Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking
Nicolas Collins
Routledge, 2006
ISBN 0-415-97592-1
In these days of digital music production “laptop performers, GarageBand, audio programming environments (Max/ MSP, PD, supercollider) & iPod DJs” it’s very easy to forget the simple facts of electronic music. We forget the hidden ugly component parts of our pretty iMacs & Viaos, resistors, capacitors chips & electrical current, which enable us to run our software or download bit torrents were once the direct (analogue) source of sound.
Early electronic music (& the recording of music itself) was born of experimenting artists & engineers, patiently listening to the bleeps, swoops and crackles of electricity as it flowed through components loving soldered together by hand. The early pioneers of electronic music had to build their own instruments from scratch, finding new sounds as they went, inventing entirely new musical languages & forms, pulling new sounds from the ether.
In Nicolas Collins‘ book “Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking” we shake off the bounds of mass produced software, of expensive consumer electronics and re-enter the exploratory worlds of early electronic experimentalists such as David Tudor & Alvin Lucier, riding the pulsating waves of sonic history through to contemporary hardware hackers & instrument builders such as Xentos ‘Fray’ Bentos, Phil Archer, John Bowers & of course Nicolas Collins himself.
What an enlightening journey it is too. After a few weeks with the book & and a few pounds worth of electrical components you’ll feel like the next Leon Theremin or Robert Moog!
In Collins’ book we find (several) lifetimes of sound-making knowledge. Information gleaned through years of sonic-tinkering is shared freely (well for a small cover price) & explained simply (almost geek free) wrapping practical creative experimentation within insightful artistic contextualisation. Collins selflessly shares with us the intimate detail of producing sounds, upon which his own notable career as performer & composer of electronic music has been built.
Another major key to the successes of this book lie in Collins’ years of experience teaching students within an art school context. As Professor of Sound at the Arts Institute of Chicago & as a freewheeling travelling lecturer he has tried, tested and honed this book over the years. His practical experiments have been road tested by creative arts students the world over before hitting the printing press & this refining is instantly noticeable. With no knowledge of electronics & practically no knowledge of sound-making you’ll be producing your first sounds within moments of reading the first few (short) chapters. Collins’ emphasis is always upon the creative outcome, giving the reader the freedom & just the right knowledge to experiment under their own steam. It is refreshing and rare to find a practical manual for creative production so direct & engaging because of the instant results it enables & the space for individual creativity it encourages. Just once I’d like to see a software manual that encourages just one gram of the experimental sprit Collins’ book does.
However, despite its instantaneous results & simple friendly explanations this is no Dummy’s Guide. Collins never underestimates the reader, just because it is easy to understand it doesn’t make it lightweight. Alongside the practical instruction & space to explore personal projects, Collins frames & contextualises well, with thoughtfully picked examples of artists, composers & musicians who have explored or exploited similar techniques. The usefulness of this contextualisation is enhanced and extended by the inclusion of an audio CD featuring many of the artists discussed & techniques explained in the book. Of course, the CD deserves a separate review all of its own, so suffice to say it is an excellent stand-alone compilation of “handmade” music as well as performing a supporting role too.
Reading the book from cover to cover, Collins years of experience teaching this material is clear. His timing, like any good comedian (and he is very funny), is perfect. He knows just when to drop in the right nugget of information, at a level the reader will understand & enhancing where the reader may take those ideas next. The reader is led through the start of a project, then through practical or historical/ contemporary examples of other artists work and then the reader is led to experiment & modify their creations. He is also expert and leaving out the right information. Too technical! Forget it, you don’t need to know that to make good sound is Collins’ mantra.
The structure of the book is such that it will appeal both to novice & experienced hackers alike. One can read the book from cover to cover to pick up all the basic skills & techniques or dip into certain chapters to develop specific projects. Both a “tool box reference manual” and a primer in all things electronic music, Collins starts out with basic information; suggestions for tools and materials & how to dos (the soldering chapter is very good if you’ve never done it before) before exploring different facets of handmade sound making.
Early chapters develop the reader’s ear for hidden sounds exploring re-purposed electronic devices such as radios & toys or listening into hidden electronic or natural sounds using telephone taps, handmade contact mikes or simple condenser microphones. Microphones so cheap you’ll be boiling them alive just for your aural pleasure.
Later chapters explore analogue (almost) synthesis through the making of simple oscillator circuits and audio processing & manipulation including distortion, gating & tremolo. Two chapters expand into visual hacking including video cameras & LCDs. The final chapter explores the interface between handmade sensors & devices and the digital world.
The chapters develop in a modular manner, so that following through the book one can build circuits which will link to the next project and so on. For example, three chapters covering building simple oscillator circuits progress through synthesis techniques such as low frequency modulation of one circuit by another or modulating an external audio source (e.g. CD, guitar etc). By the end of the book you will have entire personal instruments built, wacky bastardised noise machines patched together something like an analogue synthesiser.
Links
Buy the book at Amazon (or somewhere else!)
Rapid Electronics – The Cheapest & Best Supplier of components in UK
Music From Outer Space – Build Your Own Analogue Synthesisers
An Interview with Jeanie Finlay
Jeanie Finlay’s Home-Maker begins with the questions “what makes a house a home, and how does this change if you can’t leave?” Entering the domestic spaces of seven people living in Tokyo or Derbyshire, Finlay centres in on the household as a way of uncovering individual interaction with public and private selves. Telling personal stories with the aid of house-hold objects, fragments of narrative, and new media technologies is a new way of thinking about portraiture. The successful blending of new media with Finaly’s key questions makes each reader feel as though she or he is a guest, sitting down for a cup of tea, immersed the detail of each room and voice.
Jess: Why concentrate on the home?
Jeanie: With Home-Maker I always thought that “the home” was a starting point for wider discussion, its a tool for talking about other things. For example if I went into each home and I asked the participants to “tell me all about their life” I would probably draw a full stop. As a stranger entering a space I think people found it easier to talk to me about their taste in ornaments and the possessions they surround themselves with. The elderly people I met were surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of accumulated stuff. Each item usually was a memento of a past experience or person.
Jess: I’m looking at the section on Aiko-San – Home for 26 years and am thinking of how the images seem to tell a slightly different story from the textual narrative. Whereas the written narrative seems more or less linear, documenting her home, and ending with her fear of the move to the nursing home, the images seem to zoom in and out of the story. Do you use image and text to oppose each other or perhaps to elucidate each other…or does it depend on the project/theme?
Jeanie: I think that every element in the film can and should help to tell the story, so sometimes I use images to reinforce the dialogue, sometimes to contradict it or sometimes to provide additional information that isn’t present in the interview. It also leaves some space for an audience to make their own connections between what I’m showing you and what I’m telling you. It does also depend on what I want to say!
Jess: I am especially interested in the images of Aiko-San; the one portrait-type shot and then a zoomed in image of her hands and her eyes. Does this imply an importance on the visual and tactile senses?
Jeanie: In all of the films I was trying to contribute to a 360 degree portrait of each person. The panoramic image and interface don’t allow you to see the whole room at any one time and I kept the idea of “reveal” in my head the whole time I was making the work. The panorama reveals the room, the interviews reveal more and the cutaway images show in close up additional details about their lives. In all my work I try and create a sense of intimacy and one way of conveying this is to put the camera closer. That is why the objects in the room are filmed in close up, as if they were an extension of the person. Each person was also filmed as if they were an object in the room. I put the camera so close to Aiko-San as I wanted the opportunity to look at her in more detail, and hopefully reveal more. In my new film Teenland I use a macro lens and jib so that I can film objects and subjects in extreme close up. I also feel this approach helps me to tell a small story that make up a whole home can be seen as a microcosm of living, tiny stories can give an impression of a whole life, close up details can contribute to the bigger picture.
Jess: Most of the images in this section seem to be cropped, making me feel like I don’t have a full perspective of the scene, is this intentional to illustrate the proximity of Aiko-San’s space?
Jeanie: I think that I used these as I wanted to look more closely. Aiko-San’s hands made me think of all the hard work she had done in her life, of her age and how they were less reliable than they were 20 years ago. Again with her eyes, partly it was to show more of Aiko -San, how her age was shown in her face, partly as I was thinking about all that she had seen. The cropping is all to do with the framing and putting the camera closer, no material was cropped in the edit, it is shown as filmed. I was very aware when I was filming that I was in an extremely small space and it was a way of isolating details to look at.
Jess: You say you were interested in creating a 360 degree portrait of someone…is this something specifically achievable with new media resources?
I’m also drawn to your use of the word “portrait.” I suppose I’m thinking of a two dimensional representation of someone (as in a painting) so does new media give something other than a 2-Dness?
Jeanie: A painting that I visited just prior to developing Home-maker was the Ambassadors by Holbein. As a child I had always loved the work as it initially appears to be a traditional painting, then on closer inspection additional narratives personal and political are slowly uncovered. When developing the project I kept thinking back to the painting, I wanted to create a high quality, intriguing panoramic image (the images are made up of 18 photographs seamlessly stitched together which create an odd photograph. When viewed as a flat everything is in focus and I sneak into some of the images as a reflection) but also offer an opportunity for the viewer to trigger and uncover hidden narratives linked to objects in the room, the stories that are maybe bubbling under the surface of the image. I guess in that way, the ability to add additional narratives and details is a characteristic of using new media in this way but I would suggest that a painting or photograph CAN be a full portrait of a person – the audience is just offered less information to work with. I particularly like the photographs of Rineke Dijkstra of teenagers on the coastline, although I know very little about the individuals in the shots I am drawn to a sense of personality, vulnerability, character. I hope in Home-Maker the panoramic images stand up on their own as portraits and that the additional video offers a different view.
Jess: In terms of post-modern subjectivity, (always becoming identities), is it possible to create a 360 degree portrait of someone, or is it that as we navigate through each person’s room/life we are given one object at a time which we (as readers) accumulate into a whole?
Jeanie: I’m not sure whether it is possible, my approach was always to concentrate on the smaller details and in doing so the larger picture, becomes clearer. It was always my aim to create an impression of character rather than tell any large story.
Jess: You’ve said that each of the seven people you were with had objects which represented memories for them. Is Home-maker, existing in cyberspace, a testament to the ethereal nature of memories?
Jeanie: Since I completed filming Home-Maker in 2003 four of the seven Home-makers have died. I have kept in touch with Roy, Moji-san and Emi-san and they contributed to the Home-Maker publication, describing how their rooms and their lives had changed since I last met them. Since Aiko-san, Florrie, Betty and Lilian have died it’s made me feel quite differently about the work – I am so used to their voices and image in making and editing the work and touring the installation to 4 venues, and I did find it very difficult to comprehend that they had died as in the work they are alive and well.
One of the reasons people gave for taking part was to “leave a testimony, to tell their story.” I was always aware that each portrait was very much a capturing of a moment in time. Aiko-san left her home of 26 years 2 days after I filmed her so that she could move into an old people’s home. When she came to the exhibition in Tokyo she was very moved to see her home projected in the installation as it now only existed in boxes and memories.
With the House Clearance event at the end of the tour (Heaton Used furniture came in and conducted a house clearance at Hatton Gallery in the same way they would if someone had died) I wanted the work to “live on” on the web. I was surprisingly upset to say goodbye to the set and props as it felt much more like I had created a home for the work, and now with the dismantling it was just “stuff” again.
Jeanie Finlay
Jeanie makes interactive artworks which incorporate digital media and documentary. She often works in collaboration with members of the public, gd_page_image[0][fid]” 766 –rough interviews and online-questionnaires. Often exploring emotive themes, her recent work has examined such subjects as beauty, the home and love – with passionate and personal results.
Over three years, Jeanie photographed and filmed in the living rooms of housebound older people in Derbyshire and Tokyo to make Home-Maker. Through developing close relationships with her subjects, she created a series of highly personal and intimate portraits of a range of people and the places they call home.
Her latest project is a 60 min documentary for BBC4. Teenland which takes the audience behind the closed bedroom door of four British teenagers, revealing the small details that make up the wider narratives of their lives, infiltrating and exploring their spaces to find the stories hidden within.
Jeanie has made and presented artworks at key national gallery venues including Tate Britain, Hatton Gallery, Aberdeen Art gallery, Lakeside Arts and Angel Row Gallery as well as establishing a strong presence on the Internet. She has shown and made work in 3 different continents – including shows and screenings in Tokyo, Moscow, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Amsterdam, Berlin and Stuttgart.
To find out more about Jeanie’s work please visit https://www.jeaniefinlay.com
Article Written by Helen Varley Jamieson.
SCANZ, 3-16 July 2006
New Plymouth, New Zealand.
