Image by Alice Alexandrescu.

This year’s edition of Artivistic brings the fields of art, politics and academia together under the theme of TURN*ON.

Eventually, the investigation about systems of representation – be they semiotic, informational or political – might slip into the one psychoanalysis considers the most elementary and surreptitious of them all: sex. That’s precisely where the Artivistic gathering got into in its fourth edition, which happened in Montreal from 15th to 17th October. To be exact, the theme under which the event tied the fields of art, politics and academia together was TURN*ON – according to its curatorial statement, ‘a fragile bridge extending, over a valley of which the depth you cannot see, to a life centered on pleasure, consciousness, togetherness, understanding, and joy’.

Formulated this way, the concept seems to be a response to the well-worn verses by journalist Eduardo Galeano, in which he states that utopia ’causes us to advance’ only because it ‘lies in the horizon’. With turn on, Artivistic proposes that the forces that move people forward and bring worlds into existence are not far away: in a scenario emptied of grand narratives, the desire (of the self?) should gain preponderance over any masterplans (of the party?).

So, if libido is the why, could we say that art is the how? As crude as it can be, this comparison makes clear that aesthetics, just as politics, mainly operate in the level of methods. They are more concerned with the way desire is manipulated (often repressed or enhanced) than with its ontological truth. Language cannot explain affect, and it shouldn’t pretend to – the best it can do is create spaces for its continuous exercise.

In that sense, what really stood out during the event were the workshops. I wouldn’t go as far as to agree with the idea that such activities are a distinct genre within the contemporary art circuit. Workshops indeed revitalize the exhibition space – however, they do so not by occupying it with new forms, but by proposing new forms of occupying it. In Artivistic, these interfaces ranged from diy electronics and card game design to pornographic filmmaking and even a kind of un-workshop on workshops! Among those, there was a remarkable amount of projects concerning the performative of one’s own identity.

In fact, the workshops punctuated Artivistic in a not much different way than the everyday activities of cooking and eating in group (or translating things to French or English – it was a true bilingual event). One thing led to another, keeping the gathering together in spite of the healthy excess of participant autonomy allowed by the organization crew. Of course, the concentration of (almost) all activities in the same place helped building this integration. This was a strategic option, very coherent with the intimate theme of this edition; the former Artivistic, about un.occupied spaces, had been distributed in different venues throughout Montreal.

The integration of the participants was so successful it had the minor side effect of creating an almost self-centred environment. Even though some activities would have been very interesting for people outside regular art-audience, it was hard to see among the public someone besides those that were immersed 24/7 in the event. For instance, it was a pity that the orgasmic birth workshop, which introduced alternative ways of pregnancy and labour, had no pregnant women participating.

This paradoxical isolation was imploded in the last night of the event – most ironically, not by the long-waited closing performance Resist Me Release Me: Turn On Act On, which artist Shu Lea Cheang had been organising with the participants throughout the gathering, but because of its impending cancellation. It seems that the managers of the venue where Artivistic was happening had not understood that the event would contain nudity and explicit sexual acts, and took account of this just in time of the final soiree. Since they had no public license to host this kind of activity, they said it was impossible to have the performance there: either it had to be suspended or transferred elsewhere.

The organizers explained this incident to the participants and called for a collective decision. That immediately ignited a very intense discussion, where it became clear that what was at hand was not mere censorship, but a very subtle negotiation of the different spheres that Artivistic addressed. The autonomy people were requesting was not sexual, but artistic – ‘we do not intend to do an orgy, but performances’, as someone said. Hence, it was not a simple conflict between raw libidinal impulse and oppressive morality; it concerned more complex, structured systems – i.e. art and Montreal society, both already contradictory in themselves.

I dare say that some solutions proposed in this debate – for example, live-streaming the works from another place or ‘censoring’ performances in real-time – were way more interesting than any prescripted show might have been. These proposals were the sign of an art that was alive and kicking, ready to respond emergencies and fight back, instead of just claiming its secular, innocuous freedom (a freedom that critic Julian Stallabrass very cunningly regards as supplementary to that of the market).

The result was that in a couple hours the whole programme for the night was adapted and moved to a venue nearby, in a beautifully orchestrated, self-organized effort. Unfortunately, due to limitations of structure and space, not everything that had been planned before could be presented. Nevertheless, the accident had allowed the necessary hands-on without which a turn on just fades away, and something bigger was engendered in the process – I’d say revolutionary freedom, a kind of autonomy that, as the old leftist maxima states, must always be conquered.

Links:

http://artivistic.org/http://bang.calit2.net/wiki/Towards_a_curatorial_statementhttp://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/33846http://artivistic.org/en/content/taboohttp://artivistic.org/en/content/postporn-workshophttp://artivistic.org/en/content/un-workshop-lawn-wreckinghttp://artivistic.pbworks.com/http://artivistic.org/en/content/video-orgasmic-birth-workshophttp://artivistic.org/en/content/resist-me-release-me-turn-acthttp://www.i-k-u.comhttp://vimeo.com/7240418

Neptune is Brazil’s most powerful supercomputer. With the name of a God, its 16.2 trillion calculations per second, distributed through 256 servers with octo-core processors, are specially designed to help to model the nomadic structures of ocean currents and the surface of the deep-sea floor. With this ocean topography, it will chose the best place to install 150 million dollars of pipes, or risers, through up to 2000 meters of water, 2 kilometers of solid rocks, and then at least 2 kilometers of a fluid layer of salt submitted to intense pressure, and open a 1 cm diameter hole over 100 billion barrels of crude oil and natural gas on Tupi1 oil field2, liters of black oil that can make Brazil become the 5th largest producer in the world, overtaking Kuwait’s production. You may be asking yourself what does this has to do with art.

Since 2005, a series of radical conferences has taken place around Brazil, organized on a discussion list. The organic group of dynamic gatherings of these conferences call themselves Sub>midialogy – the art of re:volving knowledge logos by practices and disorienting practices by the immersion in sub-knowledge. Always moving through the countryside and remote regions of the country – and with very small initial support from Waag Society for Old and New Media, conferences have taken place at Campinas (2005), Olinda (2006), Lençois da Bahia (2007) and Belem (2009). At these events one could lay on the floor to listen to a passionate talk by Etienne Delacroix, join well-known Brazilian new media theorists to receive a collective electroshock, join in debates about public policies with Gilberto Gil’s advisor and friend Claudio Prado or just take a deep swim in natural rivers with the most important artists in the country. Many participants were international and national activists, artists, media practitioners, policy developers and government employees that showed up their face on those festivals. The talks and debates could happen anywhere at any time and many performances took place during each event. More than a simple meeting of friends to relax and enjoy while they discuss and work, this series of conferences were fundamental in the development and implementation of many of the governmental programs on social inclusion using new technologies and free software for media production, so-called “digital inclusion”. Many of those practices, theories, methodologies and platforms were developed with the ideologies, discussions and practices of Sub>midialogy in mind. And Brazil became a leading nation in these initiatives worldwide.

The obvious interest of the Brazilian government regarding the Tupi oil field arose in 4 different proposals: the first one changes the oil, gas and other fluid hydrocarbon exploration and production systems in the country from a Concession System – where the company responsible for exploring pays royalties over the extracted product – to a Share System, where the production is shared between government and the company that explores the reserve. The second project creates a Public Company called Brazilian Company on Oil and Natural Gas Management (Petro-sal) responsible for the administration of exploration on the same model as Norway. The third project gives the Federal Union the right to transfer exploration from Petrobras – until now the only Brazilian oil company – in change of money or public titles. And the 4th proposal creates the Social Fund that will support social (health, education, habitation), environmental and technological projects. It is important to note that only last year Brazil became a net energy exporter, mostly because of its aggressive push into sugar-cane ethanol and hydroelectric power. “All of a sudden Brazil is emerging as an energy power,” said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington focusing on Latin America. “Everything they have developed, from soybeans to sugar to oil is suddenly working. They have had amazing luck.”

Petrobras tradition of funding social and cultural activities puts it in the honorable position of the Industrial Sector Company that most invested in this field, investing R$ 205 million (around 70 million pounds) in theater, buildings restoration, cinemas, movie production, dance and even supporting actions from the Ministry of Culture from Brazil. Here, we should consider that a Brazilian cultural funding company gains discounts of up to 4% on their Annual Incoming Tax. All the selected projects to be funded should conform to the cultural policies of the Company and the objectives of Petrobras Cultural Program. This year, and for the first time, Petrobras opened a public call for projects on festivals of digital culture. And Sub>midialogy conferences were selected to be supported with 200 thousand reais (around 68 thousand pounds).

The selected project aims to develop 3 different Sub>midialogy conferences around Brazil, to be hosted at Arraial d’Ajuda, Baia de Paranagua and Mirinzal, touristic paradises almost unreachable for Brazil’s population. And it starts with some important challenges. First of all, and most important, is that for the first time this series of conferences will have major financial support. How will the collective that organizes itself through discussion list and wiki pages survive the well-known crises that shocks many cultural groups and organizations on their first big money support? The second issue is how these radical media and political practitioners will negotiate with the paternalistic and elitist machinery of support of the hated oil companies. And, at last, but not least, what ideas and practices will arise during these three editions of Sub>midialogy that will keep running this source of creativity on theories and practices on new media and politics?

We can have a clue. It is very well known in Brazil that resistance is the secret of joy. And vice-versa. We expect that different practices and ideas on sustainable development can emerge. We expect important and frank discussions and debates on socio-cultural-ecological issues. We expect to see art performances that inspire a new global order. We expect to see if ideas can still be tools of subversion of cultural traditions in the world. Of course, you are all invited to join in and help with your ideas and practices to use Neptune, the supercomputer, for a more noble mission.

A Mail-Art project across physical and digital networks in collaboration with the Dark Mountain Project; to question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation and to craft new ones for the age ahead.

This was the second Do It With Others (DIWO) E-Mail-Art project initiated by Furtherfield. The first DIWO experiment in 2007 extended the Do-It-Yourself ethos of early net art, characterised by curiosity, activism and precision, towards a more collaborative approach, using the Internet as an experimental artistic medium and distribution system to foment grass-roots creativity.

The Dark Mountain Project is ‘a new cultural movement for an age of global disruption.’ It aimed to ‘question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to write clearly and honestly about our true place in the world.’ Do It With Others (DIWO) at the Dark Mountain, a mail-art project at HTTP Gallery, is a cultural collaboration for this age. “Uncivilisation,” the Dark Mountain Manifesto, called for a cultural response to our current predicament. Its challenge was offered to network-minded artists, technologists, writers and activists as a provocation – to work together to re-envision the narratives and infrastructures that govern our relationships with the natural world, and how they might be unravelled and rewoven to reconfigure our place in it. As “Uncivilisation” concludes, ‘the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.’

Artists, technologists, writers, activists and all other living beings were invited to correspond with each other across physical and digital mail networks, and the exhibition at HTTP present the results of this process. These have been gathered and the presentation devised during an Open Curation event, involving collaborators in real and virtual space. Transmissions shown in the exhibition include collaborative image-threads, net artworks, digital videos, drawings, paintings on wall and paper, sound works, and the full text of the discussion generated on the NetBehaviour list presented in numerous forms. The opening also featured a performance representing a central controversy arising during the project. The exhibition offered new myths and maps for future uncivilisation at HTTP Gallery.

More about The Dark Mountain Project and Furtherfield

The Dark Mountain Project is curated by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine. http://www.dark-mountain.net

Paul is the author of One No, Many Yeses and Real England. He was deputy editor of The Ecologist between 1999 and 2001. His first poetry collection, Kidland, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry.

Dougald writes the blog “Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job).” He is a former BBC journalist and co-founder of the School of Everything, and has written for and edited various online and offline magazines.

This project is part of Furtherfield’s on-going Media Art Ecologies programme, which aims to provide opportunities for critical debate, exchange and participation in emerging ecological media art practices, and the theoretical, political and social contexts they engage.

For details about the project, visit: http://http.uk.net/diwodarkmountain

For information about past events: 2009 | 2010

Do you want to Do It With Others in the future?

E-Mail: go to http://netbehaviour.org, subscribe to the NetBehaviour email list, correspond and join the explosive discussions in image, text, sound, movie and code.

by Class Wargames

Images of the Exhibition

Saturday 26th September 2009 12-5pm:
Participatory demonstration – Marcel Duchamp meets Blue Peter
Sunday 27th September 2009 12-5pm:
World Premier of Class Wargames film – The Game of War

The Situationist Raoul Vaneigem famously wrote “There are no more artists since we’ve all become artists. Our next work of art is the construction of a full-blooded life.” – The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Debord, strategist of the Situationist International, developed the game while in exile after the May ’68 Revolution, and came to regard it as his most important project. For Debord, The Game of War wasn’t just a game – come and learn how to fight and win against the oppressors of the spectacular society! Join the Class Wargames crew, Richard Barbrook, Fabian Tompsett, Ilze Black and others, in redefining political and contextual territories.

On Saturday the 26th, Class Wargames presents ‘Marcel Duchamp meets Blue Peter’, a day of making and playing Guy Debord’s The Game of War.

Sunday is the World Premier launch of the Class Wargames’ film – The Game of War. Directed by Ilze Black; script writers Richard Barbrook and Fabian Tompsett; xenography by Alex Veness, voice over by Hayley Newman and Alex Veness.

For more information about Class Wargames and players:
http://www.classwargames.net

Game of War Weekend Schedule:

Marcel Duchamp meets Blue Peter.
Day 1 – 12-5pm Saturday 26th September.
12.00 meet and greet
12.15 introduction by Class Wargames
12.30 building your own game, learning to play and participatory game playing

Film Launch of The Game of War by Class Wargames
Day 2 – 12-5pm Sunday 27th September.

12.00 meet and greet
12.15 View games exhibition and film
14.30 Talk by Class Wargames
15.00 Film launch & drinks

To take part in the game please RSVP to ale[AT]furtherfield[DOT]org
HTTP Gallery
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre
71 Ashfield Road
London N4 1NY
+44(0)79 8129 2734

Click here for map and location details

With thanks to the Arts Council of England for their support.

The Freesound Project web site is a Free Culture sound repository similar to OpenClipArt for illustration, Project Gutenberg for text or the Prelinger Archive for film. Launched in May 2005 in Barcelona by the Music Technology Group of Pompeu Fabra University, it quickly attracted contributors and an audience from around the world.

Freesound is a sound repository rather than a music or audio repository. It contains samples of noises rather than of music or spoken word recordings. If you do want music there are several excellent music sites elsewhere on the Internet, from an artistic point of view notably Sal Randolph’s OpSound. But these focus on completed tracks rather than raw sound materials, and are limited to music. Freesound has no such limitation.

Digital recording technology is so cheap and of such high quality that recording found sound or sampling musical instruments is easier than it’s ever been before. But to record that sound you must have the experience to do so and you must have access to it. Setting up the right recording conditions for water going down a plug or travelling to a location where wolves are howling will be beyond the ability of many otherwise capable individuals. Freesound means that you can share whatever sound you can find or produce and access sounds that you could not even think of recording yourself.

The sounds on Freesound are amazingly diverse and imaginative. The first samples that I chose randomly from links on the front page were of tin cans being hit and of office background noise. There are musical instruments among the samples, and sounds that could be used musically, but there are also many more sounds that you probably didn’t imagine you would ever hear recorded. Clicking the “Random Sample” link in the navigation bar at the left of the site can be quite addictive.

Finding pre-recorded samples to use in music or as sound effects in multimedia or film used to mean a trip to the library or a larger record shop to dig out the few sample or sound effects CDs that were hidden somewhere past the spoken word section. Or paying for floppy disks and later CD-Roms to be posted to you containing files that might or might not match the sound evoked by their description in the catalogue.

Freesound makes finding samples so easy that it feels like cheating. The samples on Freesound are usually very well tagged with keywords that describe the sound they contain, and even those that aren’t have descriptive titles. Searching for a subject or a theme will provide you with many samples to choose from.

If your search doesn’t find an existing sample and you really need the sound you can make it and then give it to Freesound so that others can benefit from it. That’s how projects like Freesound grow. You will get more back from Freesound than you put in, and what you put in will make that true for other people as well.

It’s easy to search or browse samples, users and tags on the site. You can see how samples have been remixed and re-submitted to the site, a feature pioneered by the Remix Reading project but taken further with Freesound’s tree-view interface to that data. And you can discuss or request samples in the forums. Freesound has a very rich ecosystem of data and social interaction.

Any samples downloaded from Freesound are free to use – you are not restricted in how you use them and you don’t have to pay for the privilege. This is guaranteed by the samples being licenced under the Creative Commons “Sampling Plus” licence.

The Sampling Plus licence has some problems for the use it’s being put to by Freesound. It requires that you credit the original sample’s author, which could become burdensome if you’re using more than a few samples. The Sampling Plus licence is meant to apply to samples taken from a larger work, not to samples used to make a longer work. And it’s unclear how the resulting work can or should be licenced.

Ordinarily at this point I’d explain how wonderful copyleft is and recommend the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike licence instead. But that wouldn’t solve the problem here, as Attribution-Sharealike still requires attribution and is probably stronger than Freesound wants or requires. So I think the ideal licence for Freesound would be the minimal CC Zero. Don’t be put off by this largely theoretical discussion of Freesound’s current licence, but do remember to observe its conditions.

Samples in Freesound’s library can be tagged with words in the same way photographs or web site addresses can be in other systems. Searching on tags rather than just titles can be useful for both human and software users of the site. It enables you to search conceptually or evocatively rather than searching for a literal description of the sound you are searching for. Sounds can also be geotagged, adding the latitude and longitude at which the sound was recorded so you can search for sounds by location as well. These facilities open up new possibilities for sound art, augmented reality and machine learning.

As well as its web-based interface there is a software API for Freesound that allows you to access the library from software programmed in C++, Pure Data and Max/MSP. This is a great resource for generative art, live coding and VJing. The C++ API can be used in systems such as OpenFrameworks or wrapped by an interface generator such as SWIG for use by other languages.

Part of what the promise of the Internet has come to be is the availability of a wealth of cultural raw material that would be impractical to assemble and distribute if it had to be accessed (and paid for) physically. This is not cyber-utopianism, although it does rely on at least some individuals having enough enlightened self-interest to contribute back to projects that they use. Rather it is something that the Internet makes possible and worthwhile.

Freesound realises that promise for sound. Browsing it is inspirational. Whether you are a sound artist, multimedia designer, animator or just curious to see what kind of noises there are in the world (an idea that will sound a lot less silly after a few minutes browsing the site), Freesound is a creative gold mine. Its breadth makes it the Wikipedia of sound, a basic resource and utility to refer to and build on creatively for anyone who needs sound for their projects.

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

“Postmodernism is dead” declares Nicolas Bourriaud in the opening line of his manifesto for our new global cultural era – the ‘altermodern’. As a preface to the latest Tate Triennial exhibition of the same name, the French curator and theorist sets about defining what he sees as the parameters of our contemporary society and offering paradigms for artistic approaches to navigating and negotiating them.

This essay aims to identify what the birth of this new era tells us about our culture’s relationship to time. It will explore how we choose to define the periods in which we live and how our relationships with the past, present and future seem to constantly evolve. As a central focus, it brings together two examples of cultural events from 2009 which have both, in semi-revolutionary ways, attempted to define our current age. The Altermodern exhibition and its accompanying Manifesto (Bourriaud 2009b) launched at the Tate Britain on 4th February provides the first, and the second is provided by The Age of Stupid – a feature film and accompanying environmental campaign launched in UK cinemas on 20th March.

Set in the year 2055, The Age of Stupid focuses on a man living alone in a world which has all but been destroyed by climate change. In an attempt to understand exactly how such a tragedy could have befallen his species and the society and culture which they created over the course of several millennia, he begins to review a series of ‘archive’ documentary clips from 2008. His aim is to discover how his ancestors – the one generation of people who had the power to prevent the impending disaster – could have demonstrated such disregard or contempt for the future.

By focusing on two central texts – Bourriaud’s Altermodern Manifesto and a faux encyclopedia entry from the future which retrospectively defines ‘the Age of Stupid’ released as promotional material for the film (Appendix One) – the essay aims to explore the disturbing continuities between these two perceptions of our current times and the drastic consequences these could have, if left unchecked, for the future of humanity and indeed the future of art.

Back to the Future

Defining the eras in which we live through phrases such as ‘modernity’, ‘postmodernity’ and now ‘altermodernity’, allows us a tangible way of assessing our place within the far less tangible, metaphysical concept of ‘time’. In fact, it could be argued that ‘history’ itself has been invented, documented and perpetuated as a way of helping human beings to get a purchase on their own existence and to define how they should approach their relationships to their past, present and future.

In this sense, the ‘modern’ era could be characterised as encouraging a forward-thinking outlook. According to Jurgen Habermas, its last living prophet:

“modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun: it is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future.” (Habermas 2004, p.5)

At the very start of the Enlightenment in the mid-17th century the French philosopher and scientist Blaise Pascal portrayed an inspiring vision of humanity as progressing throughout time, by likening the development of human innovation over the course of history to the learning of one immortal man (Stangroom 2005). Scientific knowledge could be advanced by new generations building on what had been discovered before them. The humanist belief held by philosophers, and others alike, was that ‘man’ was the centre of everything; that man could control nature and could master his own destiny.

This optimistic idea was so new, compelling and widespread that it assisted in propelling the project of modernity as it ploughed relentlessly through the centuries – the French Revolution, American Independence, the Industrial Revolution, the rapid expansion of capitalism and the birth of bourgeois society. It was rational, logical and, as though guided by an ‘invisible hand’, was the way things were meant to happen. At the start of the 19th century, Hegel was still convinced; we were getting somewhere, history was progressing through a dialectical process towards its logical conclusion – towards perfection. People’s relationship with the future was one of hope; as though things could only get better.

Reason, however, appeared to have its downsides and catastrophic human developments of the 20th century, such as the holocaust and the atomic bomb, led to a loss of faith in the humanist approach. Towards the end of the twentieth century, a general consensus developed among cultural theorists (Habermas aside) that modernity was no longer working. Its ‘metanarratives’ had resulted in authoritarianism, totalitarianism and terror; minorities had been victimised or marginalised; the ‘differends’ of society smoothed over (Malpas 2003). And so, ‘postmodernism’ was born and with it began a systematic deconstruction and disownment of what were now considered the somewhat embarrassing ideals of its predecessor. The reaction was severe; inciting a series of symbolic revenge killings: the ‘death of man’ (Foucault 1994), the ‘end of humanism’ the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1992), the ‘death of painting’ and even the ‘end of art’ (Danto 1998). It was as though catharsis could be gained by the ridding of a past which had failed to live up to promise. In the wake of all this destruction, however, came a deep uncertainty of what would come to fill the gaps.

Just as modernism had done before, postmodernism “alluded to something that had not let itself be made present” (Lyotard 1993, p.13), only this time that ‘something’ felt more menacing. The decentralisation of ‘man’ from the story of history may have unearthed a hidden fear of the future. If we were no longer in control of nature or masters of our own destinies, then we could be less optimistic about what the future had in store and far more uncertain of the potential consequences of 350 years of rampant ‘progress’ that we may have to face.

The rejection of the past coupled with this uncertainty about the future gave the postmodern era a feeling of limbo within which time itself was “cancelled” (Jameson 1998, p.xii). In his critique of the historical momentum of the 1980s, Jan Verwoert refers to the “suspension of historical continuity” which resulted from the overbearing stalemate politics of the Cold War. Only when it finally ended could “history spring to life again” (Verwoert 2007) and begin accelerating away from postmodernism and into the new cultural era.

In terms of assessing the birth of altermodernism, this specific point in history appears pivotal. Firstly, the end of the Cold War meant that:

“the rigid bipolar order that had held history in a deadlock dissolved to release a multitude of subjects with visa to travel across formerly closed borders and unheard histories to tell.” (Verwoert 2007)

And, according to CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), not only did 1990 see the reunification of Germany, but it also witnessed “a revolution that changed the way we live today” – the birth of the World Wide Web (info.cern.ch). These were the nascent beginnings of an a priori globalised society in which, as Bourriaud describes, “increased communication, travel and migration affect the way we live.”

What is most interesting about this point in time, however, are discoveries referred to in the definition of ‘the Age of Stupid’. As argued in the final paragraph of the encyclopædic entry, 1988 also marked the point at which humanity had amassed sufficient scientific evidence to “become aware of the likely consequences of continuing to increase greenhouse gas emissions”. The uncertainty about the future which had characterised the postmodern era was suddenly replaced by a real-life certainty, but it was not one which we were prepared to face up to.

The Culture of Denial

Rather than taking heed of these warnings when we still had plenty of time – slowing down and reassessing our lives; curbing our consumption and production – throughout the 1990s we actually did the opposite. As Verwoert suggests, the pace quickened – the population grew, we travelled more, consumed more and wanted more. Life in the new globalised world was more chaotic and less controllable. Before we knew it twenty years had passed and we had still failed to accept the facts and to act in order to avert the course of history and “prevent the deaths of hundreds of millions of people” (Armstrong 2009a) in the future.

As we stand, in the present day, we are still firmly on course to see the devastation envisaged in the film The Age of Stupid, become a reality. At the end of March 2009, a conference on ‘sustainable populations’ organised by the Optimum Population Trust took place in London. In its coverage of the issues raised, The Observer described the future which the overwhelming scientific evidence claims awaits us:

“by then (2050) life on the planet will already have become dangerously unpleasant. Temperature rises will have started to have devastating impacts on farmland, water supplies and sea levels. Humans – increasing both in numbers and dependence on food from devastated landscapes – will then come under increased pressure. The end result will be apocalyptic, said Lovelock. By the end of the century, the world’s population will suffer calamitous declines until numbers are reduced to around 1 billion or less. “By 2100, pestilence, war and famine will have dealt with the majority of humans,” he said.” (McKie 2009, p.9)

As depressing as it sounds, the message of the film The Age of Stupid is one of hope – that it is not quite too late. According to their predictions, we still have until 2015 to make the changes required in order to prevent us reaching the tipping point which would trigger ‘runaway’, irreversible climate change. These corrective measures are huge, they are global and they need to start being implemented now.

What is most terrifying about Bourriaud’s Manifesto therefore, is its absolute lack of acknowledgement of the real and dangerous future that we face. Rather than speaking out and demanding the dramatic changes that are necessary, it seems to support a continuation of the status quo of the last twenty years. In his video interview on the Tate website, Bourriaud describes the purpose of the altermodern as the “cultural answer to alterglobalisation” (Bourriaud 2009a). However, rather than questioning the carbon-heavy lifestyles that a globalised world promotes he seems to complicitly buy into them, insisting that “our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe”.

In the film The Age of Stupid ‘archive’ footage from 2007 presents the Indian entrepreneur Jeh Wadia as the ignorant villain, as he goes about launching India’s first low-cost airline GoAir. His mission is to get India’s 1 billion plus population airborne. Although an extreme example, Bourriaud’s fervent support of internationalism is not dissimilar to Wadia’s in its level of denial. He continues to encourage the movement of artists and curators around the world (clocking up substantial air miles bringing in speakers for his four Altermodern ‘prologue’ conference events alone).

What makes Bourriaud’s case worse however is his apparent betrayal of the purpose of cultural theory in providing counter-hegemonic ideas and alternatives. The theorists of postmodernism overthrew the project of modernity in an attempt to save humanity from further nuclear extermination or genocide which had proved the ultimate conclusions of reason. Their cultural vision for postmodernism was also to provide an alternative or an antidote to the new ways of life dictated by post-industrial society. Not only does the vision for altermodernism fail to provide an alternative to the devastating path to future down which ‘alterglobalisation’ is dragging us, but it also remarkably promotes the idea that we turn our backs on and ignore this future altogether. One of the paradigms for artistic approaches Bourriaud suggests is that artists look back in time rather than forward claiming that “history is the last uncharted continent” and therefore should be the focus of artistic attention.

Jeh Wadia’s excuse is easy to fathom – he is in it for the money, but Bourriaud’s seems harder to discern. He is driven by a burgeoning ego no doubt, but alongside this there seems to be a wider problem. A nostalgia for the good times and a refusal to give up privileges and luxuries appear to be endemic in the art world’s attitude to facing up to the realities of climate change. At Frieze Art Fair last year, cultural theorist Judith Williamson delivered a keynote lecture on what she called ‘the Culture of Denial‘. She outlined a view of the world not dissimilar to the definition of ‘the Age of Stupid’ (and indeed altermodernism) that this essay has been discussing, in which a denial of the impending future or perhaps an impossibility to comprehend its severity, prevents us from acting.

What was most interesting about her introduction, however, was the discussion of her deliberate decision not to mention ‘climate change’ in the material promoting the talk, but instead to refer to it more ambiguously as an exploration of “the skewed relationship between what we know and what we do” (Williamson 2008). She identifies the persistent ‘stigma’ attached to directly addressing this issue, describing the common perception of it being “annoying, gauche or over the top to bang on about climate change”. So she was forced to revert to covert tactics in order to sneak this pressing discussion onto the Frieze agenda – in the hope of inciting the beginning of a widespread realisation that the art world is walking the path towards its own destruction.

The Real End of Art

There seems no doubt that Bourriaud’s altermodernism is the cultural side-kick of ‘the Age of Stupid’. To write a Manifesto of our times at such a crucial make-or-break point in the history of humanity and not to mention the possibility of an impending disaster or offer any suggestions as to what artists and society in general can do to combat it, is not just denial – it’s stupidity.

The truth is that all the ‘ends’ and ‘deaths’ that postmodernism faced on hypothetical grounds are now fast approaching our generation as a reality. Foucault’s famous conclusion to the seminal postmodern text ‘The Order of Things’, now seems all the more poignant:

“If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility… were to cause them to crumble… then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” (Foucault 1994, p.422)

The main character in the The Age of Stupid is an archivist. In 2055, he sits alone in an expansive tower known as the ‘the World Archive’, which houses all the works of art, books, images, film etc ever produced by the human race. It is at this point that you realise this preservation is futile. Art is, after all, a human creation – it relies on humanity to provide its meaning. Without this crucial element it may as well cease to exist. Should it not, therefore, be art and culture that lead the way for the rest of society? To be the first to snap out of this ‘culture of denial’; to overcome the ‘stigma’; to do everything in its power to save humanity, and itself in the process.

Appendix One

Future Encyclopedia Entry: The Age of Stupid

The Age of Stupid constitutes the period between the ascent of the internal combustion engine in the late-19th century and the crossing of the 2c threshold to runaway global warming in the mid-21st.

This era was characterised by near-total dependence on energy from fossil hydrocarbons, together with exponentially increasing consumption based on the destruction of finite natural resources.

The institutionalised lack of foresight regarding future human welfare that held sway during this time earned the period its popular name, but scientists know this era as the Anthropocene: the period during which human activities came to be the dominant influence on the Earth’s biosphere and climate. The end of the Age of Stupid is marked by the sixth major mass extinction event, with the fifth being the K-T asteroid impact which ended the Age of the Dinosaurs. The abrupt loss of the majority of plant and animal species between 2020 and 2090 was followed by a crash in the human population, to just 7.4% of the 9 billion people alive at its peak.

