lost in metamorphosis: ursula endlicher’s html_butoh

Butoh is enigmatic. Sometimes characterized as dance, sometimes as theatre, sometimes as meditation on what it means to be human, butoh seems to resist definition and easy categorization. Undeniably, however, butoh is about movement. Butoh emerged in post world-war II Japan, in part rising out of dissatisfaction with the prevalence of Western dance movements and influences in that country. Some have suggested that the goal of butoh is for the dancer to cease being him/herself, to stop being human, and to become instead another entity altogether. If butoh drives the human out of the dancer through movement, Ursula Endlicher’s html_butoh “a web-driven performance piece” raises questions about humanness in the realm of the internet.

Html_butoh is based on Endlicher’s movement library, “a web-based repository of short video clips and images by various performers who use html tags, such as,,, as a starting point for generating movements.” Anyone can submit a video clip to the library. Uploading a video allows you to be integrated into not only the movement library, but also html_butoh’s code recital. The performances of html_butoh come to fruition when a particular website is enacted or read. What results is a five by five grid of video clips from the movement library, each clip corresponding to a particular line of html code (,, or for instance). The websites that form the basis for these performances are culled from the ‘global top 500’, a listing ?updated daily” of the most popular websites based on traffic.

In the collaborative, mutable play of html_butoh, all the web is a stage and the performers flit from page to page. One of the webpages on which both they and I landed was [url:http://msn.foxsports.com/]Fox Sports[/url]. With a click, I surfed away from the hypnotic movement and sound of html_butoh, to the steely gray and blue of the Fox Sports website, peppered with images of athletes. It was hard to remember that what I saw in each was the product of the same code interpreted two different ways. I had to force myself to see the Fox website differently, imagining in it the invisible structure that was being so vibrantly performed on html_butoh. The video performers of Endlicher’s work make visible the invisible workings of web surfing, embodying and humanizing it. It is the interpretative work, the decoding, executed by the web-butoh dancers, that drives html_butoh. And it is their work that makes the web-performance so fascinating, no two individuals moving, acting, or looking alike. Some of the html_butoh dancers are costumed, one in toga like robes and head wrap, holding a spear, like Athena, rising fully formed from the net itself. Some, in contrast, are dressed in street clothes, one wearing a bulky coat and carrying a large green purse while she moves in looped translation of the command. The juxtaposition of stage and street is intriguing in a work that is at once randomly generated and wholly constructed.

It is tempting to think of what html_butoh offers as a simple translation, the rendering of code into movement through a sort of ‘open-source’ improvisational dance troupe. Certainly, translation seems to be central to some of Endlicher’s other web-driven works. Websitewigs for instance, renders the hypertext structure of the web into a series of interconnected wigs, each braid based on links and codes that underlie what we see when we look at websites. Singing Website Wallpaper enacts a form of double translation, reinterpreting html code first as sound, then translating that sound into a visual symbol. Although the movement library develops an ‘expandable movement alphabet of the html library’, translation is only part of the equation in html_butoh.

Endlicher makes visible what for many is an unnoticed and unintelligible structure operating behind what we see in a web browser. As we watch, the ways in which browsers scan html code in order to display its content is performed as movement. But what is it that we are really watching? Butoh dancers do not simply imitate, they become. Recalling the ethos of butoh, what takes place in Endlicher’s work is not just translation, but metamorphosis. Websites are not simply reinterpreted; rather they become something else altogether. If Endlicher is humanizing the web, she is also mechanizing humans, their movements and bodies caught in digital code, endlessly looping as we watch. Endlicher’s piece takes place at the intersection of the organic and the inorganic, human and machine. The work shifts seamlessly from the human act of looking to the calculated act of scanning. Endlicher’s work challenges the seeming separation between us and the machines we use, asking questions about the inner workings of both.

Scanpath by Catherine Baker

TheSpace4, Peterborough

Drawing is a record of looking. Learning to draw is, therefore, learning to see. Having learnt to draw, artists look at the world differently from non-artists. For example, they spend more time looking at what they are drawing than at the paper. This is not an elitist claim, and many drawing instruction books claim to help anyone improve their drawing by helping them learn how to look. Technology has allowed the act of looking to be quantified in ways that show how artistic looking differs from everyday regard.

Catherine Baker’s works in Scanpath have been made using such technology. Each piece records the artist looking while drawing but is made by eye-tracking hardware and software rather than by hand. These systems track the eye’s movements (saccades) and rest (fixations), with most of the show devoted to work based on fixations. The use of these systems comes from a long-term collaboration with Dr Iain Gilchrist, Head of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol.

After some inkjet prints of fixation points by the entrance, three main groups of large-scale work are in the gallery.

The first room contains ceiling-high installations of dozens of small outlined vinyl circles scattered across the walls. These circles are placed according to data generated by tracking the fixations of Baker’s eyes between saccades while drawing. Clipped to hooks hung from the ceiling to around eye level are dozens of small laser-pointer-like torches. You can unclip one and shine it at the circles on the wall to project an image of an eye. This reproduces the image’s journey in reverse, literally projecting back how the image was made in a nod to Plato’s idea of how vision worked. Give a child one of the torches, and they flicker the projection across the wall crazily, sometimes stopping, looping, sometimes revisiting the same place it was a moment ago.

An installation of hanging plexiglass spheres fills the next room, projecting shadows onto the walls. Like the torches, this use of projective rather than received light reverses the process of looking. Showing is the reverse of seeing, and art is an act of showing. Again, this reverses the vision process and re-enacts it to be experienced and reflected on as art.

