareciclagem (Brazil), Waag Society (Netherlands), Sarai and Alt Law Forum (both based in India) in the design of interfaces and systems, research and development of low-tech solutions. It has also organized a series of performances, conferences and seminars aimed at disseminating information about Tactical Media (Submediologia, UpgradeSalvador, Autolabs, CiberSalao).

In consonance with its street interventions and public activism, Midiatatica.org has also encouraged the production and dissemination of theoretical material about cyberculture. Following a strict open source policy, the organization promotes the writing and edition of texts about cyberculture. A recent example of this is the creation of G2G study group, dedicated to the popularization and study of cyberfeminism.

A common trait of all projects is the pervasive spirit of revolt, appropriation… and cannibalism: “We cannibalize media practices to bring awareness of the periphery as a marginalized reality.”[5] This “peripheral” condition, this permanent displacement from the centre“ the metropolis, the art world core- facilitates the reception of Tactical Media in the Brazilian context. What could be more consistent with the cannibal spirit than the irreverence of hackerism or the subversive nature of open-source projects?

Indeed, it is in the subversive character of Tactical Media practices that we can hear the echo of De Andrade’s words:

“Only Anthropophagi united us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. Only law in the world. Masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. Tupi, or not Tupi, that is the question.”[6]

—–

1] Oswald de Andrade, Manifesto Antropófago,
The Tupi people were the first Brazilian Aboriginal group that made contact with Europeans when they first arrived in Brazil. Cannibalism was common among the Tupi and was believed to be a sign of respect towards a defeated enemy.
https://391.org/manifestos/1928-anthropophagite-manifesto-oswald-de-andrade/

2] Critical Art Ensemble, “Framing Tactical Media” in Next 5 Minutes: International Festival of Tactical Media September 11-14, 2003
https://www.scribd.com/document/397298495/Next-5-Minutes-International-Festival-of-Tactical-Media

3] “Back to Basics: The Revenge of the Low-Tech” Midiatatica.org https://midiatatica.desarquivo.org/documentos-relacionados/the-revenge-of-low-tech-autolabs-telecentros-and-tactical-media-in-sao-paulo/

4] http://www.next5minutes.org/about.jsp

5] “Que Venha a Mi­dia Tatica!” in Midiatatica.org
http://www.midiatatica.org/mtb/midiatatica.htm

6] De Andrade
http://www.lumiarte.com/luardeoutono/oswald/manifantropof.html

_The Death of the Interview: a Meta:X.amination of Stelarc as EgoFried_N.tity_

About 20-odd years ago I visited a prominent contemporary Sydney Art Gallery in which was exhibited an installation of the techno_performance artists Stelarc. One of the x.hibits was a video looping of a “medical” n.tervention progressively showing the inside of Stelarc’s digestive
sys.t[ract]em. The screen had been turned off with only the audio partially working. In a defiantly sacrosanct gesture i braved the haloed-artwork-as-exhibited barrier, reached 2 turn the screen back on + attempted 2 adjust the volume. Suddenly the gallery director n.tervened + frostily conveyed her displeasure @ my attempt 2 make the installation functional, as well as suggesting i leave the gallery. Since then, my sense of Stelarc, techne_dysfunction + ego has been somewot
[Cronenbergianly] unfortunately fused 2gether.

Watching the Stelarc interview [conducted via vidcam] by CTHEORY Live [ie Arthur + Marilouise Kroker] I had strong associations with this initial introduction 2 Stelarc’s work ie art_scene panderings 2 the figure of artist-as-ego + media-perpetuated artist-as conveyor of jargonistic/post-biological/hierarchical figure. This progression of the concept of a media-squeezed Stelarc illustrates:

– how a commercial artscene is nowadays governed by a constant new-ism-seeking rhetoric of relational aesthetics.

– regulation scenic_elitism via knowledge exclusion + (subconscious or deliberate) conceptual obscurification.

– various satellite virtual n.teraction_prickings [ie working vicariously via a project associated with Stelarc] pointing 2wards the agendaised notions b.hind several of his works, eg an alleged Stelarc
theory that wot is hindering the evolution of the human species is s.sentially the size of a woman’s womb.

The interview b.tween Stelarc + CTHEORY demonstrates a certain hairiness with[in] the use of a traditional format [ie talking_head dialogue] 2 capture the s.sence of Stelarc’s works:

1) a type of problematic subliminal gender pottage in terms of a conceptual reduction of biology + interviewer presence/tandem breakdown of interviewer as injector-of-high-end theoretical concepts designed 2 faux-challenge thru pretend bristling questions [ie woman interviewer supplanted via the “real” interviewer – aping discourses governed by traditional power positionings].