Some historians argue that the Age of Stupid more properly refers to the narrower period between 1988 and 2015, during which humanity had become aware of the likely consequences of continuing to increase greenhouse gas emissions and still had time to avert catastrophe, but largely chose to ignore the warnings.

This article can also be found at:

Original text at Ellie Harrison’s web site – http://www.ellieharrison.com/index.php?pagecolor=7&pageId=press-summerreading

Edited version at The Nottingham Visual Arts web site – http://www.nottinghamvisualarts.net/writing/jun-09/altermodernism-age-stupid

The stated aim of FutureSonic 2009 was to consider how the city disconnects us from “nature and the consequences of our actions”. As Drew Hemment puts it in the curatorial statement, “the tarmac of the road cuts us off from the earth beneath and the festival set out to find the ‘cracks in the pavement’ and look for ways to reconnect with nature through the use of new media technologies and participatory processes.”

With its theme of Environment 2.0, FutureSonic proposed that we revise our notions of the world we inhabit. Described as the place we all “share, connect with and create”, Environment 2.0 attempts to bring together the enterprise culture of the ‘social Web’ with an ecological understanding of environment (in which interdependent entities and conditions co-evolve).

So how does the festival’s espousal of web2.0 mantras of empowered togetherness fit with an ecological approach? The new tools of networked sociability can mask functional inversions of the communitarian impulse to which they appeal. In contrast with Free and Open Source Softwares (often social softwares) published under the GNU GPL[1] whose workings are transparent, web2.0 social softwares (such as Twitter, Flickr and Facebook) are ‘free’ to use because their creators have found (or soon expect to find) a discreet way to harvest the hidden value of some aspect of the unwitting users’ behaviour. Value is built by users’ interactions and activities and when successful, the utility, its users’ content, habits and personal data are put to work on the financial markets in the service of industrial “bottom line” principles. So what? This looks like a winning formula doesn’t it? We get useful, free stuff, and technical innovators get rewarded.

A recent interview with new media theorist Douglas Rushkoff describes how we have internalised corporate values and then replicated and deployed them in the modelling systems of computers and the Internet. We are just simply corporate ourselves and we made it in our image again.[2] He sets out in simple terms the toxic consequences of the process. A consumer society has been created to perpetuate economic growth. It is based in speculation through colonial activities rather than the creation of ‘real’ more local value. It seeks short term satisfaction over long term work leading ultimately to the destruction of developing nations, our environment and to our own bankruptcy.

What follows is a reflection on these themes with reference to some ideas and works presented at the FutureSonic festival. This account focuses especially on artists’ and technologists’ explorations, of participation and agency in a networked society in the context of environmental crisis. It also reflects on some of the effects of a partial application of an ecological approach in this celebration of the new techno-green-enterprise soon to become FutureEverything.

FutureSonic:2009

In 1971 Guy Debord observed how ‘pollution’ had become a fashionable concern in exactly the same way as had ‘revolution’. In his conference presentation at FutureSonic 2009 Tapio Makela, co-founder of M.A.R.I.N. (Media Art Research Interdisciplinary Network), questioned the growth of events addressing arts, ecology and science, observing that ‘revolution’ doesn’t seem to be so much in fashion today but pollution still is, though it is now called climate change; this year is already crowded with arts festivals addressing environmental questions.

Tapio Makela’s conference presentation addressed a key question, ‘How can we make the environment more tangible and open for interaction?’ As he explained, ‘from a Western humanities tradition, environment seems to resist constructivist positions for the self that would enable agency for action’. He argued that environmental data is usually presented with an authoritative (and therefore detached) ‘view from above’ and described a need for a radical aesthetic for information design. He proposed this question as one ideally suited for exploration by media artists. And we agree. Media artists’ experimental processes, tools and media, frameworks and potential agility in relation to viewers/participants create ways in which complex information could be better processed, felt and differently experienced.

Usman Haque counts amongst those practitioners who start to address this question. His ‘radical aesthetic’ arises from his positioning within the network; from seeing himself as part of everything and asking himself the political question ‘what can I do?’ In his conference presentation he disentangled environment from the romantic concept (another detaching notion) of untouched nature, saying

environment is that which is generated through our existence. It’s the thing that we actually create. An environment is as much part of us as it is part of our existence.

His view of environment as being about relations is explored in two projects featured in the exhibition. Pachube, is an online platform to share and use sensor data. It explores the effect of actions or a set of conditions as they overlap with another; streaming real time data gathered by sensors (measuring for instance humidity, light, temperature, or energy consumption) located around the world. This data can then be used to control conditions in remote environments.

Possible uses include having your Second Life environment respond to sensors in the real world; connecting up basic home-automation devices so that they respond to other distant environments; connecting up your electricity meter to track it over time and embed usage graphs in your own website, or calculate your real-time carbon footprint.

The second work presented by Haque, Natural Fuse, consists of a circuit in which the elements are a fuse, a plant and a power socket. The amount of electricity available to the appliance through the socket is only that which can be offset by the plant’s carbon-sequester capabilities. The fuse has got two functions, fuse care and fuse kill. Fuse care works when there is still energy left to use, activating a water-controlling system. Fuse kill is activated when too much energy has been used and it literally kills the plant, breaks the circuit and it allows no electricity flow through the outlet.

Haque proposes that Natural Fuse should work together with Pachube as a way to illustrate an alternative set of invisible relations and their effects in a networked environment. Using this system in an exhibition installation redolent of school project, a 50w light bulb was shown to need 402 average sized yucca plants to offset the carbon generated when it is switched on. In his conference presentation Haque used this to highlight the flaws in the offsetting approach to carbon-emission reduction, pointing out that at our current levels of energy consumption we would need entire uni-personal forests in order to reach anything like the necessary reduction in carbon emissions. As Cambridge University botanist Oliver Rackham puts it

planting trees to mitigate climate change is like drinking more water to keep down rising sea levels.

This engaging demonstration-system questions how we might become aware of these effects in order to relate differently to each other and to our environment. It draws the viewer into a calculation process that impacts on their perception of their energy consumption in relation to the complex questions about what right-action might follow.

David Griffiths‘s presentation of groWorld, a video game that explores ideas of guerrilla gardening and permaculture, suggests another way to engage peoples’ ability to both feel and know. Griffiths is developing the game together with FoAM – an organisation based in Amsterdam which works at the intersection between ecology, culture and technology. For him artists contribute by increasing public engagement and encouraging scientists to think in radically different ways.

Avatars in groWorld will not only be controlled by people but also by plants, using sensor data (for humidity, Ph level, temperature, etc.) drawn from ‘real’ gardens to shape game behaviours. Griffiths pointed out that many urbanites have lost the capacity to grow their own plants and vegetables, unable to produce either their own food or gardens. In groWorld, a community of real and virtual gardeners exchange techniques and ideas with the purpose of recovering important knowledge on the topic. This game claims to achieve a higher level of hybridity between virtual and actual worlds than traditional video games, in that it is controlled by bio-data in a way that produces horticultural knowledge in the players.

The works and ideas discussed so far engaged us, through processes of calculation and learning, with the some of the scientific and material realities of climate change. Urban Prospecting by Jon Cohrs, exhibited in the exhibition at Cube, makes us ‘feel’ the debate quite differently. A set of modified metal detectors equipped with hydrocarbon sensors for tracking oil ‘resources’ were displayed, in the style of a trade fair, along with a ‘promotional’ video.

Drawing on gold rush hopes and imagery, urban prospectors appear in the video to endorse the product’s ability to deliver great riches to their owners. “It’s as easy as walking the dog!”. Sumps of spilt oil and toxic waste are to be found in former industrial areas ripe for commercial exploitation through resale to the black market or litigation against the polluting corporations.

This joyful satire of opportunism and greed provides one of the few critiques presented at FutureSonic that account for the role of complex economic and ideological interests, in debate and action, surrounding climate change. The values (or at least the spirit) of America’s self-made-man, mining for black gold, sits uncomfortably comfortably alongside those of the hardware hackers and media activist dudes. “Being green has never been this cool”.

Cohrs’ exploration of ethical compromise, within the networks of market and media, contrasts sharply with Flight Patterns by artist, designer and researcher Aaron Koblin. This data visualisation project shows the traces of all the planes crossing the United States in one day. The result is a stunning animation, the beauty of which suspends the critical faculties and with them, any associations with toxic carbon emissions and the warming effects of contrails. Rather, the data driven imagery evokes clean travel through boundless, clean skies that could well be sponsored by one of the large airlines and exhibited on a huge screen in an airport terminal to sooth fretful passengers. How could anything that looks so natural be problematic?

In the discussion that followed Koblin’s conference presentation, he acknowledged that when processing huge amounts of data for an artwork the artist is forced to present a particular point of view in order to make it accessible and comprehensible to the public. In that sense data-visualisation projects will always have a political implication and therefore carry a certain responsibility. One can see this principle in action in an excellent earlier Internet artwork by Koblin, The Sheep Market, “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 […] 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.”[4] Viewers of and participants in The Sheep Market are addressed specifically as Internet users, allowing them to contribute a drawing or buy stickers and so drawing them into the economic and political relations that are the subject of the work. This is a wonderful example of the potential range of the media artists’ rich palette. Unfortunately Flight Patterns, though beautiful, fails to position, or connect with, the viewer who maintains a dreamy, apolitical distance from the subject of the work.

HeHe presented video documentation of Nuage Vert (Green Cloud), a data visualisation project with direct and purposeful public engagement. A site-specific laser projection on a cloud of vapour emissions, produced by a power plant in Helsinki, takes the shape of the cloud by measuring heat with thermal video analysis while the size varies depending on the levels of energy consumption.

HeHe organised the Unplug event in Helsinki which citizens were asked to switch off all appliances and go out to look at the green cloud. The cloud was supposed to grow as consumption fell. Consumption fell by 800 kVA – which is equivalent of the power generated by one windmill running for one hour. The accomplishment of this project is the way it connects directly to energy consumption and pollution at the very site where it occurs and in doing so achieves the kind of radical data visualisation to which Tapio Makela aspires; connecting sets of information, re-presenting their effects to the very people who have a part in their generation.

Less successful was Climate Bubbles, one of the three, large scale, participatory projects devised by FutureSonic in collaboration with Natural History Museum and Lancaster University. Biotagging: Manchester and One Hundred Years of Climate Change were the other two.

Climate Bubbles by Drew Hemment, Alfie Dennen and Carlo Buontempo set out to map local heat flows within the city. To do so, people were invited to blow soap bubbles, to track and document the paths they took and to upload the results to the website – a fun activity that would contribute to the body of scientific knowledge. At the time of writing, the map on the project’s web page does not show any of the measurements contributed by participants. It is therefore hard to imagine how participants were able to gain any sense of their contribution to the social or scientific aims of the project or to get a sense of their role either in relation to the location, or to the others who took part. As one of the most highly visible keynote projects in the art bit of FutureSonic this particular work testifies to the shadow side of the festival by taking a technocratic approach to participants. It proposes a distracting and flawed framework for collective agency in Environment2.0 and its positioning in an art context only adds to the confusion.

On the surface Amy Balkin‘s three day performance Reading the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report could be interpreted as an attempt to raise public awareness about the causes, effects and mitigation of man-made climate change by making its findings accessible (or at least the existence of the report known) to festival visitors. The collective reading did serve this purpose to a small degree, however it was as a multivalent artwork, rather than as a public information service, that it had a more profound impact. Festival visitors signed up online to participate by giving a 20-minute reading of a section of the report from a simple lectern, in the foyer of the Cube gallery or outside on the pavement. They could also sit and listen on one of the 6 chairs provided and be served a cup of Feral Trade coffee or tea.

The artwork took as its materials the relationship between the IPCC report and participants in the performance (or more specifically their position in relation to issues of climate change). The report’s impressive use of jargon from the political and bureaucratic disciplines (as well as those of social and material science), combined with its length produced a range of experiences and knowledge in its readers and listeners. The participants and text came alive in unpredictable ways as the audience spontaneously interrupted and interacted with the reader to comment on particular points, to offer their own perspective, to cry out with frustration at particularly dense and obscure sections or to break off into tangential conversations. These revealed visitors’ self-reflexive awareness of the part they played in an allegory. Their participation in the performance of an impossible task (the text was just too long and dense to stand any hope of being read in full) resonated with their evident anxieties in relation to collective task (of climate change mitigation) under discussion. Through this sparely crafted framework for participation the artwork interrogated a set of questions around individual agency and public engagement with questions of environmental crisis. It also demonstrated the potential sophistication of sentient public participation in art action.

Most of us find ourselves in daily contradiction with our principles and this should not prevent us from holding and exploring our principles. Our intentions are also often mismatched with the effects of our actions. This is the human condition. However, an ecological approach must incorporate feedback processes for evaluating and making adjustments in response to the effects of these contradictions and mismatches. In his influential anthology, Steps to an Ecology of Mind[5], Gregory Bateson clearly sets out the dangers of attempting to instrumentalise living beings, no matter how apparently worthy the goal. The loss of flexibility that arises in an evolving civilisation when it ignores complex (bottom up) feedback in blinkered pursuit of a single process can be fatal for an ecosystem. Research by social scientists such as Tim Jackson on sustainable consumption also demonstrate the fatal consequences of persistent political attachment to economic growth and extravagant consumption as the sole ideological monorail to the future.[6]

So it was sinister to note how narrowly the frame of debate had been set at this year’s FutureSonic. None of the conference presentations we attended acknowledged the role of corporate and institutional power in Environment2.0. The role of economic interests or perverse effects of ‘free’ markets remained undiscussed. Instead most lines of thought were singly directed to technical solutions for environmental crisis, characterised by uncritical optimism and blind trust in technological progress as the ultimate counter-force to anthropogenic climate change. Jamais Cascio, an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies provided a distillation of the general tone of the Social Technologies Summit:

I think we are going to make it through the century and I think what we’ll come out with at the end of the century will be wondrous.

So it appears that while participants are encouraged to run about blowing bubbles, connecting and shaping the physical and virtual Environment2.0 someone, somewhere else is running the economic and political bottom-lines.

The organisers of FutureSonic deserve recognition for a diverse line up of emerging and high-profile practitioners and some well wrought copy that appeared to attract a high turn out. It also gathered some important work and ideas together. First, projects like Pachube highlighted the value of sharing information about our environments as a crucial step towards acting upon it responsibly. Second, the festival highlighted an emerging field of experimental practices that deal with the growing hybridity of networked virtual and physical realities.

We think we understand FutureSonic 2009’s drive to conflate the coordination of mass social behaviours, demonstrated by web 2.0 ‘utilities’, with the sharing and critical practices of participatory media arts. If the precise and transforming effects of an encounter with the best of the dialogic media arts were to be distributed at scale they could perhaps make some significant contribution to the quality of connection and co evolution of humans and Environment2.0. They might also provide an alternative approach to sustaining radical artistic practice with diverse and interdisciplinary partners and collaborators.

However (and we know that it’s difficult), the ambitious aims of the programme were seriously undermined by a lack of focus in the conference line up and a casual approach to exhibition curation. Many of the works in the exhibition were poorly presented and contextualised (artistically and technologically). And then it was just plain unclear what lots of the works and projects were doing there, or what they contributed to the debate. This was very frustrating and felt like a waste of an opportunity. At a time when the value of media arts is being eroded by the dominant (scale and numbers-obsessed) agendas of creative industry and threatened with cuts in public funding by an impoverished national treasury[7] we cannot afford to present an incoherent interface. It just contributes to the already ill-informed arguments out there for the dismantlement of our arts culture. It’s even more crucial in the context of environmental crisis that we don’t settle for generalisations and approximations and that we attempt to be clear about where optimism is possible and where we have to allow uncertainty. As Bateson points out there are some times when appearing to do the job is just not good enough.

Choosing environment as a framework for a media arts festival carries with it a certain responsibility. To work at this scale, to make sense of work at the intersection of artistic and technological culture, to gather the resources and partners to produce a critical and conscious cross-section of what is really happening out there, and to take the necessary time to make sure that things are communicated well is a huge undertaking. We therefore applaud the ambition and energy of the FutureSonic team.

Perhaps though, as with environmental issues in general, a radical aesthetic of organisation and engagement is required. One that allows closer attention to local concerns and participation. One that incorporates an authentic engagement with connected, complex ecologies; felt, experienced and constructed at both local and translocal levels and visible from all points both above and below.

Footnotes

1. Corporate Dominance of Every Aspects of Our Lives Is Suffocating us, Douglas Rushkoff interviewed by Helaine Olen, AlterNet. August 7, 2009. http://www.alternet.org/media/141828/are_we_all_corporate_shills
2. For more about the GNU General Public License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
3. Corporate Dominance of Every Aspects of Our Lives Is Suffocating us, Douglas Rushkoff interviewed by Helaine Olen, AlterNet. August 7, 2009. http://www.alternet.org/media/141828/are_we_all_corporate_shills/#comments
4. Rhea Myers. http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=244
5. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, in Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, Chicago Press: 1972.
6. ‘Why Politicians Dare Not Limit Economic Growth’ by Tim Jackson, 15th October 2008 for New Scientist http://tinyurl.com/6784zw
7. See REAL-TIME POLITICAL ART OUT OF THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND by Armin Medosch 2007 for an analysis of various economic and cultural cul-de-sacs for media arts http://www.ambienttv.net/footprints/book/02medosch.html#7

This article is co-published by The Hyperliterature Exchange and Furtherfield.org.

A short horror-game for adults, based on the Little Red Riding Hood folktale.

The Path is “a short horror-game inspired by the tale of Little Red Riding Hood” from Tale of Tales, an independent computer games development company, based in Belgium and run by Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn. It was originally released in March 2009, and it represents Tale of Tales’ first attempt to produce a fully commercial computer game.

Harvey and Samyn’s output has always been driven by a desire to move away from the typical subject-matter and style of modern computer games, into territory which is more poetic and ambiguous, touching on deeper themes. Before they formed Tale of Tales they worked together under the name Entropy8Zuper! and produced work such as The Godlove Museum (texts from the Bible mixed with new media animations and social commentary). The first Tale of Tales project, 8, was based on the story of the Sleeping Beauty. The second, The Endless Forest, is a multi-player environment where each player controls a deer in an enchanted forest; and the third is The Graveyard, a meditation on old age and mortality, set in a cemetery, and featuring a little old lady on the point of death.

In many ways The Path‘s most obvious antecedent is 8 – in terms of its visual style and fairytale inspiration, not to mention the fact that the central character from 8, a girl dressed in white, actually reappears in The Path. But the game can also be seen as an inverted reworking of The Endless Forest, a release of the dark forces which were deliberately held at bay there. The Endless Forest is a completely safe environment because players are only able to communicate with one another through a limited range of gestures and the casting of spells – in effect, giving one another gifts. All the avatars are nominally male, since they are all stags, but essentially the game is sexless. In The Path, on the other hand, sexuality is one of the core preoccupations, and the fears that parents have about letting their children play on the Web – that they will be exploited and brutalised by sexual predators masquerading as playmates – hover in the background too.

The opening scene of the game is a red room containing six girls, aged from nine to nineteen. Your task as a player is to select one of them and guide her along a path through the woods. Words appear on-screen as you begin: “Go to Grandmother’s house. And stay on the path.” You can only play the game to the full, however, if you disobey these instructions, leave the path, and venture into the trees. As soon as you do so the ambience of the game changes: the music becomes more ominous, and most of the colour disappears from the screen. Daylight is replaced either by deep shade or night. You begin to notice things between the tree-trunks: in fact, one of the most effective aspects of the game is the way in which you catch the glimpses of things far off in the wood, and they gradually reveal themselves more fully as you move towards them. There are gleaming white flowers; a running girl dressed in a white smock; abandoned objects such as an armchair, an old car, a bath or a broken television; and finally places, such as a ruined playground, a disused theatre, a field of flowers with a scarecrow in the middle, or a graveyard.

At certain points in the game, semi-transparent images loom up onto the screen, and if you let go of the controls your avatar will act of her own accord. If you place her close enough to one of the shiny flowers, for example, she will bend down and pick it. If you place her close enough to one of the abandoned objects in the wood, she may interact with it – although some of them will only interact with certain girls. She may pick up an old teddy-bear with two heads, or get inside an abandoned car. When this kind of interaction occurs, images and text-fragments appear on-screen, apparently dropping dark hints about your avatar’s ultimate fate, her past history or her inner life. For example when Ruby – the most Gothic of the girls, who wears a black brace on one leg – interacts with an old wheelchair, the following text appears:

Sitting on wheels. Paralyzed soul. Nowhere to go. Fast. Don’t come close if you want something from me. Whatever it is, I probably don’t have it. Just leave me alone.

The most potent form of interaction occurs when your avatar arrives at one of the special places in the wood, and meets her wolf. Each of the girls has her own particular wolf and will meet him if she goes to a particular place. Scarlet, for example – the oldest of the girls, lover of order, hater of mess, devotee of the arts – meets her wolf at the disused theatre. The following text appears: “Art is where the nobility of humanity is expressed. I could not live in a world without it.”

When a girl meets her wolf she is no longer under the control of the player, but swept up instead into a lengthy and sinister video-sequence which ends with a blackout. She “comes round” from this experience in torrential rain, just outside Grandmother’s house. The only thing left is to enter. Inside the house, which is dark, predominantly red and full of snarling noises, what happens depends on how many discoveries she has made in the wood. The more extensively she has explored, the more rooms she will be allowed to enter. Each room reveals a sinister and enigmatic tableau – a roomful of empty glass jars, an underwater table, or a wrecked automobile. After passing through a series of these rooms, your avatar must finally traverse a corridor decorated with a nightmarish damask pattern of spiky black leaves, until she comes to the last room, where she discovers both Grandmother’s bed, and a whole sequence of split-second images, often images of bleeding or dismemberment, which seem to half-reveal some terrible experience she is undergoing or has already undergone, possibly her rape and murder.

If you restart the game you will find yourself back in the red room where it began, but this time there is one less girl in it. In order to play the game properly all the way through, you need to take each girl in turn through the woods to Grandmother’s house.

The Path is by no means flawless. One really serious problem is its slowness. Samyn and Harvey make a virtue of this (“The Path is a Slow Game” they point out on their website), and the game’s slowness certainly does help them to build up atmosphere and tension; but there comes a point at which suspense tips over into boredom and frustration. Perhaps the most glaring example is the plank bridge leading to Grandmother’s front door, which seems to take an eternity to get across.

Furthermore, the fragments of text which appear from time to time are effective at pointing up the main character-traits of the avatars, and reinforcing the main themes of the game, but the quality of the writing is functional rather than inspired. Here is Ruby, the Goth, at the rusty car:

Engines. And friends. Turn them on. Turn them off. Life. Death. Are they so different?

Here is Scarlet encountering an old armchair:

A serenade in the woods. Somebody is playing my song. Long slim fingers gently caressing the keys of me.

Here is Robin at the disused playground:

I see-a-saw. Slide-the-hide. Go round the merry. And swing-along.

The first expresses isolation, cynicism and nihilism; the second an aesthetic and poetical nature; and the third a little girl who wants to play. They do their job, but they all sound rather contrived – a point which is best illustrated by comparing them with a text-fragment that really works, this one from Robin, when she picks up an old hunting-knife:

I’ll have to be very careful with this and not run any more.

This sounds much more like something that a little girl would actually say, but it’s also much more psychologically convincing: Robin knows that she shouldn’t be playing with the hunting-knife, but she thinks she can make it all right by promising herself to be extra-careful. We immediately feel convinced that her good resolutions won’t last long – and the sense that she is doing something she shouldn’t be doing, allowing her curiosity about forbidden things to get the better of her common-sense, is relevant to the larger themes of the game. She should never have left the path in the first place. The text makes us more acutely aware of both her vulnerability and her naive expectation that things will be all right.

There is also a hint of woodenness to certain aspects of the graphic design. In general the playing environment of The Path is a visual triumph – the woods, the special places in the woods, the path itself, and best of all Grandmother’s house, which is both quaint and sinister on the outside, and downright frightening on the inside. Some of the special objects, however, are less convincing – an old boot and an old record-player come to mind in particular – and although the female avatars are all very well designed, one or two of the male “wolves” are not, especially the wood-cutter and the man at the disused playground, both of whom look comical rather than sinister from certain angles.

Another criticism which could be levelled at The Path is that although it is full of hints and clues, musical climaxes and visionary moments, which seem to suggest that secrets are being glimpsed and hidden truths uncovered, everything in it remains nebulous and unexplained, the clues don’t really lead anywhere, we never actually learn anything concrete about the girls or their wolves, and ultimately all we are left with is the unpleasant message that the quest for experience leads to trauma, and the quest for love leads to sexual brutality. The counter-argument to this, however, is firstly that the game derives its goriness and suggestions of rape from the tale on which it is based – a tale which goes right back into folklore, and thus into the depths of the human psyche – and secondly that by keeping their story nebulous and suggestive rather than explicit and detailed, Samyn and Harvey prevent The Path from becoming a mere puzzle-game with a fixed solution. In this way the imagination of the player is freed rather than tied down, and the symbolic aspects of the game-narrative, which are its real strength, are allowed to come to the surface.

Certain elements of the Little Red Riding Hood tale are missing from The Path altogether. One of the best-known aspects of the tale – the sequence in which Red Riding Hood comments about her wolf-grandmother’s appearance in tones of rising astonishment: “What big eyes you have”, “What big teeth you have”, and so forth – has vanished. But although the tale has been simplified and truncated in some respects, it has been opened out in others, because Samyn and Harvey have incorporated references to various different versions of the tale instead of confining themselves to one in particular. The two best-known versions are by Charles Perrault (who turns it into a fable about avoiding sexually voracious men) and the Grimm Brothers (who place more emphasis on the dangers of being distracted from the paths of duty) – but there are numerous others. Sometimes Red Riding Hood meets not a wolf but an ogre; sometimes she is asked to choose which way she would like to take to Grandmother’s house, the path of needles or the path of pins; sometimes, when she gets to the house, she is fed various parts of a dismembered grandmother; and sometimes she is commanded to join the wolf or ogre in bed, first performing a striptease and throwing her clothes onto the fire.

In The Path, the gleaming flowers which lead us deeper and deeper into the trees are a reference to the pretty flowers which distract Red Riding Hood in the Grimms’ version, amongst others. Samyn and Harvey also incorporate references to the path of needles and the path of pins in some of their texts. More importantly, they retain the gruesomeness, the allusions to dismemberment, and the violent sexuality which feature in many earlier versions. And the symbolism which lurks beneath the surface of Red Riding Hood in all its various manifestations comes through particularly strongly. First of all, of course, there is the symbolism of a path through tangled woods – the same symbolism with which Dante’s Divine Comedy opens:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la diritta via era smarrita.

(Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.)

The road or path represents virtue, civilization, safety, a sense of purpose and direction – whereas the wood represents sin and error, wilderness, danger, the unknown, bewilderment and confusion. Aspects of the same symbolism can be found in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: in fact it is a commonplace of Christian iconography. Beyond this lie other meanings: the road represents the known whereas the wood represents the unknown; so, by extension, the road represents the conscious mind and logic, whereas the wood represents the unconscious, emotions, desires and dreams. Samyn and Harvey reinforce these associations by having the path daylit, whereas the wood is always shrouded in darkness.

The beginning and end of the game are also interesting from the symbolic point of view. We begin in a red room, and we end in the red interior of Grandmother’s house. Red is the key colour in the game: all the girls are dressed in red, and all their names play on the same theme – Robin, Ginger, Carmen (Carmine), Ruby, Scarlet and Rose. Red is the colour of blood, and therefore signifies both life and death. We never see the mother at the beginning of the story, but in a sense she is there nevertheless, because the red room from which all the girls start their journey can be interpreted as a womb-symbol. What about the horrific red house where all the journies end? On one level the journey the girls make is from innocence to experience, especially in the sexual sense, and Grandmother’s scary house represents the terrors of adulthood, life with all the pleasantries stripped away. But on another level, the house where Grandmother lives – the house where all our ancestors live – is the grave. The girls in the story are thus like red corpuscles of life, journeying from the red starting-point of the womb to the red vanishing-point of death.

Needless to say this is all very far removed from the subject-matter of most computer games. Traditional adversarial games (such as Space Invaders, PacMan or Mario Brothers) are all about the triumph of the individual over difficult circumstances; their aim is to stimulate adrenalin, their requirements are concentration and dexterity, and their message, if they have one, is that winning is good and you can achieve anything if you try hard enough. In recent years the adversarial model has lost a certain amount of market share to games such as The Sims or Animal Crossing, which are more to do with exploring and integrating in a social milieu; but their messages still tend to be upbeat and uncomplicated – you can earn lots of money, get a better house, acquire lots of friends and so forth if you just try hard enough. Importantly, in these “social interaction” games, it is left up to you, as a player, to create your own narrative. By contrast, in The Path, we find ourselves in an environment which is drenched in symbolism, where the message is anything but upbeat, and where the story already exists. Your task as a player is not simply to explore the game’s environment but to experience it – in the same way that you might explore and experience a poem or a piece of music. In the process you are also unearthing the narrative which lies buried within the game. This game is not about the virtues of self-application, willpower, quick reactions and an acquisitive nature: it is about sexuality, the darker side of human nature and the price we sometimes pay for experience. It is a game which could never have been conceived by one of the big commercial companies, and which could perhaps never have been made in the USA at all, steeped as it is in European folklore and sensibility.

As regards the commercial success of The Path, Samyn and Harvey are unable to release full sales figures at the moment, due to the nature of their contract with their main distributor, Steam; but they comment that

…we need to pay back the 90,000 Euro loan (+ interest) we got from the governmental investment company CultuurInvest. And we’re happy to say that it looks like we’re going to make it. The total budget of The Path, however, was quite a bit bigger (but financed mostly by non- or less commercial art grants). And it’s far from certain if we will actually be able to make that much back.

Conventional marketing wisdom about The Path would undoubtedly be that it is hardly likely to succeed in commercial terms, because it gives itself too many disadvantages to start with. A game based on a fairy-tale is sure to appeal primarily to young children or parents with young children: The Path, on the other hand, despite its fairy-tale origins, insists that it is designed for adults. It’s also a game about girls (a disadvantage in itself), and about girls who succumb to the wolves in the wood rather than overcoming them; and despite its billing as a horror game, it’s long on atmosphere and short on visceral thrills. In other words it disqualifies itself from success with the mainstream gaming audience (teenagers and young adults, predominantly male) by virtue of its subject matter, disqualifies itself from success with a minority audience (younger children and their parents) by virtue of the way in which that subject matter is handled, and disqualifies itself from success with any gamers left over by being too “arty”, slow-moving and downbeat.

These may seem like very crushing considerations, but if you boil them down, like a lot of marketing wisdom, what they amount to is the assumption that nothing will sell if it doesn’t fit neatly into a pre-existing category, or if it deals with its subject-matter in an unconventional way – to put it more simply, that nothing will sell if it doesn’t imitate something which has sold already. Ultimately this kind of “wisdom” is self-defeating, and leads to nothing but stagnation.