The show’s final room is in darkness and contains two pairs of projections. Each has one projection of an eye and one of a recording of that eye’s scanpath as it looks over a scene that the eye’s owner is drawing. This is the more or less raw data that the models of the previous two rooms project. Overcoming any lingering memories of Un Chien Andalou, watching the eye flick to and fro, the landscape being drawn (and occasionally the edge of the drawing), and the scanpath of the eye as dots or lines become hypnotizing. The path taken by the torches and the positions in the space of the globes that project two-dimensional shadows ties into this work to make the show an assertion of the reality of the artistic vision.

This is a record of looking, so by our starting definition, it is a drawing. Even though it is a record of an artist drawing, the lack of human agency in creating the record seems to disrupt this. Taking the verbal description of art as a point of ironization was a strategy used to great effect by Frank Stella, for example. But Baker’s work seems more like a straight inquiry into the nature of art production in a contemporary way. Hans Namuth’s film of Jackson Pollock’s painting, filmed from below a sheet of glass, is a technical forerunner to this. Watching Pollock’s hand and eye employed in constructing a painting is fascinating. There are films of another artist at work, including Picasso’s Behind Glass, but none have the simultaneously mythical and insightful character of Namuth’s Pollock. Pollock’s eyes flicker across the composition as he considers where his line will go next. But only with the resolution of a movie camera. We cannot look closer at Pollock looking.

The artist at work implies the artist’s studio or depictions of Realist or Impressionist artists in the countryside. But the movie camera removes this context and focuses on the artist’s body. The eye-tracker goes further than the camera, to the boundary of the involuntary sensory and knowledge-constructing systems that are not available to our conscious minds for introspection. Scanpath is, therefore, a postmodern depiction of the artist at work, not in the studio or the fields but in their mind, or rather in the activity of a specific subsystem of their brain.

A postmodern splintered subjectivity would result if the artist’s commonalities and individualities disappeared into these systems. But it does not. Each individual’s eye saccades are constant and unchanging in their duration throughout our lives, and these are a universal feature of human vision. Eye-tracking systems do record unique patterns of looking and of patterns in keeping with what we expect to see from an experienced artist. This asserts the hard cognitive reality of artistic vision and of the individual exercising that vision.

Scanpath shows that the cognitive basis of artistic visual experience can strongly assert artistic autonomy in the face of relativism when it avoids capture by managerialism or descent into solipsism. It shows that the craft of art can provide a basis for advanced contemporary practice when ironised technologically. And it shows that even the most sophisticated and voluminous datasets created by the most advanced technological systems can benefit from interpretation by a creative artist and vice versa.

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

What If We Played A War and Nobody Won?

What If We Played A War and Nobody Won?: Critical Approaches to War in Videogame Art is a mouthful of a title that asks the big question that lingers in our contemporary culture’s collective mind and begs its audience to consider the possibility of deconstructing war through game metaphor. This online exhibition comprises six games that tamper with the rules and styles of standardized games. Each explores an aspect of war — from its gruesome realities to its philosophical blurriness – through play. What is being reinvented here is not the act of play and the skills required to ‘win’ but rather the motivation behind the play and how it relates to our perceptions of war.

A different maker or set of makers creates each game in this collection. Yet, a common thread among them lies in their clever ability to address formulaic, culturally machinized attitudes toward war. Among them, Conker: Live & Reloaded – Saving Private Conker provocatively uses fantasy to illustrate the ubiquitous glorification of war illustrated in war films, in this case Hollywood’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’. The sensationalism of death and tragedy in Spielberg’s recreation of the 1944 invasion of Normandy is recreated here through chipmunk soldiers representing the Americans and teddy bears representing the enemy. What might at first come off as crass ridicule successfully translates into a meaningful parallel between this depiction of war and those generated by the media or Hollywood. All are inherently oversimplified and reduce the seriousness of complex issues to binary polarizations.

One game in this exhibition allows players to “Play the news. Solve the puzzle.” The conflict between Israel and Palestine is the basis for exploration and play in Peacemaker. However, as the name suggests, there is no opportunity for the player to engage in violent conquest. The equivalent of a victory in this game is achieving a peaceful resolution between the two sparring states. Losing this game results in an ongoing political struggle between them. Viable arguments from each side are the only forms of weaponry, giving ‘Peacemaker’ educational potential in a positively subversive and amoral take on video games. In a stride for utmost accuracy, the game is available in English, Hebrew and Arabic.

Another piece in this collection operates fundamentally as performance art and documentary art. ‘Dead-in-Iraq’ publicly recognizes the American casualties who died in Iraq through artist Joseph DeLappe’s participation in the online multiplayer game ‘America’s Army’. Under the username ‘Dead-in-Iraq’, DeLappe catalogues their names in the game’s system, which allows players to assume the role of real U.S. soldiers. His is an ongoing pursuit, as he promises to continue to memorialize those lost through the end of American occupation in Iraq.

The other three games in this series offer a fresh approach to videogame play, including a revolutionary, three-player game of Chess that pits pawns against royal forces. As the desensitization of shock value is gaining with increasing quickness, players generally approach games through leisurely consumption. This exhibition is an artistic manifesto that debunks these casual attitudes toward violence and gives voice to the gamers who represent our cultural blind spot toward these issues. In our game and technology-obsessed culture, this exhibition appropriates the products of technology to work with and against the assumed, mass-produced, and highly problematic conventions of games. It creates social change by engaging viewers and players in critical discourse, revealing stylized commentary, pedagogical potential, and thoughtful contemplation on the harsh realities of war. This collection becomes a part of the public record, each game representing one facet of the whole. The absence of winning and losing, as the title of this exhibition suggests, reveals an unpopular possibility and steers players toward an important outcome that eerily represents our fears and, for some, very personal experiences.

https://www.fact.co.uk/event/mywar-participation-in-an-age-of-war

Interview with Chris Joseph (Babel) for Furtherfield.org

Chris Joseph is a Digital Writer in Residence at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is a writer and artist who has produced solo and collaborative work since 2002 as Babel.