2) the interviewing beginning with a Stelarc reference 2 t.h[is]e body being unavoidably directed by biological directives (ie he’s not the best in the morning) indicating projected/neglected references 2 body replacements/post-biology. This downplaying of the very mechanics that allow for the manipulation of the concepts Stelarc uses as his artistic currency hi-lites the gap b.tween the artist’s projection and physical_x.istance/actualities.

3) the layering of flesh/tech idealisation + constant references to dialogue rather than multilogue/social.networking_type jigsaw.possibilities + theoreticians mired/housed within
print_[quasi-digerati]literary traditions; consistent references 2 Stelarc as being the primary c[reator]urator of his works [besides an attempt by Marilouise 2 n.courage future collaborative attempts] + with [only] a cursory mention of those technical ppl responsible for the execution of his idea/project fruition. This, in particular, echos the ego m.phasis/underpinning of this mono-directive interview process; an old_skool attempt @ documentation stripped of the equations necessary 2
allow Stelarc to perform/justify/reflect his artistic responses.

The next interview in the series is an interview with Katherine Hayles, during which a person from UCLA’s end attempted to dial-up into the video link – a wonderful fracture of the linear, dried-end of the outmoded dialogue format CTHEORY Live is current perpetuating.

Database video art, Performance Video, Live Cinema + VJing

One of my recent interests, perhaps even preoccupations, has been investigating live or performance video, both as an artist/producer and as a curator. This form of video art has its roots in the rave culture of the late 80’s and 90’s and I have been aware of it since the late 90’s as I was getting into video production and film making. But it really peaked my interest and became more intriguing to me, when I became the lead curator for the 2003 and 2004 New Forms Festivals here in Vancouver.

VJ Central states:
“The word VJ is also used to represent video performance artists who create live visuals on all kind of music. It originates from a parallel with DJs, although most VJs nowadays have more to do with musicians than with DJs. Often using an analog vision mixer, VJs blend and superimpose various inputs over clips. In recent years, musical instrument makers have begun to make speciality equipment for VJing. The evolution of computers has allowed for VJ-specific programs to be produced and has allowed for easier accessibility to the art form.”

As background, audio/visual performance in recent years has had a greater and greater incorporation at international festivals and film festivals, as it own art form, integrating generative new media tools for sound, images and video. As well as bridging electronic music, new media art/ installation and experimental film and video, adding to the live component of performance, audio/visual performance is coming into its own as a medium outside the party context.

For example, at the Montreal annual electronic music festival MUTEK, during the last two years the festival has added extra, discreet programs, with unique themes and styles for the audio/visual performance or “live” cinema” stream, and in 2005 there were three different audio/visual performance programs, in addition to their regular music performance events. As this performance visual art form develops, if more forward thinking art institutions got involved in nurturing this hybrid, art genre-bridging form, it might get more of the credit its due.

For one of the 2004 New Forms Festival events, we presented a night of performance video or audio/visual performance, as it was called. I assisted the curators of the event, Ed Jordan and Stephanie McKay of The nomIg. Collective, in producing the event within the context of the rest of the festival. The event was still so new to Vancouver audiences that we didn’t know how to properly promote it to reach the different types of video art and electronic music cultures, who might appreciate the works. Yet there were some stunning works from the Montreal artist team skoltz_kolgen (Herman Kolgen and Dominique Skoltz) and local filmmaker Velcro Ripper that year, as well as in 2003 by The nomIg. Collective themselves and the French Canadian film artist Jean Piché.

Last year, I managed to get to Mutek for Montreal’s annual electronic festival, to check out their audio/visual program (which I was told was not their best year for this type of work, but intriguing in any event). I’ve since been trying to make time in my life to get more personally acquainted with this practice in my own work. I’ve also incorporated an introduction of this new video art practice into my 2nd year video art and production course, Moving Images, in order to try inspire a new crop of performance video artists.

In the Jan/Feb issue of RES magazine there was a feature on VJ artists moving more into the art sphere (sadly the article is not available online) and getting better exposure, recognition and respect. It discussed how they are reinventing themselves, as they move away from the electronic music and party scene onto the street and into galleries, showing their performance installations and exploring new ways to present themselves to the world beyond the late-nights.

The following are quotes by the artist/curators team, The nomIg. Collective, of the new genre/format/ art form:

“…manipulate audio and video samples live, as DJs would manipulate their records. Here, however, Coldcut transcends the traditional material manipulations of the DJ and move into the limitless realm of digital exploration where sound and image can truly become one.”

“… the creation of works where the audio and video components are composed and performed together with an awareness of each other’s inherent compositional characteristics. This … requires that neither the audio nor the video serve the role of accompaniment, but that they work together to form a synergy of audio and video; of sight and sound; of music and cinema.”