SCANZ (Solar Circuit Aotearoa New Zealand, www.scanz.net.nz) represented several firsts: it was the first Polar/Solar Circuit event to be held in New Zealand, and the first festival of its kind in this country, bringing together 25 artists from NZ and around the world for a two week collaborative residency. SCANZ provided the context for the first faces meeting in New Zealand, and it was also the first time a group residency had been offered to Avatar Body Collision our first opportunity for the four globally dispersed Colliders to actually meet and work together in the same physical space!!!
SCANZ was also cloaked with mystery, rumour and illusion, the line between truth and fiction often fluctuating and hard to discern. Were we really hearing a recording of the extinct? Why was at least one artist always struck down with a strange illness? What was making the wireless network at the accommodation randomly appear and disappear? And who was the loud snorer in Room 6?
Then there were the little entanglements with the authorities. The orchestrated litany of mishaps so beautifully performed by the Colliders was more than matched by the antics of our fellow artists, who reported close encounters with security guards at the Port, forcible ejection from a local bar for insubordinate activities, frantic emails with IP lawyers and reprimands from the fire service for experimental circuit bending with a smoke alarm…[
However, these exploits were not the main fare of the two-week residency “The meeting of the artists and the work was what it was all about, and a very interesting mix of artists had been brought together. We filled the evenings of the first week with presentations about our work, our brains close to bursting as we struggled to remember each other’s names, let alone the many fascinating projects everyone had been involved with over the years. As well as the opportunity to meet and work with the international artists, it was a treat to reconnect with other New Zealanders and for once, to have a decent length of time to hang out together and the resources to do some work. Many meetings and collaborations evolved during the residency.
An important meeting for me was with Becca Wood, an Auckland-based dancer experimenting with choreographing and performing over the Internet; we exchanged ideas, technologies and techniques and messed around with software and data projectors. It was also good to have ex-pat Adam Hyde there, in the role of chief network organiser but also presenting his latest project, Floss Manuals (have you set it up for the UpStage manual yet, Adam? : ) It’s hard to name a few people without naming them all, so I invite you to visit the [url:www.scanz.net.nz]SCANZ[/url] web site for a full list of artists and projects. A number of the artists contributed work to an exhibition at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery at the end of the residency, and during the event, numerous informal workshops were held.
The themes of SCANZ were connection disconnection and environmental response. For [url:http://www.avatarbodycollision.org]Avatar Body Collision[/url], our work mainly addressed the first theme, and our residency effectively became a two-week endurance performance on presence and absence. Once we had recovered from the intense disappointment of having to accept, a fortnight before the residency, that Karla and Leena were not going to have the funds to get to New Zealand and our well-made plans for our first-ever physical meeting might as well be thrown out the window, we wholeheartedly implicated every available technology and everyone around us into the elaborate tale of our Near Miss. With the aid of a blog Trip The Light Fantastic, email, webcams, mobile phones, [url:http://www.upstage.org.nz]UpStage[/url], PhotoShop and a few wily conspirators, we virtually brought Karla and Leena into the SCANZ environment. There are people out there who will insist they met them in New Plymouth last July…
At the same time as maintaining our extended performance, Vicki and I engaged with other artists’ projects, worked on our new show and prepared for our presentation on the final night at the launch of the exhibition at the Govett Brewster. We set up a shared workspace with Becca in a blacked-out gallery near N2, the SCANZ main work room and set about exploring the new experience of working in the same physical space. Even without Karla and Leena there, it was a very different working situation for me and Vicki to be in the same physical space – especially a space where there was a lot of other artistic activity going on around us. Sometimes, I found it easier to go back to my room and communicate over email and chat, but when it came to setting up the installation and the presentation, it was great to have Vicki there. Cyberformance can be a lonely process even when you are part of a group.
The faces meeting was a good opportunity for a break from the work; hosted by myself and Nina Czegledy, we welcomed the new faces and chatted informally with wine and snacks. Another escape from SCANZ was Second Life but while Vicki and Caro were having hysterics together, some strange bug prevented me from seeing or being visible to them, it became a sadly ostracising experience! More satisfactory was the [url:http://cheapmeatdreamsandacorns.blogspot.com/2006/07/watching-sky.html]Indian banquet[/url], created by a team of artists under the direction of Sara Kolzer; shared meals are always a highlight of such gatherings.
What began as a gloriously long residency period rapidly dissolved into a collection of digital photos and selective memories, and suddenly the final weekend was upon us. The annual [url:http://www.scanz.net.nz/disc_symposium.html]ADA symposium[/url] was incorporated into this weekend, although Vicki and I missed most of it while we were setting up for our presentation at the Govett Brewster that night. Besides revealing the final climax of our Near Miss and giving an UpStage performance on the theme of presence and absence, our presentation included experimenting with the installation element of our new show. This involves a webcam feedback loop, simple enough in itself but tricky to get everything positioned correctly. As we were setting it up in the gallery, a group of children came by and needed only the slightest encouragement to play with their too-brief-connection shadowy projected images. After the presentation, the audience encountered the installation as they left the auditorium, and proved to be less effective with a crowd, but still a lot of people stopped to play in it. When we reconstructed it a week later at [url:http://www.intimacyandinyerface.net]Intimacy & Inyerface[/url], the different environment made it into another experience altogether.
As SCANZ drew to a close, I wondered what it would have been like if Karla and Leena had really been there; how would we four have coped with the enormity of finally being together in the same space after 5 years of working remotely – at the same time as participating in an intense event such as SCANZ? It reminded me of running into Caro McCaw in Novi Sad a few years ago at the Transeuropean Picnic – the last place you’d expect a couple of kiwis to meet up randomly. We spent most of the weekend catching up with each other, which meant that we barely met any of the other artists. That might have been our experience of SCANZ, had we four collided there. Perhaps the best meeting place for the Colliders will be in a remote village, a long way from other distractions…
Some might think that’s a good description of New Plymouth, but I have to disagree. Having previously spent very little time in the Taranaki area, I discovered it to be an unexpectedly rich place. Watching the mountain come and go teasingly amongst the [url:http://bodycollision.blogspot.com/2006/07/mountains-of-information-to-process.html]clouds[/url], being honoured with one of the most meaningful [url:http://bodycollision.blogspot.com/2006/07/scanz-begins.html]powhiri[/url] I’ve ever experienced, and getting to know New Plymouth the Govett Brewster, fine cafes, the beaches, Paritutu, these were just a few of the local features that gave SCANZ that extra specialness.
As we drove south with Vicki at the wheel of the Valiant, I looked back to watch a cloud-free Taranaki gracefully shrink and disappear into the golden sunset. Thank you, Taranaki, for your generosity, and thank you, Ian Clothier, Trudy Lane and the other organisers, for a most excellent SCANZ may it be the first of many.
Slippage, is an exhibition of net.art curated by Nanette Wylde, bringing together a group of 8 artists that include: Mez Breeze, Krista Connerly, Juilet Davis, Lisa Hutton, Paula Levine, Jess Loseby, UBERMORGEN.COM, and Jody Zellen. The exhibition presents an eclectic mix of work under the broad concept of ‘exploring and exposing relationships between intention, perception, control, experience, behaviour, memory, knowing and the unexpected’. There isn’t one specific theme that runs through the exhibition; it’s a collection of explorations of personal and social projects, that came about from an open call initiated by Loseby. The female artists exploring the theme of “angry women” have created an audio, visual mix of personal experiences, sometimes unexpected and far political and playful approaches to the concept proposed by the curator.
One project that touches on many of the different elements of the open, flexible and ad-hoc concept is, Jess Loseby’s disturb.the.peace [angry women]. It is a unique ingredient in the exhibition. Not only because it manages to sit well with the exhibitons’s original, fluid concept, but also because the work does not only reflect one individual creator’s voice alone. It is a collaborative project, that came about from an open call initiated by Loseby herself. The female artists featured in the work are exploring the theme of angry women and have created an audio-visual mix of personal experiences. Definitely worth anyone’s time due to the various imaginative explorations of the theme and the dynamic and expressive nature of the content. Some of the work displays unexpected shifts, reevaluating the notion of what an angry women actually is, declaring that anger can be many different things. The selection of artists featured in this project are; jess loseby, Anne Bray, Annie Abrahams, Barbara Agreste, deb king, Donna Kuhn, Elisabeth Smolarz, Evelin Stermitz, Girls who like Porno, Helen Varley Jamieson, Juliet Davis, Lilian Cooper, Maris Bustamante, Maya Kalogera and Regina Celia Pinto. It is an ongoing project with no specific deadlines, so if you are interested in showing a net-orientated work of art that fits with an angry context, and if you are female, perhaps you should contact Jess Loseby and offer to submit some work.
Another unique project is Mez Breeze’s Live Journal, with its use of language. Live Journal is an intriguing poetic discourse using computer programming syntax. Breeze’s stream of consciousness creates a staccato rhythm that stops and starts. With regular updates, the text reflects the everyday concerns of the artist. The statements, private classes and functions are, compiled one after each other to create a unique language that encourages the viewer to adopt an alternative approach in reading the material/work presented, which is much like trying to decipher code. Mez, is an interesting artist and has remained dedicated to her communication style since the early days of net art. “Written in her by now famous mezangelle language shows us one more time the possibility to use the Net as a non-linear reading tool and that coding can be artistically and culturally oriented, through its creative re-interpretation.” Tatiana Bazzichelli.
Social and political commentary is prominent with a number of the works featured in the exhibition. UBERMORGEN.COM, in PsychIOS Generator, is a playful commentary on the phenomenon of global pharmaceutical companies creating unnecessary drugs to treat apparent symptoms without addressing their cause. By selecting a series of options based on symptoms the PsychIOS Generator provides absurd diagnosis and fake prescriptions.
Also, taking a playful approach is Altar-actions by Juliet Davis, a tongue-in-cheek reality check on the modern wedding planning experience. Davis pokes fun at controversial issues by presenting interactive scenarios such as “make a better baby”, inviting you to create and customize your baby. Davis juxtaposes the absurdity with serious, factual information, best highlighted by a personal and engaging narrative describing the experiences of a student that Davis teaches from Sierra Leone, who has been directly affected by war in the region where the diamond trade in Africa plays a big part.
Not as slick but, also media-rich, which incorporates sound, video and text, Aqua by Lisa Hutton explores the relationship between humanity and water. While the concept is definitely imaginative and extremely poignant. In respect of its fluent referencing to natural catastrophes that have taken people’s lives and focusing on various connected social contexts from strong research. It seems to work at best in offering, informative in the context of art as information through a kind of networked clustering functionality. The interface’s execution slightly lets it down. The design and visual aesthetics lack the energy to inspire or fully engage the viewer. Which can distract one from getting its message across. Content-wise, and of course, contextually, it succeeds.
Exploring our relationship with other people in urban environments, the project for urban intimacy (PUI) by Krista Connerly is an online space that features a range of projects and ideas for ‘instigating intimate encounters and ‘border-crossing’ within an urban environment’. My favourite project is the urban parlour games, a series of games that can be played while you are out and about, encouraging its players to extend their brief encounters with other strangers. Connerly’s twist on childhood is in the form of Throw a Smile, a game I can imagine working well on the tube. Smile at someone, and if they return your smile, make them ‘it’ by throwing them a game card.
The mass media itself becomes a subject worthy of investigation for Jody Zellen in all the news that fit to print. Zellen has created a website that archives images and headlines from a year of newspapers. A selection of images on the homepage takes the user to a page containing a random headline juxtaposed with an image. Zellen’s motivation here is to question “what is real, what is important, what is of concern, what is not”. Using scanned newspaper print and well chosen images Zellen has, created a striking visual style. However, although there are instances where the headlines and images create profound statements, the repetitive nature of the work can wear you down. This is probably part of the work, in respect that we are overdosing through the mass consumption of perpetual news.
The visually engaging Shadows From Another Place by Paula Levine utilizes locative media to add a new way of referencing the ongoing war in Iraq. Levine sets the tone, stating her inspiration in the introduction to the piece: What if international gestures, such as acts of terrorism or war, were like boomerangs that returned to sites of origins with an impact equal to the one enacted? What would such actions look like if they landed in other backyards or our own?
By exploring the changes that redefine one land concerning another untouched by the traumatic forces of war, the project presents a series of web-based and site-specific maps. Using GPS, Levine has plotted the impact of political or cultural changes that have taken place in Baghdad and placed them upon a map of San Francisco. This is represented visually on the website where bomb sites in San Francisco have been marked out using longitude and latitude data. There is also a physical element that exists in and around San Francisco where geo-caches of project information contain the names of the U.S. service personnel who have died in the war since May 1, 2003 (the date that George Bush declared that major combat operations had ended). By employing the same technology used to target areas in Baghdad, Levine interrogates her immediate environment and creates a scenario that demolishes the distance from the place of the “other” to successfully “bring home” the impact of war.