The conclusion Samyn and Harvey themselves draw from their experiences with The Path is a positive one: “Apparently you can sell art to gamers now.” They may not have produced a huge commercial success, but they haven’t produced a flop either – and this is an achievement in itself, given their unconventional approach. And it probably isn’t desireable that The Path should become a huge commercial success in any case, since this would only be likely to produce an outbreak of Path imitations. What is more important is that Tale of Tales should continue to produce new and challenging work, demonstrating that the rules of conventional games-design are not written in stone, and that it is possible to design games which are poetic and expressive but still viable in the marketplace. If they can do this for long enough, then undoubtedly other independent games developers will be inspired to follow their example, and their influence over the evolution of games design in the next few years may well be a profound one.

Available via download for Mac or Windows at $9.99, or on USB for Mac or Windows for 25.00 Euros.

copyright – Edward Picot, August 2009.

Thou God Seest Me: Some Gathered Thoughts for A Short Film About War.

“You see the imagery, you know what’s going on, you see what you’re looking at. It’s very easy when something like that is happening to project yourself there and feel a part of the battle. Like I said, your heart starts racing a little bit.” – CNN interview with US-based predator drone aircraft pilot on flying air strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan from a control room in the Nevada desert.

“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” – Legendary command attributed to William Prescott at the Battle of Bunker Hill, American Revolutionary War

A Short Film About War by Thomson & Craighead is the second installment in what will be a series of three “desktop documentaries.” The first work in the series, Flat Earth establishes the context; a series of web based films constructed exclusively from media gathered from the Internet. A vast world is made smaller, more manageable, through the impossible eye that carries viewers in and out of the earths orbit to reveal the seemingly individual voices of bloggers as lines in an elaborately staged narrative. The idea that subjectivity belongs to oneself, that I am the subject of my own will, gives way to an unfolding map of interconnectedness, subjectivity externalized, an opening, and a chance at conceptualizing shared existence on a platform used mostly for performing private moments.

But something is awry here. There is free speech, and a presumption that someone’s listening, and yet there is no possibility of reciprocal communication. The global positions of the speakers are precisely pinpointed for us, but they seem lost to each other and lost to anything but an abstract notion of an audience. Unidirectionality is largely built into the technologies of traditional cinema and broadcast media, and criticism concerning the political implications of this self-imposed constraint are well circulated. Yet these conventions seem ripe for criticism when carried over to the context of the web where the structural/political limits of broadcast media are easily transcended and happily so by many. Perhaps, the fact that net cinema attempts to have an “audience” at all is worth looking at, simply for the political implications of (re)establishing the relationships of authority and passivity that are the hallmarks of cinema and broadcast media. All this seems particularly striking in A Short Film About War where alienated speech seems to deny the speakers and their (invisible) audience a view of our possible political and economic relationships in what could be called the fourth world war. There are connections without contacts, calls without responses. The network is revealed only to the privileged audience who is carried by the universal eye, soaring and yet mired in sublimity.

“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” – The Death of Author, Roland Barthes

Once reviled by media institutions for the threat they offered to the authority kept by traditional broadcast media, the voices of bloggers, now assimilated, are framed (or haloed) as high voices in a hierarchy of sight – they’re assumed to be out there and on the ground, closer to whatever it is we wish to know intimately with the click of a mouse. In large part the celebration of blogging is a celebration of supposed individualism, the story of the man or woman who refuses to work within established boundaries of institutions, one who, with equal parts objective reporting and personal confessional somehow “gets it” and lures us in with the status that “getting it” and “going it alone” promises. But what are we to make of the war stories featured in A Short Film About War; a few selected from possible millions, but seemingly without reference to one another? How are we to contextualize these narrative fragments and find them meaningful as a group? For that, it seems that we’ve been given some rather heavy-handed help from a higher place.

A (holy)ghost of sorts lurks above this mushy swamp of lonely calls to the great search engine in the sky – keyword – “war,” and it’s not long before He speaks as the singular master narrator – as if to top off the long mythic journey of humanity from the wheel to the neutron bomb to the Internet in which this moment, as every other, plays its indelible part in a preordained techno-history. Here the stage is set, where a story of any particular war, and the development of any particular technology begins to smother under the weight of a narrative of mythic proportions as we zoom in and out of orbit and are treated to an image of the world as it might look to one who floats above it rather than live on it. And although this divine voice, who speaks in simulated orbit over a simulated planet seems to be a push-over, a cardboard cutout, a canned voice on the set of a made-for-tv Genesis remake – like most gods, he has a lot to say, but you listen most for what’s not said.

“From yon blue heaven the eyes of the glorified look down on us; there the children of God are sitting on their starry thrones, observing whether we manfully uphold the banner around which they fought; they behold our valour, or they detect our cowardice; and they are intent to witness our valiant deeds of noble daring, or our ignominious retreat in the day of battle.” – Omniscience . A Sermon Delivered by REV. C. H. Spurgeon, June 15, 1856 At Exeter Hall, Strand

Let us pray to the absolute speed of electromagnetic waves that simultaneously composes the three attributes of perfection and tyranny: urgency, omnipotence and omnipresence. How is democracy possible when this is the vantage point from which we’re (re)constructing the world? These days, communication is described primarily as a technological operation, and technology is often conceptualized as an evolutionary process somehow outside of the messy realm of human desire – a self-guiding force. This framework for understanding communication in techno-evolutionary terms (rather than cultural ones) seems to be upheld in A Short Film About War, where communication seems to be understood as the power of technology and progress to facilitate unfettered individual expression (even in the worst of circumstances). However frightening, seen from this vantage point, it is quite easy to view our current global predicament as the natural material outcome of a universal “man’s” ongoing dreams, ending in the deconstruction of the finite view of the human(ist) eye and the construction of the disembodied all-seeing post-human(ist) eye. We’re all just reporters of inevitable events. Not a whole lot of back-and-forth chat is needed.

“Thou God seest me.” – Genesis 16:13

In a way, the orbital perspective seems reminiscent of Pre-Renaissance European perspective – the work of Hieronymus Bosch comes to mind – where viewers are given a representation of God’s perspective – impossibly large landscapes, multiple time zones existing simultaneously, everything equally in focus. Of course, the feudal era of Europe wasn’t dubbed the “Dark Ages” for nothing; lacking widespread concepts of personal possession seeing for oneself was about as equally strange a concept to most as taking for oneself. It would take capitalism and the “Enlightenment” to finally convince people to think otherwise – though massive brutalities persisted through it all. It’s worth noting that during the “Middle Ages,” people assumed that they were on earth to act as stewards of God’s creation and to carry out this mission within a very particular and brutal hierarchy of power. Wholesale ownership and destruction of God’s creation was unthinkable and undoable, except by God himself. The damage of Christian feudal life was on a human scale not a planetary one. But what are we to make of the divine perspective we’ve fashioned for ourselves in today’s world, with today’s technologies? How is it that we can simultaneously embrace the post-human perspective even while caring about preserving humanity? Perhaps we’re all going (post)medieval – each one of us gods-of-sorts behind our computer screens receiving reports straight from our angels in orbit? Is the era of God 2.0 upon us?

…but wait, this whole thing is a fabricated view – not even a whole thing at all but a fragmented thing framed in a series of constructions posing as inevitabilities and divine rights. It is a fictional vantage point (like all) that we’re being asked to see and speak from, but regrettably one that often works to convince its subjects – us – of our simultaneous power as spectator consumers and outright political worthlessness. It has been said that to remain a docile and happy subject of rule one must (mis)recognize one’s subjectivity as one’s own. The master narrative provides that – given that the user/subject is provided with an impressive enough spectacle to call his or her own. Who is freer (in individualist terms) than one who can virtually see / possess everything? I am a god in front of my screen, but one who’s both omnipotent and impotent. With a click I become master of my destiny, but my destiny is not my own.

As a Furtherfield intern, I recently began a research project to find and investigate net.art originating from Asian countries. Coming from an Asian background myself, I thought it would be worthwhile to explore the field in hopes of making some self-reflexive connections. Before undergoing my research, it was clear that such net.artists are quite under-represented – even less-so than the “traditional,” Western net.artists like the Heath Buntings and Olia Lialinas of the digital world. But it was exactly this lack of representation that made the search even more compelling.

However, after nearly a month of research, I came to the conclusion that Asian net.artists are virtually impossible to find. The few that I kept running into during Internet searches were the net.art heavyweights – groups like Young Chae-Heavy Industries or Soiizen Art Labs. I wondered where the underdog was hiding. I was looking for the under-represented, the under-exposed, perhaps an underground, grassroots art community that needed to get their message out. All I found were dozens of broken hyper-links and unfortunately, websites with potential that were in languages I couldn’t understand.

Feeling quite defeated and frustrated, I realized that this blind spot in net.art might have something to do with me being based in the UK, where I am unable to take to the streets and explore word-of-mouth recommendations. There was also the possibility, and this was a complete assumption, that certain Asian countries such as the Philippines (my personal ethnicity), are culturally less likely to make net.art for its original purposes – as a method of social change or political/philosophical discourse, or to crack and manipulate the digital cipher. Artists in poorer countries like the Philippines seem to be largely more concerned with commercially orientated art – graphic design and animation for marketing and advertising industries. This was the type of work that was easily accessible. Thus, I was quite unsuccessful in gathering a list of what I deemed profound Asian net.art sources that weren’t already being picked up by the radar.

Just when I thought I was hitting a roadblock, my colleagues at Furtherfield suggested that I broaden my research requirements, to search within what I already knew was available. What I came up with was a compromise between the two worlds of Asian art and Internet-based work. The result was an investigation on the concept of identity within these works. These works are not necessarily net.art in the traditional sense, but they have two things in common – they are by Asian artists and they explore the concept of identity through digital means on the Internet.

Virtual Identity – CJ Yeh (Taiwan)

“Where a human is reduced to data, data is converted to values, values are transformed into art.” – CJ Yeh, myData=myMondrian 2004

In 2004, Taiwanese artist CJ Yeh created several digital interfaces known as The Equals Series, in which the participants input personal data in order to produce modernist-style artworks that are aural, visual or both. The Equals Series explores the ideas of taking fragmented personal computer data and using it to create artworks that mimic styles of modernist greats, such as Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian. New York Arts Magazine described Yeh’s work as a combination of “the principals of painting with the programming of the digital image.” Essentially, the works represent a merging of old and new styles, coupled with the uniqueness of personalized mathematical data.

One work of The Equals Series, called myData=myMondrian, transforms basic personal data into a digital painting modeled after Piet Mondrian’s modernist style – straight, horizontal and vertical lines forming blocks of white space and primary colors. Upon launching the interface, users are prompted to fill out a digital survey form that asks for basic information; such as age, height, weight, education level and ethnicity. After submitting the form, the data is then transformed into a mathematical code to generate a visual rendering of a Mondrian-like painting. As Yeh said himself, the human is reduced to data, which is then reduced to values, and transformed into works of visual art.

The rendering takes a similar form to Piet Mondrian’s compositions. Although the screenshot above is missing the color yellow, it is because the data transformed does not call for that particular color. In a way, myData=myMondrian plays on the idea of personal identity. Someone who answers the survey form differently will have a different visual result. Therefore, the artwork is completely personalized by the user – and is made possible solely from the capabilities of the Internet.

In another of the series works, titled myAvatar=myChuckClose, the participant works from an interface that looks much like the avatar interface of the Nintendo Wii gaming console. The user chooses from sets of basic head and body shapes, gender, skin color, hair, eyes, etc. After the user is finished creating his or her avatar, the image is transformed into a digital print mimicking the portraiture style of American artist Chuck Close – a fragmented photo-realist painting of the head and shoulders.

In contrast to myData=myMondrian, this work in The Equals Series takes an even more visually personal approach to identity. From the very beginning of the process, the participant is able to choose exactly which elements to include in the portrait. The ending result in myAvatar=myChuckClose comes as less of a surprise, as opposed to the other works in the series, which have more abstract results.

The rest of the artworks in Yeh’s Equals Series are similarly lighthearted. There are a total of five, including myParticipation=myMagritte (which utilizes a viewer’s movement in front of a webcam to trigger a work based on Rene Magritte’s The False Mirror) and myBirthday=myPhillipGlass (a computer program that generates musical compositions based on a user’s birthdate). In myTune=myPollock, the computer keyboard is used like an electric piano. While sounds are generated through pressing the various buttons, “splatters” of paint appear on the canvas. A Pollock-style composition is generated right on the screen according to the note, octave and the tempo in which the viewer plays the keys.

Each of the works in The Equals Series is significantly user-friendly. Upon launching each project, participation is self-explanatory, making the works easy to use. The works take an interesting approach on how virtual identity can be manipulated – while they may lack more profound messages and lean towards aesthetically “fun” results, Internet users are able to explore how personal portraits can take less-traditional forms. Although the artwork being generated through these interfaces are more or less established styles, today’s participants are able to express themselves in ways that were once reserved only to the muses of these artists. The Equals Series gives the audience a chance to be hands-on, and to customize and evaluate their own digital portraits for their own pleasure or reflection.

Racial Identity – Dyske Suematsu (Japan)

“Remember, we are not here to make a statement; it’s a question.”
-Dyske Suematsu, All Look Same, 2001-2009

In the ongoing artwork All Look Same, Japanese artist Dyske Suematsu poses a question regarding racial identity. He explores the way Asians are sometimes socially stereotyped by their facial characteristics or cultural traditions – such as architecture or food – and it offers us a way to test our knowledge on how to tell different Asian nationalities apart. The purpose of the work is less offensive than it sounds, and more so serves to provoke thoughts on how Asian nationalities are categorized throughout the western world. It can also be seen as a work attempting to dispel certain misnomers about Asian cultures.

All Look Same is presented to the user in the form of a digital exam room that holds a total of eight quizzes, where users can test their knowledge about various Asian cultural elements. In the first exam, different faces are displayed on the screen, where users are to choose from a multiple-choice menu of Chinese, Japanese and Korean. All the people in the photographs are residents of New York City, but are of 100% pure Asian descent. At the end of the exam, the correct answers are given to the test-taker for comparison, and the results are quite thought-provoking when a participant realizes he or she has used certain stereotypes to answer the questions.

The other seven exams in All Look Same involve Asian art, architecture, landscapes, urban scenery, food and decorative patterns. The artwork as a whole examines elements that are often thought of as easy to differentiate, but in fact, the results are often quite the opposite.

Based on average test results, which are given at the end of each exam, test-takers are generally bad at telling the difference between Chinese, Japanese and Korean characteristics. But the work does not mean to be taken as a way of calling people out on their lack of familiarity with Asian cultures. Suematsu writes on his website:

“I’ve always thought that it was one of those urban myths that you can tell different Asians apart. Especially if I can’t see what they are wearing, I don’t think that I can tell them apart. And, I’m an Asian myself. I’ve been living in the US for over 15 years and I’ve heard some people tell me I definitely look Japanese, while others thought that I don’t at all. Some people boastfully claim that they can tell the difference no problem, while others quietly admit that they can’t. Even with those who claim they can, is it really true that they can? Maybe there is something to be said about someone saying ‘You guys all look the same!’ Or, maybe they just don’t know any better. This site, therefore, is a way for me to demystify this issue once and for all.”

Like Suematsu said before, All Look Same is not trying to make a statement. It’s asking a question – is it really possible to tell the difference? And should Asians take offense when someone can’t tell the difference?

An interview with Annie Abrahams and Albertine Meunier by Cyril Thomas, French art historian and art critic, who posed his questions by mail separately to each artist.

How would you define yourself as an artist?

Albertine Meunier:
Will the first question be the most difficult one? To take a look at and to define oneself as an artist? Impossible. Others do this for me. The pronunciation of the words: “I am an artist,” seems too difficult. If I am, I am not solely. Because of my daily professional activity in the field of web innovation, because of my personal history, my career as an engineer in optoelectronics, as a researcher, as an Internet project manager, I juggle continuously from one status to the other. I feel like a web schizophrenic! At the same time, me and another. Albertine is there to show the borders. Albertine (alias Catherine Ramus), is my identity-plug, my artist identity. Catherine Ramus has the same body as Albertine, but only Albertine is an artist.

Annie Abrahams:
I do not feel the need nor the desire to define myself. I may be wrong.

In my video series I confirm Ami Barak answers the question Is what you see around you art?, with: Yes, because it’s done by an artist. This sentence pronounced by a contemporary art curator is revealing. Value is determined by both the claim of the artist and – do not forget that – by the power invested in art to defend it.

I am not only an artist, to some people I’m a poet, for others a video maker, a photographer, a performer and even a singer. I am also someone’s partner, an academic, a researcher, a teacher, as I am the daughter of, the aunt of, the friend of…

Would you say that you are Net-artists?

Albertine Meunier:
You add “Net” in front of a word and all of a sudden all becomes much simpler! If I am a net artist, my two “mes” are artists as well. Both of them handle, mix and play with the web. Me and my alter-ego, we try to understand the Internet, we digest it. We also try to protect ourselves from it. To be an artist of the Internet, a net artist, is to live the Internet as matter, to feel it breathing. In order to create, my two identities take detours, trace routes and analyse mechanisms in this universe.

Annie Abrahams:
Yes and no. No, because I refuse to qualify myself. I want to be both vague and fluid. I want to exist in different aspects and by following different roles and patterns. To some extent, I would like to remain an elusive identity. A moving person can be everywhere at the same time, is capable of acting according to circumstances and their own desires.

Yes, when I have to defend networked art. Then I transform into a missionary who travels to Paris, to small villages, who flies to other countries, in order to show that the Internet contains more than pornography and games to download.

Annie Abrahams, how do you define Albertine Meunier’s art practice? What are its main characteristics?

Annie Abrahams: Albertine Meunier = + or – Catherine Ramus. Albertine and Catherine have an intense practice on the Internet. They move around in the Internet with an enormous appetite coupled to an analytical eye and a strong willingness to show us, often through diversion, why and how the tools we use every day determine who we are, and sometimes take control over us.

In 2004, Albertine Meunier didn’t exist yet, only Cathbleue and Counter Googling existed. In this work Albertine published biographies meant to hijack and parasite the emergent practice called “googling” – i.e. the action of typing the name and surname of a person into the Google search engine – in order to create other identities, less truthful but far more humorous.

Since late 2006, with the work in progress My Google Search History, Albertine started publishing the history of her own Google searches. By making private data public, this work totally destroys the value of Google’s possession of personal data. Albertine points to the idea that the best way to react to the panoptical tendency of the Internet is to give and to share everything publicly, in order to make the race for personal data by private companies useless. Is it a way to immunise ourselves against attacks on our private space? Or a simple defence formula saying: “Take all my data, it is not me. You are mistaken if you think you can have me under control. I remain the one who decides, you cannot fool me” On one side it is delicious to see that a single person can intervene in the policy of a great Internet mastodon. On the other hand, this art piece draws a very intimate self-portrait of its author.

Catherine, Cathbleue, Albertine, three identities who raise essential questions that also underlie my own practice, “Who am I in a society where my references are located on the Internet? Who am I in a society with changing notions of identity and intimacy, turned upside down by networked practice? How will our identity evolve in the future? Where will it be hosted? In 1999, I asked three people to play Annie Abrahams in a networked performance entitled I only have my name. A few weeks after, I wasn’t able to recognise which of the four “Annies” in the performance was the real, authentic one. This experience strongly upset me. Play with and about identity is always disconcerting, maybe even dangerous, indeed, it generates real uncertainty.

Albertine Meunier, I address to you the same question in connection with the work of Annie Abrahams? More particularly, what does the metaphor of the “ant”[1] evoke?

Albertine Meunier:
In her pieces, there is an omnipresence of texts collected on the Internet and a constant presence of the voice. Words are repeated, sounds also. Repetition is fundamental in her creations; it is what involves us in familiar bodily sensations: fear, loneliness, the need to be reassured, separation…

In one of her works, Annie Abrahams says: “by repeating the content disappears”. The formal content disappears in order to allow the sensation, the feeling. The body with it’s emotions, it’s beats, it’s excesses, it’s irritations is made present…

The titles of her pieces reflect this bodily presence: Alone – Who am I? – I have only my name – Understanding – Tout va bien – Puisque ma voix / Since my voice – Do you doubt – One the puppet of the other – reassuring – Bitter times – Being Human – Separation – Painsong – Attentions – Solitudes – Breaking Solitudes – I am an artwork – Happy moving – Don’t touch me.

Annie Abrahams likes to assemble, to gather together. She says that she carries out “many collections on the Internet to observe the human being around her”.

On the occasion of a collective performance, she also brought together in a kind of Girls Band 11 French women working in and on the Internet. She constitutes a junction point between various people. This is concretely confirmed when she invites other artists to take part in the InstantS project or in the Breaking Solitude or Double Bind web performances.

The metaphor of the ant is directly related to her relational approach. The wandering ant, thanks to its “wanderings”, finds other sources, relates what was separate. Ants, with their way of approaching and touching each other, communicate and live together.

In her “collections”, Annie Abrahams evokes the idea “to give flesh and bone to what is on her screen,” because this “has lost its emotion.” In her pieces the emotion returns in the density of the texts and the voice. Through the omnipresence of the other in the work, of the relation with the other and of the barriers which are inevitably present, the limits of the skin emerge. And these reveal other borders, in particular those dealing with mutual comprehension.

When preparing this interview I also discovered a video I did not know: The green oaks. It’s a treat! One almost manages to feel the wind, present on the set on the afternoon when the film was made.

How did you come to work on and in the Internet?

Albertine Meunier:
Naturally and intuitively. With the arrival of the Internet, I quickly moved from the scientific sphere of optics towards the Internet. From white or black closed rooms[2], I passed into the world of open and unbounded Internet space. I engulfed myself in this unbounded universe where all seemed possible: to learn by one’s own methods, to construct, to communicate, etc. In parallel, I learned how to control the Internet in a professional framework. Very gradually, timidly, I began my artistic actions by publishing collages made up of texts and animated images. Year after year, I multiplied and enriched my practice by manipulating the Internet, the mobile phone, video formats… Today, I publish all my creations on the Internet. All is visible and downloadable online.

Annie Abrahams:
Since always, I have interrogated identity. Since always, I have sought my place in a world that I don’t understand. Since always, I have tried to comprehend the other. This is the very condition of my existence. It was impossible not to work on the Internet. Nowhere else, I can be closer to this other, nowhere else I can watch so intensely this other.

First I tried to better understand the world around me by studying biology at the University of Utrecht. (Doctorate, 1980) However, science did not help me to answer some very important questions. To quote Tolstoy: “What should we do and how should we live?” So, I radically changed my approach and went on to study at the Beaux-Arts. After my degree, I tried to identify what I called “truth” in installations based on 133 so-called chaos paintings. Then in 1990, I started using the computer. I quickly realised that besides efficient management of my installations in virtual and real space, this computer was also bringing other possibilities such as an escape from the gravity of the object.

In parallel, I increasingly began to work on the relation to the other, first in video, then also in installations. In 1995, in the gallery Ocre d’Art in Chateauroux, I created an installation called “Tribune / Refuge”. In 1996, I replaced all the tables of a bar in Nice – called the Wagram – with tables made out of paintings. In 1997, invited by an artists group in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, I developed an installation, a meeting device where the visitors could drink tea, eat cakes and assist in events. In order to be present from the South of France, I created my first website, quickly followed by the first works specifically designed for the Internet: Comprendre / Understanding,I am alone and I want a kiss, love and respect.

What place does the media occupy in your life and your practice?

Albertine Meunier:
I very much live the media through the web. The place of the Internet is central in my daily life because it is the place from which my ideas, my projects emerge. It’s like a small beating heart! The Internet is much more central than the newspaper deposited in the letter box, or the radio that I listen to in the morning. The newspapers and the radio function as appointments, which mark out the key moments of my day. They connect me with reality, with the thickness of matter. While the Internet is everywhere: everywhere in my day, everywhere in my eyes, everywhere in my practice, everywhere in my thoughts, and I cannot locate it anymore.

Annie Abrahams:
I almost always start my day by consulting my email account. Apart from my personal mail, I receive mail from SPECTRE, Nettime-fr, NetBehaviour, e-critures, NEW-MEDIA-CURATING, Empyre and a few other lists. I am also subscribed to some RSS feeds: “Instant RSS” from Nicolas Frespech, “Instants” of panoplie, Rhizome, Poptronics and some blogs of friends. Reading all these news, I easily spend two hours, in order to be informed and to keep in touch. Starting from information given by peers, I activate, I navigate and I operate the Internet. Some days I throw away everything except for my personal mail. This way I free myself from a ridiculous panoptic tendency. Then I relax, I am satisfied, because I managed to create empty time.

The Internet is omnipresent in my life, it determines my life, but by my actions I also control the Internet. I consider the Internet as a living organism with which I live on a day to day basis; either in a symbiotic relationship, where benefits are mutual, or in an almost parasitic way, that is to say beneficial to one and damaging or even harmful to the other.

You both record the modifications of the web, you note the evolutions. You evolve permanently with the tools placed at your disposal, you do not remain anchored on one type of software. The innovations related to the software, the new platforms become instruments which fit in your pallet.

Albertine Meunier:
I am interested in the evolutions of the Internet itself, and in particular in the tools, the services or the contents disposed of on the Internet; the service of Google Search History, the status of the friends of friends on Facebook, the mobile phone YouTube videos or the data of Freebase (free and open database accessible via an API[3]) which all become genuine matters for creation.

The Internet is unceasingly moving, has an incredible richness and is filled with innumerable contents. I wonder whether I do not seek to understand it, to capture it, to seize its nuances, its operations, its subtleties, its infinitude, its permanence. All in all, I try to touch the elusive.

Annie Abrahams:
In the beginning I was impressed by the possibilities of the Internet and I felt that each new tool could bring me new possibilities and that I needed to practice all of them in order to evaluate and judge them and eventually make art works out of them. Nowadays I focus more on the influences generated by such tools on our human behaviour.

Observing both your work, common topics appear: absence, disappearance, the trace and death… Do you think, the Internet abolishes temporality? Does it make a-temporal any physical trace, any inscription?

Albertine Meunier:
As a net artist, one knows that all this is very ambiguous. The Internet allows the storage of all, an eternal permanence and, at the same time, all can disappear in an eyelash, in a click. The Internet does not abolish all temporality, all physical traces or all inscriptions; it is at the same time impermanent and permanent. It is dubious. What will become of these pieces that only exist on the Internet? What will remain over time? It’s rather the law of all or nothing. A disappeared object, by a simple copy/paste operation, can reappear constantly because of its numerical nature. The Internet moves between two things: absence/presence – disappearance/appearance – traces/transparencies – inscriptions/obliterations. I think, the Internet transposes all on and in a binary mode. It transforms time, space, bodies and thoughts, in an operation between zero and one.

Annie Abrahams:
Being connected to the Internet may imply loosing the notion of your own body when you are online. It is comparable to the loss of a sense of time one might feel while writing a letter or while solving a puzzle. Our emotions are chemical states related to physical sensations. Emotions in their turn cause new bodily reactions. It is a biological cycle that begins at birth. The course of these cycles is inscribed unconsciously in our body. Sitting in front of my computer, my emotions are no longer associated with the same activity, with the same physical sensations as before. I type on a keyboard regardless of the emotion that crosses me. Whether joy, fear, disgust or anger, these emotions manifest themselves in the same way and so disturb my inner functions. I stress my body. My muscles tense. My level of excitement increases. Without necessarily noticing it, an unsteady state in my body settles down.

Albertine Meunier, what according to you are the interrogations conveyed by One the puppet of the other?

Albertine Meunier:
I did not see this performance live. I watched the video, with surely means a loss in perception. I was struck by the remoteness, the hesitation, and also by the silences – which do a lot of good – between the two characters. Somewhat like on the Internet, where a possible omnipresence of the other chokes, in these strained flux exchanges, silence is given a real breath.

The device of the performance itself is extremely disconcerting. Two tents inhabited by two persons connected by the Internet and communicating via webcam and microphone. First of all, these two tents resemble matrices, uterus; one wonders about the bond between them. The numerical umbilical cord, which connects these two people (these puppet-babies) directly one with the other, is also disturbing. Why are these “twins of the Internet” not together in the same space?

The title, One is [sic.] the Puppet of the other made me think of dislocated jumping jacks, stuck in a closed place, of directed puppets that wait until the wire coming from the Internet tells them what to do. By alteration, each one requires of the other to do or say something precise, for example: “Tell me your social security number” or “Face me…”.

In the beginning the one tells the other simply what to do and the other way around. Progressively during the performance, the symmetry in the device disappears, the puppets come to an independent life because each one is confronted with the other in its difference. So, they end up playing “dog and cat,” they say that they do not resemble each other much, and all of a sudden one is breathing.

How one and the other, do you invest the new social networks such as Myspace or Facebook?

Albertine Meunier:
I am not on Myspace. I am on Facebook. I am on Twitter. I am listening to Twitter’s chirping, where I am quite active, all day long. It allows me to have small news of my friends, of the web and of the “friends of the web.” My activity on Facebook is very minimal, I am almost only playing with “status.” I adore these short notes launched like numerical echoes on the Internet. Until now I particularly affection these short phrases of 140 characters. They became real matter for me. I adore reading those of others. This is probably at the base of my desire to make the Big Picture[4] and to use them in the Instants entre elle et lui, and in some of my videos.

They represent the assertion of oneself on these social networks and at the same time they are an almost useless gesture. The status of oneself or “statues of oneself” make us bathe in an ambient intimacy.

The Big Picture is an image of the updates of status on Facebook. Presented like a widget, the Big Picture consists of several zones, each zone being allocated to the status on Facebook of the friends of a person. The simple fact of moving the mouse on the surface of the Big Picture makes it possible to read the status on Facebook of a great number of people. This creation is also an artistic experiment in visualising the activity of a site like Facebook: to restore its rhythm, to make present the palpitations of its actors and also to record via videos[5] its accelerations, its decelerations, its stops. And last but not least: because any person can install, via a widget, all or a part of the Big Picture, the Facebook fortress is opened up a little bit.

For Instants entre elle et lui, I wrote every day and for approximately one month[6], poems with the Facebook status of people present in the Big Picture. The process was the following: Recover all the status present in the Big Picture on a particular day, make a selection of these statuses and finally create the instant, a poem, between her and him.

Extract of Instants entre elle et lui of April 17th 2008:
He crushes white.
He does nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing,
He is falling, it blows.
nothing discourages him!
she is high, low and below.
And she likes that.

by
Antoine Brea [Robin Hunzinger’s friend]
Xavier Leton [Andre Lozano’s friend]
JR Bellanger [Alex Andrek’s friend]
Andre Lozano [Albertine Meunier’s friend]
Laetitia To rust [Caroline Hazard’s friend]
Dawn Laloy [David Guez’s friend]

In these Instants of every day, I like to choose the status I prefer and give these a collective direction. This way I let some of their absurd but necessary content escape.

Annie Abrahams:
I watch closely how my “friends” are describing themselves on Facebook, how they establish links or not with others. I read their status, and look at their virtual libraries. Contrary to what one may think, people do not share much. They communicate their identities. It is usually more about promoting their tastes, their interests and expanding their influence.

Albertine Meunier, your observations nourish your works. How do these re-appear in your relation to the elderly people and your collective work the Big Picture?

Albertine Meunier:
With the Internet, I notice a certain impermanency, a ceaseless movement. One word replaces another and, at the same time, it can be stored at any moment, it can be fixed. The Internet is for me, quite simply, synonymous with life. Its movement is intrinsically associated with an accumulation…

I noticed that with the Internet women that are more than 80 years old[7] have desires: desire to make, desire to say, desire to see, desire to listen, desire to show and to show themselves, desire to play with themselves and the other… Each day, these demonstrations of desire surprise me a bit more. All seems possible. Here, the wordplay: Internet makes us a life, has a sense. It makes a bit more immortal maybe.