His past work includes Inanimate Alice an award-winning series of multimedia stories produced with novelist Kate Pullinger The Breathing Wall, a groundbreaking digital novel that responds to the reader’s breathing rate (also with Kate Pullinger); and [url:http://www.animalamina.com]Animalamina[/url], an A-Z of interactive multimedia poetry for children. He is the editor of the post-dada magazine and network 391.org.

Jess: Babel has been extremely active and has maintained a web presence since the late 90s, but only recently, with your new post as a digital writer in residence, have you begun a [url:http://www.chrisjoseph.org/wp/] blog[/url] under your *real* name. What motivated this addition to your internet profile, and how is it different from your other sites?

Chris: I’ve been using the Babel name since around 1997, when the Babel [url:http://www.towerofbabel.info]Encyclopedia[/url] first went live, as (amongst other reasons) a way to distinguish my commercial daytime activities from my ‘artistic’ ones. Very happily, as a digital writer in residence, there is no need to make any such distinction! But it is more than that… babel is (or was) an online identity, and this residency has large offline requirements, so it always made sense to me to revert back to my ‘real’ name, as you put it!

The blog was a requirement of the residency post, and initially, I resisted as I really didn’t want to add to the mass of superfluous texts out there. Eventually, I settled on making it a site that might be useful to other UK-based digital writers, where they can find out about relevant events, calls for submissions, and other flotsam and jetsam of possible interest. It may change over the course of the residency, but that’s pretty much what it is for now. I also try to break up the text entries with creative posts – flash movies, sound files, etc.

Jess: Although initially you say beginning your blog was a proviso of your new role how is it modifying or transforming how you work? Especially since you note that you “try to break up the text” with “creative posts” (suggesting that words in themselves are not substantially creative on their own)?

Chris: Ha ha, would I ever dare suggest such a thing? The majority of my blog postings so far have been calls for submissions, so these particular words in themselves are not particularly creative, rather informative. It’s nice to break up these texts with more creative posts. Completely coincidentally I was invited to post on remix_runran, and the posts there provide exactly the kind of thing I wanted to break up the informative texts on my blog.

Whether the blog is transforming how I work… aside from the remix_runran pieces, which are designed specifically for a blog format, I don’t think so – at least not yet. There is a project in the works that may change this, but I can’t say much more about it yet.

Jess: You’ve lived in Canada and the U.K., how do the different environments affect your creations?

Chris: Profoundly. The different cultural influences and language you are exposed to in (French) Canada are obviously important, but so are the extremes of Canadian weather, which I find cause very particular creative rhythms (for me, winter=creative hibernation, summer=play and procrastination). There are other practical differences: up until very recently, the Arts were very well supported in Canada, and the financial cost of achieving a good quality of life is much lower, which makes it a great place to be an artist or writer. However the quality of life is almost too good, in some ways… the greater friction in UK society is somehow more inspirational. Perhaps that’s because I was born here.

The remix_runran creations you’re doing for Randy Adams seem incredibly tactile. I’m thinking particularly of la cicciolisa. The words which flash all over the Mona Lisa obscuring both her from viewers and us from her, except, very intermittently, do words disappear from in front of her eyes; not often enough for me as I find myself attempting to snatch the words away with my mouse. Of course ciccio means chubby in Italian (interestingly you did not use the female form, ‘ciccia’) but perhaps this reference alludes to the filling out you’ve accomplished with this flash piece. In fact, Randy describes you as someone who “fleshes the invisible words.” Design here seems more than an effort to render something smooth and sexy. What role do you see design playing in this piece and in others for remix_runran?

Chris: The text that appears in this piece was taken and remixed from a previous post on remix_runran by Ted Warnell titled The Porno Italiano text was itself taken from a spam comment on Geof Huth’s blog inflight insight unseen – I really liked the notion of using and reusing spam in this way. So La Cicciolisa is a textual and thematic remix of Porno Italiano, the title and visual being a mashup of those two icons of Italian culture, La Cicciolina and Mona Lisa: the words that deface Mona reveal La Cicciolina, or perhaps vice versa.

Jess: Being a digital writer in residence it is logical (more or less) that you create digital works however most of your (published) creations seem to live online. Do the internet and its possibilities for ‘real-time’ and communication influence how and what you create?

Chris: Actually, the great majority of my creations are offline, awaiting (perhaps forever) their call to online service 🙂

The possibilities you mention are certainly exciting, and I have explored them in pieces such as [url:http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/frame/oo/]Online/Offline[/url] or more recently [url:http://www.391.org/40]Universal Wish[/url], but they probably haven’t influenced what I create as much as the basic ability to distribute work online. Online distribution (for me) generally necessitates creating within certain file size/download time boundaries, or adapting works to attempt to reach non-English speaking audiences. Of course the ability to meet and communicate with collaborators online has been a big influence on how I create.

Jess: Moving from the online environment to offline work, I’m thinking here specifically about your Electromagnetic Radiation Soundmap on display in the IoCT,how is this installation different from works of yours that are created for the internet? What different considerations do you take into account?