This exhibition/project is to be congratulated for bringing together a creative mix of engaging works existing in the grey areas of language and social interaction. As well as the different levels of playfulness in dealing with subject matters, concepts, and audience interaction with imaginative shifts. Overall, it manages to encourage its audience to explore life, net art, media art and its themes to great lengths, in opening up artistic questions and notions in their practice, sharing questions and investigations.
5 short movies by 5 film makers about 5 networked art projects exploring imaginative and critical approaches to social engagement.
Furtherfield has commissioned 5 short movies about 5 UK-produced networked art projects which explore critical approaches to social engagement. These pieces offer alternative interfaces to the artworks and the every-day artistic practices of their producers. They introduce the motivations and social contexts of artists and artists’ groups who are working with DIY approaches to digital technology and its culture, where medium and distribution channels merge.
Original concept and production Furtherfield, London, UK. 2006
In association with HTTP Gallery [House of Technologically Termed Praxis], London, UK.
Made with the support of Stiftelsen Längmanska Kulturfonden and Mejan Labs in Stockholm, Sweden – Arts Council England and Awards for All in UK.
Free Media by Mongrel
This movie focuses on Mongrel’s digital workshop project, the MediaShed in Southend on Sea, 65 km east of London, where anyone can come to seek knowledge, use computers, suggest projects and attend lectures. More info >>
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Polyfaith by Chris Dooks
Polyfaith.com provides a printable map and mp3 files to accompany a free tour of of his home town Edinburgh seen through the eyes of an unusual local character. In this short movie Polymath he introduces the beliefs and philosophies of his friend Erica Tetralix, as explained through the city’s landmarks. More info >>
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VisitorsStudio by Furtherfield
This movie is about VisitorsStudio, an online place for real-time, collaborative, audio-visual mixing and networked performance, a tool for editing movies and images live with other people online. More info >>
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Want and Need by C6
The London based artist group C6 believes in communication through action and the importance of creating alternatives to established uses of new technologies. Their project Want & Need is shown in Mejan Labs during autumn 2006 and has earlier been on a tour through Norway as well as being shown in New York, London and Eindhoven. More info >>
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Golden Shot (Revisited) by Simon Poulter
The Golden Shot was a game show in British television in the 1960- and 70’s. The idea with the show was that the audience called the show to play a game and gave instructions to a camera man how to aim his camera to different targets. On the camera there was a cross bow attached. More info >>
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Date: 31 August – 8th October 06.
Art & Activism Exhibition.
Mejan Labs. Stockholm. Sweden.
http://www.mejanlabs.se/article_en.asp?ID=54&KAT=CURREX&templ=2
Date: 3rd October 06.
Being Digital. Greenwich University. London. UK.
Date: December- date to be confirmed.
HTTP Gallery. 5+5=5 UK launch. London. UK.
http://www.http.uk.net/
Date: November – date to be confirmed.
MediaShed – Mongrel. Southend on Sea, Essex. UK.
http://mediashed.org/
Please contact us for details if you wish to show or screen 5+5=5 at a venue.
Game/Play exhibition at HTTP Gallery
22 July – 3 September 2006
Game/Play is a national touring exhibition that explores goal-orientated gaming and playful interaction through media arts practice. This collaboration between Q-Arts, Derby and HTTP, London has provided a framework to develop a context for creative exchange between visitors to the exhibition focusing on the rhetorical constructs game and play. Projects fall under three main categories: installations, independent video games and online (networked) artworks. Download the catalogue in pdf format https://www.academia.edu/1470002/Game_Play_2006_
[giantJoystick] by American ‘girl gamer’ Mary Flanagan has been specially commissioned by HTTP for this exhibition. Alongside this installation, HTTP presents independently produced video games selected by curator Corrado Morgana for their divergence from commercial game-types and online participatory artworks Tale of Tale’s Endless Forest and Furtherfield.org’s VisitorsStudio.
[giantJoystick] offers a humorous reworking of the multi-player game. Visitors are invited to collectively play classic arcade games with a nine foot tall joystick modelled after the Atari 2600 one. The competitive goals of these classic arcade games are already familiar, however the dramatic change in scale of the joystick necessitates both an encounter of the whole body with the artwork and cooperation between a number of players in order to reach them.
Two of the independent video games Kenta Cho’s Noiz2sa and Julian Oliver’s 2nd Person Shooter are both shooters. Kenta Cho’s Noiz2sa is a retro shoot ’em up while Oliver’s is a a wry riff on First person Shooters. Oliver’s game-demo places the gamer behind the eyes of a murderous bot over which they have no control and which is set on destroying them. Players are not only hunted, but also have to quickly adopt a new logic for operating where their perspective is no longer attached to their body, the customary instrument of their will.
Jetro Lauha’s Truck Dismount presents us with a simple 3-dimensional world including a truck, some ramps, a wall and a crash test dummy called DJ. An example of physics gaming, which uses physical interactions as their primary basis, Truck Dismount examines the guilty pleasures of transgressive behaviour.
Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern have fused the hyperlink with the one-act drama to engineering a novel architecture for supporting emotional and interactive character behaviour.
Tale of Tale’s Endless Forest and Furtherfield.org’s VisitorsStudio use the Internet as a networked, platform for real-time, collaborative play and online performance and they provide connecting spaces between audiences at HTTP & Q Arts galleries. VisitorsStudio is an online arena for real-time, multi-user mixing, networked performance and play. Endless Forest is described by the artists as a “social screensaver”, audiences join other players, in real-time downtime to inhabit the bodies of deer, roaming in a lush virtual landscape.
Game/Play is a collaboration between Q-Arts, Derby and HTTP, London that explores goal-orientated gaming and playful interaction through media arts practice.
From 22 July to 3 September, HTTP presents a new commission [giantJoystick] by American ‘girl gamer’ Mary Flanagan, independently produced video games selected by curator Corrado Morgana for their divergence from commercial game-types and online participatory artworks by Tale of Tales and Furtherfield.org.
The works exhibited at Q Arts from 22 July to 10 September create spaces for socio-dramatic play through physical action and response. Q Arts has commissioned artists such as Simon Poulter and Low Brow Trash to create socially engaged art games, which will be presented alongside games created for the commercial industry.
http://www.game-play.org.uk
http://www.http.uk.net
http://www.q-arts.co.uk/
Game/Play opens at a simultaneous launch event at Q Arts and HTTP galleries. Enjoy the Ermajello performance of Plankton at Q Arts, test drive Mary Flanagan’s [giantJoystick] at HTTP, view the works and connect and collaborate with visitors in both galleries in the online, multiuser spaces of Furtherfield’s VisitorsStudio and Endless Forest by Tale of Tales. Game/Play will tour as a combined exhibition from September 2006 – January 2008 with a series of online events.
21 July 6.30pm – 8.30pm Q Arts – Gallery
35/36 Queen Street, Derby, DE1 3DS
22 July 7pm – 9pm
HTTP, London
Unit A2, Arena Business Centre,
71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY
A series of online events, performances and workshops will create opportunities for more directed interaction between gallery visitors and remote audiences at Q-Arts and HTTP between July and September 2006. Visit http://www.game-play.org.uk for full details.
The team behind the project is Giles Askham (curator and coordinator), Corrado Morgana (independent curator), Louise Clements (Q Arts), Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett (HTTP). Game/Play is funded by Arts Council England and Awards For All.
HTTP [House of Technologically Termed Praxis]’s main remit is to offer a physical interface to networked art projects thus creating a social space in which people can interact with artworks and each other. It was opened on the initiative of Furtherfield (http://www.furtherfield.org) in the vibrant and culturally diverse Green Lanes area of North London. HTTP works with a wide range of artists and audiences to explore the potential of network technology and to promote distributed creativity. HTTP is supported by Arts Council of England.
Opening hours: Friday to Sunday 12noon-5pm
Tube: Manor House Buses: 29, 67, 141, 253, 254, 259, 341 Train: Haringey Green Lanes
www.http.uk.net
This project is supported by Arts Council England (London), Q Arts, Awards For All, Derby City Council, QUAD, Http and Furtherfield.org.
Midiatatica.org and the cannibalization of Tactical Media
“Tupi, or not Tupi that is the question.“[1]
In his Manifesto Antropófago, Oswald de Andrade imagines a Brazilian modernism based on the cannibalization -and transformation- of European models. 75 years later, Miadiatatica.org continues this deglutition by proposing the translation of the tactical media movement to the Brazilian context.
Tactical media is the critical use and theorization of media practices for political and artistic goals. It is both a cultural and political response against the depolitization of technology, the deterritorialization of capital, and the increasing commodification of the arts. Tactical Media interventions range from performances to hackerism, and they offer a chance for micro-subversion, immediacy and intimate bonds between social actors. Critical Art Ensemble proposes a definition of tactical media as “the experimental wing of a(ny) given movement.”[2] In the case of Midiatatica.org this critical and experimental use of media is regarded as an alternative against mainstream artistic practice, global corporativism, and high tech media art: “One thing we had in mind while translating the Tactical Media Lab and its concept to the Brazilian reality was, throughout the entire process, never to close our eyes to such a context.”[3]
In 2002, Tatiana Wells, researcher and information architect, Giseli Vasconcelos, cultural agitator and web designer, and Ricardo Rosas, net critic and web master, launched Midiatatica.org, a mailing list whose aim was the organization of a tactical media laboratory in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The idea was to reproduce the Next 5 Minutes Festival’s format of Tactical Media Laboratories, which combined performances, exhibitions, lectures and debates.[4] To this end, the newly born Midiatatica.org subscribed to the 2003 Next 5 Minutes Festival edition, which would take place in Amsterdam, and whose goal was to spread the call for media oriented activism beyond the European borders. From December 2002 to March 2003, with neither budget nor governmental support, Midiatatica.org managed to mobilize 315 members who worked together in the production and realization of what it would be one of the first Tactical Media festivals in Brazil.
The festival Midia Tatica Brasil gathered around 20 collectives that touched upon core issues for media activism: free software, the digital divide, copyleft, videoactivism, independent media. It also made explicit Midiatatica.org’s commitment to a low-tech version of media activism; the only possible version that can speak to the complex reality of a developing country such as Brazil.
Midiatatica.org and the continuation of the Cannibal project
More recently, Midiatatica.org has begun collaborating with Metareciclagem (Brazil), Waag Society (Netherlands), Sarai and Alt Law Forum (both based in India) in the design of interfaces and systems, research and development of low-tech solutions. It has also organized a series of performances, conferences and seminars aimed at disseminating information about Tactical Media (Submediologia, UpgradeSalvador, Autolabs, CiberSalao).
In consonance with its street interventions and public activism, Midiatatica.org has also encouraged the production and dissemination of theoretical material about cyberculture. Following a strict open source policy, the organization promotes the writing and edition of texts about cyberculture. A recent example of this is the creation of G2G study group, dedicated to the popularization and study of cyberfeminism.
A common trait of all projects is the pervasive spirit of revolt, appropriation… and cannibalism: “We cannibalize media practices to bring awareness of the periphery as a marginalized reality.”[5] This “peripheral” condition, this permanent displacement from the centre“ the metropolis, the art world core- facilitates the reception of Tactical Media in the Brazilian context. What could be more consistent with the cannibal spirit than the irreverence of hackerism or the subversive nature of open-source projects?
Indeed, it is in the subversive character of Tactical Media practices that we can hear the echo of De Andrade’s words:
“Only Anthropophagi united us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. Only law in the world. Masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. Tupi, or not Tupi, that is the question.”[6]
—–
1] Oswald de Andrade, Manifesto Antropófago,
The Tupi people were the first Brazilian Aboriginal group that made contact with Europeans when they first arrived in Brazil. Cannibalism was common among the Tupi and was believed to be a sign of respect towards a defeated enemy.
https://391.org/manifestos/1928-anthropophagite-manifesto-oswald-de-andrade/
2] Critical Art Ensemble, “Framing Tactical Media” in Next 5 Minutes: International Festival of Tactical Media September 11-14, 2003
https://www.scribd.com/document/397298495/Next-5-Minutes-International-Festival-of-Tactical-Media
3] “Back to Basics: The Revenge of the Low-Tech” Midiatatica.org https://midiatatica.desarquivo.org/documentos-relacionados/the-revenge-of-low-tech-autolabs-telecentros-and-tactical-media-in-sao-paulo/
4] http://www.next5minutes.org/about.jsp
5] “Que Venha a Midia Tatica!” in Midiatatica.org
http://www.midiatatica.org/mtb/midiatatica.htm
6] De Andrade
http://www.lumiarte.com/luardeoutono/oswald/manifantropof.html
_The Death of the Interview: a Meta:X.amination of Stelarc as EgoFried_N.tity_
About 20-odd years ago I visited a prominent contemporary Sydney Art Gallery in which was exhibited an installation of the techno_performance artists Stelarc. One of the x.hibits was a video looping of a “medical” n.tervention progressively showing the inside of Stelarc’s digestive
sys.t[ract]em. The screen had been turned off with only the audio partially working. In a defiantly sacrosanct gesture i braved the haloed-artwork-as-exhibited barrier, reached 2 turn the screen back on + attempted 2 adjust the volume. Suddenly the gallery director n.tervened + frostily conveyed her displeasure @ my attempt 2 make the installation functional, as well as suggesting i leave the gallery. Since then, my sense of Stelarc, techne_dysfunction + ego has been somewot
[Cronenbergianly] unfortunately fused 2gether.