Annie Abrahams, how do you analyse the Big Picture?

Annie Abrahams:
In the Big Picture, we see a nice colour table composed of a lot a coloured squares that shows in real time the Facebook Status updates of the “friends” of the Big Picture participants. Each status of a person is associated with a colour. According to the authors, Albertine, Olivier Auber and Yann Leguennec, this work is an artistic experience that should “capture the explosion of social media?” Be careful to the question mark and then imagine the follow-up: – People are more and more abandoning their Facebook activity, their status will no longer be updated and so they will disappear from the Big Picture table, leaving behind them the black square of death. On the contrary, Facebook might be booming and people will have more and more new “friends.” These new friends do not yet have colour, so their square is black but because newcomers are usually the most active, the table should also move towards a whole black picture, the dark colour of death.

According to you, what is the future of the Internet and the social networks?

Albertine Meunier:
Sacred question! The Internet is promised with a brilliant future… at the firmament of the media. I do not know how the social networks will change. They make more visible the contents inside groups, but it seems to me that their finite form has not yet been found. Their future will inevitably be determined according to what we are, we who have already changed so much in so little time.

For what concerns me personally, after ten years of practice I feel sometimes a little breathless running from link to link, a little mutant too. I become hypertext, hypermedia, hypernet. My spirit is “multi-task”, my brain “virtualised”, my body is sometimes elsewhere in the Internet, my thought is enriched but dispersed in all my roaming. I live in a kind of collective intimacy. The Internet grows, and I find out that my life narrows with the passing of days!

Annie Abrahams:
The future is in the hands of the users. It is through them that the Internet can grow, it is only by their “clicks” and “clacks” that one can earn money on the Internet. The users are also those who are building alternatives to proprietary softwares. They write blogs, create wikis and transform information sources. The Internet parasites these users, it feeds on them, it tries to phagocyte them by proposing behavioural molds such as Myspace or Facebook that make them harmless by encapsulating them. The Internet uses their loneliness, their need for recognition and fame.

I see all these users as living in their own bubble, in a sort of foam where everything is moving, where the exchange surfaces, in contact with other bubbles, are porous and let in some information but not other. Conglomerates form and disintegrate according to the requirements of the moment. It is not the image of an Internet where everything is connected by lines, but, I believe, the image of a fragile foam that reflects best our current situation. We should come out of our bubble to deal with the medium in which this foam will have to continue to exist. We should always leave our bubble.

This interview was originally undertaken for the French journal, Mercure, Les medias autrement, n.4-5.

---

Footnotes

1. bram.org/info/presentation/IML.htm
2. I built optical components for the telecommunication networks in clean white rooms and tested them on aircushion benches in dark rooms.
3. Application Programming Interface, allows access in real time to databases and makes it for instance possible to use flickr photos or youtube videos in other websites.
4. The Big Picture is based on the poetic aggregator made by Olivier Auber and Yann Le Guennec.
5. Capture of 1 month of Facebook activity on youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0KVx5sBgiY
6. Invited by Annie Abrahams for the InstantS project on panoplie.org
7. http://teatimewithalbertine.tumblr.com/

One of my older brothers played a stand-up bass, and unlike my brother I had no formal musical training. The musical notation that my brother could read and the instrument itself were part of a closed, mysterious and privileged society from which I was excluded. But still, I loved to flail away on the thing.

The Piano Etudes project by Jason Freeman, with Akito Van Troyer and Jenny Lin, is a move towards opening the forbidden city of musical composition. The project is based on piano etudes, musical compositions in which the pianist can rearrange connections between some open form pieces. Site visitors are invited to create their own etudes from four short compositions by Jason Freeman. Each etude is transcribed graphically into something that resembles an organizational chart. Each visual component of the chart has a corresponding audio note pattern. The pitch of a note pattern is roughly indicated by the height of a horizontal bar that is part of the graphic. A site user can select graphic elements and arrange them on a time-line to hear the resulting sound piece. Pieces created on the site can be saved and transcribed into musical notation so that pianists can perform pieces created by site visitors.

The Piano Etudes site interface is easy to use. Making the connection between what is possible musically on the site and the visual interface takes a bit of play. But then playing seems to be very much the point of the Piano Etudes project.

Two things that strike me straight off about using visual graphic elements to compose music digitally are remix and re-mediation. The Piano Etudes project invites us to remix the works, to make a new composition from components of the original. Ironically the tradition of open-form musical scores continues in digital mash-ups and other forms of remixing.

Remixing is an admission that all creative product is indebted to other works in some way, and unlike most of the remixing done in the Wild West of popular digital music, in the Piano Etudes site the remixing is done with the authors’ assent and encouragement.

The Piano Etudes project also asks users/composers to re-mediate, to re-write one text in another, completely different medium. Here the musical score becomes visual elements that can be arranged within a rectangular space. The visual mode of composing opens the creative process to those untrained in reading musical scores. That the product – the composition – can then be re-mediated again as musical script, and again re-mediated when performed by a pianist is an amazing expression of digital technology making a creative space.

There are similar spaces for digital composing that do not require formal musical training, the most recognizable being the GarageBand application. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra was competitively constituted by applications/auditions submitted via YouTube. The Pete-Townsend affiliated site and application Method Music (now defunct) came close to offering the kind of creative space for composing music digitally that Piano Etudes makes available. Along the lines of GarageBand and Method music, many of the “opportunities” to create music on the Web are commercial pitches to purchase licensed applications. The free and collaborative nature of the Piano Etudes seems to be quite different.

What makes this project truly wonderful and distinct from other approaches to creating music digitally is that this is a shared creative space. The inherently social nature of the web allows for creative collaboration that dissolves many of the obstacles to creative practices: differences in education, training, language, location, culture and economic status become valuable distinctions among contributors that inform the creative process rather than impede it.

My brother’s stand-up bass offered an opportunity to create something musically, it was a solitary experience, since my playing was dependent on my brother being away from our house. And the product of my flailing away on the bass could be thought of as illegitimate, since I lacked training in music. The Piano Etudes project I feel, values the creative possibilities in us for musical expression. The site also validates those musical expressions by making them available and performative. What is perhaps most valued by the Project Etudes project is play; to discover, to learn and to create through experiences that are enjoyable and interesting – kind of like banging on my brother’s bass fiddle but much more fun, more social and more generative.

——————————–

Special thanks to Turbulence for hosting this web site and including it in their spotlight series and to the American Composers Forum’s Encore Program for supporting several live performances of this work. I developed the web site in collaboration with Akito Van Troyer. Piano Etudes is dedicated to my wife, Leah Epstein. Jason Freeman.

An art exhibition that is also a working café, Feral Trade Café opens at HTTP Gallery for 8 weeks during Summer 2009. Serving food and drink traded over social networks, Feral Trade Café by artist Kate Rich (AU) provides a convivial setting from which to contemplate broader changes to our climate and economies, where conventional supply chains (for food delivery and cultural funding) could go belly up.

The term ‘feral’ denotes the project’s wilful wildness (as in pigeons) as opposed to romantic or nature-wildness (wolves): it offers street-wise survival tactics for urban environments. Since the first registered Feral Trade import of 30kg of coffee direct from the growers in El Salvador to the Cube Microplex in Bristol in 2003, Kate Rich has used social networks to traffic edible produce from around the world. Feral Trade participants become mules, carrying food items with them on trips they would have taken anyway and delivering them to depots (usually friends’ and colleagues’ flats or workplaces) in the growing network.

The process is facilitated by an online database, handcrafted by the artist, where couriers log their journeys. This forms the sole physical infrastructure for an alternative freight network, which operates without any material assets (vehicles, staff, communications devices, depots). It enables producers, couriers and buyers to track not only the transit of their own produce but all grocery movements in the network; outputting waybills that document the details of sources, shipping and handling with the kind of microattention that ingredient listings normally receive.

The exhibition includes a retrospective display of Feral Trade goods (2003-present) alongside ingredient transit maps, video, bespoke food packaging and other artefacts from the Feral Trade network. This is art that you can eat, and the café will stock and serve a selection of Feral Trade products from a menu including coffee from El Salvador, hot chocolate from Mexico and sweets from Montenegro, as well as locally sourced bread, vegetables and herbs. Along with their food and drink, diners will be served waybills documenting the socially facilitated transit of goods to their plate. Visitors can also purchase groceries to take home.

Feral Trade has been based in Bristol since 2003 and is well established among media arts practitioners and organisations, who act as couriers, diners and depots in the network. Kate Rich’s Feral Trade Café at Furtherfield.org’s HTTP Gallery extends the model more deeply into the economy of the not-for-profit arts. As well as serving Feral Trade goods, the café will provide a local trading station and depot for the Feral Trade network, and present research and discussion around both food provenance and hospitality protocols for artist-run venues. HTTP Gallery has invited groups from the local Harringay community, as well as local and international artists to contribute their own home-produced food items for sale in the café. Proceeds will support the producers, ongoing development of the project, and HTTP Gallery. Local groups with interest in food, ecology, media and art will also be invited to use the Café as a meeting space.

Feral Trade Café is the first element of Furtherfield.org’s three-year Media Art Ecologies programme, which aims to provide opportunities for critical debate, exchange and participation in emerging ecological media art practices, and the theoretical, political and social contexts they engage. The café will be host to events, initiated by Furtherfield.org and others, examining issues related to the Feral Trade and Media Art Ecologies projects, including a Media Art Ecologies networking day. Further info and dates (TBC)

Catalogue Essay: Ecologies of Sustenance by the HTTP Gallery curatorial team

On the occasion of the exhibition, Furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery are pleased to publish a new essay about the Feral Trade project by writer, artist and designer Femke Snelting of De Guezen (NL)- Feral Labelling

About Kate Rich
Kate Rich is an Australian-born artist & trader. In the 1990s she moved to California to work as radio engineer with the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), an international agency producing an array of critical information products including economic and ecologic indices, event-triggered webcam networks, and animal operated emergency broadcast devices. The Bureau’s work has been exhibited broadly in academic, scientific and museum contexts. Restless at the turn of the century, she headed further east to take up the post of Bar Manager at the Cube Microplex, Bristol UK where she launched Feral Trade. She is currently moving deeper into the infrastructure of cultural economy, developing protocols to define and manage amenities of hospitality, catering, sports and survival in the cultural realm.

More information:
Feral Trade – http://www.feraltrade.org
GastroGeek – http://gastrogeek.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/wasted-again/
Kate Rich – http://bureauit.org/data/krcv/

HTTP Gallery
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre
71 Ashfield Road
London N4 1N4
+44(0)77 3700 2879
Click here for map and location details

http://www.feraltrade.org/

Kate Rich will be working as an Artist in Residence at HTTP, Furtherfield’s Gallery and lab space, in Summer 2009. During this residency Kate will develop and work on the first instantiation of the Feral Trade project as working café.

Kate Rich is an Australian-born artist & trader. In the 1990s she moved to California to work as radio engineer with the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), an international agency producing an array of critical information products including economic and ecologic indices, event-triggered webcam networks, and animal operated emergency broadcast devices. The Bureau’s work has been exhibited broadly in academic, scientific and museum contexts. Restless at the turn of the century, she headed further east to take up the post of Bar Manager at the Cube Microplex, Bristol UK where she launched Feral Trade. She is currently moving deeper into the infrastructure of cultural economy, developing protocols to define and manage amenities of hospitality, catering, sports and survival in the cultural realm.

Feral Trade has been based in Bristol since 2003 and is well established among media arts practitioners and organisations, who act as couriers, diners and depots in the network. Kate Rich’s Feral Trade Café at Furtherfield’s HTTP Gallery extends the model more deeply into the economy of the not-for-profit arts. As well as serving Feral Trade goods, the café will provide a local trading station and depot for the Feral Trade network, and present research and discussion around both food provenance and hospitality protocols for artist-run venues. HTTP Gallery will also invite groups from the local Harringay community, as well as local and international artists to contribute their own home-produced food items for sale in the café. Proceeds will support the producers, ongoing development of the project, and HTTP Gallery. Local groups with interest in food, ecology, media and art will also be invited to use the Café as a meeting space.

Feral Trade Café is the first element of Furtherfield’s three-year Media Art Ecologies programme, which aims to provide opportunities for critical debate, exchange and participation in emerging ecological media art practices, and the theoretical, political and social contexts they engage. The project will successively featured at Transmediale Festival, Germany, and the 2010 AV Festival in Tyneside.

Web cinema is an oxymoron. The internet is a resource; a hilariously unreliable encyclopedia for a distracted population amusing themselves to death as Richard Feynman has written – and all by themselves together. The new “web cinema” furthers none of the real time phenomenon of engaging with the seventh art. Bite sized videos on a computer screen actually remove the viewer from the energy and participation inherent in the original motion picture viewing experience. As dull as endless hours of someone else’s home movies – web cinema creations are typically viewed by one person watching a computer monitor in an endless possibility of environments. The very essence of cinema involves company, darkness and a communal experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aIE3O-3RKg

The actual successor to the seventh art is Second Life. The enigmatic French cineaste and sociopolitical rabble rouser Chris Marker has been offering up his home movies for six decades now. At 87 he has led the charge out of the heady 16mm revolutionary 60’s of Parisian student unrest into the subdued society of blinking solitary screens that incite mass hypnosis via YouTube today. Second Life is the perfect realm for Mr Marker to further his socially conscious antics. While newcomers to the moving image who may never have spliced a real piece of film let alone toiled at a steenbeck lay claim to being the future of “web cinema”, Chris Marker has moved on and taken the foundations of cinema experience with him into Second Life. As a new medium Second life is not an extension of human experience like Youtube or Facebook it is an alternate collective experience in the spirit of film viewing.

Image: Monsieur Guillaume, photo by Bettina Tizzy

Famously elusive, Marker can engage people with remove in this alternate reality. While Marker stays put in Paris – his avatar traveling to points infinite in Second Life – he continues to have a presence in our actual reality through his recently appointed live action avatar Thomas Vuille. Vuille, the creator of serial Parisian graffiti cats has been rocketed out of obscurity into the public domain as a result of Marker’s interest. A collaboration made in cyber heaven, Marker’s attraction to Vuille’s anarchic art practice started with the resemblance he saw to his own cat Guillaume. Marker’s homage to Guillaume, “Cat listening to music” is the original and probably the most sublime YouTube home movie or “web cinema” ever created. Thomas’ enchanting graffiti cat has taken Marker’s subject back into the real world to continue his heroic journey while Chris ventures deeper into the virtual world to further the artistic discipline of cinema. Just as cinema propels us into a place that feels intensely real but is only a representation experienced collectively so – in spite of real time connections – Second Life has the potential to further the collective cinematic experience by creating a space for parallel experience.

Chris Marker first appeared in Second Life in the company of his longtime guide, Monsieur Guillame, a cat and a furry entity at the opening of his exhibit l’Ouvroir. On Tuesday, March 11th, 2007 at 11am SLT / 19:00 CET, in conjunction with a Real Life exhibition in Zurich, Switzerland, at the Museum Gestaltung. Marker exists in this cyber realm in much the same way as he has in the real world – only occasionally venturing out of his virtual hiding place. The site is still active but you may knock at his cyber door for hours if not months without a real interaction. He is there and he is not.

Image: Ouvroir, photo by Barbara Binder

Just as he was and is in his films, Marker is there through the creation of the work but absent in the experience of it. Marker’s highly regarded meditations on the state of our existence, including the infamous short film La Jetee, have mellowed into playful observations of our lunatic society through the eyes of a cleverly positioned graffiti cat who echoes Marker’s own feline amour “Guillaume”. Featured in such video art classics as “Cat listening to music” Marker’s cat has been reborn on the streets of Paris and the world and redrawn in Second life. This has revived the profile of Second Life at the same time – no longer a cyberia where losers go to live the lives they cannot in reality – it is becoming a creative platform, an infinite silver screen for individual heroes journeys to be played out in concurrent time.

Recently Marker participated in a brief discussion in Second Life that was broadcast live through Harvard’s Film Center. He cheekily “assisted” the cinematic dialogue in Second Life commenting on the limitations of the Second Life communication in amusing misspelled entries under the pseudonym Sergei Murasaki. Not unlike a director’s talk before or after the screening of a film in real life, the event offered more in the way of an experience of Marker as mischief maker than any elucidation of his Second Life experimentation as the new platform for his cinematic explorations. Marker’s contribution to the evolution of cinema into video and Second Life is documented, reviewed and archived on a comprehensive site that includes examples of what web cinema might have been if users were gathered around a giant screen together. His Youtube premiered video “Leila Attacks” from 2006 begs this communal experience and serves as a stark example of the non-cinema experience of “web cinema”. Like any great innovator Marker has infiltrated the realm of pretenders to his throne and dabbled enough to prove his explorations in Second Life are the real web cinema.

You can see other recent works, including experimental film loops such as Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men 2005 – at Peter Blum Gallery- Chelsea. New York. Between May 16th – July 31st 2009.

References and resources:

Museum of Design, Zurich: http://www.museum-gestaltung.ch/E_welcome.html
Marker Website: http://www.chrismarker.org/
YouTube: Leila Attacks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iParBp8cS0w
Chris Marker’s second life site: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ouvroir/187/61/39/
Archive of Marker as sergei-murasaki interacting on Second life during Harvard event: http://www.webknot.net/2009/05/17/chris-marker-sergei-murasaki-presente-son-exposition-dans-louvroir/
blog describing l’Ouvroir: http://islandouvroir.blogspot.com/
Telling Stories A History of Web Cinema: http://www.druidmedia.com/booksscripts/ahistoryofwebcinema.html
“Web Cinema” a Rogue site posting “great films and videos” http://ukrtv.com/en/
M. CHAT info site France: http://monsieurchat.free.fr/MChat.php
M. CHAT info site Chile:

[url=http://omarperezsantiago.blogspot.com/2007/11/monsieur-chat-clausura-feria-del-libro.html ]http://omarperezsantiago.blogspot.com/2007/11/monsieur-chat-clausura-feria-del-libro.html
[/url]

The collaboratively produced on-line encyclopaedia Wikipedia is becoming an important reference resource for art as well as for its traditional strengths in the sciences and popular culture. To help improve the representation of new media art on Wikipedia, more people who are involved in the field should learn about how Wikipedia works and get involved with editing it. This article is a brief introduction to doing so.

Wikipedia’s organization and culture can present a steep learning curve for even experienced new media art practitioners. Don’t be put off, it’s easy to learn how to work with Wikipedia’s organization once you understand the project’s core concepts and the rationales behind its processes.

Becoming a Wikipedia Editor

The technical side of editing Wikipedia is relatively simple, especially if you have experience of writing for other media or of HTML or BBCode editing. To become a Wikipedia editor just register, log in, set up your user profile and start working on a page. As soon as you click “save”, your work will go live on Wikipedia.

The social side of editing Wikipedia can be much more complex, even if you have experience of writing or editing for academia or the art world. Wikipedia is a large project with well established governance structures and its own peculiar terminology. It is important to learn how Wikipedia works at an organizational and social level as well as a technical level in order to write effectively for it.

There are several well written books on Wikipedia that cover all of the various aspects of editing Wikipedia clearly and in depth. Two that are available freely online are –

How Wikipedia Works

Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

You can save immeasurable time and frustration by reading at least one of these before you join in editing Wikipedia. I also recommend practicing editing on articles that are unrelated to new media art to start with so you can get a feel for the editing process as an end in itself.

Wikipedia’s organization and processes have their own concepts and terminology (or jargon). The books linked to above should teach you the terminology and concepts you need to know, but if you encounter an phrase in an article or in a discussion you can always find a reference for it on Wikipedia itself.

Notability

The most important concept in editing Wikipedia is “notability“. Notability is Wikipedia’s standard for deciding which topics should be included in an online encyclopaedia. It’s best if you think of it as a strange new quantitative concept that shares only its name with any qualitative concept of notability.

You cannot establish notability in Wikipedia based on personal opinion or unsupported assertion. This would be considered “original research” in Wikipedia’s terminology and rejected. Instead you must establish the notability of your subject by citing multiple reliable third party sources that have in turn found the subject notable enough to comment on.

“Reliable sources” mean established and probably mainstream news or opinion sources such as magazines, journals, or major web sites. “Third party” means not self-published (and not autobiographies).

An additional difficulty when trying to establish notability for any artistic subject, never mind a new media art subject, is that there are no stated notability guidelines for art as there are for music. There should be.

If existing media, books, journals, magazines or the mainstream press cannot provide citations to support the notability of a subject, then it is not notable under Wikipedia’s definition of notability. The solution to this is lies outside of Wikipedia. You will need to write about your subject for reliable sources or to push for other people to do so. This will be of benefit to your subject more generally than just for Wikipedia if they do not already have such coverage.

Conflicts Of Interest

When a subject is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia, it is important to avoid conflicts of interest. If you are tempted to write or edit an article about yourself or a project or organization you are directly involved with, there is a very simple rule to follow: don’t. This would be a conflict of interests. You can request that such an article be written, and you can contribute links to appropriate sources on its talk page, but you can’t edit it yourself.

Prohibiting conflicts of interest avoids vanity pages, and it avoids censorship. Individuals and corporations can both be tempted to remove negative facts and add positive spin to their Wikipedia articles. As an encyclopaedia, Wikipedia is intended to present a full and balanced view of its subjects. If you have information that you feel could help establish that a subject should be included in Wikipedia, you may be able to contact the editors and provide it, but it must satisfy Wikipedia’s standard for reliable sources (autobiography doesn’t, for example).

What Wikipedia Is Not

As a website Wikipedia can contain far more articles than a traditional printed encyclopaedia, but all of those articles should be encyclopaedic in nature. This means that original criticism, promotional material, reportage and other perfectly valid forms of writing about art have no place in Wikipedia.

As well as such writing not fitting Wikipedia’s stated purpose, Wikipedia is not the most effective way of distributing it. People who are interested in new media art are far more likely to find an audience and get useful input in more appropriate forums. There are many alternative outlets for writing about art, from web sites such as Furtherfield and mailing lists such as Netbehaviour to hosted blogs and Facebook groups. Using a more focused platform or setting up your own resource can be better for promotional purposes as well.

Deletion Reviews

When other editors think that an article does not meet Wikipedia’s notability criteria, they will list it for a deletion review. A deletion review is not a personal attack on the innermost being of the article’s author or subject, it is an opportunity to improve an article for readers by answering the concerns of Wikipedia’s editors. When you have created or edited a page, watch it for deletion review notices so that you can get involved in the process.

The formula for a successful deletion review is simple. Write a well structured article about a notable subject. Then answer any queries with reference to how the article itself satisfies people’s concerns about how it may not follow Wikipedia’s guidelines. If it does not already answer those concerns, edit the article so that it does. If the article cannot be edited to meet Wikipedia’s standards, then harsh though it may seem it should not be on Wikipedia.

It can be difficult to explain precisely how the subject of articles on new media art projects or organizations should be evaluated. Often other editors will evaluate online artworks or pages for community projects simply as web sites and argue that their low Google pagerank means that they are not notable. This is listed as an argument to avoid in Wikipedia’s own guidelines.

Even the longest running and most widely distributed art computing and new media art journals may be unfamiliar or inaccessible to the majority of Wikipedia editors who will vote on whether to delete an article or not. This can create problems for new media artists and galleries as perfectly valid sources may require explanation during a deletion review.

How To Write A Good Wikipedia Article

The formula for a successful Wikipedia article is surprisingly simple. State what the article’s subject is, state why that subject is notable and support this with links to multiple citations from reliable sources, then place the citations at the bottom.

This makes for an article that is informative for Wikipedia’s readers, that is easier for Wikipedia’s editors to review, and that because of this is more likely to remain on Wikipedia.

If you click on Wkipedia’s “Random Article” link you will see that most articles follow this formula (and that those that don’t have most likely drawn the attention of Wikipedia’s editors).

How To Improve The Representation Of New Media Art On Wikipedia

Establishing standards for notability for art and improving the quality of citations for art are tasks that will require involvement in the organization of Wikipedia as well as in the technical side of the editing of individual articles. Organization around a topic on Wikipedia is done through WikiProjects. There isn’t a New Media Art WikiProject (yet), and the Contemporay Art one is moribund. The Visual Arts Wikiproject is very active, and should probably be the starting point for any new-media-art-related developments –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Visual_arts

The best argument for keeping an article on Wikipedia is an article structured to quickly make the case that its subject is notable with multiple citations from reliable sources. With a group dedicated to better provision of reliable sources, more articles about new media art topics will satisfy Wikipedia’s standards and be accepted as part of the online encyclopaedia.

And that, galling as it can be when sitting out a deletion review of an article on your gallery or yourself, is the point of editing Wikipedia. For articles to remain on Wikipedia they must satisfy its standards. Those standards exist to make Wikipedia a worthwhile resource for society. New media art should definitely be a part of that resource. It is artistically and socially notable, and we can work to establish this within Wikipedia’s guidelines.

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

“Onward transit of FER-1327 from Codecano arrived Cube Microplex 2007-07-25 kate rich 20/6/07”

Shipment pallet delivered by forklift, boxes were all present but many were opened and the coffee bags looked rummaged. Forklifters kindly reweighed the shipment (252 kg) and recorded the pickup as damaged. Drive home was gloomy yet aromatic. Arrived Cube at midnight, unloaded 1/4 metric tonne coffee into the under-auditorium-seating area. Coop had miscompiled the order as 175kg ground coffee and 75kg beans, the reverse of my emailed order; the ground coffee was also ground too coarse. Emailed Ricardo shipping report then went home to sleep.[1]

As food is seldom consumed when and where it was found, it needs wrapping into other materials before it can travel. Bulk ingredients packaged in batches move across long distances; they are stacked, stored, sorted and sold. Packaging is the result of an uneasy compromise between people and their machines, negotiating industrial wants with the more convoluted desires of individual customers, so that products roll off a food grade conveyor belt as smoothly as they fit into a biodegradable shopping bag or a kitchen cupboard. But besides physical protection, packaging offers a convenient surface on which to project messages about the product or even about the package itself. Food labelling is a means of communication between the many parties involved in the way food gets around; each of them leaving traces that represent their own interest in what is or what is not inside.

When a new product is added to Kate Rich’s Feral Trade product range, packaging is a factor to be reckoned with. As the goods are mainly passed by hand, size matters, for example, in relation to the volume that is allowed as carry-on luggage. In addition, its container needs to be tough enough to resist the unpredictable conditions that might occur on non-freight routes. But above all Feral Trade products, as well as their packaging, make the experience of trading tangible.

It’s 1986. In a conference centre in the Netherlands, shopkeepers of various local Fairtrade shops gather for a long meeting.[2] The single item on the agenda is a proposal to launch a new brand, Max Havelaar, named after a bestselling 19th century novel about the exploitation of Javanese coffee plantation workers by Dutch colonial merchants. Solidaridad, the country’s largest importer of Fairtrade coffee and initiator of the brand, is under pressure from Mexican coffee growers who demand access to a larger market than the autonomously and rather amateurishly run shops will ever be able to provide. The shopkeepers present at the meeting respond with mixed feelings, voicing their predictable worries about the risk of brushing with mainstream retail, and wondering how this brand will be able to increase sales and still guarantee the fairness of the trade.

The main anxiety though, is that once the coffee is sold in supermarkets, it will be hard to communicate the complex story of provenance that comes with it. Outside the narrative context they have carefully built in their small-scale, volunteer-run spaces, the packaging will be too tight a space to make up for the loss. By the end of the day, the argument for market expansion is more convincing. Solidaridad settles for a logo with a hand drawn portrait of a Mexican farmer carrying a bag of raw coffee beans. More than 20 years later, after an indecisive interlude, the brand is redesigned by a London agency[3] in an attempt to rationalise packaging and streamline marketing.

Again, after much discussion, the Max Havelaar foundation chooses a human figure but this time it is depicted in the form of an abstract swoosh representing both producer and consumer.

Feral Trade promotes its coffee proudly as ‘non-certified organic’, a community guaranteed label that is established through shifting social processes instead of relying on external quality assurance. Keeping with the same ethos of undefined definition, the hybrid philosophy behind the design for the packaging of Montenegrin Delight fits with the variable graphic styles of the Feral Trade product range: “The original owner of the company designed the box art himself on his home computer to connect tradition with modernity.”[4] Without a consistent brand identity, another layer of information is added to the many types of messages that are already conveyed by the diverse packages in the Feral Trade range. Sometimes attached as a label, often available through the Feral Trade website, customers can find a detailed breakdown of costs and also a full track record of each shipment. The information is retrieved from a custom made database in which Feral Trade shipping agents offload e-mails, reports, faxes and freight documents gathered along the way. Making the bureaucratic nightmares of international cargo legible, customers are offered a form of transparency that is not necessarily reassuring. In a parody on EU-regulated nutrition labelling, the supplied information here produces an active position, where unexpected events and, sometimes, undesirable results are to be taken into account.

To bring up the debate about Fairtrade labelling in the context of the Feral Trade project is, to say the least, a little uncomfortable. But even if their respective scales, aims and ideas are of a different nature, such a comparison might help to understand how to reveal complicated stories of origin and destination, without falling into the trap of pairing authenticity with reliability. Feral Trade’s unpredictable appearance offers an occasion to come into contact, proposing both a recording and a constitution of social networks. The precision of its design is in the persistent choice for the kind of leaky containment that allows narratives of trade to permeate through.

‘Instead of adopting narrative threads from other media, I am interested in the currency that exists already in the city space. These works are focused on the wider picture of city experiences which are being played out in real time.’ Stanza.

Unseen geographies of our cities lay around us with areas yet to be discovered. Much of it seldom noticed as we pass through them in our everyday lives. The traces of our journeys through each city leave temporary presences. There was once a time where many would have believed these traces were spirits, psychic remains, registrations and impregnations onto objects and environments, from what was possibly a traumatic event in time. Are contemporary technologies a realisation of this belief? These technologies that record our movements in time, are no longer odd, or alluding to being mystical occurrences but the switching of sensors and transmission of radio waves through the ether.

The sensors deployed for Sensity measure temperature, sounds and light as well as the humidity and vibrations, around each recording and transmission unit. Depending on the deployment (there have been several across different cities in Europe) the units are used for different combinations of these discrete elements. But rather than taking finite measurements at a moment in time, mathematically, the notation is delta, registering the change over a period of time. The difference between one state to another that brings our attention to the changes around us, where we may imagine the world around us has not altered very much, but the data gathered from the sensors tells a different story altogether. It draws our attention to the ever-shifting mood of the city. This ebb and flow, viewed over a period of time, might, one imagines, bring about some kind of anthropomorphism in our relationship to the environment. In the same way that an anonymous animal, viewed over a period of time, gradually shows personal characteristics, so does a city. It becomes a barometer of all our psychic imprints on it. As Stanza says in the project documentation:

‘These artworks represent the movement of people, pollution in the air, the vibrations and sounds of buildings. They are in effect emergent social sculptures visualizing the emotional state of the city.’

Stanza regards this change as vital to the work,

‘Some things change for the better but sometimes they don’t; one thing is for sure; things change’.