Chris: I’ve found offline installation pieces are much easier in the sense that you (normally) have much greater control over – or at least understanding of – how the piece will be experienced, who the expected viewing audience are, and how much time they will have to spend viewing your piece. No more of those pesky platform or bandwidth considerations!

I think each installation piece has its own particular set of considerations, but clearly the immediate physical environment in which the piece is displayed is a key issue. The Soundmap is displayed on a touchscreen in the IOCT, which is a very pleasant state-of-the-art environment: the main consideration here was that it has lot of time-limited visitors, so the intention of the piece and how to interact with it had to be very clear.

A distant version of this Soundmap will be a mobile ‘augmented reality’ installation. This will be less concerned with the particular IOCT audience and environment, and more with the variety of physical features that the soundmap will overlay, and the physical movement and safety of the viewer in a non-bounded ‘live’ environment. The idea of a mobile installation is somewhat oxymoronic, but some of the same considerations of a fixed installation will be relevant, such as the intended audience and the time they will have available to experience the piece.

Jess: What kind of dialogue does the sound in the Electromagnetic Radiation Soundmap enact with its users? What does sound offer this piece that text and image do differently?

Chris: This is something I am still trying to understand… the best answer I can give at the moment is that one side of the ‘dialogue’ is about revealing the unsensed – at least, for most people, unseen, unheard and unfelt. The sound is a simple translation of particular geographical and environmental features (electromagnetic radiation and the way it manifests in a specific space), so in these sounds could act in a similar way to a textual or image location marker: it is a ‘map’ of sounds, though without those additional textual and image markers we have no simple way (so far) to use these sounds for practical navigation through the space.

The other side of the dialogue – how the listener responds to these sounds – is determined primarily by how much they know about electromagnetic radiation and perhaps sound in general, so this is much more variable than the equivalent textual or image knowledge might be. For many people it seems to act as a prompt to find out more, which was certainly one of my intentions.

Jess: As you’re playing a role in the digital arts as creator and [url:http://www.ioctsalon.com/]facilitator[/url] what might your view of a ‘history’ of new media work look like and where would you situate yourself?

Chris: Trying to give a clear account of the history of new media work is like trying to keep hold of two dozen slippery eels: just when you have one in your grasp, six others wriggle loose. Those eels represent photography, animation, film, video art, electronic sound, programming, audience participation, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Situationism and Fluxus, to name just a few…. I wouldn’t want to explicitly situate myself anywhere within these fascinating but messy histories. However of particular interest to me is the history of aleatory art and writing, as exemplified by the Dadaists and later Burroughs, Metzger and Cage.

Jess: If early outlooks of the internet might be broadly classified as utopian what would you suggest is a key theme for today’s conception of how technology can influence art (in general)?

Chris: I can’t speak to wider (public) conceptions, but my own conception of how (electronic) technology can influence art is still broadly utopian, though there will always be important contrary opinions: for example, issues regarding who has access to the technology, and the environmental impact of these technologies during their creation, use and disposal.

9 March – 3 June 2007
Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna

Long live the immaterial!
-Yves Klein, The Chelsea Hotel Manifesto

Yves Klein is for me, and many others, the most important French artist after Henri Matisse. This may sound somewhat appalling to some, as Klein enjoyed only a very concise, but invigorating, seven-year artistic career. But I will clarify this controversial judgment by pointing out his historic relevance to our era of digital culture. The emphasis here will be on Klein’s conceptual articulation of the spatial and the ephemeral/immaterial in relationship to our current actual state of virtuality. Indeed the subtitle of the exhibition, CORPS, COULEUR, IMMATÉRIEL (Body, Color, Immaterial), itself brings out the salient viractual (*1) aspects of Klein’s art.

Yves Klein’s own lived life is the first major example of the ephemeral. Klein was born near Nice in a village called Canges-sur-Mer in 1928 of artist parents; Fred Klein, a figurative painter, and Marie Raymond, an abstract painter in the tradition of the cole de Paris. He died unexpectedly in 1962 of a heart attack shortly after seeing the sensationalizing Yves Klein segment of Gualtiero Jacopetti’s Mondo Cane exploitation film at its Canne Film Festival debut at the young age of 34. He was at the height of his fame.

On entering this exhibition the viewer is immediately introduced to the fact that Klein first studied Oriental languages, Zen philosophy and Judo via a highly accomplished digital presentation which was augmented by a plethora of photographs, drawings and texts. Indeed Klein achieved black-belt stature in Judo and taught and wrote a book about the subject after spending fifteen months at the Kodokan Institute in Tokyo. He then went on to found his own Judo school in Paris, making a living teaching Judo from 1955 to 1959. He also played music in a jazz band.

With such a basis in sport and music performance, Klein easily brought his theoretical concerns around space, color and painting into the theatricality of conceptual and performance art and thus negated and undermined the classical work of art object, dissolving art into action and thus styling himself into an artistic personality in a way that anticipated the strategies of Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys and Orlan. His staging of even the minutest details and the orchestration of their documentation and framed reception, along with his linking of art and technology, make him a most relevant figures for current art practice.

What was not pointed out in the show very well was that in 1948, at age 20, Klein discovered a book by Max Heindel (1865-1919) which teaches the basic beliefs of an esoteric Christian sect called the Rosicrucians. Klein obsessively studied the book for five years, and after coming to Paris in 1955, began to refer to himself as an initiate in the sect (he was made a Knight of the Order of Archers of Saint Sebastian) and was married to the beautiful Rotrault Uecker (now Rotrault Klein-Moquay) within it’s highly flamboyant and ritualistic ceremony. This exceedingly formal marriage is presented further on in the show in a delightful color documentary film.