Watching the Stelarc interview [conducted via vidcam] by CTHEORY Live [ie Arthur + Marilouise Kroker] I had strong associations with this initial introduction 2 Stelarc’s work ie art_scene panderings 2 the figure of artist-as-ego + media-perpetuated artist-as conveyor of jargonistic/post-biological/hierarchical figure. This progression of the concept of a media-squeezed Stelarc illustrates:
– how a commercial artscene is nowadays governed by a constant new-ism-seeking rhetoric of relational aesthetics.
– regulation scenic_elitism via knowledge exclusion + (subconscious or deliberate) conceptual obscurification.
– various satellite virtual n.teraction_prickings [ie working vicariously via a project associated with Stelarc] pointing 2wards the agendaised notions b.hind several of his works, eg an alleged Stelarc
theory that wot is hindering the evolution of the human species is s.sentially the size of a woman’s womb.
The interview b.tween Stelarc + CTHEORY demonstrates a certain hairiness with[in] the use of a traditional format [ie talking_head dialogue] 2 capture the s.sence of Stelarc’s works:
1) a type of problematic subliminal gender pottage in terms of a conceptual reduction of biology + interviewer presence/tandem breakdown of interviewer as injector-of-high-end theoretical concepts designed 2 faux-challenge thru pretend bristling questions [ie woman interviewer supplanted via the “real” interviewer – aping discourses governed by traditional power positionings].
2) the interviewing beginning with a Stelarc reference 2 t.h[is]e body being unavoidably directed by biological directives (ie he’s not the best in the morning) indicating projected/neglected references 2 body replacements/post-biology. This downplaying of the very mechanics that allow for the manipulation of the concepts Stelarc uses as his artistic currency hi-lites the gap b.tween the artist’s projection and physical_x.istance/actualities.
3) the layering of flesh/tech idealisation + constant references to dialogue rather than multilogue/social.networking_type jigsaw.possibilities + theoreticians mired/housed within
print_[quasi-digerati]literary traditions; consistent references 2 Stelarc as being the primary c[reator]urator of his works [besides an attempt by Marilouise 2 n.courage future collaborative attempts] + with [only] a cursory mention of those technical ppl responsible for the execution of his idea/project fruition. This, in particular, echos the ego m.phasis/underpinning of this mono-directive interview process; an old_skool attempt @ documentation stripped of the equations necessary 2
allow Stelarc to perform/justify/reflect his artistic responses.
The next interview in the series is an interview with Katherine Hayles, during which a person from UCLA’s end attempted to dial-up into the video link – a wonderful fracture of the linear, dried-end of the outmoded dialogue format CTHEORY Live is current perpetuating.
Database video art, Performance Video, Live Cinema + VJing
One of my recent interests, perhaps even preoccupations, has been investigating live or performance video, both as an artist/producer and as a curator. This form of video art has its roots in the rave culture of the late 80’s and 90’s and I have been aware of it since the late 90’s as I was getting into video production and film making. But it really peaked my interest and became more intriguing to me, when I became the lead curator for the 2003 and 2004 New Forms Festivals here in Vancouver.
VJ Central states:
“The word VJ is also used to represent video performance artists who create live visuals on all kind of music. It originates from a parallel with DJs, although most VJs nowadays have more to do with musicians than with DJs. Often using an analog vision mixer, VJs blend and superimpose various inputs over clips. In recent years, musical instrument makers have begun to make speciality equipment for VJing. The evolution of computers has allowed for VJ-specific programs to be produced and has allowed for easier accessibility to the art form.”
As background, audio/visual performance in recent years has had a greater and greater incorporation at international festivals and film festivals, as it own art form, integrating generative new media tools for sound, images and video. As well as bridging electronic music, new media art/ installation and experimental film and video, adding to the live component of performance, audio/visual performance is coming into its own as a medium outside the party context.
For example, at the Montreal annual electronic music festival MUTEK, during the last two years the festival has added extra, discreet programs, with unique themes and styles for the audio/visual performance or “live” cinema” stream, and in 2005 there were three different audio/visual performance programs, in addition to their regular music performance events. As this performance visual art form develops, if more forward thinking art institutions got involved in nurturing this hybrid, art genre-bridging form, it might get more of the credit its due.
For one of the 2004 New Forms Festival events, we presented a night of performance video or audio/visual performance, as it was called. I assisted the curators of the event, Ed Jordan and Stephanie McKay of The nomIg. Collective, in producing the event within the context of the rest of the festival. The event was still so new to Vancouver audiences that we didn’t know how to properly promote it to reach the different types of video art and electronic music cultures, who might appreciate the works. Yet there were some stunning works from the Montreal artist team skoltz_kolgen (Herman Kolgen and Dominique Skoltz) and local filmmaker Velcro Ripper that year, as well as in 2003 by The nomIg. Collective themselves and the French Canadian film artist Jean Piché.
Last year, I managed to get to Mutek for Montreal’s annual electronic festival, to check out their audio/visual program (which I was told was not their best year for this type of work, but intriguing in any event). I’ve since been trying to make time in my life to get more personally acquainted with this practice in my own work. I’ve also incorporated an introduction of this new video art practice into my 2nd year video art and production course, Moving Images, in order to try inspire a new crop of performance video artists.
In the Jan/Feb issue of RES magazine there was a feature on VJ artists moving more into the art sphere (sadly the article is not available online) and getting better exposure, recognition and respect. It discussed how they are reinventing themselves, as they move away from the electronic music and party scene onto the street and into galleries, showing their performance installations and exploring new ways to present themselves to the world beyond the late-nights.
The following are quotes by the artist/curators team, The nomIg. Collective, of the new genre/format/ art form:
“…manipulate audio and video samples live, as DJs would manipulate their records. Here, however, Coldcut transcends the traditional material manipulations of the DJ and move into the limitless realm of digital exploration where sound and image can truly become one.”
“… the creation of works where the audio and video components are composed and performed together with an awareness of each other’s inherent compositional characteristics. This … requires that neither the audio nor the video serve the role of accompaniment, but that they work together to form a synergy of audio and video; of sight and sound; of music and cinema.”
“The sound and video are presented as a single, coherent thought.”
“the simultaneous creation of sound and image in real time by sonic and visual artists who collaborate to elaborate concepts on equal terms. The traditional parameters of narrative cinema are expanded by a much broader conception of cinematographic space, the focus of which is no longer the photographic construction of reality as seen by the camera’s eye, or linear forms of narration.”
Stephanie McKay and Ed Jordon of The NomIg. Collective
I’ve also recently discovered an adaptation of the live VJ / Visuals activity online “WJing or web jockeying” although what I’ve seen so far is not live online, a European group has cropped up to develop a system for WJing and are doing workshops on the software all over Europe. The system seems to create live performances that are wirelessly streamed online. The Rhizome artbase recently promoted it, stating:
“While the DJs and VJs of the world remain tethered to the remix of sound and image, WJs (web jockeys) have at their fingertips an infinite and diverse pool of material–sound, image, text, code, web cams, blogs, and more–all constantly changing and expanding. A new software development, WJ-s, offers artists a tool to create live multimedia performances from this digital soup… the world of artistic algorithms, and computer art in a live performance. WJ-s was conceived…. to create ‘a strong cybernetic experience, captivating, sensual, and shifted where [….] the flow and the extreme pleasure of surfing are moved into a performative framework…” Helen Varley Jamieson, Rhizome.org.
Although not really a new thing, as I’ve known The nomIg Collective to do such live online performances several years ago on PirateTV, which were basically live streams of VJing, it is intriguing and I hope to see more on this particular manifestation of live performance cinema.
Another area of interest and somewhat related to live video performance, is the new works in non-linear, non-narrative, ambient or generative video projects and the software and database systems that have been developed for them. In my research for courses I’ve been developing, I discovered that many artists and filmmakers are trying new ways to generate narrative or non-narrative cinema online for ambient backgrounds in homes, using computer databases and programming to display random film clips and audio. In this way, they are always creating something new and “live”- which is primary to the work of new media cinema artist and theorist Lev Manovich in his work on the Soft Cinema system.
Lev Manovich is more often cited and known for his book The Language of New Media, where he attempts to contextualise new media in terms of film theory, history and form, but also as a new form that will find its own language, which he tries to create the beginnings of (since I have only browsed through the book itself, forgive me if I have oversimplified or mistaken its overall intent).
With his Soft Cinema project, Manovich is continuing his investigation of new media film. On his website he states:
“Soft Cinema consists from large media database and custom software. The software edits movies in real time by choosing the elements from the database using the systems of rules. The software decides what appears on the screen, where, and in which sequence; it also chooses music tracks. In short, Soft Cinema can be thought of as a semi-automatic VJ (Video Jockey), or more precisely, a FJ (Film Jockey).” Lev Manovich
Manovich also claims he is exploring four ideas:
1.First is Algorithmic Cinema: which is the writing and implementing a script and a system of rules, that are defined the creators or as he calls them authors of the cinema clips, the software then controls what the screen layout is, including the number of windows and their content. Then the author/videographer can choose to have minimal control letting most of choices to be made by the software, or they can determine which clips the viewer will see at specific points in time. However, the actual editing is done in real time by the system and the video clips and sound can run continuously without repeating the same edits.
2.Then there’s Macro-cinema: where the computer user uses the various windows sizes and dimensions within the larger frame.
3.Next is Multimedia cinema: where the video is meant as only one type of representation, with others being 2D animation, motion graphics, 3D scenes, diagrams, maps, etc.
4.Finally, he explores the concept of interest to me, that of Database Cinema: where the media elements are randomly selected from a database of clips and sound, to create virtually limitless (limited only but the number of clips and media elements themselves) combination number of video elements or different versions of the same film. His approach to using a database is as a new representational form in and of itself, in order to research the different ways to display the ambient cinema database. So its an exploration of database versus narrative structure or recombinations for various narrative effects.
Camille Baker is a media curator/ producer/ artist/ instructor living in Vancouver –
For more on Camille Baker, see http://www.swampgirl67.net/
June 2006
HTTP Gallery is pleased to present Urban Eyes, an intermedia project by Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Angesleva. Urban Eyes uses wireless technology, bird seeds and city pigeons to reconnect urban dwellers with their surroundings.
The Urban Eyes feeding platform stands in one of London’s public spaces. By landing on the platform, pigeons tagged with RFID chips send aerial photographs of their locality to surrounding Bluetooth-enabled devices. In this work pigeons become maverick messengers in the information super-highway, fusing feral and digital networks. HTTP Gallery provides an interface to the project, mixing live and documentary footage and offering visitors an opportunity to experiment with Bluetooth.
Being one of the last remaining signs of nature in a metropolis such as London, the urban pigeon population represents a network of ever-changing patterns more complex than anything ever produced by a machine. However, pigeons’ movements are based on a one-mile radius around their nest. Any pigeon you see every day shares the same turf as you. Urban Eyes crosses and expands human mobility patterns offering to reconnect you with your neighbourhood.
In the 1960s, situationists Debord and Jorn composed psycho-geographic diagrams of Paris, which described navigational systems based on their drift through the city. For this, they used Blondel la Rougery’s Plan de Paris a vol d’oiseau, a birds-eye map of Paris. Inspired by this methodology, Urban Eyes enlists our feathered neighbours to establish a connection between this view of the city as now distributed by Google Earth and our terrestrial experience.
About Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Angesleva
Marcus Kirsch holds an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art. He was invited to the 2004 Seoul Biennale and as exhibiting artist and to last year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival and DEAF Festival. He was awarded a silver Art Directors Club NY and a fusedspace.com award in collaboration with Jussi for ‘Urban Eyes’.
Jussi Angesleva holds MA in Audio Visual Media Culture from the University of Lapland in Finland, and MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art and has shown at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Siggraph, ZKM and Science Museum London. He has received awards from the Royal Society of Arts, NESTA, D & AD (together with Ross Cooper), Prix Ars Electronica and the Art Directors Club of Europe. He is currently working at ART+COM in Berlin, Germany and is a co-founder of the new media agency Prosopon.