“The sound and video are presented as a single, coherent thought.”

“the simultaneous creation of sound and image in real time by sonic and visual artists who collaborate to elaborate concepts on equal terms. The traditional parameters of narrative cinema are expanded by a much broader conception of cinematographic space, the focus of which is no longer the photographic construction of reality as seen by the camera’s eye, or linear forms of narration.”

Stephanie McKay and Ed Jordon of The NomIg. Collective

I’ve also recently discovered an adaptation of the live VJ / Visuals activity online “WJing or web jockeying” although what I’ve seen so far is not live online, a European group has cropped up to develop a system for WJing and are doing workshops on the software all over Europe. The system seems to create live performances that are wirelessly streamed online. The Rhizome artbase recently promoted it, stating:

“While the DJs and VJs of the world remain tethered to the remix of sound and image, WJs (web jockeys) have at their fingertips an infinite and diverse pool of material–sound, image, text, code, web cams, blogs, and more–all constantly changing and expanding. A new software development, WJ-s, offers artists a tool to create live multimedia performances from this digital soup… the world of artistic algorithms, and computer art in a live performance. WJ-s was conceived…. to create ‘a strong cybernetic experience, captivating, sensual, and shifted where [….] the flow and the extreme pleasure of surfing are moved into a performative framework…” Helen Varley Jamieson, Rhizome.org.

Although not really a new thing, as I’ve known The nomIg Collective to do such live online performances several years ago on PirateTV, which were basically live streams of VJing, it is intriguing and I hope to see more on this particular manifestation of live performance cinema.

Another area of interest and somewhat related to live video performance, is the new works in non-linear, non-narrative, ambient or generative video projects and the software and database systems that have been developed for them. In my research for courses I’ve been developing, I discovered that many artists and filmmakers are trying new ways to generate narrative or non-narrative cinema online for ambient backgrounds in homes, using computer databases and programming to display random film clips and audio. In this way, they are always creating something new and “live”- which is primary to the work of new media cinema artist and theorist Lev Manovich in his work on the Soft Cinema system.

Lev Manovich is more often cited and known for his book The Language of New Media, where he attempts to contextualise new media in terms of film theory, history and form, but also as a new form that will find its own language, which he tries to create the beginnings of (since I have only browsed through the book itself, forgive me if I have oversimplified or mistaken its overall intent).

With his Soft Cinema project, Manovich is continuing his investigation of new media film. On his website he states:

“Soft Cinema consists from large media database and custom software. The software edits movies in real time by choosing the elements from the database using the systems of rules. The software decides what appears on the screen, where, and in which sequence; it also chooses music tracks. In short, Soft Cinema can be thought of as a semi-automatic VJ (Video Jockey), or more precisely, a FJ (Film Jockey).” Lev Manovich

Manovich also claims he is exploring four ideas:

1.First is Algorithmic Cinema: which is the writing and implementing a script and a system of rules, that are defined the creators or as he calls them authors of the cinema clips, the software then controls what the screen layout is, including the number of windows and their content. Then the author/videographer can choose to have minimal control letting most of choices to be made by the software, or they can determine which clips the viewer will see at specific points in time. However, the actual editing is done in real time by the system and the video clips and sound can run continuously without repeating the same edits.

2.Then there’s Macro-cinema: where the computer user uses the various windows sizes and dimensions within the larger frame.

3.Next is Multimedia cinema: where the video is meant as only one type of representation, with others being 2D animation, motion graphics, 3D scenes, diagrams, maps, etc.

4.Finally, he explores the concept of interest to me, that of Database Cinema: where the media elements are randomly selected from a database of clips and sound, to create virtually limitless (limited only but the number of clips and media elements themselves) combination number of video elements or different versions of the same film. His approach to using a database is as a new representational form in and of itself, in order to research the different ways to display the ambient cinema database. So its an exploration of database versus narrative structure or recombinations for various narrative effects.

Camille Baker is a media curator/ producer/ artist/ instructor living in Vancouver –
For more on Camille Baker, see http://www.swampgirl67.net/

By Filmmaker Flick Harrison.

The film “Marie Tyrell”came to my attention when I was asked to moderate the Cinematic Salon, a monthly informal community event in Vancouver, hosted by Cineworks, a non-profit artist-run cinema centre. The Cinematic Salon is meant to “provide an opportunity for dialogue around film artistry, in which guest artists show and discuss their work, encourage other filmmakers at all stages of their careers, as well as for individuals simply interested in film, meet, discuss and learn from each other’s experiences in film making.” This particular event was called “Flick Harrison: Film Interactive” due to its interactive features as a means to demystify or interrogate the narrative, politics and production of the film.