Presumably this means the physical space as well as the social aspect (psychic well-being?) of the environment. The two are like a bio-feedback loop. But what is it that Sensity reveals to us in its visualisation of the city?

One of the moods of the city is ‘fear’ of the consumer class. A very contemporary class, replacing what we once knew as the working class, caught within the trappings of an economical reliant state of bourgeois anxiety. The consumer classes who, it might be suggested, consume without question and are more likely, in their drunken Saturday night release from the pressure of state-endorsed nullification of the desire to think, to destroy and cause chaos. The CCTV cameras aren’t trained on the would-be anarchist, or political dissident. It’s the masses that scare the state, with their potential to destroy property. A hungry, voyeuristic CCTV culture is there all around us, and it works more subtly than we might imagine[1].

Sensity can be viewed as a way to challenge or exploit the power balance of state imposed surveillance systems like CCTV, mobile phone monitoring and car monitoring (for example, cameras installed on buses to monitor the illegal use of bus lanes in the city). There is, of course, an ongoing struggle between the population on one side and the privacy concerns of the population on the other side. And if these spaces are public, how much of our own surveillance technology are we allowed to deploy? The argument over public space becomes not just one of ownership, but of how much freedom we are allowed in those spaces. Anyone who has spent time within a shopping mall, soon comes to realise that you are only visiting those public spaces, and are allowed little more than the ‘privilege’ of being within them to consume products, that’s the deal.

It would be good to imagine that the changes monitored by Sensity are working in favour of the ordinary public, rather than the elite who are most often served by the surveillance technologies. After all, aren’t most CCTV cameras deployed into areas of commerce and entitlement? Nobody cares what the general public actually gets up to, as long as property isn’t destroyed and the reputation of the city isn’t compromised. Of course, when the government talks about the general public, they mean the British working class, the consumerist, a celebrity-obsessed class. And in particular, those of us employed to work in the inner-city space, rather than live there. You can visit, work and spend your money here, but you must return to your own dwellings! Owen Hatherley points out this ambivalent attitude in the introduction to his book, Militant Modernism (2009):

‘The pervasive class hatred only slightly below the surface of British life (what else does the word ‘chav’ signify?) centres on the feared or ridiculed estate dweller.’

But whereas Hartherley is discussing the issue of Modernist architecture in relation to political standpoints and the class system, Sensity, through its monitoring of the movement through those architectural spaces, presents a human-centred perspective tracing our movements, rather than the monumental buildings.

If we are truly to once again have ownership of our own spaces, then isn’t the right to deploy surveillance technology one of those rights? The argument of course, is as much about who owns the data, as who is collecting it. And to what use it will be put. Stanza takes the data to measure our existence in public spaces to ‘create artistic metaphors.’ These metaphors are the visualisations of existence projected into the exhibition space and online. These metaphors are like seances, drawing out the spirits of the city. Tapping into the spirit metaphor again, it is possible to communicate with the city and the inhabitants who are the cells and organs of the spaces. Sensity offers the city a chance to tell a different story.

On the Sensity website, clicking on the images activates the simulation of the recordings. The slightly blurred images of cities or park locations are covered with puffy clouds of ‘data’ moving out from the points that mark the locations of the sensors. The effect is hypnotic and gives more to the patient viewer than the casual observer. This isn’t the sort of artwork that the viewer should cast a casual glance at and then move on. It requires time to understand the change in the data. Where there is audio content, the click and stutter of noise begins to build a symphony of sounds that can hover just at the edge of recognition before fading away. Numbers form and then change, always offering a sense of movement.

What is being observed within the gallery is something that has already happened, an historical moment that has passed. Conversely, this gives the work its strength as a comment on contemporary time. The work sits within time and acts as a reminder that we are constantly in flux. Despite the many questions that it raises about the cityscape and urban life, this constant change offers a reminder that there is always the future to look forward to. If everything is constantly changing, there is always the possibility of reaching possible states of alternate contentment.

[1] For a more in-depth discussion on the surveillance society, read Marc Garrett’s article on the fourth radiator festival. Where he refers to the 2006 research document A Report on the Surveillance Society For the Information Commissioner produced “by a group of academics called the Surveillance Studies Network.”

HTTP Gallery’s Summer exhibition, which is also a working cafe, is fittingly located in a residential area near Green Lanes in North London. This ‘longest street in the Capital’ is noted for its Greek, Turkish, Cypriot, and Kurdish traders and more recently has attracted migrant grocers and restaurateurs from Hungary, Bulgaria and beyond; establishments abounding with assorted goodies whose packaging conveys in a multitude of ways the distances they have travelled but very little about the journeys they have made.

Visitors to the Feral Trade Cafe may order snacks and refreshments from a menu composed of ingredients, first selected for their capacity to convey substantive data and then traded along social networks. Unorthodox supply chains are documented, mapped and displayed on packaging to provoke new conceptions of community and localness (simulating the space-folding properties of the social Web) to include a range of social networks: artworld denizens, family connections, migrant grocers and home farmers.

This 6-year retrospective of the Feral Trade project, by artist Kate Rich, kicks off Furtherfield.org’s Media Art Ecologies programme. An ecological approach pays special attention to the interrelation of technological and natural processes: beings and things, individuals and multitudes, matter and patterns. This awareness can be traced back along the art-historical roots of media art, through the political, anti-art of Dada, the communitarian Fluxus movement with its explorations of Intermedia, and the Situationist practices of detournement and derive. Contemporary artists, such as Rich, who are active across this terrain, display a talent for reworking the relationships between the core constitutive elements of society and culture, often reaching across established borders and boundaries, straddling media and disciplines. And so… an artist becomes the proprietor of a cafe. This work is not developed through formal business planning, strategising or goal setting, but by establishing priorities and street-level tactics on the fly, in response to immediate conditions and inter-personal negotiations. It utilises the concepts and tools of social media, computer software and global digital networks (the power-tools of our day) and works both with the material realities and the poetics of objects, people, places, systems and institutions to reflect and remake the world. Taking food (and its distribution systems) as its artistic media, Feral Trade performs a social hack, remediating mainstream artworld infrastructure (both operations and concepts) by engaging the imaginations, taste buds and surplus labour of one artworker at a time.

Transdisciplinary ecological approaches have been developing for nearly half a century, but their effects become especially compelling in the context of contemporary environmental and economic crises. Since the reality of global economic collapse became inescapable last September, there has been considerable discussion about the ‘sustainability’ of the art world. The economy of dramatically inflated prices for artworks, and more and bigger galleries for showing and selling them in, suddenly appears anachronistic. At the same time, the (un)ecological model on which this economy is based is beginning to be questioned, where artists and curators must constantly travel to international biennials, festivals, and fairs to exhibit and see art, and be seen doing both. For example, Gustav Metzger’s ‘Reduce Art Flights’ campaign, first introduced at Sculpture Projects Munster in 2007, and reiterated several times since, suggests that the art world ‘could or should diminish its use of aeroplanes.’

Feral Trade seems to have anticipated these developments. It is parasitical, feeding off the surplus energy emitted by the artworld, and using traveling artists and curators as couriers to carry food items between nodes in its network, mostly arts venues in Europe and North America. However this is neither utopian nor virtuous art. While, by surfing the excesses of the artworld, Feral Trade implies a critique of the mechanisms of growth economics, patterns of consumption and associated strategies for avoiding ethical discomfort; it takes pleasure in resisting a logically consistent alternative system design. Its materials and methods appear diverse, particular, non-standard and ungeneralisable, and yet in its apparent perversity it presents a delicious, tangy, but harmonious alternative view. It demonstrates a DIY approach for creating new paths and approaches to established ways of doing things, lightly scratching new connective grooves across engrained systems and behaviours.

Participants: 20 Year 4 students from Southwark Park Primary School.

Artist: Michael Szpakowski (video artist, composer and facilitator)

In a series of workshops to promote enthusiasm for maths within the school, a class of children aged 8-9 years old created Mad About Maths, a CDROM of 8 maths games, which encouraged them to test their ideas, use their own words, and try new approaches. The games were presented in a school event in which the pupils demonstrated the games to their family members and teachers. The pupils were able to share their learning and knowledge of calculation with their siblings and families in an engaging and fun way.
The CDRoms continue to be used in the home and in school with other classes to support enthusiasm and skills in maths.

Partners: Creative Partnerships, A New Direction, Southwark Park Primary School

The Princess Murderer by Geniwate and Deena Larsen
The Free Culture Game by Molleindustria
The Marriage by Rod Humble
Samorost 2 by Amanita Design
The Graveyard by Tale of Tales
Gravitation by Jason Rohrer

discussed by Edward Picot

This article is co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange.

Computer games enjoy a special position in the canon of new media art. One of the most distinctive features of new media is its interactivity, and because computer games are inherently interactive they have always attracted a good deal of attention from new media theoreticians. They seem to offer the opportunity to create artforms which are participative rather than dictatorial in structure, and thus to redefine the relationship between artist and audience. No longer will audience-members simply act as passive recipients of whatever the artist chooses to put in front of them: instead, through their interactivity, they will become co-creators.

Oddly enough this line of thought has been particularly important in the field of hyperliterature. This is partly for historical reasons: in the 1970s and 1980s home computers had little or no graphics capabilities, and an adventure-game interface entirely based on text and imagination was a good way of sidestepping the problem. Early “interactive fiction”, as it became known, derived a good deal of its inspiration and functionality from the hugely-popular dice-and-rulebook role-playing games of the 1970s, notably Dungeons and Dragons – which in turn derived their inspiration largely from Adult Fantasy or Sword and Sorcery novels. Computerised role-playing games, therefore, were literary in style not only because they were initially text-based, but because they had a literary ancestry – and this ancestry remained very much in evidence at least up until Myst, initially released in 1993, which was the biggest-selling PC game of all time until The Sims replaced it in 2002.

The interactive fiction genre was also associated with hyperliterature because it reached its creative peak in the 1980s, at the same time as hypertext fiction was coming into existence via Hypercard (a system of interlinked hypertext pages, created prior to the Web itself, which was pre-installed on Mac computers from 1987 onwards). The students and young academics, mainly American, who embraced hypertext fiction as a new literary form were often quick to embrace interactive fiction too, and it has remained a cornerstone of hyperliterary theory in the USA ever since. The New Media Reader (2003), edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, included not only a good deal of discussion of early computer games, but a CD with emulations of “Spacewar!”, “Missile Command”, “Adventure”, and “Karateka”. Likewise, Volume One of the Electronic Literature Collection (http://collection.eliterature.org/) (2006) included a number of interactive fictions: “All Roads”, “Whom the Telling Changed”, “Bad Machine”, “Galatea” and “Savoir-Faire”.

The insistence on interactivity as an important element of hyperliterature – and on computerised role-playing games as a paradigm of interactive art – has always begged a number of questions, however. First of all, champions of “traditional” literature are inclined to argue that new media theorists are starting from an incorrect model of the relationship between author and reader. Readers do not receive text “passively” – they interpret it, and many modern(ist) texts, far from spoon-feeding their readers with predigested messages, are deliberately written in fragmented, ambiguous or enigmatic ways so as to oblige the audience to make interpretations. If this is granted, then the claim that interactive fiction is “liberating” its readers by re-defining their relationship with its authors begins to look simplistic.

Furthermore, some new media practitioners themselves have come to the conclusion that far from setting the audience free, involving them in a game rather than simply giving them text to read is trading one form of control for another. Geniwate and Deena Larsen, for example, writing in about their piece The Princess Murderer in 2003, commented that they “wanted to create this frustration of power and powerlessness as a response to early hypertext works that placed readers as coauthor…” (http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=76). The work – pointedly subtitled “No Exit” – deliberately uses interactivity as a means of entrapping readers or viewers rather than liberating them.

But the fundamental question, which haunts all attempts to create art from computer games, is whether it is really possible to reconcile the two. It could be argued that art requires a different kind of concentration from a game, and uses a different part of the mind – and that the more intensely you play a game, the less inclined you will be to pay attention to any artistic qualities it may possess.

The Princess Murderer exemplifies the problem. It isn’t by any means a fully-fledged computer game, but a hyperfiction which incorporates a number of game-style design elements. It’s cleverly-conceived and well-written, but its Achilles’ heel is the fact that the more you engage with its game-playing aspects – basically, clicking rapidly from one “page” to another in order to change the scores displayed at the bottom of the screen – the more difficult it becomes to pay attention to its literary content.

Another more recent example of the same difficulty is the Free Culture Game (2008), from Italian collective Molleindustria. This game bills itself as “playable theory”, and as the introductory screens explain it illustrates the conflict between the market, where “knowledge is commodified and sold”, and “the common”, where “knowledge is cooperatively created and shared”. The common is a white circle in the middle of the screen, inhabited by a number of green stick-men with lightbulbs popping out of their heads. Round the outside of the white circle prowls “the vectorialist”, a rapacious copyright symbol which magnetises and gobbles up the lightbulbs unless you, the player, can guide them back towards the green men with your cursor. If the vectorialist gobbles up all the lightbulbs, the green men turn grey and stop producing new ones. Again, it’s a nice piece of design, but the first problem is that its meaning is too thoroughly explained in the introductory screens – the vectorialist’s aim is to “copyright ideas and create scarcity in the common”, and “people who can’t access knowledge in the common will stop producing new ideas and turn into passive consumers”. The game itself merely illustrates these statements without developing them. On the other hand, once you start to play, you quickly become absorbed by the slightly-irritating challenge of trying to keep ideas away from the vectorialist, and the trickiness of this task distracts you from the meaning of the game, instead of reinforcing it.

The same problem even haunts Rod Humble’s celebrated computer art-game The Marriage (2006). Humble, according to Wikipedia, “is the executive producer for the Sims division of the video game company Electronic Arts since 2004. He has been contributing to the development of games since 1990, and is best known for his work on the Electronic Arts titles, The Sims 2 and The Sims 3.” The Marriage has been widely written up and generally well received within the gaming community. It starts with a blue square and a pink square floating towards each other until they “kiss” – whereupon the blue square gets smaller and fainter, while the pink one gets larger and more distinct. Through the screen fall a number of coloured circles. Contact with these circles makes the squares larger, unless the circle is black, in which case it makes them smaller. Over time the pink square fades, and can only be made distinct again by contact with the blue one – but this contact makes the blue square smaller and fainter. If either square becomes too small or indistinct, the game will be over. You can make them float towards each other by mousing over them – and the trick is to allow them to drift apart until they have “eaten” some of the circles, and thus enlarged themselves, but to bring them back for a “kiss” in time to prevent the pink square from disappearing. If you can manage to keep this going, then as the game progresses the screen-background will go through a number of colour changes, from blue to purple to green to pink and eventually to black – and your couple will then disintegrate in a firework-display of tiny pink and blue squares, which is the closest you get to “winning”.

The main thing which makes us regard this game as a work of art is its title, The Marriage. If it was called “Keep the Squares Alive” it would probably never occur to us to search for meanings in the game rather than just playing it; but because of the title, we immediately identify the blue square as male, the pink as female, and their drifting-together as the start of a relationship. As a knock-on effect, we feel inclined to interpret all the other game-elements symbolically as well – the falling circles are life-events, the black circles are bad things happening, the differently-coloured screen-backgrounds represent different stages of the marriage, and so forth. The directness with which The Marriage presents itself to us and demands this effort of interpretation is undeniably poetic in its effect – but there are problems. The first one is that the colours blue and pink, although they enable us to identify one square as male and the other as female, suggest a rather stereotypical view of the sexes, and various other aspects of the game seem questionable in the same way. Why does the blue square get larger and better-defined as it drifts around colliding with circles, whereas the pink square gets larger to a lesser degree, and keeps fading? Why can the pink square only become well-defined again by re-colliding with the blue, and why does this contact make pink larger and blue smaller? But the second problem is the familiar one: after you have played the game for a while, you stop thinking about what the various symbols on-screen represent, and just want to keep the squares going for as long as possible. The artistic meaning of the game fades into the background, and the activity of playing it takes over.

Despite these flaws, The Marriage undeniably has an artistic impact. Humble himself has written an extremely suggestive article about the artistic potential of games – “Game Rules as Art”, published in The Escapist in April 2006. In this article he argues that

…the rules of a game can give an artistic statement independent of its other components.

– and as an example of what he means, he cites (amongst others) Snakes and Ladders:

As a lesson about life’s nature, Snakes and Ladders is interesting work: Firstly, it is entirely luck based, and secondly, no matter how well someone appears to be doing, there is always a chance he will land on a snake… and be whisked back down the board.

So far so convincing, but Humble is on less certain ground when he argues that the power of game-rules derives from childhood psychology:

I believe that childhood play is about practising within the rules designed for adulthood, testing them out in a pretend world first. Later on, grownups deconstruct literature or art for rules (and the ways they have been tested) in a similar fashion.

This seems rather a simplistic view, both of childhood play and its purposes, and of grownup attitudes towards literature and art. Humble would like to establish rules as the common denominator between games and art, but although some types of creative work are undoubtedly rule-governed – a sonnet, a fugue, a lumiere video or an Oulipo project, for example – the rules in these cases differ from game-rules, in that they affect the artists and their endeavours, rather than the audience and their interactions; and it remains far from clear whether rules are a defining characteristic of the arts right across the spectrum. But Humble goes on to categorise different types of game in terms of whether their rules are created in advance or on-the-fly, suggesting that there are four categories:

1. Rules are created in advance, and fully understood by the players as they play (eg. Snakes and Ladders)
2. Rules are created in advance, but too complex to be remembered, and therefore a book or umpire is required to clarify them during play (eg. Dungeons and Dragons)
3. Rules are created in advance, but modified during play (eg. “professional military umpired war games”)
4. Rules are created when the game starts, and modified during play (“This type includes children’s play or make believe”)

It is in the fourth of these categories that Humble’s over-emphasis on rules becomes problematic. “Children’s play or make believe” is not necessarily rule-governed at all. To a child, the phrase “Let’s play!” means something different from “Let’s play a game!” The second phrase means “Let’s play a game with predefined rules”, whereas the first means “Let’s have fun”, and may involve rules or may not. When my brother was six or seven years old, his favourite pastime was digging holes in the back garden. Rules were imposed on him – “Don’t you dig up my flowerbeds!” – but these were nothing to do with his enjoyment of the activity. Nor was it in any direct way a preparation for adult life. Was digging holes a game? Not by any normal definition. Was it play? Certainly. Running and jumping, make-pretend, pulling faces, standing on one leg, skipping, singing, painting and playing Monopoly are all types of play, but not all of them are games, because not all of them have rules. In other words, games – recreational activities defined by their rules – are a subset of play; and play is a spectrum of behaviour which also includes the arts (such as painting and make-pretend).

Humble’s attempt to create a link between games and art by suggesting that both activities are rule-governed is ultimately unconvincing. But this is not to say that there cannot be common ground between the two, or to deny that – as in the Snakes and Ladders example – rules can sometimes convey meaning. And where Humble’s analysis is really useful is that it allows him to see through what most people regard as the most important aspects of computer games – “representation systems” and “simulation”, as he puts it – to the inner structure. It is this insight which allows him to drastically strip away so many of the computer game’s most familiar gizmos and strategies – the levels, the lives, the point-scoring systems, the sound-effects and most of the visual effects too – in The Marriage, until he arrives at something which combines some of the visual qualities of abstract art with some of the economy of suggestion of a modern poem.

Simplification of format seems to be a common feature amongst the more successful computerised art-games. Samorost 2 (2005), from the Czech company Amanita Design, is another example. It’s basically a puzzle-solving game. A little cartoon man lives on a small planet with a dog and a pear-orchard. The game begins with two aliens landing in a rocket, stealing his pears and abducting his dog. The little man launches his own rocket and sets off in pursuit. The rest of the game takes us through a number of screens as the little man attempts to get his dog back, but finds himself confronted by one difficulty after another. In each screen there is a puzzle which has to be solved before he can make any further progress – in one, for example, he comes to a flooded chamber and has to work out how to drain away the water before he can reach the submerged exit. This is accomplished by pulling a flush mechanism and then turning a stopcock to prevent the water from coming back.

One reason why Samorost 2 works in artistic terms is because it doesn’t hurry us. You can take as much time as you want (or need) working out the puzzle on each screen, which means that your attention isn’t dragged away from the game’s artistic aspects by the need to get on with playing it. And the artistic aspects are well worth noticing. The graphic design is wonderfully quirky, full of textures such as bark, moss and rust which give the Samorost universe a unique identity – small-scale, retro and homely – not at all what you would normally expect from a science-fiction computer game. There are also numerous flashes of humour. At the start of the game, for example, the little man has to bang a dozing robot over the head to make him open an iron gate; in order to do this he has to steal a mallet from a slug-monster; and he obtains the mallet by concocting a potion which makes the slug-monster drunk.

What takes the game one step further into artistic territory, however, is that as the little man reaches the end of his quest we learn why the aliens stole his pears and abducted his dog in the first place. He finds himself in a pear-pickling factory. The aliens, it turns out, serve a hedonistic slug-king addicted to pickled pears, and they have imprisoned the dog in a treadmill (with a sausage just out of reach to keep him running), which drives a fan to keep the slug-king cool. It’s all very light-hearted, but even so it does give us the feeling that in playing Samorost we are doing more than just solving a series of puzzles: we are exploring a world, and unearthing its secrets.

One last aspect of Samorost worth noticing is our relationship with the little man himself. Because he has quite a distinct character of his own, when we play the game we don’t really feel that we are inside him. Again, the pace of the game helps with this effect. When you play a high-pressure game in which, so to speak, you are constantly having to fight or run for your life, there is no room for a sense of separation between yourself and your avatar. In Samorost, on the other hand, there is an odd and persistent sense that it’s the little man himself who is solving the puzzles on each screen – even though it’s really us. In the flooded chamber, we’re the ones who have to work out how to pull the flush and turn the stopcock in order to get rid of the water – yet when we succeed, we feel as if the little man has done it. And this sense of watching a character from the outside as he makes progress through the game is part of what makes Samorost feel more like a story than a conventional computer game.

Interestingly, this sense of separation from the central character is also a feature of Tale of Tales’ 2008 game The Graveyard. In this game, our task as players is simply to guide an old lady along a path through the middle of a cemetery, until she comes to a bench in front of a chapel. When she sits on this bench the game enters a non-interactive sequence, in which a song on the theme of mortality is sung in Flemish, with subtitles. After the song is over we are able to control the old lady again, and our task is to walk her back out of the cemetery, which completes the game. The only variation is that if we pay $5 for the full version, the old lady may die while she is sitting on the bench.

A lot of the discussion about this game has focussed on two questions: firstly whether it’s really a game at all, and secondly whether it would have been just as effective as a short film, given that the middle section is non-interactive, and that your options as a player are strictly limited even when you are supposedly “in control” of the avatar. On the first question, Michael Samyn himself (one of the co-founders of Tale of Tales, the other being Aureia Harvey) responds by attacking the boundary which separates games from art:

We don’t mind calling our work games because we believe that contemporary computer games have already crossed the borders of traditional games. Most of them just don’t realize it yet. They don’t realize that the most interesting aspect of their design is the way in which they express the story: through the environment, the animations, the colour, the lighting, etc… [But] when we talk about “story” … we don’t mean linear plot-based narrative constructions… we refer to the meanings of the game, the content, its theme… With Tale of Tales, we try to develop a new form of interactive entertainment. One that exploits the medium’s capacity of immersion and simulation to tell its story… It is the experience that matters, not the length of the game or the number of levels or enemies or weapons, etcetera. (http://tale-of-tales.com/blog/the-graveyard-post-mortem/)

These remarks also shape an answer to the second question – whether The Graveyard would have been just as effective as a short film. Samyn’s argument is that a computer game possesses qualities of interaction, immersion and simulation which cannot be reproduced in other media, and which make players experience the content of the game quite differently from a film or a written narrative. Interactivity is the key ingredient, but not the only one. In The Graveyard, the three-dimensional environment also plays a very important part. The virtual cemetery through which we guide the old lady is displayed on the screen in two dimensions, but it was created using 3D software, and the sense that we are moving into the cemetery as the old lady walks, rather than looking at a framed picture of it, is central to the feel of the piece. The 3D modelling gives a feeling of perspectives changing all around us as we move. As in Samorost, playing the game is a way of exploring a world: and as in Tale of Tales’ other games, The Endless Forest and (most recently) The Path, this sense is greatly augmented not only by effects of light and shade – clouds passing overhead, turning the environment from sunny to shady and back again – and by the sound-environment – the noise of traffic from outside the cemetery, birds twittering, a dog barking – but also by a sense of what we can’t see: a feeling that the three dimensional structures in the game are blocking our view at times, which implies that there is more in the game-world than we are being shown.

In some respects the game’s most important qualities are negative ones: it makes its statement as much in terms of what it isn’t, and what it doesn’t do, as in terms of what it is and does. It is such a deliberately dialectical and provocative piece, a poke in the eye for “traditional” computer games design, that it’s really no wonder it has provoked howls of outrage from the diehard gaming community. (“The Graveyard… infuriates me. I think it’s a pretentious, ineffective waste of the interactive medium, and I hate it.” – Anthony Burch, http://www.destructoid.com/indie-nation-39-the-graveyard-110611.phtml, July 2008.) It’s a game set in a cemetery; the central character is a decrepit old lady; you can’t make her jump or fly or even walk very fast; there’s no point-scoring, no way of winning, no challenge to be overcome and no skill involved in playing. Furthermore the range of things you can do as a player is so strictly limited that the word “interactive” is almost a misnomer. Almost, but not quite. What nobody seems to have picked up on is that the tension between what we expect to be able to do as computer-game players and what we are allowed to do within The Graveyard is one of the game’s most important messages. The sense of frustration, thwarted expectation and powerlessness is intentional. This is what old age and death are like: you run out of options: all you can do is follow a pre-ordained path. But within this grim message there is a hint of positive philosophy. Life, the game seems to be saying, is not necessarily about doing, achieving and winning: it’s about experiencing. Your aim should not be to overcome the universe in which you find yourself, not to win prizes from it, but to attune yourself to it. Beyond The Graveyard’s critique of “traditional” computer-game design lies a wider critique of our consumerist, achievement-oriented, individualistic society.

In The Graveyard it isn’t just the content of the game which is significant, but the underlying structure: it isn’t just the fact that we recognise the gaming environment as a cemetery and the avatar as a little old lady; it’s also the fact that our options as players are very strictly limited and it’s impossible to make the game go very fast. This use of structure to convey meaning is something which The Graveyard shares with Jason Rohrer’s Gravitation. In Gravitation, your avatar is a pixellated man, who you initially discover standing next to a fireplace, in a small illuminated square surrounded by blackness. If you walk to the left, the square travels with you, and you discover a yellow-haired child with a red ball. The child throws the ball towards you, wanting you to play. If you get underneath the ball and bounce it back towards the child, the child starts to emit love-hearts, the illuminated screen around your avatar expands, and you can see that above the room in which you are playing there is a maze of upper levels. After you have played with the child for a bit, the illuminated area around your avatar expands to its maximum, flames start to come out of the top of your avatar’s head, and by pressing the space-bar you can jump up into the upper levels and explore them. They are full of stars, which tumble down to the bottom as soon as you touch them. After a short while the illuminated square begins to shrink again, and your jumping power declines, which means you have to go back down to the bottom to refresh your powers.

When you get there, you find the child walled in by the stars you have collected, which have turned to blocks of ice with scores on them. You can free the child – and collect your points – by pushing these blocks into the fireplace, where they melt. Then if you play with the child again your powers of inspiration come back, and you can once more leap into the upper levels. You can only do this a couple of times, however, before you find that when you return to the bottom of the game the child has vanished and there is nothing left but the red ball. This is the game’s most intensely emotional moment: the illuminated square has shrunk back to its smallest dimensions, and you find yourself walking your avatar up and down in the dark, in an attempt to discover where the child has got to. The game is time-limited (at eight minutes), but it normally goes on for a while after the child’s disappearance. Furthermore, the illuminated square expands again after a while, and your leaping power comes back – which gives you a chance to reflect on how different the leaping and star-collecting feel when there’s nobody else in the game apart from yourself.

Rohrer describes this as a game “about mania, melancholia, and the creative process”. It’s also, of course, about the relationship between a parent and a child. Playing with your child fills you with inspiration, but in order to pursue your ideas (or, to put it another way, in order to use them as a means of earning points) you have to abandon the child and risk not only disappointing but losing him or her. As in The Graveyard, the limits placed on what you can do as a player are integral to the meaning of the piece – you can only acquire the ability to jump to the upper levels of the game, and thus to score points, by playing with your child; but when you get into the upper levels you can’t see the child any more. Unlike The Graveyard, however, Gravitation has more of the attributes of an orthodox computer-game: point-scoring, a time-limit and an element of skill (jumping from ledge to ledge in the upper levels requires some dexterity). Where the game departs from orthodoxy is that it seems to suggest that point-scoring may be a waste of time, or perhaps even harmful. It doesn’t really get you anywhere – it doesn’t, for example, earn you access to another level – and when you return to the bottom level you will either find that the stars you collected have walled your child into a corner, or that your child has disappeared entirely.

In this way, like The Graveyard, Gravitation seems to be offering a critique of the normal game-playing mindset. If you don’t go into the upper levels at all, you can spend the entire game playing with the child, and the child won’t disappear – but you won’t score any points. Thus you can play the game “safely”, but only by resolutely ignoring much of its potential. As soon as you fully engage with it, and start trying to score points, you gain in one way but lose in another. The effect is one of irony and complexity. Instead of the usual game-playing credo, that winning equates with virtue, Gravitation seems to be suggesting that in life there are no clear-cut winners and losers, only difficult questions with no correct answers.

From these examples there seems little doubt that the answer to the question whether computer games can also be art is yes. It may be possible to object that The Graveyard pushes so far in the direction of art that it ceases to qualify as a game, but this accusation cannot be levelled at The Marriage, Samorost or Gravitation. Furthermore, although there is an ever-present danger that game-play and artistic appreciation may be at odds with one another, these games show that there are various strategies which can be used to get around the difficulty. The first is to use the structure of the game itself for symbolic purposes. The second is to slow the game right down, eliminate time-constraints and do away with the need for players to display skill or dexterity – thus allowing them more freedom to concentrate on the game’s artistic aspects. The third is to create a sense of separation between the player and the game’s central character, so that the unfolding of the game becomes less like a personal challenge and more like the unfolding of a story.

But the most obvious strategy, used by all of these games, is simply to choose an unusual game-scenario and develop it in an unorthodox manner: a marriage, a little man trying to get his dog back from aliens, an old lady visiting a cemetery, or a man getting inspiration by playing with his child. All of these games make us stop and think simply because they are different from what we would normally expect.