Based on the Rosicrucian metaphysical ideology, Klein avowed to indicate to the world a new age, the Age of Space. In the Age of Space, boundless spirit would exist free of form, objects would levitate, and humans would travel liberated from their body. This contextual understanding is essential for understanding Klein’s artistic importance, as this ideology of the immaterial informs all his work, even the paintings but most explicitly such conceptual-technological works as the Sculpture rostatique (1957) which was the release of 1001 balloons, and the Illumination de l’Oblisque (1958) in the Place de la Concorde. Indeed, the exhibition reinstates Klein’s metaphysical ideology as the basis of his ephemeral actions as equal to his monochrome paintings. Definitely the well-known IKB blue monochrome were for him no more than an introduction to his ideological “blue revolution”, which he saw as the diffusion of immaterial pictorial sensibility throughout the whole cosmos, both visible and invisible. So blue color was for Klein was not pigment and binder but a spiritual, cosmic force that stimulates the entire environment, transforming life itself into a work of art.

Admittedly, Klein’s idea of pure virtual open space (free from form) was first actualized in his blue monochrome paintings, where the bisecting nature of line was rejected in favor of an even, all-over, ultramarine-blue color which he called IKB (International Klein Blue). However, later some of his monochromes were painted pink or gold. The Ex-voto Sainte-Rita (1961) which was deposited by Klein at the Convent of Santa Rita in Cascia, Italy (and presented for the first time at this exhibition) is valuable evidence of the importance of pink and gold alongside blue in Klein’s imaginative, viractual, and ephemeral universe.

Of course Klein, by all accounts, was not all theory. He was a showman too. In 1957, not long after the appearance of the first monochromes in 1955, Klein turned to the further exploration of the immaterial aspect of his art through act and gesture. His exhibitions of evanescent performance works, ephemeral sculptures in fire or water, sound works, “air architectures” and artistic appropriation of the entirety of space (extending to the whole cosmos) were all manifestations of the ephemera and invisible idea that for him is the essential experience of art itself.

We must remember when gazing into his luxurious blue paintings that Klein’s interests in open areas of color and light, in vibrating voids, and in sheer saturated colors emptied of figurative presence are primarily directed towards space’s and color’s aoristic qualities, qualities which subsequently will interest future generations of ambient-oriented artists and digital artists.

Most notably, in 1958 Klein went beyond the monochrome rectilinear canvas with a distinguished ephemeral and immersive presentation titled Le Vide (The Void), which was held at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris. For this exhibition Klein cleaned out and whitewashed the gallery and “impregnated” the empty space with his consciousness; filling the freshly whitened gallery (emptied of figurative presence) with Le Vide, through which Klein led small groups.

Yves Klein, Le Vide, 1958

I consider this installation to be of utmost importance to the identification of the immersive ideals of virtual reality in that it crystallizes the body’s entrance into a consciousness of aoristic space. (*2)

Further along these lines, in early-1961 Klein installed, as part of his retrospective at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld Germany, another immersive walk-in installation called Raum der Leere (Room of the Void) in reference to his Le Vide which consisted of a 285 by 442 by 172 centimetre room (approximately 9 by 14 by 5.6 feet) painted white (with slightly rough textured surface) lit by neon lamps. This work is documented through photographs and drawings in the exhibit.

Also notable is Klein’s faux Leap into the Void: Man in Space! The Painter of Space Throws Himself into the Void! of 1960 of course deserves some mention concerning immaterial idea art. Klein’s famous photomontage Leap into the Void, which depicts him floating above a street, is a symbol of the desire to overcome gravity and thus enter into the unlimited aspects of virtuality. It is a manifestation of Klein’s will to transcend limits, which runs through his entire oeuvre.

Beginning in 1960 Klein devoted himself increasingly to the immaterial aspects of fire as a medium to express elemental energy. I very much liked and respected the Cosmogonies ‘paintings’? on view here, which capture the imprint of wind, of rain. Fire and air, two invisible fluids that Klein officially claimed as his own, give rise to works both real (fire paintings) and utopian; such as his air architecture projects and his schemes for planetary air-conditioning. But the gorgeous color film of Klein painting various Anthropometries through the use of “living paintbrushes” (i.e. female nudes) in a black dinner jacket while his proto-minimalist one note Monotone Symphony (1949) is performed is certainly one of the high points in the show, even though it perhaps it was responsible for his death after he viewed it in the dreadful context of the Mondo Cane film. The music is performed brilliantly live as the nude models paint each other from the buckets of lush IKB Blue painnt, gently pressing their naked bodies against the canvas that had been placed on wall and floor – while Klein (wearing white gloves) directs them verbally, never touching the paint or the bare models. (*3)

This is, needless to say, a highly ephemeral way to paint which pointed the way towards (and then away from) the Nouveaux Ralistes (New Realists), the French post-war avant-garde movement which was organized and theorized by the French poet and art critic Pierre Restany (1930-2003). The core issue of the Nouveaux Ralistes was the conception of art as formed by ‘real’ elements, that is, materials taken from the world directly rather than formed pictorially. Influenced by Yves Klein and the general anti-rationalism that opposed the machine-like logic which underlay the killing efficiency of aerial war, many artists followed in these deep but shifting footsteps.