As it states on the Cineworks website,
“Flick Harrison’s award winning short MARIE TYRELL based on the 1974 short story by Vancouver author D.M. Fraser. Marie Tyrell is a humanizing portrait of a woman on death row, from inquisitive teen to uncompromising revolutionary leader. Like the 1974 short story by legendary local author D.M Fraser, Harrison’s film weaves multiple perspectives, splintered time and forceful poetic language into a startling examination of the politics of dissent. Mixing painterly compositions, traditional narrative, and a richly-layered bombardment of symbols and imagery, Marie Tyrell hijacks the aesthetics of high-art and hostage-video, of indymedia and indiewood.”

As the event’s moderator, and as an interactive media producer, curator and instructor, I felt it was my role to interrogate the DVD, beyond the intentions of the artist, but also as a new thread in the on-going Interactive Cinema discourse. I’d like to share some of my questions and comments, for both the viewers and the filmmaker, some of which were answered, some still remain to be answered.

‘Marie Tyrell’ can be viewed from many perspectives and all of which had to be considered and questioned before the events, so that I could field viewers’ questions appropriately or stimulate discussion effectively. Some of those perspectives include: standard technical execution concerns, production development factors, the political and social issues presented by the content, the film narrative construction and inclusion of non-narrative aspects, the presentation format, the DVD interactivity and audience response or experience. I will briefly discuss all of these perspectives, and finally, the success of the in all these areas.

To start with I’d like to discuss the content of the Marie Tyrell story, which was taken from an adaptation of the D.M. Fraser short story of the same name. The social issues addressed in the film focus on social activism in times of war, terrorism and the line between the activities of it and activism, the current social climate in the world due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, police brutality and subsequent fascism taking place in so-called democratic societies. The film is trying to address the topical concerns of the loss freedoms including liberty, dignity and free speech, rights that, especially in the US, are threatened after September 11th, 2001. The Marie Tyrell story also suggests that activists are portrayed to uninformed citizens, by the government and the media to be, sometimes are treated as, or assumed to be, terrorists. So that when individuals get involved in protest activities or activist organizations (even art projects, such as with Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble case, some fearful citizens believe the right-wing rhetoric, that the two are synonymous. While the divisions between activism and terrorism are not black and white, as they have been perceived in the past and certain cases are sometimes difficult to discern, peaceful civil protest is NOT terrorism. The film seems to be stating that, to take away basic civil rights such as an individual’s right to protest about injustice and government misconduct, is considered undemocratic in Western, countries. However, the film brings these issues to the foreground and show how fragile these right are, in a timely, if fragmentary, dream-like way.

A deconstruction of Marie Tyrell’s narrative elements, reveals its non-linear approach (i.e. the dream-like weaving through the protagonist’s memories), not dissimilar to other recent, popular independent films such as Memento by Christopher Nolan. However the questions that the non-narrative aspects evoke are: Do we really have a story here or a manipulation of emotional response? Does this non-linear approach add or detract from the message or impact? Why did the filmmaker choose this approach to present the political content, wasn’t there a more straightforward approach? The rationale to is primarily that the work, adapted directly from the 1974 short story by Fraser, also wove in multiple perspectives, splintered time and used forceful poetic language to create an impassioned view of his experience of politics in the 1970’s, which parallel those of today. But this approach begs another question, what was the motivation to work with this topic and/or this poem? More fodder to explore Harrison’s political views or an unearthing of under appreciated political commentary to show that things haven’t changed much? I would wager, both.

To change focus now, to the mechanics of the work, let’s look at the DVD construction and its interactive elements. In respect of the domain of Interactive Narrative in film. Between 2000-2001, there were only a few film-makers, interactive artists. Such as Janet Murray, and her Hamlet on the Holodeck fans, whose attention was peaked. Yet this domain seemed to develop more in the online and console gaming world, with a few Macromedia Flash animators and designers interested in creating projects that explored its possibilities (not to mention Science Museums and Planetariums). However, not many filmmakers took up the challenge, if only for the cost of shooting all the “choose your own adventure” elements, necessary to make it work, requiring many different possible choices of scenes or narrative routes for the viewer to pursue. In addition, the presentation format of this type of film is limited to home computers and set-top DVD systems, at that time not common. Yet, here in Vancouver one filmmaker, David Wheeler, attempted such a project, with his interactive DVD feature Point of View (P.O.V.) in 2001, to limited release and exposure.