By Filmmaker Flick Harrison.
The film “Marie Tyrell”came to my attention when I was asked to moderate the Cinematic Salon, a monthly informal community event in Vancouver, hosted by Cineworks, a non-profit artist-run cinema centre. The Cinematic Salon is meant to “provide an opportunity for dialogue around film artistry, in which guest artists show and discuss their work, encourage other filmmakers at all stages of their careers, as well as for individuals simply interested in film, meet, discuss and learn from each other’s experiences in film making.” This particular event was called “Flick Harrison: Film Interactive” due to its interactive features as a means to demystify or interrogate the narrative, politics and production of the film.
As it states on the Cineworks website,
“Flick Harrison’s award winning short MARIE TYRELL based on the 1974 short story by Vancouver author D.M. Fraser. Marie Tyrell is a humanizing portrait of a woman on death row, from inquisitive teen to uncompromising revolutionary leader. Like the 1974 short story by legendary local author D.M Fraser, Harrison’s film weaves multiple perspectives, splintered time and forceful poetic language into a startling examination of the politics of dissent. Mixing painterly compositions, traditional narrative, and a richly-layered bombardment of symbols and imagery, Marie Tyrell hijacks the aesthetics of high-art and hostage-video, of indymedia and indiewood.”
As the event’s moderator, and as an interactive media producer, curator and instructor, I felt it was my role to interrogate the DVD, beyond the intentions of the artist, but also as a new thread in the on-going Interactive Cinema discourse. I’d like to share some of my questions and comments, for both the viewers and the filmmaker, some of which were answered, some still remain to be answered.
‘Marie Tyrell’ can be viewed from many perspectives and all of which had to be considered and questioned before the events, so that I could field viewers’ questions appropriately or stimulate discussion effectively. Some of those perspectives include: standard technical execution concerns, production development factors, the political and social issues presented by the content, the film narrative construction and inclusion of non-narrative aspects, the presentation format, the DVD interactivity and audience response or experience. I will briefly discuss all of these perspectives, and finally, the success of the in all these areas.
To start with I’d like to discuss the content of the Marie Tyrell story, which was taken from an adaptation of the D.M. Fraser short story of the same name. The social issues addressed in the film focus on social activism in times of war, terrorism and the line between the activities of it and activism, the current social climate in the world due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, police brutality and subsequent fascism taking place in so-called democratic societies. The film is trying to address the topical concerns of the loss freedoms including liberty, dignity and free speech, rights that, especially in the US, are threatened after September 11th, 2001. The Marie Tyrell story also suggests that activists are portrayed to uninformed citizens, by the government and the media to be, sometimes are treated as, or assumed to be, terrorists. So that when individuals get involved in protest activities or activist organizations (even art projects, such as with Steve Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble case, some fearful citizens believe the right-wing rhetoric, that the two are synonymous. While the divisions between activism and terrorism are not black and white, as they have been perceived in the past and certain cases are sometimes difficult to discern, peaceful civil protest is NOT terrorism. The film seems to be stating that, to take away basic civil rights such as an individual’s right to protest about injustice and government misconduct, is considered undemocratic in Western, countries. However, the film brings these issues to the foreground and show how fragile these right are, in a timely, if fragmentary, dream-like way.
A deconstruction of Marie Tyrell’s narrative elements, reveals its non-linear approach (i.e. the dream-like weaving through the protagonist’s memories), not dissimilar to other recent, popular independent films such as Memento by Christopher Nolan. However the questions that the non-narrative aspects evoke are: Do we really have a story here or a manipulation of emotional response? Does this non-linear approach add or detract from the message or impact? Why did the filmmaker choose this approach to present the political content, wasn’t there a more straightforward approach? The rationale to is primarily that the work, adapted directly from the 1974 short story by Fraser, also wove in multiple perspectives, splintered time and used forceful poetic language to create an impassioned view of his experience of politics in the 1970’s, which parallel those of today. But this approach begs another question, what was the motivation to work with this topic and/or this poem? More fodder to explore Harrison’s political views or an unearthing of under appreciated political commentary to show that things haven’t changed much? I would wager, both.
To change focus now, to the mechanics of the work, let’s look at the DVD construction and its interactive elements. In respect of the domain of Interactive Narrative in film. Between 2000-2001, there were only a few film-makers, interactive artists. Such as Janet Murray, and her Hamlet on the Holodeck fans, whose attention was peaked. Yet this domain seemed to develop more in the online and console gaming world, with a few Macromedia Flash animators and designers interested in creating projects that explored its possibilities (not to mention Science Museums and Planetariums). However, not many filmmakers took up the challenge, if only for the cost of shooting all the “choose your own adventure” elements, necessary to make it work, requiring many different possible choices of scenes or narrative routes for the viewer to pursue. In addition, the presentation format of this type of film is limited to home computers and set-top DVD systems, at that time not common. Yet, here in Vancouver one filmmaker, David Wheeler, attempted such a project, with his interactive DVD feature Point of View (P.O.V.) in 2001, to limited release and exposure.
Recently, in my online travels, I have begun to see more active discussion again of Interactive Narrative, primarily from artists and academics interested in database or generative online, non-linear video. As new and different technologies now are available to explore, the possibilities are perhaps open once more. The conundrum that always surfaces is, however, how can viewers be turned, from viewers who passively immerse in the content and visuals, into users actively involved and interested in changing the narrative outcome? Many in this debate have even suggested that we stop pursuing this and leave film and TV entertainment formats as they are, lean back media, while web, interactive projects and games stay as they are, lean forward media, leave it alone so that never the two can meet.
So did Marie Tyrell contribute to this discourse? Not in my assessment, but it did add a more interesting and thoughtful means of accessing and engaging with the Special Features of a DVD, which is something in itself. So good effort on Harrison’s part taking on the challenge, no matter the motive.
On the Cineworks Cinematic Salon web page for the event, it explains that the:
“Interactive DVD: Buttons in the video can also “interrogate” the narrative, and the politics of the film’s production, by calling up documentary segments: for instance, an interview with Erik Paulsson, who sat on a BC Arts funding jury which rejected Marie Tyrell. Including original footage of Noam Chomsky, Svend Robinson, Larry Campbell, the Woodwards Squat, Arts Council Jurists, and antiwar protests.”
In the DVD, the interactivity of Marie Tyrell was accessed through the aforementioned “interrogation mode” (simply a different means to get to the “special features”). But what are the users’ experiences, with the interactive components, meant to be in terms of a different approach to user experience, and technically, in terms of user interaction? What was the motivation to create an interactive component to a standard film project and why in this way? As a media producer, curator, researcher. While not all of my questions were answer, the answer I received, I felt, while understandable, somewhat unsatisfying. The filmmaker, Flick Harrison, seems to have wandered into new media and the interactive domain, purely out of a desire to get his project funded.
Harrison, a local Vancouver film-maker, often known to have political, controversial and thought-provoking topics for his projects, was having trouble getting his film project funded. For whatever reasons (which are delved into in more detail on the DVD), he took advantage of the novelty factor and the potential of the interactive DVD format, to attract the interest in the project by the film and video funders. It seemed to work, but has it pushed the medium? Some may say “yes”, some may say “no”. As someone who’s researched this domain a little, I would have to say, “not really”, and I think Harrison would admit to this as well.
In terms of exposing the production process, such as: funding concerns, filming and technical elements, and the style or approach, in the DVD’s interrogation mode has interaction that mainly features clickable buttons, which appear at certain points in the narrative and expand on the behind-the-scenes pre-production such as, the funding process; the adaptation of the short story, the politics of it and the era in which it was written, as well as the parallels it has to current day circumstances; and other documentary elements that correspond to the reference points in the interrogation mode of the DVD.
I asked Harrison, did this way of connecting the content to the process, add to the experience for the viewer, and how was it different from standard Special Features that you normally find in most commercial DVDs? His response was that, “the intention was to aid viewers in becoming more engaged with the film making process, not just to have them sit back and take it in as finished entertainment piece, but to have them to think about the all aspects of film making.” This approach perhaps harkens back to the Fluxus or Structuralist Movements in experimental film making of the 60 and 70’s, where the materials for making the film were exposed, to thus, become the film content. In this case, Harrison not only used the technological materials as the product, but all the parts in the process from the funding, to the text adaptation, to the filming of political protests, to the historical fodder for the story, etc. as the materials as well.
Ultimately, the choice made for this approach, again, was to show the unique means of presenting the content, in order to receive funding. Harrison agrees that, in some ways this interrogation mode of the DVD is not so different than presenting the Special Features menu to viewers, to see how the film was made or watch the whole film again with the director’s commentary, etc. However, he sees it as less about showing the viewers how cool the film is but, rather as a tool to sell the DVD, with its special effects etc, but instead about demystifying the whole process of film-making, stripping it down and exposing both the good and the bad. In the end, some could see it as two different approaches to the same end: to make money so to continue to make more films. And while such a motive is a reality, whether you are a big production company or an independent film-maker, let’s just be clear about the fact that they are basically the same thing.
So while I think the overall intention of the interactive component was to find funding to make a controversial or political film, and the interactivity merely a by-product of the process, the result still has merit, in terms of exploring interactivity through film.
Finally, in discussing the presentation format and the audience response or experience, I wonder, was it meant to be seen in a gallery, movie theatre, or on personal computer? Is it intended to be more personal or private? Isolated and alienating (mirroring the film subject matter and main character), does this interactive approach add to the viewer’s experience? Or does it feel familiar? Harrison suggests that he is focusing on distributing the work in two parts: the DVD to galleries and artist-run centres in Canada and the film to Film Festivals, which reiterates my claim that presentation is a difficult task for this type of project. Perhaps he should find a way to put it online (and why wasn’t that a first choice? the lack of royalties and people willing to pay for it likely), atleast some of the interrogation mode documentary clips. This is a huge hurdle for this medium to leap and likely the main reason it is not pursued more; how does one cover the huge costs of making the project if its difficult to present? Speaking from my own experience of watching the film the first time, at my computer. I would say that it really should be watched with a computer and headphones over the theatre setting. The impact of the narrative is felt so much more intimately and the ability to surf around in the interrogation mode helps the viewer to really “get” what Harrison was going for. On the other hand, it also allows those of us with short attention spans to not explore it, as in depth, he might wish. So the jury is still out on each mode experience for this piece.
So is this project successful as a new means to explore interactive cinema? I would say, not really, for reasons given above, but at least filmmakers are still toying with this domain and if the worlds of film and games could start to crossover more, there might be more interesting interactive narratives in both domains.
Is Marie Tyrell successful as a controversial film? I would say, yes. It has many intriguing and provocative ideas and insights that nudge the viewer to consider the current political reality worldwide. It was successful, in terms of my experience, having viewed it both, with others at the Cineworks’ Cinematic Salon, and with my video production students, easily prompting discussion on the issues presented by it.
Is Marie Tyrell successful as an experimental film project? I would say that it is, it effectively uses an non-linear narrative approach, unfolding the world of the main character. It mixes visual fragments with poetic narration, to elucidate the memories of the main and supporting characters, as Marie moves toward her execution for her implied terrorism, as a barrage of memories flashing in one’s mind before they die. It is an aesthetically appealing film (except for one extra long psychedelic segment 2/3 of the way through), that is well told cinematically, leaving the viewer ponderous and emotionally affected.
It was successful in terms of creating a closer connection between topical clues within the main narrative content and with the documentary or interrogation elements of the film making process. This was fresh, and interestingly there were more interrogation documentary clips than there was in the original film. One could easily get so caught up in that part and forget the original film they started with. I’m not sure if this was because the main film was edited more stringently or that on some level the film was just a way to lure a viewer into the politics and world of the film-maker. Perhaps the real artwork here is the whole DVD as a package, which would be more aptly named, “Flick Harrison’s Trails and Tribulations in the Making of Marie Tyrell”, as the real project is not just the dreamlike short.
For more on the interactive DVD and screening bookings or copies, contact Flick Harrison:
http://members.shaw.ca/flickharrison
For more on the Cineworks and the Cinematic Salon, see:
http://www.cineworks.ca/past_salons/film_interactiv.php
For more on Camille Baker, see:
http://www.swampgirl67.net/
Free103point9 and Transmission Arts
“the guts of radio are not sounds, but rather the gaps between sending and receiving, between transmission and audition, or however you want to name this space.”
Soundclash, airwaves’ tapestries, aural networks. Transmission art is an artistic movement interested in exploring transmission “as a medium for creative expression”. Transmission artists navigate the unnamed space “between transmission and audition”, the ephemeral territory where the medium becomes the message. Transmission art attempts to make airtime available to those whose vision of the medium does not fit commercial venues, to those who imagine airwaves as raw material for something more than ads.