According to an article Esquire magazine published about Jason Rohrer in 2008,

Clint Hocking, a designer at Ubisoft best known for Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, was so blown away by Passage [Rohrer’s previous game] that he made it a focus of his Game Developers Conference talk earlier this year. In front of an audience full of the industry’s most influential game designers, Hocking growled, “Why can’t we make a game that fucking means something? A game that matters? You know?”… Then he put up a slide of another small indie game, the Marriage, coded by Rohrer’s friend Rod Humble. “I think it sucks ass that two guys tinkering away in their spare time have done as much or more to advance the industry this year than the other hundred thousand of us working fifty-hour weeks,” said Hocking. (www.esquire.com)

But the fact that these games are produced by individuals or small teams is significant in itself, of course. It’s far easier for individuals and small teams to come up with something really original than for large organisations working fifty-hour weeks and locked into an industrial cycle of production and mass-marketing. The problem in the past has always been that such small-scale individualistic work has found it difficult to reach an audience: but the Web has changed the laws of the marketplace to some extent; and the Web’s potential for bringing really original work to the attention of interested parties right across the developed world may be the real key to the future development of computer games as art.

copyright – Edward Picot, May 2009

Art and Revolution – Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century
Gerald Raunig
Semiotext(e) 2007
ISBN 1584350466

“Art and Revolution – Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century” by Gerald Raunig is a book that presents and contextualises artists engagement with revolutionary moments over the last one hundred and fifty years. The history of artists’ involvement with the revolutionary movements of the modern era that it presents is compelling for artists looking for something more than the art market. And the theoretical framework that it uses as the context for this history is surprisingly pertinent to the post-credit-crunch new world order.

Starting with a youthful revolutionary called Wagner who after struggling to bring about the revolution in Germany later went on to write the occasional opera, focussing on the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik counter-revolution, then continuing through the Situationists and May ’68 to the anti-globalization movement, Raunig presents the moments in modern history where real artists and real revolution, or at least its potential, have touched. The more recent moments, notably the anti-globalization protests at the G8 summit in Genoa, are less convincing as moments both of revolutionary and artistic potential. But they contrast informatively with the earlier examples.

I have studied both European History and History of Art but within the first few pages Raunig had told me things I had not even suspected about well known cultural figures and tied their activities into a critical framework that added to understanding of their activities rather than judging them as simple failures to live up to an imagined revolutionary ideal. Raunig does use the language and concepts of contemporary academic Marxist criticism but this is standard for current art writing and the history he presents is explicated rather than obscured by the social and political historical context that this provides.

Raunig neither romanticises nor dismisses the very real achievements and failings of artists caught up in the revolutionary moments of what he calls the long Twentieth Century. When art and revolution meet the result can be folly, careerism, empty gestures, cowardly complicity or false dawns. But there are moments where artists have helped to make the new social order not just concrete and visible. Iconoclasm such as Courbet’s tearing down of the Vendome Column in the Paris Commune, and iconography such as Stalinism’s Socialist Realism have both played their very real and very effective part in destroying old political and social orders and introducing new ones.

“Transversal Activism” was written after Francis Fukayama’s risible neoliberal end-of-history claims had been proven wrong by the rise of political Islam but before it had also been proven wrong by the credit crunch. The credit bubble bursting has made it harder to claim that the revolutionary moment has entirely passed. Revolution is not imminent, but nor does a world where it might be possible seem unthinkable any more when the global economy has recently been described as being months or even just hours from collapse. And the clear class content of the act of socialising private losses of fictitious capital have started even the most Fukuyaman observers conscious of class politics once more.

Aileen Derieg’s translation for the Semiotext(e) English language edition deserves recognition for its clarity and flow. Semiotext(e)’s mission to bring the best continental philosophy to an Anglophone audience is well served by such competent translation.

Revolution may not be imminent, but with the art market, the global economy and the planet’s ecosystem all in danger of collapse more and more artists are looking for models for genuine political engagement in art rather than “career building bullshit that cares”, to quote Art & Language. “Transversal Activism” provides engaging and instructive case studies of political and artistic success and failure at moments of political possibility contextualised for a contemporary artworld and academic audience. Raunig has produced a very readable and instructive set of historical case studies not so much of praxis as of actually doing something.

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Franz Thalmair interviews Daphne Dragona.

“Tagging”, “posting”, “sharing”, “commenting”, “rating” and … once again, the other way around: affective and opinion-driven practices of exchange seem to be essential key issues for the everyday behaviour on the so called Social Web. But, what happens with us, the users of commercially hosted platforms, when we share our experiences and comment on opinions and statements brought in by other users? Do those mechanisms of interaction have any effect on the clever systems of pre-defined templates we move in? Tag ties and affective spies is the title of an online-exhibition which presents a selection of Internet-based artworks that highlight different aspects of the Social Web. With the exhibition, hosted by the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST), curator of the show Daphne Dragona asks if we are really connecting or if we are also forming the structure of the Social Web itself?

The linked artworks reflect some of the controversies brought up by the inflationary use of Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Delicious, just to name a few of the most popular examples of Web 2.0: We Feel Fine (2006) by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, for example, refers to the Social Web’s most basic human and affective character, its influence on our everyday lives and the inability of the users to transcend mental and physical borders, as do Gregory Chatonsky’s L’Attente – The Waiting (2007) and Folded-In (2008) by Personal Cinema & The Erasers. Wayne Clements’ IOUs (2008) tests the possibilities of forming content, whereas Internet Delivers People (2008) by Ramsay Stirling visualises the fact that a user still remains a victim of the companies, offering now his subjectivity as a product. Furthermore, the presented artworks point out how Social Media themselves can record and reflect the current trends of the users employing their own contributions (A Tag’s Life (2008), by George Holsheimer, et al) and how they can construct fake realities (The Big Plot (2008/2009), by Paolo Cirio). With a sense of humour, Christophe Bruno refers to the redemption of language by the internet companies in Dadameter (2008) and finally Jodi (Delicious – Winning Information, 2008) and Les Liens Invisibles (Subvertr, 2007) encourage users to escape the conventions and the formalisms the Social Net cleverly imposes.

Who is wearing ties? Who are the spies?

The title of the exhibition, Tag ties and affective spies, is referring to us, the users of the social media and to our current modes of connecting and socialising. I think tagging is one of the most interesting features of the social web. Have we entered the “I tag therefore I am” period? Maybe, as tagging seems to imply a number of issues for the social web. It refers to our subjectivity as it is a process of naming, defining, highlighting our uploaded material. Our choices and order of tags, our taxonomies known as folksonomies, create interrelations and interactions for the users on today’s web. Tags are about associating content, and therefore about sharing, linking with others. They are about attracting attention, connecting and building relationships. Tags are about us and the others.

Spying is a fundamental issue in this relationship and it is basically a form of surveillance based on affection. As we are given so many opportunities to express our feelings in the social platforms today, as we are exposing ourselves constantly with our own will, surveillance is becoming a unconscious habit. Exposure justifies it all. In this complex environment that there could be no better instance for the market to observe, to evaluate and to take advantage of the data offered in order to cover our “needs” and encourage the continuous growth of new ones.

In the exhibition concept you raise the question if users of Social Media sites are really connecting or if they are also forming the structure of those sites. What is the difference between the two activities?

This is one of the main contradictions the social web presents. What are we being promised by all these platforms? That we can be creative, that we can be ourselves and that we can connect with others. While great possibilities might be opening up with the social web, at the same time we are asked to play double roles; to be spectators but also actors; to be consumers but also producers. There is no social web without us. There is no content and no structure without our participation. We are no longer in the web era of the 90s when pages were static and we were discussing authorship and access. Now in the user generated period, the web in constantly being formed by us, by our images, our videos, our posts, our tags, our networks, our tastes, our friends, our own voluntary input. It is very interesting to see how the political notions of immaterial labour and affective labour, as defined by Lazzarato and Hardt respectively have found their expression in the social web. Leisure and work have become one today because it is our own will, interest and affection that are being invested to support the social platforms. We are all cultural workers in the internet.

Many of the presented artworks do have a playful approach to Social Media. Is this characteristic for nowadays use of Social Media in general, or is it the artistic point of view?

I find that play has a central role in the social media. Not only because most of our activities within them have a playful side – lets think about the ways of interacting, of playing roles and of competing in the social platforms. But also because we have the tendency to play, to cheat, to doubt, to transcend the norms and the rules that the social media impose.

The works presented are playful in this sense. They examine the features of the social media, in order to decode them and reverse them; I see their processes as playful tactics that succeed in revealing their mechanisms and functioning. They somehow remind us of our right to disobey that we often forget. So, this aspect refers to us all – no it is not an artistic point of view exclusively. Irony and humour merged with play are introduced to form a critique that can be exercised by any user.

Folded-In, one of the projects presented in the show, is a multiuser online game by Personal Cinema & The Erasers where content as well as form are generated from YouTube and related to the topic of war. Why do you think it is important for Internet-based art to reflect the mechanisms of the medium it is settled in?

This is an issue that reminds us of the net art of the 90s and of other forms of media art – game art mods is another characteristic example- where creators are using the platforms so as to critisize them. Such an approach presupposes a good knowledge from the side of the creators. They need to be participants, residents, players in the social web in order to comment on it, to transform it, to reveal it. So my answer to your question is positive but principally for one reason; for the audience. Who do we – or most accurately the creators- want to address this to?

The main audience would probably be the users of the social media, the people who use them as a tool of communication, of socialisation, as a mode of entertainment, of information and education. It would be absurd to talk about social media through sculpture or painting – although this also does happen… -. If you want to talk to poeple directly you talk to them in their own language and within their natural environment.

How could the online exhibition be presented in a physical setting? Do you think this would add any value – as well as to the art/artists as for the spectators?

This period the exhibition is presented physically in two venues: at the media lounge of the National Museum of Contemporary Art – Athens, and in the exhibition space of Enter festival in Prague. Yes, I believe it does add value for several reasons that interconnect. Firstly, I believe that through a physical installation, institutions can communicate the information to a wider audience that might not be familiar with net based art. Secondly, acknowledge and support in terms of presentation is very important for an art that is contradictory to institutions by its nature and it is out of the marketing system. Furthermore, such works, as the projects on social media, can raise fruitful discussions about issues of art, society and politics and build bridges between institutions, artists and visitors as they are based on platforms that the people know and use.

The project is settled within an institutional framework: How do you think that a museum like the EMST can come to terms with the artworks the 21st century “networked society” develops when “everything becomes changeable, interconnected and rhizomatic; personified, exposed and exploitable”?

That’s a good bet for the future. Will it work? We shall see. Because in a way we are talking about vertical versus horizontal structures. If one absorbs the other, then their nature will fatally alter. I think changes occur and adaptations happen that bring edges closer together. Museums are not what they were in the past. You can not have a network museum – at least not yet – but museums do work in networks today. They also aim to work as public spaces, as environments open to collaborations and discussions. They are trying to bring more people in and allow them to have roles, to be active spectators. I think that museums are learning from the forms of interaction from the virtual public spaces and are developing environments that respond to today’s needs. Artworks are not the peculiarity we should pay attention to – they are only part of the phenomenon. Museums are changing as society is changing itself in an interconnected world.

What was the latest Social Media site you opened an account at?

Dont ask! It was my blog believe it or not… a month ago… I wanted to start it for a couple of years now and I only recently decided to go ahead…

Do you still use it?

Well yes… but as a site mostly. I’ve uploaded the info I wanted and sometime soon… I hope i ll make it more lively. Blogs need energy… I was always admiring bloggers for the time they were giving into this.

About Daphne Dragona
Daphne Dragona is a media arts curator, based in Athens. Her exhibitions and events the last few years have focused on the notion of play and its merging with art as a form of networking and resistance. She has been a collaborator of Laboral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial (Spain) for the international exhibitions “Gameworld” and “Homo Ludens Ludens” and of Fournos Center for Digital Culture (Greece) for the International Art and Technology Festival, Medi@terra. She is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Mass Media & Communication of the University in Athens conducting a research on social media and a member of the Media Arts Collective Personal Cinema.

The first NODE.London Season of Media Arts in 2006 was conceived as an experiment in tools and structures of cooperation as invented or adapted by artists, technologists, and activists, many of whom were committed to ideas of social change through their practice. It was to be an experiment in radical openness. Not just to be confined to participatory artistic processes and events but also applied to the method of organisation.

This text by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett is a reflection on the NODE.London “experiment”, its context, its cultures and the make up of its events, infrastructure and organisation. It points to some earlier grassroots media arts festivals in London and gives a bare­bones description of the components of the NODE.London 2006 season. Taking Felix Stalder’s analysis of the difference between Open Source and Open Culture, this text looks at how different ideas and approaches to networks and openness were played out in the first season. With a focus on organisational matters, it further makes some judgements about where these were fruitful and where they were problematic. Finally it looks at the work of OpenOrganizations as one example of alternative frameworks for grassroots organisations and suggests that by directly addressing the particular problem of organisation, it might be possible and worthwhile to support the development of grassroots media arts infrastructure in London, including the possible iterations of a NODE.London season.

Download full text here (pdf 640k)

Also published and translated into German by the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (EIPCP) 2008

Furtherfield in support of Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day was conceived of and promoted by Suw Charman-Anderson as a way of “bringing women in technology to the fore”. It was successful in motivating nearly 2000 people to publish a blog post about a woman in technology whom they admired. In support of Ada Lovelace Day we invited women working in media arts to join the NetBehaviour.org email list for a week, between 23rd and 30th March. They were invited to post information about their own work alongside the work of other women who had inspired them in their own practice. Some names came up a number of times but with different stories and for very different reasons. NetBehaviour provided a context for sharing and discussing influences and tracing connections: artistic, practical, theoretical, technical, historical, personal. For readability this edited list does not include all of the discussion but this can be traced back through the NetBehaviour archives. Some contributors were anxious about the many excellent people who may have been missed out. We know this is not a definitive survey or list but it is an excellent resource and just one possible starting point for anyone wanting to know more about women working in media art.

A big THANKS to all of those – women and men – who contributed to this tribute!

Click here to view project:
http://www.furtherfield.org/ada_lovelace.php

The 4th Radiator festival. Going Underground – Surveillance and Sousveillance.

“The more perfect civilisation is, the less occasion has it for government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself…”
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine.

Many readers will remember their fave sci-fi, fantasy and social-political movies, exploring and relating to themes of humanity’s civil liberties threatened by technological means. One movie which springs to mind is Enemy of the State, starring Will Smith as Robert Clayton Dean, released in 1998. The film was about a group of rogue NSA agents who kill a Congressman in a political-related murder, and then try to cover up the murder by destroying evidence and intimidating witnesses. It explored and exploited our worries, fantasies and paranoias around technology being used against us by those who have power within the realms of government agencies. In contrast to such adventurous and playful films with their stylish visions and high-octane, scenarios; we are presently faced with something less imaginative and sadly, more predictable. In the real world, as in ‘real’ digital networks and everyday human environments, the creep of surveillance has entered everyday life.

We have emerged into a complex world, inter-meshed in digital and virtual technologies, harbouring social networks and on-line communities, alongside the ever expansive growth of mobile and portable platforms; facilitating us to share with others our moments of immediacy. The convenience of connecting with others has opened a multitude of doors to a complicated era. We have become part of a larger world which is also shrinking at the same time. We are globalized citizens, united not only through economic work-related directives, but data. Behaviour related products for markets thrive on trying to find out what we are doing and thinking. We are a rich resource, fresh territories for knowledge. Digital data about us, ‘civilians’ is big business. Many individuals and organisations including artists, are cashing in on the rush to make money out of our digital identities and behaviours. Whether it be in the supermarket, with I.D cards, on the Internet or by tracing people’s movements on the streets.

The Radiator Festival and Symposium was curated and organised by Anette Schafer and Miles Chalcraft, co-founders and continual main instigators of Trampoline with support from Matt Davenport. Trampoline has hosted and curated events in both Nottingham and Berlin since 1997. Exploits in the Wireless City is the 4th Radiator festival and symposium to date, which lasted from 13th to 24th January 2009, 10 days of Exhibitions, Events, Screenings, Music, Artists’ Talks and more. This time the main theme was about engaging in an active shared dialogue, around the development of digital networks transforming and effecting people’s everyday lives, whether it be public or private space. “In its critique, Radiator will question the opportunities, future strategies and implementations that artists and communities face when learning to act within these new hybrid city spaces.”

My visit was on a different day from the symposium and even though I usually enjoy a good hearty debate, it felt important not to dilute my experience. Nottingham was given a quality treat outside of its usual, consumer orientated vices in witnessing and being part of this festival. The art was accessible from different venues around the city, the Surface Gallery, Hand and Heart gallery, Broadway Media Centre and also the QUAD in Derby.

For the festival a commission was set up, called Going Underground, inviting artists to submit work about surveillance and Sousveillance. The artists selected, were Glenn Davidson (exponentially), N55 Intelligence Agency (NIA), Folke Kobberling & Martin Kaltwasser, The Office of Community Sousveillance, Christian Nold, as well as the guest artists Stanza, Sebastian Craig and Candice Jacobs.

Before we move straight into exploring some of the work featured as part of the Going Underground commission. I need to lay out some context…

In 2006 a research document called A Report on the Surveillance Society For the Information Commissioner was published. Produced by a group of academics called the Surveillance Studies Network. The report was presented to the 28th International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners’ Conference in London, hosted by the Information Commissioner’s Office. The publication begins by saying “Conventionally, to speak of surveillance society is to invoke something sinister, smacking of dictators and totalitarianism. We will come to Big Brother in a moment but the surveillance society is better thought of as the outcome of modern organizational practices, businesses, government and the military than as a covert conspiracy. Surveillance may be viewed as progress towards efficient administration, in Max Weber’s view, a benefit for the development of Western capitalism and the modern nation-state.”[1]

To deny that Surveillance is systematically effecting a modern day panopticon[2] for UK citizens, more highlights where their priorities lie. One priority seems to be an unquestioning protocol in support of the needs of a market system over the needs of civilian rights. Such a stance communicates a behaviour which is complicit in promoting a hegemony that lacks compassion or empathy of the very real circumstances of public freedoms being eroded for the sake of corporate economics rather than nurturing human, social contexts. Make no mistake, this is the privatisation of our public spaces, civil liberties are pushed aside as a secondary factor, rather too easily at whatever price.

So, if we cannot rely on our governments and local councils to do the honourable thing and take responsibility in effectively challenging this encroachment on our civil liberties, who can we turn to? Thankfully, there has been much debate around the subject in the media the last few years. Whether the government is able to step outside of its current mind-set, and become less blinkered is another thing. So, there needs to be as many different forms of communication around the issue so others from all walks of life can be included to share a critique from their own perspectives. In this context, regarding the festival we have artists who also happen to be experimenting with activism as part of their dialogue, initiating imaginative forms of expression to enable and facilitate varied processes in, getting their critical thoughts on subjects which matter, out there. “…artists using CCTV are critical of the present level of surveillance, but they’re also interested in establishing a dialogue about what is typically a secretive arrangement”[3]

The Surface Gallery successfully presented a dynamic and varied collection of art on the subject. Stanza’s ‘Stars of CCTV’, hung on the wall were representations of the ‘Big Brother’ generation, re-mediated as history paintings representing a social portrait of England. Displayed in expensive white frames, these works showed ghostly, chilling blurred images “each picture has a narrative, a history of time and place”.

Stanza. Stars of CCTV.

The images depict the last whereabouts of a lawyer, the July bombers, happy slappers beating someone up, people drunk in the street, thefts at gunpoint, sex in car, running someone over, stealing from a shop and trying the stuff on first. Other images include police abuse, child abduction, senseless fighting and terrorists using public transport.”

Stanza. We Dont Want No Education.

Anonymous faces stare back at the CCTV cameras during their drunk and disorderly activities, like acts of defiance, whilst being snapped, trapped within the visual flicker of the ever spying eyes.

Stanza. The Rise of the Urban Surfe.

As soon as they are captured for us to observe, they become shadowy reflections of our own selves. Feral representations of strange creatures in an urban zoo. The darkness of these collected images allow us to observe our own subterranean fears, resting closely at the edge of what we as a supposedly decent society, accepts as normality. Yet there is a contradiction at play informing us that this is all too normal, part of the everyday. We are those people within these selected frames, as we scrutinize them, we judge ourselves.

One group who got their teeth stuck into the complex mess of community security and surveillance were The Office of Community Sousveillance, with the project PCSO Watch (Police Community Support Officer).

Upon entering the venue, just before stepping into the main gallery was a help desk for the visiting public to use, offering a kind of alternative community service, where visitors input information regarding their own personal experiences of being watched or hassled by local authority security. On the desk it read “PCSO Watch will be appointing its very own ‘sousveillance officers’ to co-ordinate an information gathering exercise in the period leading up to the festival. The findings of this serious-piece-of-research-completely-unmotivated-by-revenge will be made public and interactive during the festival and will be presented in collaboration with guest undercover officers operating from a mobile field unit placed temporarily in hotspots around the city.”

There is even a blog where you can observe or contribute to the continuing number of incidences, experiences with ‘official’ security in the Nottingham area. This art, transcends the formal realms of being objects or items of installation within an art context alone, and seeks not to be fashioned within what it sees as a limitation. It exploits the ‘imaginative’ frameworks and infrastructures of art culture itself as a creative and polemic space, considering our every day lives and relationships with the world as part of its ingredients, as an interface; allowing a certain amount of flexibility and freedom to express their own particular methodologies and political voice. It rests on the edge of what many would consider to be art and this is where its main strength lies, for it if became ‘gallery’ art, the messages and spirit of it would be lost. For it to remain in its essence vital, it needs its own agency of raw presence. This work is angry, it demands an immediacy which is direct and resolutely challenges institutional hegemony, harbouring an angst which was not uncommon with the early nineteenth century Luddites. It is art performance and direct action.

Officer B report of incident
Incident report (ref 230)
15.15-15.45 Thursday 15 January 2008

LOCATION – PCSO WATCH mobile unit parked legally (with landowners permission) on private land at the edge of Sneinton Market. Officer B was staffing the mobile unit.

This work rests between legality and illegality. By posing as security officers, PCSO Watch imaginatively play at the borders of what is typically deemed right and wrong, real and unreal, pushing their expression in the form of political enactments and direct action. This is a paradigm shift that is not particularly interested in the art critic’s perspective. Their approach deliberately bypasses art dialogue and is more interested in connecting with every day people’s lives. The audience they wish to make contact with is all of us. By relocating their particular creative practice and placing it in the streets, it opens up a more cultural dynamic. Tapping immediately into the murky depths of what our society is dealing with locally, nationally and in fundamental ways – it is about reality. At the same time this work helps us to realise that outside, out there, we need more than just shops as social environments; that we need more creative and wholesome experiences in our cities coming from the ground up. Through their work, one is also aware of how vulnerable we all are to forces imposed by those who say that they care for us. Solutions to social problems need not always have to be based around monetarily orientated processes and a presumption that all civilians are potential villians, tarred with the same brush.

The energy and spirit of this work reminds me of the The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army “…we refuse the spectacle of celebrity and we are everyone. Because without real names, faces or noses, we show that our words, dreams, and desires are more important than our biographies. Because we reject the society of surveillance that watches, controls, spies upon, records and checks our every move. Because by hiding our identity we recover the power of our acts. Because with greasepaint we give resistance a funny face and become visible once again…”

Another artwork worth highlighting is Blind Spot by Folke Kobberling & Martin Kaltwasser. I remember a day project/event that they collaborated on with Heath Bunting in Warsaw, 2008 called Fence Challenge. A one day performance of Kobberling & Kaltwasser and Bunting, an ironic play with architectural borders which get higher and steeper as a kind of obstacle run. Building fences and gates of found materials for Heath Bunting to climb over.

This time round they built small temporary structures out of building waste, with panels of wood and doors in Nottingham. These structures were designed and made to fill in spaces, blind spots where the gazes of CCTV cameras did not reach. When I saw these pieces they were exhibited in the gallery itself, but even imagining them in the streets brings a smile to one’s face.

These mini- architectural builds were human scale, you could go inside and close the door behind you. Offering a haven to those who wished to avoid the perpetual gaze of cameras, to hide away for a little while when in the street, in order to reclaim some sense of privacy.

A contemporary enactment of the Orwellian vision is now here and for real, millions of lensed spectres watch our every move around the country in the streets, as the constant drone of shopping serfs waddle around in their state imposed panopticon daze. In George Orwell’s visionary novel Nineteen Eighty-Four the Thought police could view and control citizens at any moment via a tele-screen, no one knew whether they were being watched or not. Today, the UK Government is so rabid in its support of a more technocratic solutions to control its citizens, we are now the most watched soap opera by the powers that be on the planet. Us, who live in Britain are presently monitored by 4 million CCTV cameras, and if you happen to be living in London you are probably viewed on camera about 300 times a day.

A simple, search on the Internet for CCTV cameras will take you to thousands of web sites, offering you up to the minute, hi-tech CCTV equipment for the viewing of people in offices, work environments as well as the more lucrative business of selling CCTV for street surveillance. If we take a moment and consider the financial crisis, the repeating wars and climate change. It should not be a surprise to anyone that art in its various mediums and forms will naturally take account of it all and question what this means. Yet much art, whether it be performance based, activist or media art related are pushing things further in their processes, much of it challenging the very infrastructures of our institutions and their purposes for existence. This is not because they wish for a revolution, but more because they demand a better life for all, asking our institutions to become more human regarding their interaction with civilians and offer more progressive approaches. Our society needs an upgrade, pretty quick!

There were many other works at the festival worth writing about but this article would have been even longer, so I hope this will do for now. My main aim was to pull together the issues proposed by the festival commission Going Underground and discuss some of the artworks exhibited.

Regarding the Going Underground commission itself? It was successful, a much needed project and festival that desperately needed to happen. It has contributed to the larger debate on surveillance. Instead of choosing to treat art like a conveyor belt as a singular and banal process. Trampoline took a risk and moved things on further and this is to be commended. Hopefully, this endeavour will leave a legacy in Nottingham with some thought provoking challenges for all to reflect upon.

References:
[1]’A Report on the Surveillance Society For the Information Commissioner by the Surveillance Studies Network.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/02_11_06_surveillance.pdf

[2]The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

[3]Keep an eye on our growing surveillance culture
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/09/surveillance-privacy

Other links of interest:

Talking CCTV Launch.
http://www.nottinghamcdp.com/index.asp?pageid=pageid183.xml

Watching the Watchers.
Right under Big Brother’s nose, artist-hackers are using surveillance images for their own purposes.
Christopher Werth. NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Sep 8, 2008.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/156339/output/print

Notes on Surveillance, Sousveillance and Inverse surveillance:
Sousveillance, originally a term French, as well as inverse surveillance are terms coined by Steve Mann – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann (Toronto, Canada) to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant. “Surveillance” denotes the act of watching from above, whereas “sousveillance” denotes bringing the practice of observation down to human level (ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures doing the watching).

Inverse surveillance is a proper subset of sousveillance with a particular emphasis on “watchful vigilance from underneath” and a form of surveillance inquiry or legal protection involving the recording, monitoring, study, or analysis of surveillance systems, proponents of surveillance, and possibly also recordings of authority figures and their actions. Inverse surveillance is typically an activity undertaken by those who are generally the subject of surveillance, and may thus be thought of as a form of ethnography or ethnomethodology study (i.e. an analysis of the surveilled from the perspective of a participant in a society under surveillance). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

Pall Thayer’s Microcodes are short code art pieces written in Perl and presented on a website for viewers to read, download, and execute. Each code piece encapsulates tasks performed by artworks such as portraiture or memento mori. They follow on from Thayer’s earlier “Exist.pl”, which allegorized life, death and being using running Perl code.

This is a Romantic use of code, a projection of human experience onto mere material existence. Processes become lives or individuals, network sockets become voices or eyes. And in a Nietschean twist some of the code can be genuinely destructive for data. But it works the other way round as well, demonstrating that meaning can be found in or recovered from mere processes.

The program listings are presented on a modern, neutrally styled, website for download and execution. The code is licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 (or later), so everyone is free to use, study, modify and redistribute it. The use of the GPL should be a given for code art, but far too many artists are happy to take the freedom that they are given by other hackers and not pass it on. Thayer deserves credit for doing the right thing.

You can send modified versions back to be published on the Microcodes website, something that resembles social media and collaborative web projects, but this isn’t yet the focus of the project. Given the opposition between social media and computer programming that some commentators have tried to establish (myself included), it is refreshing to see a project that uses elements of both where both can add to it.

Historically, “microcode” is the inner programming of microprocessors such as the ARM or Pentium, the level below machine code. Thayer’s Microcodes are short (micro) programs (code) written in the programming language Perl. Perl is a well-established and popular language for scripting and for web programming. It is a more typographic language than many, with a rich and intentionally ambiguous syntax. This makes it ideal both for expressive programming and for visually interesting program listings.

Perl is installed on modern operating systems by default (and can easily be installed on Windows). Running a Perl script in 2009 therefore requires minimal geekery. But Perl is a strange-looking enough language, even compared to newer scripting languages and other C-style-syntax (curly-brace-based) languages, that using it emphasizes the strangeness of code and makes its structures visually noticeable.

Like any Perl script each Microcode creates a composition of relationships between operating system resources such as processes, network sockets and files. Unlike most Perl scripts this is the intended end result of the code, not a side effect of its execution or the means to the end of the program’s effects as for example a UNIX command-line tool. The process of executing the code is intended for contemplation rather than for instrumentalization. The incidental or contingent becomes the primary or key.

Information workers spend at least eight hours a day “in” the digital landscape of the computer or the network. This is their landscape. Software that depicts this environment is in a way the landscape or land art of the UNIX hegemony. It functions as paintings of Venice or as stone circles for hackers and for anyone whose life is touched by technology.

Software is both performed, as something that is written by a programmer, and performance, as something that performs a task. Making that performance the focus of the software’s execution makes the software the intended result and subject of both acts. Software debuggers observe and present the inner working of the operation of other pieces of software, but not of themselves. It’s a bad old joke in aesthetics that art is defined by its inutility. But it is true that code that does nothing other than what it does must in some way be doing (or being) itself and that if this is the intended result of executing the software then this must be intended to be interesting in some way.

When I was at art school I took up programming as one means of resisting the local hegemony of art-as-text under the stultifying academic regime of semiotics-and-Marxism. Programming is a specific, technical competence that cannot be replaced with “generic” textual or managerial skills. Artistic practice also consists at some level of technical competences. This upsets both managerialistic critics and curators (who need interchangeable and easily ventriloquised art) and managerialistic artists (who need interchangeable and easily ventriloquised artisans to actually make the products of their semiotic genius).

I, and others, have claimed that artists who use computers need to be able to program. Artists who, whatever their intent, accept computers as closed tools are often offended by this. But mastery of tools is a prerequisite for competent expression. There is the question of at what level this mastery needs to be demonstrated, though. If one wishes to be an Impressionist should one master colour theory while using pre-mixed oil paint in tubes or does one need to master molecular chemistry?

Thayer’s work is competent programming but as a project it is socially open. You don’t need to be able to program to appreciate or add to it. It can be taken and modified as an aesthetic as well as executable resource. Its framing as code is clear, but its presentation on a social site and its licensing under the GPL leave its use by other artists, whether programmers or not, open. It frustrates those of us who hoped to use code to draw a line in the sand by using code effectively as a social product and resource.

The creation of software that does nothing useful as a command-line tool is not comparable to too many artists’ technically incompetent use of medical equipment, mathematical equations or scientific theories as mere imagery in aesthetically competent artworks. Software has to run. Thayer’s Microcodes run, run correctly, and perform as specified.