Recently, in my online travels, I have begun to see more active discussion again of Interactive Narrative, primarily from artists and academics interested in database or generative online, non-linear video. As new and different technologies now are available to explore, the possibilities are perhaps open once more. The conundrum that always surfaces is, however, how can viewers be turned, from viewers who passively immerse in the content and visuals, into users actively involved and interested in changing the narrative outcome? Many in this debate have even suggested that we stop pursuing this and leave film and TV entertainment formats as they are, lean back media, while web, interactive projects and games stay as they are, lean forward media, leave it alone so that never the two can meet.

So did Marie Tyrell contribute to this discourse? Not in my assessment, but it did add a more interesting and thoughtful means of accessing and engaging with the Special Features of a DVD, which is something in itself. So good effort on Harrison’s part taking on the challenge, no matter the motive.

On the Cineworks Cinematic Salon web page for the event, it explains that the:
“Interactive DVD: Buttons in the video can also “interrogate” the narrative, and the politics of the film’s production, by calling up documentary segments: for instance, an interview with Erik Paulsson, who sat on a BC Arts funding jury which rejected Marie Tyrell. Including original footage of Noam Chomsky, Svend Robinson, Larry Campbell, the Woodwards Squat, Arts Council Jurists, and antiwar protests.”

In the DVD, the interactivity of Marie Tyrell was accessed through the aforementioned “interrogation mode” (simply a different means to get to the “special features”). But what are the users’ experiences, with the interactive components, meant to be in terms of a different approach to user experience, and technically, in terms of user interaction? What was the motivation to create an interactive component to a standard film project and why in this way? As a media producer, curator, researcher. While not all of my questions were answer, the answer I received, I felt, while understandable, somewhat unsatisfying. The filmmaker, Flick Harrison, seems to have wandered into new media and the interactive domain, purely out of a desire to get his project funded.

Harrison, a local Vancouver film-maker, often known to have political, controversial and thought-provoking topics for his projects, was having trouble getting his film project funded. For whatever reasons (which are delved into in more detail on the DVD), he took advantage of the novelty factor and the potential of the interactive DVD format, to attract the interest in the project by the film and video funders. It seemed to work, but has it pushed the medium? Some may say “yes”, some may say “no”. As someone who’s researched this domain a little, I would have to say, “not really”, and I think Harrison would admit to this as well.

In terms of exposing the production process, such as: funding concerns, filming and technical elements, and the style or approach, in the DVD’s interrogation mode has interaction that mainly features clickable buttons, which appear at certain points in the narrative and expand on the behind-the-scenes pre-production such as, the funding process; the adaptation of the short story, the politics of it and the era in which it was written, as well as the parallels it has to current day circumstances; and other documentary elements that correspond to the reference points in the interrogation mode of the DVD.

I asked Harrison, did this way of connecting the content to the process, add to the experience for the viewer, and how was it different from standard Special Features that you normally find in most commercial DVDs? His response was that, “the intention was to aid viewers in becoming more engaged with the film making process, not just to have them sit back and take it in as finished entertainment piece, but to have them to think about the all aspects of film making.” This approach perhaps harkens back to the Fluxus or Structuralist Movements in experimental film making of the 60 and 70’s, where the materials for making the film were exposed, to thus, become the film content. In this case, Harrison not only used the technological materials as the product, but all the parts in the process from the funding, to the text adaptation, to the filming of political protests, to the historical fodder for the story, etc. as the materials as well.

Ultimately, the choice made for this approach, again, was to show the unique means of presenting the content, in order to receive funding. Harrison agrees that, in some ways this interrogation mode of the DVD is not so different than presenting the Special Features menu to viewers, to see how the film was made or watch the whole film again with the director’s commentary, etc. However, he sees it as less about showing the viewers how cool the film is but, rather as a tool to sell the DVD, with its special effects etc, but instead about demystifying the whole process of film-making, stripping it down and exposing both the good and the bad. In the end, some could see it as two different approaches to the same end: to make money so to continue to make more films. And while such a motive is a reality, whether you are a big production company or an independent film-maker, let’s just be clear about the fact that they are basically the same thing.

So while I think the overall intention of the interactive component was to find funding to make a controversial or political film, and the interactivity merely a by-product of the process, the result still has merit, in terms of exploring interactivity through film.

Finally, in discussing the presentation format and the audience response or experience, I wonder, was it meant to be seen in a gallery, movie theatre, or on personal computer? Is it intended to be more personal or private? Isolated and alienating (mirroring the film subject matter and main character), does this interactive approach add to the viewer’s experience? Or does it feel familiar? Harrison suggests that he is focusing on distributing the work in two parts: the DVD to galleries and artist-run centres in Canada and the film to Film Festivals, which reiterates my claim that presentation is a difficult task for this type of project. Perhaps he should find a way to put it online (and why wasn’t that a first choice? the lack of royalties and people willing to pay for it likely), atleast some of the interrogation mode documentary clips. This is a huge hurdle for this medium to leap and likely the main reason it is not pursued more; how does one cover the huge costs of making the project if its difficult to present? Speaking from my own experience of watching the film the first time, at my computer. I would say that it really should be watched with a computer and headphones over the theatre setting. The impact of the narrative is felt so much more intimately and the ability to surf around in the interrogation mode helps the viewer to really “get” what Harrison was going for. On the other hand, it also allows those of us with short attention spans to not explore it, as in depth, he might wish. So the jury is still out on each mode experience for this piece.