If John Cage, Jean Tinguely and Nam June Paik’s work can be regarded as “landmarks” of transmission art, a more recent chapter of this history cannot ignore free103point9‘s transmission art projects and online radio.
Performing transmission
Since it emerged as a microcasting artist collective in 1997, free103point9 has consistently pursued the legitimization and promotion of transmission arts. Today, the clandestine collective is a non-profit arts organization whose many ventures are: Project space -a gallery in Brooklyn, New York-, Wavefarm -a research centre currently under construction-, a radio lab, an on-line radio and a distribution label. Aware of the need of defining transmission arts, free103point9 has painstakingly theorized and documented the history and forms of transmission art: radio and video art, performance, installation, light sculptures. Textbooks and a growing on-line archive of transmission artworks are two ways in which free103point9 consolidates the notion of transmission arts.
The term “transmission” has often been associated with linearity and passive reception. In Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s cybernetic communication model, transmission is the transference of information from sender to receiver. Despite its obvious debt to the cybernetic model, transmission art subverts this linearity by focusing on reception conditions. This is the goal of free103point’s transmission projects (Tune (In)), Radio 4X4 and Microradio Sound Walk), in which artists “re-examine conventional ideas about sound performance and the audience experience”. These “conventional ideas” are basically the assumption that performance is “immediate” and that audiences are “passive”.
In Tune(In))), for example, both assumptions are challenged by proposing listeners to experience audio performances broadcasted live in individual radio headsets. These “mediated” performances compete with other signals in the FM dial, and their transmission is not complete until the listener agrees to break with the silence and puts the headsets on. The silence of the room contributes with the audience’s self-awareness of its “role” in the performance.
A variation of this theme is found in Radio 4X4, a collaborative radio transmission performance that proposes a “walking tour of local airwaves”. The project, presented at the Center for Contemporary Art Laznia in Gdansk in May 2005, consists in four simultaneous audio performances transmitted separately throughout the room. The viewer/listener collaborates in the performance by moving within the room, mixing the signals with each step.
Premiered in 2004 at free103point9 gallery, Microradio Sound Walk is a walking tour and sonic piece that invites viewers to move among station transmitters situated along a path. Signals shift with each participant’s move, resulting in a soundscape that reveals the complexity of local airwaves. As in the case of Tune (In))) and Radio 4X4, the participant becomes extension and medium of the sonic experience.
Creating community
If performing transmission is the first step towards new uses of airwaves and sound, free103poin9 on-line radio is crucial to bridge the gap between artists and public. The possibility of transmitting on-line extends the goal of artistic experimentation by opening up a space to communicate creativity beyond the monopoly of commercial stations. The creation of the on-line radio is a symptom of free103point’s shift from civil disobedience to alternative action under the umbrella of “high profile nonprofit media arts organization.”
The most promising aspect of free103point9 is precisely this determination that prompts the organization to engage larger audiences in the debate and imagination of richer and more interesting forms of radio, to encourage artists to explore the unnamed territory between “transmission and audiences”, and, finally, to dare to make art out of the “guts of radio”.
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Gregory Whitehead, as cited in Allie Alvarado, “An Interview with Gregory Whitehead.”
free103point9 is now Wavefarm.
Interview with Mary Flanagan
Jess: I’ve been thinking about the idea of works-in-progress and issues of exploration and am wondering what kind of aesthetic possibilities do you see available in an online environment that might not be tangible on a more static platform like cd-roms?
Mary: Most CDROMs have the ability to be networked so that they can at least provide some of the same possibilities as completely networked artworks and games. . . however, I know of few artists at this time who continue to create artistic CDs. Rather, working on the network or in installation/application seems to be the norm. For example, if an artist is using a game engine to make artwork (such as the Unreal engine ) the application and assets may require download or complete distribution as a packaged work. Compare this to a changing and updatable database or applet accessible quickly through a browser, you have distinct differences. However, the dichotomy between “static” and “nonstatic” is not absolute. Most commercial online games, for example, distribute base code on CD, then updates, patches (as well as user created content) online, ends up being a choice for the artist as to what kind of work they wish to make. Some projects are still just too big for the web, too textured, too intense in their processes or 3D graphics.
So the idea of work in progress, in industry is called a prototype, in writing, a draft. There are always different audiences for works-in-progress. A web based project for example can have many testers for the work to receive critique and feedback before it is finished. The scope and scale of which is, quite different from say a studio visit to see an in-progress installation.
In more “static” and “net” based work, both can involve multiple users or multiple readings, and both can be augmented and changed due to the network surrounding them. As an artist I choose to try and do web-accessible work as much as possible to allow the maximum number of user/participants to enjoy the work. Traditional art circles, however, still prefers objects to place into galleries and sell (and buyers, collect), and not something that merely can be accessed on the web. So here, too, economic choices come into play for a variety of artists wishing to sell their work or at least having it seriously considered along with other arts currently housed in more traditional institutions (art objects, film archives, etc).
Regarding aesthetic possibilities, well I personally like the immediate and fluid feeling of a web-based application, the feeling that it can unintentionally occur or happen on the screen while a user thought he or she was just surfing. The unintentionality of simple discovery and the ‘everydayness’ of integrating art into other computer activities is compelling to me.
Jess: Perhaps because I’m researching web fictions written by women, I’m finding your ideas of access and unintentionality resonating with a cyberfeminist thinking. If cyberfeminism, broadly explained as optimism in the “digital turn” combined with feminist thought, (like that of Rosi Braidotti’s), might be said to revolve around a theories of representation (of women), then how might online media like The Adventures of Josie True begin to question the (relationship?) interaction of (enabling?) technologies and women’s lives?
Mary: Well my thinking has changed recently about feminism and media that relies on design + code structures… Instead of matters of representation (issues I worked on in the late 1990s in several essays), my attention has turned towards thinking and reworking computer-media specific things such as ‘game goals’ and ‘architectures’ as important sites for social change and activism. How we participate in digital culture, how we are framed — as consumers or as producers — is fundamental to this notion.
When I worked on Josie, this was not yet my thinking, so developing the Josie character with friends and students was definitely more about representation. Josie is not too thin -she is average. She has often been mistaken for a boy. She is both fashionable and unfashionable. She is Chinese American but also has been referred to as “anime,” which suggests that anime characters are either ‘white’ or a whole other group altogether. Her role models in the game: Ms. Trombone, Science Teacher, and Bessie Coleman, Aviator — are decidedly African American. So here, representing adventurous, smart, and scientific women of colour is very important to enhancing all player’s exposure to ‘what constitutes a hero.’ We simply don’t get enough diverse heroes and this is very important for everyone: man, woman, white, black.
I’m certainly a cyberfeminist. I’m overly optimistic. But I’m not one to believe that new technologies can replace old hierarchies of power — look at who is making the new technologies, and look how they got there. How can this system change? My belief is that by changing who authors systems, there may be some kind of change, at least through empowering and sharing knowledge. In part IT is a knowledge economy. Therefore, this certainly means networking women together to support their success in technological arenas as much as possible as they become authors. I think it also means shifting how we teach technology, as well as who designs hardware and even programming languages, too. . .(these lofty-bordering-on-insane-suggestions can only come from someone optimistic, don’t you think?) One step at a time… : )
Jess: The more I re-read your answer, the more I wonder whether matters of representation are really so different from “game goals” and “architectures.” As you say, changing the authors of systems can mean also changing hierarchies of power. But by changing the authors aren’t we also changing representation? I mean, as a woman thinking about representation, you created Josie with specific goals in mind. Is changing game goals perhaps a further step in this direction?
Mary: Matters of representation I believe can be abstracted to these larger systems and architectures, so yes, changing game goals and larger system designs is a further step in the direction started with games like Josie True. Diversity and variety matters in what we see and how we as players, consumers, and participants are framed. For example, games which promote sharing or have goals of ‘giving everything away’ vs. ‘accumulating’ might offer entirely different perspectives on success in play and, potentially, the real world around us. This may or may not affect the way things ‘are seen’; in a way, it is a kind of ‘getting under the skin’ or surface in ways theorists such Barthes talks about in his Mythologies (among many many others) and what I write about in my work on feminist game design. Because every image, object, sound, or gesture is susceptible to the imposition of meaning, designers must be conscious in all steps of this meaning-making process, perhaps especially when it is completely created from code.
Changing the authors of such systems may indeed alter how such design processes are approached. That’s my hypothesis, but it is only proven in small cases because massive scale social change to change hierarchies of authorship has not yet happened. There is the very real danger of reproducing the status quo. Bell Hooks discusses this in terms of teaching in her 1994 Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, and other feminist thinkers who see radical social change as only possible in changing systems of power.
Jess: How might women destabalise “old hierarchies of power” as interactors with games and as designers/producers of games?
Mary: So how might women and other disenfranchised groups destabalise “old hierarchies of power”? Certainly one way this can happen is through asking different kinds of questions and by asserting different kinds of goals. And ultimately by making work with differing perspectives, values, and communities which bleeds through to larger culture. One of the failures of the feminist movement has been its cohesion to itself. For example, ‘women’s studies’ should not only happen in a certain course but across courses and fields. How many editors of books or art exhibitions are conscious of ensuring equal representation of women, of people of colour, of people with varying functional abilities or interests? Making the tools, knowledge, and context available to all for diverse visions of community, space, place and beyond is an accessibility issue.
As consumers, women already destabilise hierarchies. Look, for example, at the case of The Sims games. Here, fan culture and machinima, as well as re-skinning and unplaying such games, is popular. Gamers re-skin, re-design, and indeed, re-issue popular games such as The Sims and manipulate their own Neopets web pages, offering their own interpretations and inventions for play. It is helpful to know that according to last year’s ELSPA white paper, the typical female gamer in the UK is 30 to 35 years old, plays around seven hours a week and spends £170 a year on games. The positioning of consumption as a game goal in itself is cause for further investigation, if only because it so closely resembles real-world corporate messages and the everyday practices of ‘consumers’ according to Willis, however, “Consumerism has to be understood as an active, not a passive, process ”active, for it is a type of play which also includes work”. Along with consumption, however, critique can come about: a great deal of pleasure is derived from subverting these set norms and exploring the boundaries of what is, and is not, permissible. I’ve linked these subversions in some of my essays to historical models of playing with domestic situations: Victorian doll fiction has been replaced by fan fiction generated by Sims players, and Victorian practices of doll funerals have translated into macabre Sims play with the ability to have the virtual dolls suffer, become malnourished, or even set objects on fire within the ‘normative’ suburban environment.
So, subversion of existing systems, and the making of new examples and experiences, seem to be a few of the approaches we can take as ‘culture jammers’ in a quest to create new models for play, for art, and for culture.
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1 http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml
2 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374521506/002-4660078-6525628?v=glance&n=283155
3 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374521506/002-4660078-6525628?v=glance&n=283155
4 http://www.elspa.com
Chris Ashley – Look, See.
Every day since 2002, Chris Ashley has created an abstract coloured drawing in hand-coded HTML tables and posted it to his weblog Look, See. The structured format of a weblog frames these small but often complex works perfectly.
Weblogs are an informal medium, and personal weblogs often have the quality of a diary or consisting of a confessional nature. This is a deflating context for art that, in Chris’s case, allows some of the aesthetic content of high and late modernism to be rehabilitated without bathos. What was once meant to be universal is made personal, not with the knowingness of Neo Geo but with a remixer’s virtuosity and enthusiasm.
Weblogs are also a highly referential medium; some weblogs consist almost entirely of commentaries on news or links to other blogs. The visually referential nature of Chris’s HTML drawings shares this quality. Despite being grid-based geometric abstracts, they evoke the heroic universal grids of high modernism, 8-bit computer graphics, or the colours and forms of scenes of nature or technology. This is quite apart from their titles, which often refer to concrete entities. Again, the informality of the weblog’s context prevents the problem of how something concrete can be expressed or represented in abstraction from becoming a problem.
These are very successful works, and paradoxically, the limitations of their chosen medium help make them so. Grids, especially HTML table grids, are a restrictive format. But this formal limitation can free other qualities such as colour and composition. And formal constraints have often been used as a spur to creativity by Dada or the Oulipo.
Looking at the watercolour works that Chris has also posted is instructive. Like the HTML table drawings, they are formal but playful exercises in colour and composition. There is a strong hint of Sol LeWitt’s geometric abstracts in some of the forms, and like LeWitt, Chris’s work can be seen as an ironic continuation of high modernism after it died in the 1960s. Where LeWitt’s ironisation was in the form, with the platonism of pure abstraction recast as rigid geometric specifications, Chris’s is in the subject, with visual referentiality replacing hermetic platonism.