Despite numerous retrospectives, among them the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1983, much of Klein’s immaterial-oriented work remained somewhat unknown until recently. In bringing together 120 paintings and sculptures, some 40 drawings and manuscripts and a great number of contemporary films and photographs, this exhibition offered me a new reading of Klein’s work, this time in the context of virtuality. Adhering as faithfully as possible to the artist’s own intentions as revealed in his recently published writings, the design of the exhibition brought out the importance that Klein accorded to the diverse aspects of his artistic practice: not only painting and sculpture, but also immaterial performances, sound works, interventions in public spaces, architectural projects and, most essentially, immaterial art theory. This diverse oeuvre, all produced during a period of just seven years, is indeed impressive as much of it anticipated the trends of Happening and Performance Art, Land Art, Body Art, Conceptual Art and Digital Art. Thus it has had an, ironically, a durable influence on art through its essential interest in and expressions of the immaterial.

Joseph Nechvatal

Fall 2006, Paris

(*1) The basis of the viractual conception is that virtual producing computer technology has become a significant means for making and understanding contemporary art and that this brings us artists to a place where one finds the emerging of the computed (the virtual) with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This merge – which tends to contradict some dominant techno clich’s of our time – is what I call the “viractual”. This blending of computational virtual space with ordinary viewable space indicates the subsequent emergence of a new topological cognitive-vision of connection between the computed virtual and the uncomputed corporeal world.

(*2) Aorist is a classical Greek spatial term which was used when discussing an occurrence without limitations. Aorist literally means without horizons.

(*3) A short film, a Klein painting performance can be viewed on-line at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqLwA0yinWg

The Last Tag Show, a live ‘net performance’ took place on Last.FM on April 14, 2007. Last.FM is a social networking site centred around tracking its users’ music listening habits and creating a profile based on that data. As a user listens to music, the track title and artist name are sent to his/her profile and listed publicly, allowing the service to create connections between users and the musicians they listen to. Another notable aspect of the service is its reliance on user participation through wikis in creating artist profiles.

The Last Tag Show cleverly took advantage of Last.FM’s technical structure to pull off a 24-hour performance. As the allotted time progressed, viewers saw tracks and artists appear in succession on Last.FM user profile lasttagshow’s profile page. These were no ordinary songs. However, the artists instead altered the metadata of audio tracks such that when they were uploaded to the Last.FM servers appeared as a multi-character dialogue. The principal personages in the performance include ‘Moderator’, ‘Hannah’, ‘Voiceover’, ‘Instructor’, ‘Marck’, ‘Zita’ ‘Vass’, and ‘Gregg’, with occasional guest stars like Thom Yorke. Since each of these characters takes the role of a musician in Last.FM’s data-centric view, each of them has a dedicated user-editable artist page, which The Last Tag Show took full advantage of by developing the identities of their subjects in these spaces. As such, the Moderator, for example, existed beyond his archived snippets of speech, complete with a photograph and short biography.

Yet, while this was a particularly clever subversion of Last.FM’s intended use, judging by their description of the piece, it seems that the artists failed to think through the conceptual implications of their performance fully. The idea of a ‘net performance’ is immediately suspect, especially in the context of a social network like Last.FM for whom archivization and aggregation take precedence over live performance’s immediacy and ephemeral nature. So, while inventive and whimsically guileful, The Last Tag Show as a performance was starkly out of place in an environment existing in the future as much as it looks to the past.

Yet, it is from this oversight that perhaps the most interesting aspect of the piece arises. After the performance was finished and the Show creators had moved on, their once purely diegetic characters began to take on a life outside the confines of that single 24-hour period. It seems that there are several other Last.FM users who listen to tracks in which the artist is listed as ‘Voiceover’ or ‘Papa’ (another character in the Show) and several other names. As these other users consumed their oddly labelled tracks, the artist profiles, which served as a stable signifier for the Show’s players, began to change. Suddenly, their “most listened to tracks”? Were not out-of-context snippets of dialogue, but what seemed to be…actual songs; the real possibility of users coming in and subtly changing Gregg’s biography comes to mind.

Indeed, the fact that these fictional characters can continue to ‘live’ – produce and be produced – long after their utility to the performance has ended makes The Last Tag Show so interesting and the limited period of its run-time so constricted. Where the creators began this piece as a “hack” of a social networking site, in the end, it may turn out that they are the ones hacked – by their creations.

EVENT: RAPIDFIRE.001 Montreal. March 15, 2007, StudioXX, Montreal

PRESENTERS : (in order)

Angela Dorrer(germany) – program angels and alternative formats for cultural sharing.

Pascale Gustin (france) – Algorismus travelling sound poetry work with Pure Data.

Darsha Hewitt (canada) – Tin Can Telecom + Cantennas.

Laef Anderson (usa) – Cheyenne Story Map.

The FORMAT:

The RAPIDFIRE Session was a ‘first come, first serve’ “sign-up and present” formula, in which individuals were asked to put forward short presentations lasting 15 minutes each. The concept was proposed by Kyd Campbell and Angela Dorrer with the aim of providing a highly responsive environment for presentation, for dialogue about works in progress. This exchange structure stems directly from open formats such as what has been organised by program angels(munich), Upgrade! Munich and Upgrade! Salvador and the Pecha Kucha Network

The local community was invited to expect socializing and cheap beer, to come and milk the public brainwaves. The first !Rapid!Fire! session was presented by frontierlab.org and StudioXX with help from the
Upgrade! International network on March 15, 2007 at StudioXX in Montreal. The event was a success, with some amazingly animated presentations with a small audience, the tension and curiosity was high at then end of each presentation. Following the 4 presentations the dialog continued casually and many contacts were shared. The format provided a two way exchange, artists could ask questions and get critique from the audience and the audience had the opportunity to view some new works and techniques.