So is this project successful as a new means to explore interactive cinema? I would say, not really, for reasons given above, but at least filmmakers are still toying with this domain and if the worlds of film and games could start to crossover more, there might be more interesting interactive narratives in both domains.

Is Marie Tyrell successful as a controversial film? I would say, yes. It has many intriguing and provocative ideas and insights that nudge the viewer to consider the current political reality worldwide. It was successful, in terms of my experience, having viewed it both, with others at the Cineworks’ Cinematic Salon, and with my video production students, easily prompting discussion on the issues presented by it.

Is Marie Tyrell successful as an experimental film project? I would say that it is, it effectively uses an non-linear narrative approach, unfolding the world of the main character. It mixes visual fragments with poetic narration, to elucidate the memories of the main and supporting characters, as Marie moves toward her execution for her implied terrorism, as a barrage of memories flashing in one’s mind before they die. It is an aesthetically appealing film (except for one extra long psychedelic segment 2/3 of the way through), that is well told cinematically, leaving the viewer ponderous and emotionally affected.

It was successful in terms of creating a closer connection between topical clues within the main narrative content and with the documentary or interrogation elements of the film making process. This was fresh, and interestingly there were more interrogation documentary clips than there was in the original film. One could easily get so caught up in that part and forget the original film they started with. I’m not sure if this was because the main film was edited more stringently or that on some level the film was just a way to lure a viewer into the politics and world of the film-maker. Perhaps the real artwork here is the whole DVD as a package, which would be more aptly named, “Flick Harrison’s Trails and Tribulations in the Making of Marie Tyrell”, as the real project is not just the dreamlike short.

For more on the interactive DVD and screening bookings or copies, contact Flick Harrison:
http://members.shaw.ca/flickharrison
For more on the Cineworks and the Cinematic Salon, see:
http://www.cineworks.ca/past_salons/film_interactiv.php
For more on Camille Baker, see:
http://www.swampgirl67.net/

Free103point9 and Transmission Arts

“the guts of radio are not sounds, but rather the gaps between sending and receiving, between transmission and audition, or however you want to name this space.”

Soundclash, airwaves’ tapestries, aural networks. Transmission art is an artistic movement interested in exploring transmission “as a medium for creative expression”. Transmission artists navigate the unnamed space “between transmission and audition”, the ephemeral territory where the medium becomes the message. Transmission art attempts to make airtime available to those whose vision of the medium does not fit commercial venues, to those who imagine airwaves as raw material for something more than ads.

If John Cage, Jean Tinguely and Nam June Paik’s work can be regarded as “landmarks” of transmission art, a more recent chapter of this history cannot ignore free103point9‘s transmission art projects and online radio.

Performing transmission

Since it emerged as a microcasting artist collective in 1997, free103point9 has consistently pursued the legitimization and promotion of transmission arts. Today, the clandestine collective is a non-profit arts organization whose many ventures are: Project space -a gallery in Brooklyn, New York-, Wavefarm -a research centre currently under construction-, a radio lab, an on-line radio and a distribution label. Aware of the need of defining transmission arts, free103point9 has painstakingly theorized and documented the history and forms of transmission art: radio and video art, performance, installation, light sculptures. Textbooks and a growing on-line archive of transmission artworks are two ways in which free103point9 consolidates the notion of transmission arts.

The term “transmission” has often been associated with linearity and passive reception. In Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s cybernetic communication model, transmission is the transference of information from sender to receiver. Despite its obvious debt to the cybernetic model, transmission art subverts this linearity by focusing on reception conditions. This is the goal of free103point’s transmission projects (Tune (In)), Radio 4X4 and Microradio Sound Walk), in which artists “re-examine conventional ideas about sound performance and the audience experience”. These “conventional ideas” are basically the assumption that performance is “immediate” and that audiences are “passive”.

In Tune(In))), for example, both assumptions are challenged by proposing listeners to experience audio performances broadcasted live in individual radio headsets. These “mediated” performances compete with other signals in the FM dial, and their transmission is not complete until the listener agrees to break with the silence and puts the headsets on. The silence of the room contributes with the audience’s self-awareness of its “role” in the performance.