Chris recently added another classic web design staple to his HTML, single-pixel animated GIFs. The result is not limited to animation but very successful moving images. Duration and movement of colour become formal properties alongside hue, saturation and transparency. Falling strips of colour evoke rain, and flashing panels of contrasting brightness become lightning or city lights. This is more distillation than abstraction. It is a peak shift evocation of visual experience.
The way that Chris’s HTML table drawings hold and animate the aesthetic references gives them the internal complexity required to have a critical voice. Like a political weblog they draw in, interrogate and comment on issues from a larger world, although the world of aesthetics rather than politics. And it is this that gives them their lasting value as art.
Look, See – http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/
Earlier HTML Drawings – http://chrisashley.net/htmldrawings/
Watercolours – http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/archives/cat_on_paper.html
Moving Images – http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/archives/2006_03.html
American ‘girl gamer’ artist and theorist, Mary Flanagan will be working as Artist in Residence at HTTP, Furtherfield’s Gallery and lab space in Spring 2006. As part of the residency HTTP Gallery has commissioned [giantJoystick] for the Game/Play exhibition, a national touring exhibition, in collaboration with Q-Arts (now Quad), Derby, which explores goal-orientated gaming and playful interaction in media arts practice.
[giantJoystick] offers a humorous reworking of the multi-player game. Visitors are invited to collectively play classic arcade games with a nine foot tall joystick modelled after the Atari 2600 one. The competitive goals of these classic arcade games are already familiar, however the dramatic change in scale of the joystick necessitates both an encounter of the whole body with the artwork and cooperation between a number of players in order to reach them.
Mary Flanagan is an artist, author, educator, and designer. Known for her theories on playculture, activist design, and critical play, Flanagan has achieved international acclaim for her novel interdisciplinary work, her commitment to a theory/practice dialogue, and contributions to social justice design arenas. Her research examines the boundaries between the personal and the public, perception, power, and what technology can teach people about themselves. Using the formal language of the computer program or game to create systems which interrogate seemingly mundane experiences such as writing email, using search engines, playing video games, or saving data to the hard drive, Flanagan reworks these activities to blur the line between the social uses of technology, and what these activities tell us about the technology user themselves. Her artwork ranges from game based systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works are exhibited internationally at venues including the Laboral Art Center, Whitney, SIGGRAPH, Beall Center, The Banff Centre, The Moving Image Center, Steirischer Herbst, Ars Electronica, Artist’s Space, Guggenheim, Incheon Digital Arts Festival, and and venues in Brazil, France, UK, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia.
The infomera cyber-wrestling challenge – arcangel vs. subculture – London, April 1st ’06
Luca Barbeni from TeKnemedia.net talks with Antonio Mendoza from Los Angeles (aka subculture) and Arcangel Costantini from Mexico about their forthcoming encounter in the cyber-wrestling ring in the Area10 Project Space in Peckham, South London on April 1st ’06 as part of the SUM (1,4,6) event of the NODE.London March ’06 season.
introduction by atty, SUM(1,4,6) event organiser
Its a great pleasure to be able to host the latest Infomera challenge particularly when the contestants are to be Arcangel, the creator and guardian of the tradition of cyber-wrestling against one of its greatest adepts, subculture aka Antonio Mendoza, we are also lucky to have the assistance of Lele Luchetti of Valencia acting as referee and announcer for this match.
As Arcangel explains in his interview, was started by him in 2001, first of all as an invitation to the net-art and wider net community as a whole to collectively hack and rehack the content of a specific URL on Infomera.net for a month. The challenge has since been honed and mutated to its present incarnation where the contest is a ‘mano o mano’ duel and it is held with the contestants physically together facing each other across a ring while the actual action remains in cyberspace. For our SUM (1,4,6) event at Area10 (3D view) we have the benefit of a very big, very amazing and atmospheric space to place the Infomera ring, maybe more a street, even back street fight setting for this show down compared to the more familar media lab and art museum venues. Can we expect the resulting ‘moves’ be the deepest, dirtiest most dastardly scripts, images and sounds seen yet on Infomera? All the action will be projected on a set of three huge screens displaying the site of the fight and the desktops of the contestants as they put together their next moves.
After checking the interviews from the two champions below you can also visit their pre-match URLs at http://www.unosunosyunosceros.com/prematch/ and http://www.subculture.com/netcampeones/ and then visit our open_digi association website at http://club.net-art.ws to register who you support for the big match. If you can get to SUM (1,4,6) registered supporters will receive handsome fan support items from their champion.
interview with Antonio Mendoza
LB: This is your second cyber-wrestling match, what is it like to participate in this kind of competition?
AM: This is actually my third cyber-wrestling match. My first one was strictly online. I fought Area3 who were in Barcelona from my house in Los Angeles. Unfortunately the time zones are so different that it was hard to get a good flow. My second match was in Mexico City. That was the first time live in a wrestling ring. I dueled muserna for like four hours. The battle was great until the tequila (a sponsor of the event) took over.
LB: Can you tell us something about your strategy, do you attack, defend or integrate?
AM: The best way to prepare for this kind of event is to achieve the perfect combination of ninja-like focus, drug-induced madness and steroid-enhanced endurance. Once I hit this cyber-wrestling nirvana, I like to pirate all sounds, images and javascripts from my opponent’s web site and use them against him (or her).
I also try eat a sensible meal with lots of carbohydrates and water before the match.
LB: what’s your mood now? do you feel fit and ready for April 1st?
AM: my mood? I feel pretty. I feel fit. I feel pity for arcangel. I feel like the Russian Revolution before it went wrong. I feel like jihad. I feel like psychoanalysis. I feel like the chance meeting of a sewing machine and tomahawk missile on a dissecting table.
LB: net-art would like to be stable whereas the reality is that is is transient and also implicitly participatory. It can easily be more like a temporary performance. What do you think about this?
AM: reality is just an excuse for those who can’t handle net-art.
LB: what do you want to say to arcangel, your opponent for April 1st in London?
AM: Arcangel, I’m looking into your eyes… I want you to know how it feels to have your beating heart squashed like a plum. I want you to know that I wipe my behind with your code. I want you to know that according to the latest CNN-Gallup poll, I’ve already won by a margin of five to one.
interview with Arcangel Costantini
LB: this cyber-wrestling match on the 1st of april is part of the infomera project, can you describe infomera for us? And what is the relation between the name infomera and the word ephemera?
AC: The idea was to have implicit in the domain the concept of “informacion efimera”. There is no entropy in digital data, the main goal of the project is to generate a metaphor of the transformation of information on the web, as two artists have access to a server and the possibilities and goal to transform the content of this server for the audience there is a proximity to an ephemeral process, what is important for this audience is to be present in the moment of transformation and at the end the collective work will disappear.
LB: net-art would like to be stable whereas the reality is that is is transient and also implicitly participatory. It can easily be more like a temporary performance. What do you think about this?
AC: Yes, it is a temporary performance, an action occurring in real time, like its counterpart in wrestling “Lucha Libre” (mexican style wrestling), it is a combative action but more important than this is that it is in fact also a collaborative action. ItÃs the process that makes it special.
LB: For infomera first there was free for all, then virtual duels, how did this work and who was involved? Then, how did you decided to do the duel non-virtual, live + online?
AC: the first infomera was “todos contra todos”, on an open server where everybody could participate, this was a one month duration performance whose end objective was to show net art in a public space. The resulting public show was in fact a memoria of the site interventions and was held at Galeria Metropolitana in Barcelona in 2001 (Vicente Matallana of La Agencia was promoter of this show) as well as in the open in BarcelonaÃs Placa Sol in the Gracia district. A composite Flash documentation of the Place Sol show can be found at http://rnd.net-art.ws/infomera/
During this first infomera process I realized that the outcome constituted essentially four duels between the most active participants on the server during the month. This gave me the idea to do explicitly one vs. one. As a result we did an exhibition series at the cyberlounge of Museo Tamayo in Mexico City called, Champions of the WWW, where during 48 hours two contestants would combat collaboratively on the infomera site. This was a totally virtual performance where the matches where by very famous old school net artists such as superbad vs redsmoke, oculart vs dream7 etc. Player cards created by these combatants can be found at http://www.museotamayo.org/inmerso/infomera/playercards/album.htm
The first online and real/non-virtual ‘mano o mano’ match was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina where I did combat with Brian Mackern, he used ërudoà technics and beat me. Next I changed to ërudoà style and with the opening of the Mexico City’s El Centro de diseno y television, we set up an almost real wrestling ring and the match was between subculture and muserna.
Net artists are used to working and communicating from an unspecified and isolated physical location, sharing their content through the global web. In the infomera non-virtual match the wrestlers are facing each other BUT still working through cyberspace, the only physical touch in the match is the one of the eyes, also brainwaves are closer,
and it’s nice to meet friends.
LB: muserna in his essay http://www.petitemort.org/issue03/24_code-warriors/ says you told him before his match with you of Sept 11th 2002 to “prepare all your moves”. Can you describe what you mean by a “move” in this context of cyber-wrestling between ‘net-artists’. Does it imply the destruction of
the other artist’s work, and if so in what manner? to what end?
AC: Probably I try to convey in my bad english the concept of ‘movimiento’, our expression for a transformative move which creates dynamic flow. In mexican wrestling the participants are acrobats who collaborate to create and share a beautiful and exciting performance, they share and exchange their moves as a competition, but the important part of the process, the key factor, as in cyber-wrestling, is dynamism vs. stillness. In the infomera contest works start to blend and transform in a dynamic manner building the creators’ aura.
LB: Did you ever think of inviting Netochka Nezvanova http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/03/01/netochka/index.html?pn=1 to an infomera challenge?
AC: There would be a big queue to fight against her.
LB: what do you want to say to subculture, your opponent for April 1st in London?
AC: Querido subculture I will make chicken tamales of you scripts, your bitmaps will be washed out and frozed to oblivion
/////////////////////
Links
infomera http://www.infomera.net
net-campeones at node.l http://www.nodel.org/projects.php?ID=162
SUM(1,4,6) http://www.nodel.org/events.php?ID=1
open_digi http://club.net-art.ws
Area10 Project Space http://www.area10.info
Mano a Mano, review from Mexico City Aug 2004 by Eduardo Navas
CODE WARRIORS essay by Muserna
the ephemeral angel feature
http://www.TeKnemedia.net/magazine
9 March – 22 April 2005.
SPIO is a ‘self-surveilled’ system based on a robotic device designed for capturing and processing images from a different perspective.
An autonomous vacuum cleaner equipped with high sensibility and infra-red CCTV cameras scans the installation space through pre-defined movements and triggers sound and visual events.
In the UK, one of the most visible interactions of place and high-technology communications systems over the past 10 years has been the installation of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV). Designed to improve the economic fortunes of public, commercial street systems, such technologies are so widespread that it has been estimated that the average UK urban resident is now monitored more than 300 times a day, making Britain the most visually surveilled nation on Earth.
Artists working in digital media are increasingly exploiting the subject of CCTV. Lucas Bambozzis SPIO, now installed at HTTP gallery, is an autonomous vacuum cleaner equipped with high sensibility and infrared CCTV cameras. SPIO scans the exhibition space through pre-defined movements and triggers sound and visual events in the ambient. The work is making an ironical comment on the self-surveyor apparatus, based on apparently innocent gadgets that will be filling our homes and habits more and more.- Tobi Maier
The CCTV cameras were installed in the robot.
Credits and technical details
Concept, creation and direction: Lucas Bambozzi
Music: Radboud Mens
Technical production in UK: Giles Pender for Furtherfield
Original Setup
Software development: Caio Barra Costa
Hardware and technical production: Fábio Seiji Massui
Originally presented at Emoção Art.Ficial 2.0 Itaú Cultural, São Paulo Brazil
Presented at Emoção Art.Ficial 2.0 Itaú Cultural, São Paulo Brazil – July to September 2004.
Curated by: Tobi Maier and Furtherfield
9th March – 22nd April 2006
HTTP Gallery is pleased to present Open Vice/Virtue: The Online Art Context a solo show by American artist Andy Deck, as part of NODE.London season. For this, his first exhibition in London UK, Deck uses the Internet, the gallery and public space to challenge corporate control over communication, tools and software, and by extension the social imagination.