A hacker and free software activist I know asked me what exactly makes the Microcodes code listings art (interestingly, they didn’t ask why they are code). I gave two reasons:

Firstly, the text of each program listing is short enough to be taken in as a single visual composition. When presented under the claim that they are art they therefore fall into the tradition of conceptual text-as-art. The tension between appearance and meaning that this implies is a live issue in art history and in art. There is an immediate and historical aestheticism or artistic-ness to the code.

Secondly, the behaviour of each program when it runs achieves no practical task as a command-line utility. It is therefore either useless or intended for some other purpose. The user must evaluate it using on their knowledge of what it does and how this relates to their experience of software. That is, on its aesthetics and iconography rather than on how it performs as a tool for some other external end.

This is exemplary code art. It makes strange the environment of the operating system and the command line. It creates an aesthetic representation, a meaningful resemblance in appearance but not function, of it in code as an object for contemplation. Microcodes has a balancing social component, but by being at its core unashamedly about code it allows that code to be about something of interest rather than the ostensive social or political content of the project just being an excuse to write code. This is code about the experience of being human in society in a time when being human in society is in no small part about the experience of code.

http://pallit.lhi.is/microcodes/

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Jorn Ebner’s “(sans femme et sans aviateur)” is an atmospheric time-based multi-window web-browser image work that presents an evocative exploration of contemporary Paris.

It consists of four series of pop-up browser web windows containing image slide shows which are programmatically arranged in turn on the desktop. The content of each window is static but animated by blurring or scrolling. The frames of the windows are also animated, being opened, closed and placed. Window choreography in net art has a long history, but there’s something subtle and satisfyingly compositional about Ebner’s windows. They are part of the flow of the story, or absence of story.

The build-up of windows on the desktop resembles the way that windows accumulate during the average computer user’s working day, only arranged with more intent and precision. Instead of word processor and spreadsheets or web pages and emails the windows present what looks as if it should be a narrative told using photographs of the streets, alleys and parks of contemporary Paris.

But there are no characters and nothing happens. It becomes obvious that the people who appear incidentally in the background of the images really are just people who appear incidentally in the background. There is no foreground. There is an absence of presence. This is alienating, like being a stranger in a unfamiliar big city.

I didn’t know precisely what was absent, though, not being familiar with Eric Rohmer’s film “The Aviator’s Wife” which the launch page for (sans femme et sans aviateur) explains is its inspiration. Would this familiarity improve the experience of the piece? It would definitely change it. But (sans femme et sans aviateur) is a very successful as an alienated portrayal of a city even without that extra point of reference. A viewer who does not spot the references to the film can still spot the references to Paris and to the haunted empty spaces of a modern city.

I did have to struggle with Firefox’s popup blocker to start the piece, but the instructions on its page at Turbulence explained what I needed to do. (sans femme et sans aviateur) uses Flash but it’s a mark of how far web technology has progressed since FutureSplash was first released that it could as easily be made entirely in JavaScript and HTML using the new “canvas” tag. This isn’t a technology demonstration, though, it is a work of art that uses technology to embody its aesthetic.

The wandering of a city guided by an incongruous text, especially if that city is Paris, evokes Situationism. (sans femme et sans aviateur) has the feel of a modern psychogeographic investigation, a tour of a city guided by a film rather than an inappropriate map. The measured pace of (sans femme et sans aviateur) allows it to deliver an increasingly strong feeling of immersion in its made-strange world. Repeated watching only increases this.

Whether as a homage to a film or as a psychologised depiction of urban space, (sans femme et sans aviateur) is worth taking the time to watch unfolding on your monitor. And to watch repeatedly, to let it draw you in. It is mature work of net art, relying not on visual or technical pyrotechnics but on the viewer’s visual competence to present a compelling meditation on the meanings we give to places.

(sans femme et sans aviateur)

The text of this review is licenced under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Licence.

Ada Lovelace Day was conceived of and promoted by Suw Charman-Anderson as a way of “bringing women in technology to the fore”. It succeded in motivating nearly 2000 people to publish a blog post about a woman in technology whom they admired.

In support of Ada Lovelace Day we invited women working in media arts to join the NetBehaviour.org email list for a week, in March ’09. They were invited to post information about their own work alongside the work of other women who had inspired them in their own practice. Some names came up a number of times but with different stories and for very different reasons. NetBehaviour provided a context for sharing and discussing influences and tracing connections: artistic, practical, theoretical, technical, historical, personal. For readability the list displayed here does not include all of the discussion but this can be traced back through the NetBehaviour archives.

Some contributors were anxious about the many excellent people who may have been missed out. We know this is not a definitive survey or list but it is an excellent resource and just one possible starting point for anyone wanting to know more about women working in media art.

A big THANKS to all of those – women and men – who contributed to this tribute!

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Ruth Catlow

URL: http://www.furtherfield.org/display_user.php?ID=14

INSPIRED BY

Ele Carpenter
For tech inspired and facilitated participation with Open Source Embroidery, her curatorial project exploring artists practice that explores the relationship between programming for embroidery and computing.
http://www.elecarpenter.org.uk/

Auriea Harvey
For her part with Entropy8Zuper in early intimate networked performances http://entropy8zuper.org/wirefire and for Endless Forest, Tale of Tales’s bucolic social screensaver.
http://tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest
http://tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest

Mary Flanagan
For her energetic explorations as academic, educator, artist and programmer at the intersection of games, art and feminism and exploring collaborative approaches to thinking about values in.
http://www.valuesatplay.org/
Read the full list here

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: netwurker_mez/][mez][[oz.org]/gossama[WoW-Bloodscalp]/bowwtoxx[WoW-Demon Soul]/netwurker_twin[Second Life]/mez breeze [geolocative]

URL: http://mezbreeze.com

INSPIRED BY

Linda Dement
4 her incredible early visual x-periments with trauma + lust + and the visc[f]eral.
www.lindadement.com/

Virginia Barratt
4 her early-90’s inspiration/queer theory + pioneering cyberfeminist work[s] + now 4 her ongoing commitment 2 micro-ecodevelopment.
http://mybigbackyard.blogsome.com

Kathy Acker
4 her pre-emptive writerly mashup-tech[niques] + taking head-on the copyright industry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Acker

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Karen Blissett

INSPIRED BY

Sadie Plant
I love her work, especially ‘Zeros + Ones, Digital Women + The New Technoculture’. “Sadie Plant introduces Ada Lovelace as a woman whose awareness of peripheries, of indices, headings, prefaces, etc. gave her a new way of perceiving reality. In her footnoted, non-fictional texts, these peripheral details were crucial in contextualizing the texts in historical and social reality.” Laura Lee. Laura’s review on the book.
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/body/lgl1.html

Francesca da Rimini
I have always enjoyed Francesca’s net art work as well as her other works/collaborations to do with networked culture. Francesca da Rimini, aka GashGirl, (Adelaide/Rome) has been working in the field of new media since 1984 as an arts manager, curator, corporate geisha girl, cyberfeminist, puppet mistress and ghost. One of the original members of VNS Matrix, the Australian cyberfeminism group formed in 1991. Worked in New York on a project in collaboration with Michael Grimm, snafu and Ricardo Dominguez, los dias y las noches del muertos, and with Ricardo Dominguez on hauntings. Squandered hours investigating the artistic and erotic potential of negotiated email relationships, online virtual communities and web-based narrative architectures that have been reverse engineered into multiple immaterialities.
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors/dariminibio.html

Ruth Catlow
I know, but she’s cool. And has been incredible in supporting other emerging artists as well as maintaining in still making interesting and challenging artwork with technology. One project springs to mind – ‘Rethinking Wargames’, a participative net art project instigated by Ruth Catlow of which calls for ‘pawns to join forces to defend world peace’. It uses the game of chess to find strategies that challenge existing power structures and their concomitant war machineries.
http://www.low-fi.org.uk/rethinkingwargames/

Hope Kurtz (1959-2004)
Such a talent. I remember seeing Hope perform in Amsterdam in 95 or 96, at the Next Five Minutes Conference – I was mesmerized by her articulation and excellent performance presence, and imaginitive intelligence. Hope “worked behind the scenes of the CAE collective by contributing to the conceptual basis for their work. It is through her brilliant editing that their work articulates challenging concepts to a multifarious audience many of whom might not otherwise come into contact with such radical thought. The Ensemble collectively authored several books including Electronic Civil Disobedience and other unpopular Ideas…”
http://www.thebrooklynrail.org/arts/july04/hopekurtz.html
The Critical Art Ensemble site – http://www.critical-art.net/

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Tatiana Wells

Free software/media artist and activist from brazil.

URLs:
http://midiatatica.info
http://contratv.net

INSPIRED BY

The collective body of g2g (BR)
http://interfaceg2g.org

Cindy Flores (MX)
http://ciberfeminista.org

The collective body of retome a tecnologia (BR)
http://retomeatecnologia.info brazilian campaign about
violence against women

The collective body of genderchangers (NL)
http://www.genderchangers.org inspiring women all over the world to use free technologies

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Simon Biggs

Research Professor edinburgh college of art

URL: www.littlepig.org.uk

INSPIRED BY

N Katherine Hayles and Margaret Morse
For their ground breaking work on digital literatures and interactive media.

Vera Molnar
For her pioneering work in developing expressive yet rigorous approaches to computer graphics.

Steina Vasulka, Joan Jonas and Pauline Oliveros
For setting artistic agendas.

Kathy Rae Huffman and Anne Marie Duguet
For their diverse activities, across three decades, to put new media arts and women’s practice, in this area in particular, on the agenda of museums, galleries, journals and the press.

There are many others…

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Pall Thayer, artist

URL: http://www.this.is/pallit

INSPIRED BY

I second the mention of N. Katherine Hayles and add Christiane Paul.

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Katharine Norman

I work mostly in digital music/radiophonic sound, and experimental writing about it – interested in listening, people, words, voices, places.

URLs:
Essay with weblinks to sonic work, http://www.stayconscious.com/writings/localmaterials.html
Email fiction, http://www.stayconscious.com/reach/yesreally/
Home page, http://www.novamara.com

INSPIRED BY

a few influences/inspirations from women working with technology and sound

Laurie Anderson
I’ve always regarded her as a sonic anthropologist of the highest calibre.
http://www.laurieanderson.com

Pauline Oliveros
Listener, network performer, thinker, composer, improvising musician. Her way of listening, and her music have been a beacon.
http://paulineoliveros.us/

Magali Babin
Extraordinary French-Canadian performer/composer finding wonderful sounds in unusual and usual places.
http://www.myspace.com/magalibabin

Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram
Both for pioneering work in electronic music in the UK, at a time when women were more often in the BBC typing pool than the BBC Radiophonic workshop.
http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/
http://daphneoram.org/

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Majena Mafe

My work focuses on the perverse affect of sound in/as language, and its
implications for digital ways of saying.

URLs:
http://www.sounded-language.blogspot.com/
http://www.that-unsound.blogspot.com.au

INSPIRED BY

Gertrude Stein
For being a ground breaker, ground shaker and self described genius. For her introduction of the loop in language that eventually filtered through into digital sound that the idea repetition is never repetition. The idea that if objects are things, so too are the word we use for them. That meaning does not lie linearly. She highlighted the non-definitive Her play with ear-play. For her insistent sane use of disruption. Honesty that written language is mock realism. For highlighting the aurally charged nature of language and its connection to meaning.
http://books.google.com.au

Meredith Monk
For sticking with her own throat sounds
http://www.meredithmonk.org/

Cathy Berberian
For interpreting contemporary music, Armenian folk songs, Monteverdi, The Beatles, and her own compositions in a very throated way. Especially for best known work is her “Stripsody” (1966), in which she exploits her vocal technique using comic book sounds.
http://that-unsound.blogspot.com/2008/09/cathy-berberian-trills-me.html

Cathy Brietz
For her elaborate video instillations. For her shots taken at media.
http://www.whitecube.com/artists/breitz/texts/78/
http://www.kunstraum.net/content-en/artists/index/b/candice-breitz/view?set_language=en

Pipilotti Rist
For being ‘not the girl who misses much’. For her insistence on the perverse pleasure principle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipilotti_Rist
http://www.pipilottirist.net/begin/open.html

Maja Ratkje
For her use of the voice as un-mediated instrumented sound.
http://www.ratkje.com/main.php

Joan la Barbara
For her use of multiple voices. For her use of multiple voices. For her use of multiple voices.
http://www.joanlabarbara.com/bio.html

Vicki Bennett and People Like Us
For the mischief. For her re-examining the throw away sounding out from the 40s and 50s. For the interpolation and density of sound image mashups.
http://www.peoplelikeus.org/index.html

Janet Cardiff
For being a composer/performer intrigued by change, the subtle and the thick in sound, fascinated with voices and definitely enamored by technology. For using her voice as raw material, which she transmutes into machine noises, choral works or pulverizes “into granules of electro acoustic babble and glitch, generating animated dialogues between innate human expressiveness and the overt artifice of digital processing” as the Wire Magazine put it.
http://that-unsound.blogspot.com/2008/08/janet-cardiff.html

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Annie Abrahams

URLs:
http://www.bram.org
http://aabrahams.wordpress.com

INSPIRED BY

Ada Lovelace
Jane Goodall
Virginia Woolf
Vita Sackville West
George Sand
Donna Haraway
Judith Butler
Olia Lialina
http://art.teleportacia.org/olia.html

and lots of men
yes lots of men

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Liliana Garcia

My current work is related to Lilith

URL: http://liligrana.wordpress.com/lilithandthetreeliliths-trial-project/

INSPIRED BY

Simon de Beauvoir
For opening my eyes that I have kept alert since then.

Laurie Andersen
For her magnificent acoustic realm.

Kate Bush
Who reminds me of something I cant quiet describe.

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Alex Olsen (aka Alex Ookpik)

URLs:
www.alexookpik.com
www.myspace.com/alexookpik
www.myspace.com/alexookpik2

INSPIRED BY
Okay, it’s not a short list, but I think that’s a good thing. 😉

*Inspiration from an early electronic music pioneer:*

Laurie Spiegel (added to the list with Daphne Oram et al)
She has recently posted a number of very nice, archival video clips of herself on YouTube. It’s so refreshing hearing her speak in such a no-nonsense way. She’s just so natural about it all (and such a good sport fielding all those awkward questions). Hearing her talk about music and computers so enthusiastically makes me swoon.
www.kalvos.org/spiegel.html
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzOJtZYsGSA&feature=related

*Mentorship & support:*

To the sound-focused, studio-loving, women that I have met in recent years here in Toronto, who have extended encouragement for my own music & sound studio practice:

Laurel Macdonald
www.improbablemusic.com/laurel/index.html

Anne Bourne (a student of Oliveros)
www.openears.ca/2005_site/2005/westerkamp.htm

Wende Bartley
www.naisa.ca/deepwireless/2002/bartley.html

*Camaraderie & Peers:*

I am so thankful that it seems that I meet more and more women every day who are either pursuing or asking about electronic music, recording, film editing, programming, etc.

I am especially thankful for my friends Eiyn Sof and Building Castles Out of Matchsticks, (did I really have to wait 30 years to find peers?):
www.myspace.com/eiynsof
www.myspace.com/buildingcastlesoutofmatchsticks

*Current Inspiration:*

Juana Molina
For stepping out of a successful acting career into a career making beautiful, unselfconscious, electronically manipulated folk music. To me she has re-defined to archetype of the mad-scientist electronic music ‘guy’, into a steady, feminine, force (especially with her elaborate one-woman live step-up!).
www.myspace.com/juanamolina

*Honorary mentions: *

Brenda Laurel (an early role-model in my interest in human-computer interaction)
http://tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/BrendaBio.html

To the supportive men I’ve met along the way, who have treated me as equal,
showed interest in my work and extended opportunities my way.

(I have to put Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Andersen here in brackets as they have been mentioned already but always bear mentioning again! 🙂 )

PS. I too forgot a very important link (in the realm of woman sound artists):

Hildegard Westerkamp
From her site: “Hildegard Westerkamp is a composer, radio artist and sound ecologist. She presents soundscape workshops and lectures internationally, performs and writes.”
http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Sarah Cook

URLs:
www.sarahcook.info
www.crumbweb.org

INSPIRED BY

Sara Diamond, Susan Kennard and the many great ladies of the Banff New Media Institute (you all know who you are!)
For organising and producing amazing future-forecasting interdisciplinary rigourously researched events and exhibitions in the field of new media, commissioning artists, building labs and platforms and generally encouraging an atmosphere of knowledge-sharing. I’ve met some of the most important people in my career from my time spent at Banff working for and with Sara and Susan; I owe much to them both, and they know it 😉
www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi

Kathy Rae Huffman
For opening her filofax to me within minutes of our first meeting, at my first visit to Ars Electronica, giving me names and phone numbers and subsequently introducing me to artists and cultural producers. Until that point every curator I had met was quite closed about their research and their social network and Kathy completely obliterated that museum-influenced impression that curating was about gate- keeping. She continues to inspire me by her very honest, ethical and straightforward working method, for not playing the power games so prevalent in the art world, for the early work she did for women in new media in the 1990s, for undertaking one of the first postgraduate courses in curating (actually Exhibition Design and later Museum Studies) and being (and I was also on my MA curating course) one of the few who wanted to work with media artists.
www.faces-l.net/en/user/10

Alison Craighead
For her (collaborative) art work, for being an absolute delight to work with, for helping me question and refine my commitment to new media, to art, to installation, to gallery-museum based practice, to collections, to archives, and to the web. (And together with Jon for teaching me about whisky, how to handle relationship breakups, how to be nice to strangers, how to shop online, how to be a minimalist, how to live and eat well, and where to get the best British change purses and German unctions).
www.thomson-craighead.net

Marina Hyde
For writing so smartly, sardonically, and delightfully about three of my favourite things to read about in the paper/online: politics, sport, and celebrity. On days I wish I were a journalist or blogger rather than a curator (which are many), contributing in an immediate and wide-ranging way to debates which can change minds about popular culture and media, I wish I could be like her.
www.guardian.co.uk/profile/marinahyde

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Jennifer Radloff

INSPIRED BY

Sally-Jean Shackleton of Women’sNet
For her work in training women in South, and Southern Africa and Africa in digital storytelling. She has also been instrumental in other solid and meaningful activist work that connects activism with the real use of ICTs to transform women’s lives.
www.womensnet.org.za

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Olga Panades Massanet

URLs:
www.ungravitational.net
http://virtualfirefly.wordpress.com

INSPIRED BY

Francesca da Rimini
For her evocative and cruel mappings of certain realities; her radical use of fiction, of the impossibility coming to life. Her manufacture of peripheral worlds, deeply rooted in actuality, but also exceeding it in a very powerful personal style that floods perception. And particularly for her way of constructing labyrinths that suck you in.
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors/dariminibio.html

Natalie Jeremijenko
I find particularly inspiring her practical approach and aim to produce actual results. Her current project for example, the Environmental Health Clinic – www.environmentalhealthclinic.net – “develops and prescribes locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable and mediagenic evidence and coordinating diverse projects to effective material change.” “Her work explores opportunities presented by new technologies for non-violent social change. Her research centres on structures of participation in the production of knowledge and information, and the political and social possibilities (and limitations) of information and emerging technologies – mostly through public experiments.”

Coco Fusco
For her ongoing fight against authoritarian policies and repression along borders, inside communities, and across countries. An active feminist working at the intersection of political intervention and media-art. Hers is a critical look into the technologically mediated environments of today that brings about questions in a daring and playful manner.
www.thing.net/~cocofusco

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Corrado Morgana

Has anybody mentioned Rosalind Franklin?

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Giselle Beiguelman

Media artist, graduate studies in communication and semiotics – professor, artistic director of Sergio Motta Art and Technology Award

URL: www.desvirtual.com

INSPIRED BY

Jenny Holzer
www.jennyholzer.com

Christiane Paul
too many links…

Ivana Bentes
I could not find anything relevant about her in English. Btw, this is very good (from the WSF),
http://podcast.amarc.org/Social_Forums/WSF/2009/Audios/AudioFiles/Grab_2_Evana_Bantich.mp3
During her speech Ivana argued that the free media movement has to abandon its “cry baby” mentality and make full use of all available technologies. She says that these technologies may have been created within a capitalist paradigm but they should not be held captive to it. We need to use them to advance our communities and peoples.

Virginia Woolf
My favorite writer

Clarice Lispector
My favorite writer too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarice_Lispector

Mez Breeze
mez is mez
www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker

Laurie anderson
www.laurieanderson.com

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Pall Thayer

INSPIRED BY

Oh, and let’s not forget the tireless work of Jo-Anne Green and Helen
Thorington at Turbulence.org

www.turbulence.org

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Perry Bard

www.perrybard.net
http://dziga.perrybard.net

INSPIRED BY

Berta Sichel
Director of Audiovisuals at the Reina Sofia Museum Madrid who recently started a video collection for the museum. The inaugural exhibition for the the collection contained 32 installations, 12 of them by women (maybe a museum record?) and her programming has celebrated a wide range of internationally known women.

Second Sarah’s eloquent praise of Kathy Rae Huffman who was Director of Cornerhouse which commissioned my artwork Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake through its Bigger Picture program. Every artist should be as lucky as I was to have such an encouraging and supportive working relationship.

Simone De Beauvoir
For contributing a female voice to the history of western thought.

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Ghislaine Boddington

working within the group body>data>space
www.bodydataspace.net
with ResCen Middlesex University
www.rescen.net/Ghislaine_Boddington/index.html
and previously early digital sound and movement collective shinkansen
see here for shinkansen and Future Physical archive
www.connectivity.org.uk

INSPIRED BY
many many women across the years and we believe by even more of the future generations to come !!! in particular for us, the following women have been imperative as mentors in our development of interauthored telematic performance

Thecla Schiphorst
For her work on embodiment, sense enhancement and the human side of digital interaction. She worked as part of the original development team of Lifeforms software, the computer compositional tool for choreography and she has worked with Merce Cunningham since 1990 supporting his creation of new dance with the computer. She inspires many with her work at Simon Fraser University Vancover and with her international exhibits including Bodymaps: artifacts of Touch, an pioneer touch based video body installation. We have been pushed by her thinking and questioning while working with her producing the second iteration of “whispers” for Future Physical (Cambridge 2003) and producing Bodymaps into the ICA as part of Virtual Incarnations Dance Umbrella 2000.
www.sfu.ca/~tschipho//

Hellen Sky
Digital choreographer and telematic dancer, writer and director, the most experienced dancing woman in cyberspace !!! Hellen is the prophet we all need to look to for her early work on telematics and technology within the performance and installation space, using realtime data generated by the body. Co-founder of Company in Space in Melbourne (1992 – 2004) this group, who we worked with several times into the ICA and other contexts, was an inspiration for all dance technology in the 90s. We worked Hellen again recently for the Post Me-New ID Forum in Dresden and here is an excerpt of her writing from Virtual Physical Bodies catalogue, published by centre des arts d’Enghien-les-Bains, Paris, for the body>data>space exhibition Oct 2008 – Jan 2009
www.hellensky.com/hellen.swf

“….Although there is no gravity here
The weight of time holds me to this virtual floor
As you wait for me to arrive in streamings of bits and bytes,
zeros and ones
In realtime, lag time, day for nighttime
To arrive at the unstable matrix of my new skin

The screen is not a surface but reach of my extended touch “

….Hellen Sky

Amanda Steggell
For early work as online band Nood, releasing the first internet CD in early 1996. Inspirational work with Per Platou as Motherboard with installations and performative live art happenings, mediated and modulated by the intermediary influence of the net, often integrate audience participation and interaction. For ongoing exciting emotive projects, bringing sensitivities and real human presence to “dry” net time projects.
www.liveart.org
www.liveart.org/motherboard/index.html

Plus here, in London +++, so many great women working tirelessly, across all disciplines and the digital, often not getting much credit over the years………………

Rachel Baker
Leanne Bird
Ilze Black
Larisa Blazic
Susan Broadhurst
Ruth Catlow
Anna Collin
Susan Collins
Kelli Dipple
Bronac Ferran
Julie Freeman
Ruth Gibson
Lizbeth Goodman
Karen Guthrie
Vesna Grandes
Delphine Gaborit
Lisa Haskell
Dianne Harris
Leslie Hill
Laura Henry
Mia Jankowicz
Janis Jefferies
Shobana Jeyasingh
Francoise Lamy
Sophia Lycouris
Pauline van Mourik Broekman
Helen Paris
Sarah Platt
Nina Pope
Hannah Redler
Gini Simpson
Annika Stark
Nicola Triscott
Claire Welsby
Sheron Wray
Marie X

who have we forgotten ? sorry……..please do add more ……………:-)

PS this list proves there is no shortage of women in UK for panels and keynotes …….so how come so many conferences, panels, etc still have so very few women involved …..?????

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Renee Turner

Collaborates with Riek Sijbring and Femke Snelting under the name of De Geuzen a foundation for multi-visual research

URLs:
www.fudgethefacts.com
www.geuzen.org
www.geuzen.org/female_icons

INSPIRED OR IMPRESSED BY (AND THESE ARE JUST A FEW):

Donna Haraway
Author of A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, she has a way of embedding and embodying technologies within history, science, bodies and everyday life.
Online lecture here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yxHIKmMI70
A Cyborg Manifesto: www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

Laurie Anderson
Jack of all trades, hacker, pioneer and techno-shaman. In 1984, I saw her United States Live tour, and was humbled to witness it.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SirOxIeuNDE

Steina Vasulka
An early pioneer of the electronic arts, Steina, often in collaboration with her partner Woody Vasulka, pushed the aesthetics of technology and video to its outer limits. In 1974, she taught at the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York, where she was the only female faculty member at that time. Through the years her work has played with the limits of technology while simultaneously embracing those restraints for their visual qualities. One particular example of this kind of approach is Machine Vision. An interview can be found here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd9jaqkY6Dw

Joan Jonas
She is a funky storyteller who has the capacity to weave together the rinky dink, the poetic and the technological. A snippet of Vertical Roll is here: www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/vertical-roll/video/1/

Charlotte Moorman
Bold, experimental and a fantastically lateral Southern thinker. Worked with Nam June Paik and had zero fears about toying with new technology. She also had a tremendous sense of humor.
Interviewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiEJdOlgcDE

Avital Ronell
The author of The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, is a mental broad surfer par excellence. Not only has she theorized about technology, but also stupidity, addiction and literature. She has a way of making wildly rogue connections. There is no link of her discussing The Telephone Book, but here’s one where she discusses stupidity:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3ksoUF0jjY

Lisa Haskell
Organized different projects around technology and digital culture. I haven’t seen her in years, but those early projects were inspiring and brought many people together to think and produce in different ways.

Christina McPhee
Artist and writer….works with data landscapes. I have admired her as a moderator on Empyre for years. She has a way of raising the calibre of discussion without being exclusive or intimidating. That is truly a rare trait on list culture.

Pauline van Mourik Broekman
She co-founded with Simon Worthington Mute Magazine.

Kate Rich
The Bureau of Inverse Technology: Many years ago De Geuzen, asked her to come to the Netherlands and lecture at a symposium called Situating Technologies. She gave an inspiring talk on the Bureau’s activities. The suicide box is still brilliant.
www.bureauit.org/sbox/#video

Sandy Stone
She is Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory. I admire her ability to forge new ways of thinking about gender, machines, the erotic, science and frontier bodies. I saw her perform several years ago at V2 in Rotterdam, and she is an amazing storyteller. Last but not least, she has a great sense of humor.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLkqFy6J14w&feature=related

Josephine Bosma
Through her essays and interviews, she’s made valuable contributions to media art history and debate.

Annie Abrahams
Dutch artist residing in France who studied both biology and fine art. Her work explores the impact of technologies in critical, poetic and quirky ways. It also points to the many inherent contradictions of mediated connectivity. Next to her work, she has created numerous nodes of exchange and production within the net art community.

Riek Sijbring and Femke Snelting (aka De Geuzen)
I have worked with both of these women for almost 15 years. Through practicing together, we have learned much about feminisms and media ecologies.

I could keep going and going with more women…. but I better stop here for the moment 🙂

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: James Morris

INSPIRED BY

Mez
She has been an influence in some of my writings/list posts, and I love her graphics work (I’d love her to design an alternative set of icons for my game;-).

Delia Derbyshire
Discovering about her and her early work with synthesis for the Doctor Who theme was exciting and inspiring. Two books I found very interesting to read were “The Demon Lover – the roots of terrorism” by Robin Morgan, and “Bosch” by Laurinda Dixon.

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Rhea Myers

INSPIRED BY

Ada Lovelace
The original hacker.

Jasia Reichardt
For Cybernetic Serendipity, “The Computer in Art”, and after.

Tessa Elliot
Interactive multimedia artist and influential teacher.

Tracey Matthieson
Online multi-user VR pioneer.

Susan Kare
Designed the influential original Macintosh icons.

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Alan Sondheim

INSPIRED BY

Katherine Hayles
She has written on digital writing and literature – more importantly, I think, she’s written absollutely brilliantly on the philosophy of first and second-order cybernetics.

Wendy Chun
She has written on protocols, issues of control, and co-edited a brilliant new media reader.

Margaret Boden and Sherry Turkle
Both made, I think, the most critical contributions understanding of online psychology and phenomenology. Everyone should read their work.

Brenda Laurel
A brilliant writer whose work on theater and interface is really critical to understanding online interaction.

Julia Kristeva
Her theories of the chora and abjection resonate in cyberspace – I’m thinking of Powers of Horror for example.

Luce Irigaray
Her notion of fluid mechanics and its relation to the feminine is more than descriptive of online phenomenology – see Speculum of the Other Woman.

Anna Munster
Her book Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, has been a touchstone for me.

Ann Weinstone
Check out Avatar Bodies, A Tantra for Posthumanism – one of the very few sources really connecting Buddhist thought with cyber-space.

Mez
I know other people have mentioned her – but she has brought code and body together in cyberspace in a totally new way.

Sugar Seville
She ran the Odyssey Artspace sim in Second Life for years and created one of the most dynamic online cultural experiments and experiences I’ve seen

Stacy Horn and Theresa Senft
Check out,
www.terrisenft.net/writing/grandinterview.html

Stacy Horn
She’s a pioneer in social networking – check her out!
www.echonyc.com/~horn/bio.html

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MY NAME: Patrick Simons

INSPIRED BY

Delia Derbyshire
www.delia-derbyshire.org

Yoko Ono
www.a-i-u.net/biblio3.html

Annie Anxiety
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFdoPhytGqU

Maja Ratkje
www.last.fm/music/Maja+Ratkje

Katherine Norman
The impressively pioneering, used to use as The example of new work in lectures, her ‘My London CD’. Most of the tracks are up on sonus.ca and/or last.fm
www.last.fm/music/Katharine+Norman

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Rachel Beth Egenhoefer

URL: www.rachelbeth.net

5 WOMEN I THINK ARE AMAZING:

Katherine Hayles
I know she’s been mentioned already… “How we became Post Human” is one of my favorite books. In addition to being incredibly smart, ahead of the curve, able to make an argument and stand by it, I can say from personal experience that she is one of the most lovely academics to meet in person. I had the honor of working with her when she was at UCLA and I was always amazed at how down to earth and easy going she was. Able to sip a soda, make jokes, and talk about the news, and then go right into intense theory about the printing press and reading novels on mobile phones. FYI, she is now at Duke University.
URL: http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Literature/n.hayles

Martha Rosler
In one of my very first video classes back in undergrad we watched “Semiotics of the Kitchen” and I was hooked. Today some of my students find this video boring (not enough whiz bang for them I guess) and it frustrated me that they can’t put themselves in the time period that it was made and see it as an exploration of trying to figure out what the medium was and what it could do. In addition to her early videos she has written and edited numerous essays and books. She is still making work in New York and teaching at Rutgers University.