A variation of this theme is found in Radio 4X4, a collaborative radio transmission performance that proposes a “walking tour of local airwaves”. The project, presented at the Center for Contemporary Art Laznia in Gdansk in May 2005, consists in four simultaneous audio performances transmitted separately throughout the room. The viewer/listener collaborates in the performance by moving within the room, mixing the signals with each step.

Premiered in 2004 at free103point9 gallery, Microradio Sound Walk is a walking tour and sonic piece that invites viewers to move among station transmitters situated along a path. Signals shift with each participant’s move, resulting in a soundscape that reveals the complexity of local airwaves. As in the case of Tune (In))) and Radio 4X4, the participant becomes extension and medium of the sonic experience.

Creating community

If performing transmission is the first step towards new uses of airwaves and sound, free103poin9 on-line radio is crucial to bridge the gap between artists and public. The possibility of transmitting on-line extends the goal of artistic experimentation by opening up a space to communicate creativity beyond the monopoly of commercial stations. The creation of the on-line radio is a symptom of free103point’s shift from civil disobedience to alternative action under the umbrella of “high profile nonprofit media arts organization.”

The most promising aspect of free103point9 is precisely this determination that prompts the organization to engage larger audiences in the debate and imagination of richer and more interesting forms of radio, to encourage artists to explore the unnamed territory between “transmission and audiences”, and, finally, to dare to make art out of the “guts of radio”.

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Gregory Whitehead, as cited in Allie Alvarado, “An Interview with Gregory Whitehead.”
free103point9 is now Wavefarm.

Interview with Mary Flanagan

Jess: I’ve been thinking about the idea of works-in-progress and issues of exploration and am wondering what kind of aesthetic possibilities do you see available in an online environment that might not be tangible on a more static platform like cd-roms?

Mary: Most CDROMs have the ability to be networked so that they can at least provide some of the same possibilities as completely networked artworks and games. . . however, I know of few artists at this time who continue to create artistic CDs. Rather, working on the network or in installation/application seems to be the norm. For example, if an artist is using a game engine to make artwork (such as the Unreal engine ) the application and assets may require download or complete distribution as a packaged work. Compare this to a changing and updatable database or applet accessible quickly through a browser, you have distinct differences. However, the dichotomy between “static” and “nonstatic” is not absolute. Most commercial online games, for example, distribute base code on CD, then updates, patches (as well as user created content) online, ends up being a choice for the artist as to what kind of work they wish to make. Some projects are still just too big for the web, too textured, too intense in their processes or 3D graphics.

So the idea of work in progress, in industry is called a prototype, in writing, a draft. There are always different audiences for works-in-progress. A web based project for example can have many testers for the work to receive critique and feedback before it is finished. The scope and scale of which is, quite different from say a studio visit to see an in-progress installation.

In more “static” and “net” based work, both can involve multiple users or multiple readings, and both can be augmented and changed due to the network surrounding them. As an artist I choose to try and do web-accessible work as much as possible to allow the maximum number of user/participants to enjoy the work. Traditional art circles, however, still prefers objects to place into galleries and sell (and buyers, collect), and not something that merely can be accessed on the web. So here, too, economic choices come into play for a variety of artists wishing to sell their work or at least having it seriously considered along with other arts currently housed in more traditional institutions (art objects, film archives, etc).

Regarding aesthetic possibilities, well I personally like the immediate and fluid feeling of a web-based application, the feeling that it can unintentionally occur or happen on the screen while a user thought he or she was just surfing. The unintentionality of simple discovery and the ‘everydayness’ of integrating art into other computer activities is compelling to me.

Jess: Perhaps because I’m researching web fictions written by women, I’m finding your ideas of access and unintentionality resonating with a cyberfeminist thinking. If cyberfeminism, broadly explained as optimism in the “digital turn” combined with feminist thought, (like that of Rosi Braidotti’s), might be said to revolve around a theories of representation (of women), then how might online media like The Adventures of Josie True begin to question the (relationship?) interaction of (enabling?) technologies and women’s lives?

Mary: Well my thinking has changed recently about feminism and media that relies on design + code structures… Instead of matters of representation (issues I worked on in the late 1990s in several essays), my attention has turned towards thinking and reworking computer-media specific things such as ‘game goals’ and ‘architectures’ as important sites for social change and activism. How we participate in digital culture, how we are framed — as consumers or as producers — is fundamental to this notion.

When I worked on Josie, this was not yet my thinking, so developing the Josie character with friends and students was definitely more about representation. Josie is not too thin -she is average. She has often been mistaken for a boy. She is both fashionable and unfashionable. She is Chinese American but also has been referred to as “anime,” which suggests that anime characters are either ‘white’ or a whole other group altogether. Her role models in the game: Ms. Trombone, Science Teacher, and Bessie Coleman, Aviator — are decidedly African American. So here, representing adventurous, smart, and scientific women of colour is very important to enhancing all player’s exposure to ‘what constitutes a hero.’ We simply don’t get enough diverse heroes and this is very important for everyone: man, woman, white, black.