Commentary on experiences in Montreal : by Pascale Gustin, visiting the city from March 10-22nd, 2007

I am very impressed by the number of events which take place here (Montreal), I have the idea that each person can have their own event. This is more than the famed “celebrity quarter hour” proposed by Andy Warhol. It’s the possibility to be Andy Warhol for 15 minutes and to place the focus on?.!!! With all that this implies?

There are really so many things happening and yet not very many people attend each one. It’s a sort of ‘sprinkling’ of events and exchanges. Why not !!! What I notice, as a stranger, is that it is full of ‘democracy’, this feast of ‘democracies’ in which things finally seem to be lost in their own meaning. In some way it is the image of a woven fabric ; a canvas but in ‘real’ life ; and language etc, is used only through the tool of a screen or a keyboard.

Here, everything is always possible ; THE WORLD IS A VASTE TERRAIN OF GAMES ; and it’s exactly here that everything seems possible and thus, becomes possible. ‘We can do what we want in our lives’, seems to be the motto of North America, of ‘North Americans’. It is undoubtedly this manner of thinking and acting that effectively makes all things possible ; the ‘virtual’ becomes real. The ‘virtual’ is concretely living ; it exists, it is here, we can touch it with our fingers. Is this the reason for which digital technologies, ‘media arts’ (specific term used here, to define arts which can include analog video and other practices, television and new and digital technologies) have been developed with such ease, a sort of ease which is influenced by these technologies which have permitted this process, this manner of being to be amplified, really concretized ? Who, from the chicken or from the egg ? in essence!!!

I also think that violence in North America is not directly linked to violent images, linked to these images certainly, but in an indirect way. It is equally this possibility, all the possibilities, which make the violence possible. The sentence : ‘THE WORLD IS A VASTE TERRAIN OF GAMES’, seems to be to be much more violent than certain images that are given as forcefully violent. I think that this sentence would be shocking in Europe, at least it would be in France.

Rapid Fire was a superb meeting. I loved taking part in this event organized by Kyd Campbell. I alas was not able to understand all of the items and issues of the works presented. I don’t speak English well enough.

“For the performance at StudioXX on Thursday night, I used two puredata programs to open my patches. One patch was open with the first puredata program and ran the visual component. The second patch (and even a 3rd) was open with the second puredata program for the audio component. This allows me to avoid the having memory management problems.”

[excerpts from the Pascale Gustin’s blog, translated with permission by Kyd Campbell]

photo credits:

1. rapidfire_pascalegustin.jpg
photo by Edith Bories. March 15, 2007
‘Pascale Gustin performing Algorismus at RapidFire.001, StudioXX, Montreal’

2. rapidfire_flyer.jpg
image by Kyd Campbell, 2007
flyer from RapidFire.001 event, Montreal

Photos from the event on flickr

Dial P for Postnationalism.

Jean-Franois Lyotard defined us in the 1970s. He started the ‘post’? era. Since his ground-breaking proposal of Post-Modernism; a conceptual reaction to the Enlightenment, Modernism and its grand narratives and universal pretensions, nothing remained the same. Lyotard argued that Postmodern times were characterized by an incredulity towards meta-narratives. These meta-narratives – sometimes ‘grand narratives’ – are grand, large-scale theories and philosophies of the world. The progress of history, the knowability of everything by science, and the possibility of absolute freedom are just a few examples. Lyotard argued that we have ceased to believe that narratives of this kind are adequate to represent and contain us all. We have become alert to difference, diversity, the incompatibility of our aspirations, beliefs and desires, and for that reason Post-modernity is characterised by an abundance of micro-narratives.?

Post-Modernism opened the door for all kinds of movements and definitions that were trying to escape the powerful clutches of established Modernism. Post, trans, meta were useful prefixes in shifting theoretical discourse away from the long established occidental tradition of enlightened positivism.

If all grand narratives were doomed to uselessness in contemporary societies, those arising from the concept of nation-state (itself another grand narrative) were facing the same fate. In a time of post-colonialism, trans-national capitalism, globalized (not far from hegemonic) production of subjectivities, national identities were bound to change. And they did. Massified migrations, easy access to information, all these led to a gradual weakening of the mechanisms responsible for national identities. Or not. Postnational identities are conflicted in their essence. Once again, no more meta narratives explaining the world. Something can be (and is) its opposite and postnationalism encompasses the rise of local, or micro-national identities, nationalistic movements resurface. The assumption of living in undefined, unstable times seems pretty obvious, but wasn’t that what Lyotard expected to happen in the first place? No more universal narratives holding together human action.

Post-nationalism became a trendy word, many have enjoyed using the term in mundane conversations so to impress nearby listeners, but this increase in use may imply a loss in meaning. Dan Phiffer, a computer hacker from California (now based in Brooklyn), interested in exploring the cultural dimension of inexpensive communications networks such as voice telephony and the Internet, is committed to prevent this from happening. He created the Postnational Foundation, a website/series of public interventions, defined as “an ongoing series of brief, personal interventions, an open-ended question about personal agency and a starting point for doing something meaningful”?. Each of these three goals contains a very important concept, contextualizing Phiffer’s practice (and discourse): interventive behaviour, personal agency and meaningfulness. In these three concepts we can anchor the importance of The Postnational Foundation, in the steps of Lyotard’s views of the contemporary world. When all the holding pillars of the modernistic view of the world are shattered, when all the grand narratives that once guided us all towards a future, are gone, what is there to do? Phiffer is a committed pupil of Lyotard’s: he proposes personal agency, through meaningful interventions.