Sandy Stone (aka Allucquere Rosanne Stone)
Along with Sadie Plant who has already been mentioned, her texts are some of my favorites. “Split Subjects, Not Atoms; or, How I Fell in Love with My Prosthesis” is an oldie but a goodie and I think way ahead of it’s time. I think she brings an interesting addition to the list as a transgendered individual. Her semi-new website it pretty amusing…
http://sandystone.com

Margaret Morse
“Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the Space-in-between” is a wonderful little easy she wrote that is in a book “illuminating Video”. I ready this years ago and still come back to it. I think that “video” should be dropped from the title as it really speaks to a lot of different kinds of art forms and how we view them, create them, display them, etc. She of course has many other texts as well, all written very intelligently but accessible.

Sue Gollifer
This email wouldn’t fit in your inbox if I listed everything Sue has a hand in. To name a few she is either on the board/ a member of/ holds a position in ISEA, SIGGRAPH, CAA (College Arts Association), Computer Arts Society (CAS), DACS (Design and Artist Copyright Society), Lighthouse Brighton, and many many more, all while also heading the MA in Digital Arts at the University of Brighton, working with Digital Printmaking, writing, making, and yes she has pink hair. Sue is no-nonsense, tells it like it is, gets things done, is amazingly successful, and yet still has a ton of fun, and is incredibly kind and generous.
http://artsresearch.brighton.ac.uk/research/academic/gollifer

And lastly as one extra… I’d like to add Ada’s mother – Anna Isabella Noel Byron. She is the one who raised Ada and encouraged her to study math and science instead of literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Isabella_Milbanke

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MY NAME: Aileen Derieg

I work as a translator with an emphasis on Contemporary Art and New Media.

URL: http://eliot.at

INSPIRED BY

Judith Butler
Again and again, reading Judith Butler’s books has helped me to feel not quite so powerless in a world that I do not agree with. The way she questions things that seem to be taken for granted, proposing radically different ways of understanding the world that make so much more sense – her books are certainly among the most important I have read in my life.
http://rhetoric.berkeley.edu/faculty_bios/judith_butler.html

Faith Wilding
A description I read many years ago as a young student of Faith Wilding’s “Invitation to a Burning” was what first captured my attention and awakened my interest in Faith and her work. Years later I was even more impressed to realize how she had continued to develop and evolve her work and ideas. When I first joined the Faces mailing list in the late 90s, I nearly fell off my chair when the first response to my introduction was a personal welcome from Faith. Having admired and looked up to this woman for so long, I was deeply touched by her response.

A few years ago, in the midst of a conflict, when I was feeling sad and low, I was standing at a window looking down on an empty space, which made me think of “Invitation to a Burning” again. I wrote to Faith then and told her how sad I felt, how I missed the kind of exhilarating actions that have meanwhile become part of art history. I was very grateful for and encouraged by her response. To me, she is not only a fascinating and inspiring artist and an intelligent and thoughtful writer, but also a wise woman.
www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fwild/faithwilding

Margarete Jahrmann
I first became aware of Margarete through the “Poptarts” section of Telepolis that she and Kathy Rae Huffman were responsible for, so I think in many ways Margarete was really the one who first introduced me to the possibilities of feminist digital art. What I especially love about her work is the way all the many layers are ultimately transparent. Even though some of her writing may appear confusing at first glance, there is a depth and fundamental coherence to it that I find fascinating. As engaging as her work is at a first look, as often as I come back to it and look again, I invariably find there is always even more to it.
www.konsum.net
www.ludic-society.net

Amy Alexander
Like Margarete, Amy is someone I admired first, long before I had the pleasure of becoming personally acquainted with her. The first time I heard of Amy’s work was when she received an Honorary Mention in the Prix Ars Electronica for the “Multicultural Recycler”. When we later met through the Faces mailing list, I thoroughly enjoyed her sense of humor and her delightfully geeky interests. As we have stayed in contact since then, this is what I continue to especially appreciate and enjoy. What I love about Amy’s work is the way the humor, the not-so-serious view of things, is rooted in a very serious and well founded understanding of the issues at stake. She has an amazing ability to grasp complex issues and condense them into concise and witty statements.
http://amy-alexander.com

Paula Graham
Some years ago there was an interesting thread on the Linuxchix “issues” mailing list about how the women subscribed to the list became involved in computing. All the stories were wonderful to read, but the one that completely blew me away was Paula Graham’s. Not very long after that, I had the great pleasure of meeting Paula at the Eclectic Tech Carnival in Graz, and she has been very high on my personal list of most admired women ever since.

I’m not sure whether Paula actually invented the term “accidental techie”, but she is certainly the person I learned it from, meaning that when any kind of group reaches the point where they need to use technology, *somebody* has to figure out how to do it. Paula is most insistent about convincing other women to be self-confident and self-reliant enough – no matter what their background – to become that *somebody*. One of the most important lessons I have learned from Paula is that women don’t always need to be “nice”, and that can be quite a liberating insight.
www.opengender.org.uk
http://bastubis.wordpress.com

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Ximena Alarcon

URLs:
http://www.deeplistening.org/site/artists/a
http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/projects/ISE.html

I compose virtual sound environments and transform my scores in multimedia interfaces. I am extending and re-implementing an Interactive Sonic Environment – London Underground, which I initially built in Director, using Lingo language.
http://bartleby.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/~xalarcon/project/interactive.html

Soon, I will launch my site that links the metros of London, Paris and Mexico, thus you can have a virtual journey through the sounds of these three acoustic environments, on Internet. As a branch of this work, I have worked a networked off-line improvisation called “Listening and Remembering”, for commuters and their voice (in Mexico and Paris), in collaboration with Peter Batchelor.

Technology for me is not a goal, but a set of powerful cultural tools to analyse, experiment with, and extend perceptions of the world. My recent artistic work is mainly based on ethnographic work with commuters: http://soundingunderground.wordpress.com

INSPIRED BY

I am inspired and feel encouraged with these women’s work in art and technology:

Pauline Oliveros
Her outstanding work in electronic music and the continuous innovation in the use of technologies extending her philosophy of deep listening.
www.deeplistening.org/site/artists/O

IONE
Her art, dynamic networking, stimulating women’s art and power through dream work, using telecircles.
http://ionedreams.us

Serena Alexander
Strong electroacoustic textures and gestures, clean and master work, extending the power of her voice.
http://serenaalexander.com/

Jess Laccetti
A master blogger!
http://www.jesslaccetti.co.uk

Noemi Peña
Researcher in high technology to create “Custom Ceramic Products”
www.linkedin.com/pub/8/9b8/a48

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Diana McCarty (of Faces)

INSPIRED BY

Prof. Dr. Heidi Schelhowe
For her amazing work combining feminist concepts in technological models and her work with illustrating how important the construction of knowledge is: She informs just about everything that I do!
http://dimeb.informatik.uni-bremen.de/content/view/307/138/

Seda Guerses
Her work as a computer scientist is incredible. She asks the right questions and is a constant challenge to some very dangerous assumptions about privacy.
www.cs.kuleuven.be/~seda

Uschi Reiter
For her tireless commitment to working for Women in Technology. She is able to realize elegant participatory models.
www.firstfloor.org/ur/blog

Michelle Teran
Her work is incredible – she connects the social with so many aspects of technology.
http://techformance.blogspot.com/

VNS Matrix
They just got it: their early understanding of what was possible and scary about big daddy mainframe and how to subvert it!
http://lx.sysx.org/vnsmatrix.html

Gender Changers
Because they rock!
www.genderchangers.org

The Eclectic Tech Carnival
Because they rock!
www.eclectictechcarnival.org

Faces Community
Possibly the only 90’s mailing list that can sort out a cup of coffee, a sofa to sleep on and has members that organize their own meetings whenever they get the chance.
www.faces-l.net

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Francesca Da Rimini

INSPIRED BY

Linda Dement
A huge inspiration for me since i first met her in adelaide’s small but wild queer punk scene back in the early 1980s. her work is beautiful, fearless, adept.
www.lindadement.com/index.htm

Shu Lea Cheang
We met on email, i think through linda dement. creates complex multi-layered spaces mixing on and offline exploring issues around sex, violence, prejudice, society. pushes boundaries, always with incredible style, seductive surfaces, humour. a mistress of the interface.

Silvia Federici
Extraordinary radical historian. her book Caliban and the Witch examines women, labour, power and dispossession through the lense of inquisitions, demonisation and other forms of violence. a compelling account which can be read many times.
www.generation-online.org/p/pfederici.htm

Teri Hoskin
Philosopher, artist, criss-crossing media as the ideas demand. not afraid of the dark, ever. someone i can send my writing to, at any stage of roughness, without shame.
www.altx.com/ulmer/hoskin/fishtrap.html#

Rea
Artist working in sculpture, photography, digital media, installation. explores issues around indigenous/colonial histories and representation. smart, powerful, straight up.
www.artreview.com.au/art/profiles/artists/mint–r-e-a.aspx

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Ele Carpenter

The Open Source Embroidery project has led me to some fantastic women working with media arts and crafts in many different ways. So I’d like to nominate a list of women artists and writer who have inspired me in their rigorous enquiry, and whose work will, or should, go in the history books.

I’ve also blogged about Ada Lovelace on www.eleweekend.blogspot.com to highlight Richard Hamilton’s poster Free Ada Lovelace, which can be seen to make the connection between access to culture, museums, computing and software.

INSPIRED BY

Joanna Drucker
www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/members/drucker

Sneha Solanki
http://electronicartist.net/solanki

Aileen Derieg
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0707/derieg/en

Kate Pemberton
www.artisopensource.net/index.php

Becky Stern
http://sternlab.org/

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Tracey Meziane Benson

URLs:
www.byte-time.net
www.fauxonomy.org
www.dorkbot.org/dorkbotcbr

INSPIRED BY

Linda Carroli – Writer, artist and commentator.
http://flytrapper.synthasite.com
http://artwriting.blogspot.com
http://transmissionlines.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/lcarroli

Patrica Piccinini – artist
www.patriciapiccinini.net

Linda Dement – artist
www.lindadement.com

Elizabeth Grosz – academic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Grosz

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Anne Roth

I wouldn’t consider myself being active in media or net arts, rather activism. I did an Ada Lovelace blog post (in German)
http://annalist.noblogs.org/post/2009/03/25/ada-lovelace-day-star-simpson-and-donna-metzlar about:

Donna Metzlar
Activist and (one of the) driving force(s) with the Genderchangers, www.genderchangers.org and Eclectic Tech Carnival, http://eclectictechcarnival.org

Star Simpson
Who was arrested at the Boston Airport (and later convicted) for “wearing a hoax device”, a selfmade LED application (see http://boingboing.net/2007/09/21/mit-student-arrested.html). She described herself in one sentence as “I’m an inventor, artist, engineer, and student, I love to learn, build, and do” and here are some of the things she built.
http://starbur.st/portfolio

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MY NAME: Max d. Well

INSPIRED BY

Lynn Hershman Leeson
Already kinda literally associated by one of her outstanding works: the movie *Conceiving Ada*… all her works (installations, videos) make her one of the most influential and important woman artists of the last decades

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Micha Cardenas

I was so excited to see this, as I’m always filling in my students about ada lovelace, who seems to get left out somehow of our “introduction to computing and the arts” class, often, or only brielfy mentioned…

So I signed up for the list. But I’m not a woman, I’m transgender. I don’t identify as a man or a woman, but I guess you could say I’m mtf, in permanent transition. So, if you want a submission from a femme transgirl, here goes…

I’m interested in the interplay of the body, technology and biopolitics. I did a performance called Becoming Dragon in dec 2008. just finishing up my MFA at ucsd, just started working in sheldon brown’s experimental game lab.

URLs:
http://technotrannyslut.com
http://secondloop.wordpress.com

INSPIRED BY

Avital Ronell
Philosopher of technology, for being my friend and mentor, ever so briefly, one summer at EGS, and a massive inspiration who turned my whole idea of knowledge and thought and ways of approaching politics upside down and inside out. i can’t even describe how much i owe to her…
http://as.nyu.edu/object/avitalronell.html

Allucquere Rosanne (Sandy) Stone
Another philosopher of technology, another amazing woman who i met at EGS who was so supportive of me throughout my 15 immersive performance of Becoming Dragon, being more than generous, providing guidance, wisdom and grounding, and for thinking through the questions of online worlds and gender so long before i even started considering them, and for so generously providing me with personal advice about transitioning that was so valuable to me.
http://sandystone.com

Adriene Jenik
Networked performance artist, creator of distributed social cinema – adriene is one of the main reasons i am even in grad school and decided to dedicate myself to being an artist and has also been so, so generous and giving throughout my years working with and knowing her. her warmth along with her deep, deep knowledge of new media art has guided me so much. she has been one of the main people in my life to really educate me about feminism.
http://adrienejenik.net

Orlan
For not being afraid to find the limits of merging the body and technology, orlan is the artist who has inspired me most. i think her work is a shining example and challenge to artists’ commitment everywhere.
http://orlan.net/

Donna Haraway
Another massive inspiration for how i think about politics and technology and the body who’s thinking on interspecies and transspecies relationships helped me develop my own ideas in my work.

Beatriz da Costa
Bioartist, interspcies collaborator. For making so much inspiring bioart, for the brilliant, brilliant term Tactical Biopolitics, for her guidance in one short studio visit about Becoming Dragon which helped me reframe my approach to the whole project, and which has turned out to me a great suggestion.
www.beatrizdacosta.net/

Elle Mehrmand
My closest and dearest friend right now, a brilliant new media performance artist and beautiful, strong, brave ally.
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/something-happening/?author=18
http://myspace.com/assemblyofmazes (that’s her band, but she’s working on a website soon)

Subrosa
For their brilliant linking of witch hunts, queer and gender variant persecution and feminine knowledge production in Yes Species.
http://cyberfeminism.net

probably not surprising, but its my personal list…

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Marc Garrett

URL: www.furtherfield.org

INSPIRED BY

Anne-Marie Schleiner

Velvet-Strike. www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike – A collection of spray paints to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter terrorism game “Counter-Strike”, conceptualized during the beginning of Bush’s “War on Terrorism.”

“…part of a growing movement to bring a message of peace, love and happiness to online shooters by any means necessary. Graphical User Intervention, a more radical group of protesters, will go so far as to sacrifice their characters for the greater cause of getting out a message of non-violence.” Wired.

When this appeared on the net art scene in 2002 I completely understood and appreciate why Anne-marie used her computing and art skills to embark in such a dynamic interventionist tactic, in challenging the psychology, attitudes and fetish around violence and war in the form of interventionist, networked play. It had to be done, especially in contrast to the overwhelming experience of witnessing our governments and media falling into the typical trappings of opting for more violence to (supposedly) solve terrorism. I personally, found it all extremely frustrating seeing the world torn apart by other (slack) males, as well as those who bought into. This is also one of the various anti-war net artworks, which inspired me to make some of my own anti-war net art-works.

Aileen Deirig

Aileen, for her dedication in being part of and supporting various contemporary, independent groups and organisations; many involving women where she has selflessly shared her energy, ideas and varied skills, whether it be in programming, writing or social engagement. A collaborator who genuinely incorporates her personal, social and contextual beliefs into her everyday life and practice. I also admire her intelligence in understanding that art is not just about product, but also fluid place where contemporary factors such as feminism, politics, technology and human context all have a place, allow agency. Some of the projects that Aileen has been involved with are:
Genderchangers – http://genderchangers.org,
The faces list – www.faces-l.net/,
the Servus blog – http://core.servus.at/node/164,
the Furtherfield blog – http://blog.furtherfield.org (thanks Aileen),
Monochrome Blog – http://www.monochrom.at/english,
and more.
You find more Aileens projects, translations and writings here – http://eliot.at

Josephine Bosma

Josephine is also important to mention, especially in repsect of her work around net art, networked cultures and media art generally. From 1991 until 1998 Josephine Bosma worked with the independent station Radio Patapoe in Amsterdam and also with VPRO radio, a Dutch national broadcaster. Since 1993 her focus has been on media art and media theory and she has published numerous interviews and essays in book collections and in magazines including Mute (UK), Telepolis (D), UHK (NO), and Switch (USA). She played a key part in organizing the radio part of the Next 5 Minutes 2 and Next 5 Minutes 3 festivals, and has edited the streaming media sections of the nettime book, ReadMe and the N5M3 workbook. In January 2001 Josephine initiated the newsletter for net art criticism, Cream. Josephine Bosma lives and works in Amsterdam. Josephine Bosma’s Database, here you will find essays, articles, lecture notes, transcripts and broadcasts etc.
http://laudanum.net/cgi-bin/media.cgi?action=frontpage

Sadie Plant

The most important Sadie Plant book for me was ‘The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age, published in 1992. It’s one of those books that you read over and over again. What I personally got from it was how rich her perspective was in contrast to most Situationist historical texts on the subject, and more expansive. Here is a link to an interesting interview with Sadie Plant Brett by Stalbaum and Geri Wittig – http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v5n1/plant/

If you have not read The Most Radical Gesture and do not wish to take the risk of buying it, why not visit here on Questia where you can read it on-line and copy etc www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=103446663

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Helen Varley Jamieson

my ada lovelace day post:
http://creative-catalyst.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/13-AdaLovelace-Day.html

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Michelle Kasprzak – Curator & Writer

http://curating.info

http://michelle.kasprzak.ca

…and here’s my post, too!

http://michelle.kasprzak.ca/blog/archives/365

—————————————————————————
blogged at: http://m3me.wordpress.com

Ada is an inspiration as much in her foresight as in the ways she accomplished and implemented her ideas. going beyond the conventions of her days, she did not let herself being encloistered by her class and society, but found ways to implant her ideas into the public sphere.

Conceiving ada was my initiation to her life and work, transposed already to our times.

Technology stems from the industrial-military complex, and what it is missing most, in order to be used artistically, is poetry. poetry as in beauty, as in emotion, as in awe.

Here some contemporary artists i came across that are driven in this way:

natabor: www.aa-vv.org

adriana sa: http://adrianasa.planetaclix.pt

ursula scherrer: www.ursulascherrer.com

sculptrice: http://iiie.klingt.org/sculptrice

This brings us back to nature, maybe the most compelling discussion we should be having, as an arrogant, snobish past is giving way to a growing sensation of symbiosis and the fragility of its interrelations.

A 130 year old woman was ‘discovered’ in kazakhstan; when asked (how? why? – kind of silly really; as if they were not more interesting points of debate) attribute humor and using grandmother’s cures for all ills. An unbroken chain of knowledge, that women can pride themselves on. Interestingly, it is not always adquired but can ‘feel’ intuitively right.

Ada is as close as it can get to adam, ‘the first one’, tricked out of paradise and innocence by the scheming eve, eager for more; our chastity belt ever since. this might be coming full circle..

There is a growing movement of women empowerment worldwide, which will make a difference, specially when the patriarchal society is about to wave the white flag; like the microcredit movement or video volunteers:
http://www.videovolunteers.org/

Ada is not about any specific thing, she is about the ‘going beyond’ oneself to achieve something that wants to come forward. it is about doing the intuitive thing. names don’t really matter. it is about communication and exchange. she developed a part of that, the growing ‘global consciousness’ we call ‘the net’ – a tool that shrank space and time;

curious where it will take us..

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Nina Gazire

URL: http://blog.premiosergiomotta.org.br/

INSPIRED BY

Hanne Darboven
Since the 1960s, Hanne Darboven has focused her art-making on daily “writings” that chronicle existence and evoke the passage of time. The 2,782 typed and hand-written daily writings or drawings that make up Leben, leben/Life, living represent Darboven’s systematic approach to counting the years 1900 to 1999. These drawings make visible two orders of time: the actual time taken to create them and the historical time that they summarize. Darboven asserts the presentness of time by marking its passage in a literal form that also takes up volumetric space when the writings are installed in a large gallery. The work also includes two dollhouses that are part of Darboven?s extensive collection of popular artifacts. The houses, photos of which are included in the installation, also mark time as one represents a nineteenth-century German home and the other a house from the 1950s.
http://www.cmoa.org/international/html/art/darboven.htm

Donna Haraway
Donna J. Haraway (born September 6, 1944 in Denver, Colorado) is currently a professor and chair of the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. She is the author of Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (1976), Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991), Modest Witness@Second Millenium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (1997, Ludwig Fleck Prize), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003), and When Species Meet (2008). Haraway earned a degree in zoology and philosophy at the Colorado College and received the Boettcher Foundation scholarship. She lived in Paris for a year, studying philosophies of evolution on a Fulbright scholarship before completing her Ph. D. from the Biology Department of Yale in 1972. She wrote her dissertation on the functions of metaphor in shaping research in developmental biology in the twentieth century.

Gilda de Mello e Souza
Gilda de Mello and Souza (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1919-2005) was a philosopher, critical literary, writer and Brazilian university teacher. She passed her infancy in the farm of the parents, in Araraquara,Sao Paulo’s country, but returns the Sao Paulo in 1930 to study. She entered the College of Philosophy, Sciences and Literature of the University of Sao Paulo in 1937, graduating in Philosophy in 1940. She collaborated in the production of the magazine Clima, together with its future husband Antonio Candido. In 1952 she receives completes her PhD in Doctor in Social Sciences with the defense of the intitled work The fashion in century XIX, publishing the thesis in 1952. In 1954 she became assumes the chair of Aesthetic in the Department of Philosophy of the USP, department that would be directed by Gilda between the years of 1969 and 1972. She retires in 1973 and becomes: Teacher of the College of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences of the USP
in 1999.

Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler (born July 29, 1943) is an artist. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives. She graduated from Brooklyn College (1965) and the University of California, San Diego (1974). Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Her work and writing have been widely influential. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally and teaches art at Rutgers University and the St?delschule in Frankfurt.She serves in an advisory capacity to the departments of education at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (all New York City). Rosler’s work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women’s experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport.
http://home.earthlink.net/~navva/index.html

—————————————————————————
MY NAME: Cristina L. Duarte

Here’s my blogg A Ciudade das Mulheres or, in english, the city of women – my inspiration come of Cristina de Pisan, the writer from 16th century, who wrote ‘the city of ladies’, and other texts.

I am from sociology (sociology of culture), and I’m working on a thesis on gender studies (Phd). In the past i was also a journalist in the area of culture and fashion. This mailing list of netbehaviour is really amazing. I discovered more today in regards to women media artists than in the past year 🙂

INSPIRED BY

my aunt natalia
marguerite duras
virginia wolf
laurie anderson
patti smith
paula rego (painter)
louise bourgeois
women photographers
judith butler
rosi braidotti
lucy irigaray
simone de beauvoir
paula roush

portuguese women poets/writers
portuguese feminists

and many others 🙂

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MY NAME: Ana Valdes

I started a digital magazine for women 1995, it was called Ada and it’s today archived in the adress http://www.algonet.se/~agora/ada/index.html The mag was only in Swedish and it’s today discontinued but it’s still used as a good archive of articles related to women and technology.

Hi here comes my inspiration:

Alexandra Kollontaj
La Pasionaria
Emma Goldmann
Rosa Luxemburg
Virginia Woolf
Simone de Beuvoir
Maria Zambrano
Ulrike Meinhof
My grandmother
My mother
All my 200 jail comrades who supported me during my jailtime in Uruguay

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MY NAME: Maria Lusitano

URL: My blog is www.marialusitano.com

INSPIRED BY

Portuguese older women of my family and friends, circles, for brave acts, done in old complicated historical times of our country. Their names Judite Fonseca (my best ninety year old friend), Isolete Pato (my math teacher), Maria do Carmo Carpenter.

Then:

Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Marguerite Yourcenar, Louise Bourgeois, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Gertrude Sandqvist, Bel Hooks, Paula Roush.

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MY NAME: John Hopkins

hmmm, haven’t had the time to think about this issue in the last two weeks to the depth it deserves, and it quickly turns into a happy wander through the depths of memory. and so this is a totally incomplete list… and it’s not about just ‘media’ artists anyway, it’s about women working in arts and culture who have influenced my worldview through the crossing of paths…

In no particular order, I would mention Lucy Lippard, a big influence at CU-Boulder where she was stationed when I was doing my MFA; Janice Tanaka, a video teacher I had at the same time; Kathy Kennedy, the owner of Photoworks, the top custom B&W lab in NYC, she turned me into a master printer; all my women students at the Icelandic Academy who taught me much about gender equality and fearless creative expression, especially Sara Bjornsdottir and Solveig Sveinsbjornsdottir; Valgerdur Hauksdottir, my colleague, friend, and artist who initiated one of the first networked/distributed Master’s programs in Fine Arts in Europe in the early 90’s; Finnish artist Kaisu Koivisto, a constant inspiration and friend; Nan Hoover, media and performance artist and teacher, whose
passing last year was really a tragic loss to all who knew her; Bernice Luhulima, Eija Makivuoti, and Mari Keski-Korsu in Helsinki, Dagmar Kase in Tallinn, Rasa Smite in Riga, Isabelle Jenniches in Santa Cruz, Sophea Lerner in Delhi; Share.dj amigas Marie-Helene Parant in Montreal and Keiko Uenishi in NYC; Kristin Bergaust from Atelier Nord days; Francis Charteris in Boulder; Amanda McDonald Crowley now at eyebeam; Honor Harger; Kathy Rae Huffman; Helen Varley Jamieson; Carmin Karasic; Josephine Bosma; Joanna Buick; Sher Doruff; Bronac Ferran; Elisa Giaccardi; Antoinette LaFarge; Alice Miceli; Varsha Nair (womanifesto) in Bangkok; Leena Saarinen; Katrin Sigurdardottir; Helen Thorington; Adrianne Wortzel…

Other former students who are continuous sources of creative inspiration: Sarah Chung, Nadja Franz, Jane Crayton, Fernanda Scur, Dona Laurita, Monique Stauder, Angelica Chio, Mary Finney, the Icelandic Love Corporation; Annu Wilenius

Frida Kahlo; Louise Bourgeois; Yoko Ono;

and others…

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MY NAME: Lauren Cornell

I would say I’m inspired by women I work alongside, immediately three people come to mind: Caitlin Jones, Hanne Mugaas and Ceci Moss. All are dynamic, completely independent thinkers and constantly pushing conversations in the field of new media and internet art forward.

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The early experimental video art scene in Chicago, and its indispensability in developing an understanding of contemporary New Media practices, is something that I learned from jonCates and that jonCates learned from Phil Morton. Well, maybe it’s not quite that simple, but that is one possible set of connections that can be traced from jonCates’ COPY-IT-RIGHT project.

The Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive was initiated in 2007 by jonCates and is housed in The Film, Video & New Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It exists to organize and freely distribute Phil Morton’s new media artwork, and also to perpetuate the COPY-IT-RIGHT ideal that Morton advocated. As you can read on the blog for the COPY-IT-RIGHT project, Morton sought to disseminate an anti-copyright attitude towards media and its distribution, especially artwork that is based in digital technologies. By referencing these ideals under the phrase ‘COPY-IT-RIGHT’, Morton sought to completely replace ingrained notions of copyright law by re-framing the term’s meaning as a call to action. Make copies! It’s the right thing to do! jonCates states that COPY-IT-RIGHT ranges in meaning from copyright reform to pro-piracy. “The COPY-IT-RIGHT ethic is presented by Morton as a value, even as a moral imperative, to share and freely exchange media,” he said.

jonCates began researching Morton’s work shortly before he learned of Morton’s death from Jane Veeder, one of Morton’s collaborators. Veeder put him in contact with Morton’s surviving partner, Barb Abramo, who later entrusted all of Morton’s archived material to him. jonCates said that this took place after a couple years of correspondence and a developed understanding. The creation of the archive is, “a personal and subjective process that involves developing trust and friendships.”

The personal degrees of separation enabling this archive, however, should not betray it’s larger goal, which, according to jonCates, is to facilitate discourse. “This discursive work is intended to be productive, engendering the development of theory/practices that are informed by these archives and contributing to ongoing conversations,” he states. The archive is a central point of investigation, but also exists as a mediating voice within existing networks and issues, in both form and content. The intermingling of the archive’s personal and institutional roots is exemplary of how individual archives might begin to bridge recognized authority and the histories that are important to individuals.

Because COPY-IT-RIGHT is a project that seeks to freely distribute media art, as well as create a networked discourse around it, we are invited to explore ideas such as influence and the generative origins of our knowledge. This process eclipses antiquated visions of the archive as a static source of ‘knowledge’ or ‘history’.

COPY-IT-RIGHT’s latest web entry is a transcript of a talk jonCates gave at McGill University on anti-copyright approaches to media. In that talk, he refers to “the artistic role of archives”. jonCates provided some further examples of “artistic archives”, such as Emily Jacir’s Material for a Film and Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group, which both seek to illuminate history and contemporary contexts through materials that might not be automatically absorbed into our stateliest cultural institutions. They represent an independent approach to information collection, at the same time that they contain material that is itself a challenge to dominant cultural and historical knowledge. Likewise, COPY-IT-RIGHT is a lesser-voiced exploration of Chicago’s art history, but also an open-ended call to discuss and develop material on the future of media copyright attitudes.

The COPY-IT-RIGHT project, as mentioned, also exists to provide entry into Morton’s media art, for study or copy. The work he did with Dan Sandin, creator of the Sandin Image Processor – an analog computer for video image processing. Morton and Sandin’s “Distribution Religion” is a project that documents the process of duplicating the Sandin Image Processor. Morton wanted to create a duplicate of the processor itself, and in the process, created an outline of the method for others. The documentation became part of the copying process, and also includes remarks on the COPY-IT-RIGHT ethic.

The Distribution Religion is archived on giorgiomagnanensi.com. Examining this document and reading its prefatory statements seem to get at the heart of COPY-IT-RIGHT’s significance. jonCates is interested in the fact that Morton and Sandin’s work “predates The Pirate Party, Free and Open Source Software, Creative Commons and/or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.” Although most copyright initiatives are steeped in political and legal challenges, COPY-IT-RIGHT offers an inaugural stance on issues that are at the forefront of contemporary culture: interdisciplinary desires, open information, and the democratic malleability of our cultural memory.

We have come to expect that information is distributed, and available. But we don’t necessarily employ it for our own purposes with the intent of ‘copying’ it. But this is, in essence, a direct form of preservation. In a 2004 lecture, Florian Cramer cited a parallel between artists who step outside of copyright law, and the sciences. Scientists, he says, have mostly been free to use formulas and proofs in the generation of new discoveries. In this light ‘copying’ has now become synonymous with ‘usage’ and the natural role this plays in the development of ideas become even more obvious. COPY-IT-RIGHT, by existing as an explicitly anti-copyright project and by making Morton’s materials available for the generation of new works, aligns the idea of copying with progress rather than piracy or plagiarism. As jonCates states in his own lecture, the ethic “opposed private property, ownership and economic exploitation on the basis of technologies.” COPY-IT-RIGHT suggests that the availability of resources is, as jonCates puts it, “not simply for study, but also for creative cultural uses by artists.”