I’m certainly a cyberfeminist. I’m overly optimistic. But I’m not one to believe that new technologies can replace old hierarchies of power — look at who is making the new technologies, and look how they got there. How can this system change? My belief is that by changing who authors systems, there may be some kind of change, at least through empowering and sharing knowledge. In part IT is a knowledge economy. Therefore, this certainly means networking women together to support their success in technological arenas as much as possible as they become authors. I think it also means shifting how we teach technology, as well as who designs hardware and even programming languages, too. . .(these lofty-bordering-on-insane-suggestions can only come from someone optimistic, don’t you think?) One step at a time… : )

Jess: The more I re-read your answer, the more I wonder whether matters of representation are really so different from “game goals” and “architectures.” As you say, changing the authors of systems can mean also changing hierarchies of power. But by changing the authors aren’t we also changing representation? I mean, as a woman thinking about representation, you created Josie with specific goals in mind. Is changing game goals perhaps a further step in this direction?

Mary: Matters of representation I believe can be abstracted to these larger systems and architectures, so yes, changing game goals and larger system designs is a further step in the direction started with games like Josie True. Diversity and variety matters in what we see and how we as players, consumers, and participants are framed. For example, games which promote sharing or have goals of ‘giving everything away’ vs. ‘accumulating’ might offer entirely different perspectives on success in play and, potentially, the real world around us. This may or may not affect the way things ‘are seen’; in a way, it is a kind of ‘getting under the skin’ or surface in ways theorists such Barthes talks about in his Mythologies (among many many others) and what I write about in my work on feminist game design. Because every image, object, sound, or gesture is susceptible to the imposition of meaning, designers must be conscious in all steps of this meaning-making process, perhaps especially when it is completely created from code.

Changing the authors of such systems may indeed alter how such design processes are approached. That’s my hypothesis, but it is only proven in small cases because massive scale social change to change hierarchies of authorship has not yet happened. There is the very real danger of reproducing the status quo. Bell Hooks discusses this in terms of teaching in her 1994 Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, and other feminist thinkers who see radical social change as only possible in changing systems of power.

Jess: How might women destabalise “old hierarchies of power” as interactors with games and as designers/producers of games?

Mary: So how might women and other disenfranchised groups destabalise “old hierarchies of power”? Certainly one way this can happen is through asking different kinds of questions and by asserting different kinds of goals. And ultimately by making work with differing perspectives, values, and communities which bleeds through to larger culture. One of the failures of the feminist movement has been its cohesion to itself. For example, ‘women’s studies’ should not only happen in a certain course but across courses and fields. How many editors of books or art exhibitions are conscious of ensuring equal representation of women, of people of colour, of people with varying functional abilities or interests? Making the tools, knowledge, and context available to all for diverse visions of community, space, place and beyond is an accessibility issue.

As consumers, women already destabilise hierarchies. Look, for example, at the case of The Sims games. Here, fan culture and machinima, as well as re-skinning and unplaying such games, is popular. Gamers re-skin, re-design, and indeed, re-issue popular games such as The Sims and manipulate their own Neopets web pages, offering their own interpretations and inventions for play. It is helpful to know that according to last year’s ELSPA white paper, the typical female gamer in the UK is 30 to 35 years old, plays around seven hours a week and spends £170 a year on games. The positioning of consumption as a game goal in itself is cause for further investigation, if only because it so closely resembles real-world corporate messages and the everyday practices of ‘consumers’ according to Willis, however, “Consumerism has to be understood as an active, not a passive, process ”active, for it is a type of play which also includes work”. Along with consumption, however, critique can come about: a great deal of pleasure is derived from subverting these set norms and exploring the boundaries of what is, and is not, permissible. I’ve linked these subversions in some of my essays to historical models of playing with domestic situations: Victorian doll fiction has been replaced by fan fiction generated by Sims players, and Victorian practices of doll funerals have translated into macabre Sims play with the ability to have the virtual dolls suffer, become malnourished, or even set objects on fire within the ‘normative’ suburban environment.

So, subversion of existing systems, and the making of new examples and experiences, seem to be a few of the approaches we can take as ‘culture jammers’ in a quest to create new models for play, for art, and for culture.

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1 http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml
2 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374521506/002-4660078-6525628?v=glance&n=283155
3 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374521506/002-4660078-6525628?v=glance&n=283155
4 http://www.elspa.com