This is a clear and direct example of a critical approach needed in a post-modern world. By asking questions and inviting people to call (the anonymity factor helps and there is a prank call feel to this project) and leave their thoughts about issues such as ‘How do people think about the issue of globalization?’?, ‘What is it that causes us to become involved in politics? What factors keep us from getting involved?’? or ‘What does the word “postnational”? mean exactly? Mainstream references have nothing to offer, so why not find our own definition?’ Phiffer is not only creating his own micro-narrative, a language-game creating a critical thought on hegemonic ideologies, he is soliciting others to do as much, confronting people with the questions mentioned above and inviting them to respond and thus create their own narratives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sheep Market by Aaron Koblin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tobecontinued Is a group exhibition in progress that starts with some students of the Fine Arts Academy of Rome. Using Myspace as an interactive platform, Tobecontinued is based on the concepts of open art-work, cause and/vs effect, and free association of ideas; where the last art-work is always inspired to the previous one, in order to generate an open art-work in continuous evolution that never completes itself. The process is constituted by the single works as video, animations, photos, music, net projects, and shows details, nuances and ideas of the whole art-work’s project.

Let’s continue, joining with us and sending your art-work (max. 3 mb per email)
tobecontinued.tobecontinued@gmail.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much for the interview!

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

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

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

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

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

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

An E-Mail-Art project on the NetBehaviour email list culminating in an exhibition at the HTTP Gallery in London.

Open Call for contributions from 31 January to 28 February 2007 via NetBehaviour email list.

Images from the show are – https://www.flickr.com/photos/http_gallery/albums/72157624491759868

Exhibition at HTTP Gallery in March 2007

The Do It With Others (DIWO) E-Mail-Art project aims to highlight the already thriving imaginations of those who use social networks and digital networks on the Internet as a form of distribution. Just like Mail Art, E-Mail-Art bridges the divide between artists and non-artists to share a freely accessible form of distribution.

The Mail Art projects of the 60s, 70s and 80s demonstrated Fluxus artists’ common disregard for the distinctions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art and a disdain for what they saw as the elitist gate-keeping of the ‘high’ art world. They often took the form of themed, ‘open calls’, in which all submissions were exhibited and catalogued. Mail Art has always been a useful way to bypass curatorial restrictions for those who wish to create active and imaginative exchange on their own terms; this form of activity usually flourishes outside of the gallery system.

This E-Mail-Art project intends to follow the spirit of past Mail Art endeavours by asking those submitting their works to open themselves to a shared dialogue as part of the process and medium on the NetBehaviour mail list, as a playful platform for experimentation together at the same time.
The theme of this E-Mail-Art project is Do It With Others (DIWO).

This project suggests that we extend the DIY ethos of some early net art and tactical media (said to be motivated by curiosity, activism and precision) towards a more collaborative DIWO approach. Peers connect, communicate and collaborate, creating controversies, structures and culture using both digital networks and shared physical environments.

You are invited to contribute and curate text, images, sound, net movies, physical objects, installation plans etc. on the theme of DIWO, only via the NetBehaviour email list, towards an open exhibition at the HTTP Gallery in London that opens in March ’07.

To participate in Do It With Others (DIWO): E-Mail-Art at NetBehaviour please join the NetBehaviour email list: http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
What Will Happen?

All posts to the NetBehaviour email list between 31st January and 1st April 2007 will be considered part of the artistic and curatorial project. In the spirit of early Mail Art Do It With Others (DIWO): E-Mail-Art at NetBehaviour is completely open. For the HTTP Gallery contributors are be invited to propose works for networks, computers, screens, projection, sound, print…

31 January 2007: Contributions to Netbehaviour email list begin.
List members are invited to devise their own ordering and selection strategies for the exhibition.

25 February 2007, 2 – 5pm GMT: Collaborative Curation Event
Open review of contributions and discussion about the exhibition. The event will be available for viewing and interaction from the HTTP gallery. List contributions thus far will take physical form as an exhibition. Discussions using IM (chat) between Furtherfielders and other active contributors. Documented and posted to the list.

1 March 2007: Gallery Opening of Do It With Others (DIWO): E-Mail-Art at NetBehaviour

1 March – 1 April 2007: Continue to shape the exhibition via the email list by contributing more work, suggesting things be taken down, put back up, rearranged, anything!

1 May 2007: All contributions documented in a catalogue available as a pdf download.

The project will also be documented in the NetBehaviour email list archive and a blog maintained by Furtherfield newcomer Lauren Wright – LaurenDIWO’s Blog.

Do It With Others (DIWO): E-Mail-Art at NetBehaviour project by Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett and Lauren Wright for Furtherfield in collaboration with all contributors to the NetBehaviour email list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Stringer – The Destabilisation Of Perception.

TheSpace4, Peterborough, 10 November 2006 – 12 January 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

GROUNDED Unearthed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much/grazie mille for the interview!

—

About the Amazon Noir crew:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2nd Upgrade! International Meeting – Oklahoma City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FF: Any other work on the horizon?

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

_The Lost Biology of Silent Hill_

/join Silent Hill

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

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

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

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

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

/leave Silent Hill

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

Interview with MACHFELD, VISP Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q:What makes a digital virus compelling to visualize?

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

Is it the character of the code that you visualize?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogbot and productive inertia

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

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

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

In line with the cadavre esquis

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

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

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

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

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

disturb.the.peace [angry women]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tijuana Calling: an exercise on virtual coyote tactics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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