‘The giantism of media corporations and the ongoing deregulation of media consolidation (Ahrens), underscore the critical need for independent media sources. If it were just a matter of which cola to drink, it would not be of much concern, but media corporations control content. In this hyper-mediated age, content — whether produced by artists or journalists — crucially affects what people think about and how they understand the world. Content is not impervious to the software, protocols, and chicanery that surround its delivery. It is about time that people interested in independent voices stop believing that laissez-faire capitalism is building a better media infrastructure.’ Andy Deck
Glyphiti is an online collaborative drawing project resented uniquely at HTTP. A large-scale projection forms an evolving graffiti wall and visitors to the space are invited to edit and add graphical units or ‘glyphs’, which compose the image, in real-time. The marks made by each person, combine with others and are shown as a time-lapse image stream. Hanging fabrics being shown here for the first time provide a tactile document of recent years’ of Glyphiti. Unlike most image software available on the Internet, Glyphiti functions through most corporate firewalls by using standard Web server requests. For the artist, penetrating firewalls acts as a metaphor for graffiti making: both activities necessitate the appropriation of privatised space for visual play.
Imprimatur consists of an online ‘groupware’ for poster illustration and layout accessible through a computer workstation installed in the gallery space. Visitors can use the software to create their own posters in collaboration with their online counterparts. This piece provides a framework for visitors/participants to launch a personal poster campaign based on their own social and political concerns. This DIY approach revives the tradition of poster-making as a medium of mass communication and persuasion developed during the 20th century. The posters will by displayed as part of the exhibition and will circulate freely beyond the gallery walls, appearing in surrounding streets, schools, libraries, kitchens and bedrooms.
Panel Junction combines the graphic novel with forms of shared authorship that have been made possible by the Internet. Here the artist selects a few stories emailed to him by visitors from all around the world. Each of the stories is chosen as a sequel to the most recent one and is transformed into a graphic novel by the artist. Hard copies will be available at the HTTP space for visitors.
Andy Deck presents his works at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre.
On Wednesday March 8 Andy Deck will be presenting his work at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre. The evening will be split into two parts: 17.30 -18.30 Screenings of key interactive works that you can get involved within real-time, and an informal opportunity to meet the artist with the HTTP Curators, Marc Garret and Ruth Catlow. 19.00 – 20.30 presentation by the artist of his work. Both events will be free and will be in the Dana Centre cafe bar. For details of this event www.danacentre.org.uk
“Leading American artist Andy Deck and HTTP Gallery are important independent voices in the new cultural communication space we call ‘the Internet’.” – Hannah Redler, Head of Arts Programme, Science Museum.
About Andy Deck
Andy Deck makes public art for the Internet that resists generic categorisation: collaborative drawing spaces, game-like search engines, problematic interfaces, informative art. Deck has made art software since 1990, initially using it to produce short films. Since 1994, he has worked with the Web using the sites www.artcontext.com and www.andyland.net
In addition to online commissions from New Radio and Performing Arts, Rhizome.org, the Whitney Artport and the Tate, Deck has shown his work in a variety of exhibitions in places like the Machida City Museum (Tokyo); the ZKM (Karlsruhe); PS1 (NYC); the MACBA (Barcelona); the Moving Image Gallery (NYC); Postmaster’s Gallery (NYC); the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Ars Electronica Center (Linz). Andy studied for a Post-diplôme, at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; and received his MFA in Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), NYC. He has taught at the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, Sarah Lawrence College, and New York University, the School of Visual Arts, and most recently the iEU Faculty of Fine Art and Design in Izmir, Turkey.
Notes for editors:
Title: Open Vice/Virtue: The Online Art Context
Artist: Andy Deck
Dates: Exhibition and associated events at HTTP 9th March – 22nd April 2006
Screening and presentation of works at Science Museum’s Dana Centre 8th March 5.30-8-30pm
Exibition opening hours: Friday to Sunday 12noon-5pm
Gallery details: Unit A2, Arena Business Centre, 71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY
Tel: + 44 (0)20 8802 2827
e-mail: info@http.uk.net
Web: www.http.uk.net
Tube: Manor House Buses: 341, 141 Train: Haringey Green Lanes
For more about NODE.L, please visit http://nodel.org
One of the most interesting and recent shifts in respect of perspective that has occurred during the Internet’s short history Is the movement away from the World Wide Web being an anonymous space to one where location has begun to matter. A range of services such as Google Maps, Google Earth and upmystreet.com are changing how we perceive and interact with the localities and spaces in which we all live. The growing availability of public mapping data and the combination of technologies that provide an easy method of producing cartography means that map creation is beginning to evolve from the bottom up. Communities can now utilise these technological maps, establishing communication between people in highlighting areas of interest or contextual issues (chicagocrime.org is an example) that conventional maps have always overlooked.
This fusion of physical and data space has inspired artists to explore different methods of engaging audiences with notions of space and time. GPS devices, in particular, have served a useful purpose for exploring how we might begin to think about maps based on human experience rather than physical features. Vice versa, the physical landscape can be experienced in a multi-dimensional form. Landscapes can be recorded and indexed according to their location data and then transferred into virtual space, offering new experiences and contexts and facilitating an exploration of human relationships between place, time and space.
The Danube Panorama Project by Michael Aschauer is one such project exploring these interlinked and complex concepts. This ambitious piece of work uses Europe’s second-largest river as its subject. The goal is to produce a full panorama of the Danube’s coastline using slit-scan photography, the result of which will be, according to Aschauer, a “unique cross-section of contemporary Europe”. In the digital realm, slit-scanning involves taking a series of images and concatenating them together to create one whole image. Aschauer’s technique uses GPS data to control the speed at which the video camera records material, resulting in a series of images indexed according to longitude and latitude. The geographical precision of the images provides a unique method to contrast the area of the Danube.
The success of Aschauer’s project lies in what these images bring to the surface. As the viewer floats downstream, west to east; from Vienna to Budapest, and onto Bratislava, the transformation of architecture and landscape highlights how different each culture is.
It is the Danube’s accumulated history over time, littered with disagreements and suspicion between the countries whose borders are formed by its waters, which becomes immediately visible and engaging. The political significance and the effects of war run deep the further East one travels along its current. The effects of the bloody conflict during Europe’s last war, on the site of Serbia and Croatia, began on one side of the Danube and ended on the other. Relics of the battles, including broken bridges and unexploded ordinance, line the Danube’s riverbed along this stretch of river. The Panoramas merely skim the surface of such ‘very real’ histories. However, it is the skimming of these images that adds a sense of curiosity for one to explore even deeper. In diving into the subject, the viewer will feel compelled to ask what it all means. When witnessing this process of time and space being folded into a visual context through the Internet’s glancing eye. Stories that are steeped in human-scale history are re-wakened, declaring past happenings of significance reflecting these people’s lives that now intersect.
Michael Aschauer: http://m.ash.to
The Danube Panorama Project: https://danubepanorama.art/
Google maps: http://maps.google.co.uk
Google Earth: http://earth.google.com
UpMyStreet: http://www.upmystreet.com
The term “glitch”, coined in 1962 by former U.S. astronaut John Glenn, originally referred to a spike or change in voltage in an electrical current. The meaning of the word glitch has since expanded to refer to any unmistakable yet unexplainable hiccup in what would otherwise be a smoothly functioning system. When referring to computer glitches, they range from the merely annoying to the panic-inducing symptom of a full-scale systems breakdown (e.g., the “blue screen of death”). On the other hand, glitches can also be about serendipity, a full-on happy accident, embracing a mistake and running with it, or functioning as a veritable readymade. In the case of artists Dimtre Lima and Iman Morandi’s Glitchbrowser, a fascination with glitch-as-metaphor serves as a conceptual basis for a work of Internet art.
Generally speaking, Glitchbrowser is not the first of its kind in that it is preceded by other alternative browsers, or what some have referred to as “browser art”. Some of these predecessors include the work of Jodi, I/O/D’s Web Stalker, Mark Napier’s Shredder, and Maciej Wisniewski’s Netomat. Like its predecessors, Glitchbrowser shunts aside notions of how the web (or even computer interfaces in general) is “supposed” to look or “supposed” to work. Therefore, in order to discuss Glitchbrowser, I feel it would be helpful to construct a brief art historical context, as well as a brief description of the aforementioned examples.
What was the initial impetus to create alternative browsers? By the years 1997-1998, a handful of net artists and theorists had already begun voicing concern about how information was being presented and organized on the web, particularly in regards to how it was quickly being codified according to standards dictated by 2D print media (e.g., magazines, catalogs, newspapers, books) as if web pages were paper. They also began critically examining how data space is presented on the web and how this presentation directly shapes the user’s experience. Furthermore, they also endeavored to call attention to how users’ expectations of web browsers’ functions were already becoming shackled by commercialization. Popular discourse about the web reinforced, rather than questioned, notions of Internet use based on information gathering, information hierarchies, and information organization. In an effort to openly challenge what was quickly becoming the status quo, some net artists wanted to explore what they considered the Internet’s connective, tactical and dynamic potential.
The artist duo jodi (Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskirk; 1995-present) created what could unarguably be considered the first example of browser art (http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/), if not an alternative web browser per se. What was particularly groundbreaking was their use of HTML scripts to turn the browser into art, as opposed to using the browser to display works of art.
Mark Napier, an Internet artist strongly influenced by the work of jodi, was intrigued by their use of the web as a medium. One of his early works, Shredder, is an example of browser art that plays with the web-as-print-media metaphor. With Shredder, he created a browser that would “tear up” web pages via a cgi script that would retrieve and alter the HTML before displaying the page on the screen, resulting in a collaged mixture of code fragments and disassembled images. Shredder succeeds in turning a number of web conventions on their head: what is normally hidden is displayed, text becomes image, organization becomes abstraction.
The members of I/O/D (Matthew Fuller, Simon Pope, Colin Green), creators of Web Stalker (1997), one of the first publicly available standalone alternative browsers, are explicit in their political and critical intent, dubbing Web Stalker an “anti-browser”. Once up and running, it disassembles web pages into discrete parts as opposed to displaying data as a seamless whole. Averse to what one of it’s creators (Matthew Fuller) deemed “eye candy” – the preponderance of visual imagery on the web – Web Stalker portrays a stripped down, minimalist rendition of an Internet browser; earlier versions did not read or display images, although later versions were able to read GIF files. In a 1998 interview with Tilman Baumgaertel, the members of I/O/D explain they were inspired to create Web Stalker from observing how people do not necessarily use the Web the way it is “supposed” to be used, such as turning off images or blocking cookies. Adhering to a DIY ethos, they wanted to create an application that allows the user to create a web suited to her or his preferences, rather than settling for a commercial browser that dictatedthe nature of one’s Internet use.
The first incarnation of Netomat (1999), originally created by Maciej Wisniewski, was a “meta-browser” which treated the Internet as an open source, free-form application that permitted the user to create their own browser interface using what is referred to as netomatic markup language. An alternative to point-and-click navigation, structured and hierarchical information distribution and passive browsing of authored information, it was meant to foster an exchange between the user and the Internet. It functions by permitting the user to type in a question or keywords, who then receives independent bits of data in the form of images, text fragments, and audio files which can be recombined and recontextualized according to the user’s wishes.
Fast forward to 2006, the year Glitchbrowser is released. This work is evidence that the ethos fueling the creation of alternative browsers and the like is still very much alive and kicking. Functionally, visually, and metaphorically, the work has a bit more in common with Napier’s Shredder than it does with the other works mentioned. Like Shredder, it functions relatively straightforwardly: the user is taken to a minimalist first screen containing a text field for a URL to be entered by the user, along with a button to press to trigger a “glitch”. Above the text field are the words “Quick links”, “BBC News”, “Webshots”, “Flickr last 7 days”, and “Statement”. When the user enters the URL and hits the return key, the web page appears in altered form. The glitch does not impact the text on the page, nor does it affect the page layout; it is the imagery that is altered. As a result, my experiences with viewing more text-heavy pages such as BBC News were different from those with image-heavy pages such as those on Flickr. The BBC page, with its small thumbnail photo images meant to elicit not much more than a glance, looked as if it was pockmarked with little photographs that had been washed over with multicolored strips of varying transparencies. Looking over the page, my eyes felt like they were hiccupping, or like a break in my stride when my feet twist slightly over a large crack or chunk of asphalt in the sidewalk.
Viewing Flickr pages via Glitchbrowser gave me more of an opportunity to ponder the aesthetics of glitches. Many of the photographs on Flickr are beautiful in their own right, of course; Glitchbrowser transforms them into small, digital versions of abstract paintings created with bands of rich, saturated colors. The degree to which the images are “glitched” varies. Sometimes the original image is still recognizable – it looks as if someone had superimposed variably sized strips of multicolored acetate onto the image’s surface and haphazardly rearranged a smattering of small pieces that had been cut out from the surface as well. At other times, especially when the page is refreshed repeatedly, the recognizability of each image disintegrates into angular, pixilated swatches of color, almost resembling a collection of miniaturized electronic renditions of Diebenkorn paintings.
While the creators of Glitchbrowser appear to be motivated by a desire to jolt the user’s expectations of the function of Internet browsers, just as its predecessors, the aesthetics of Shredder tend toward the raucous and blunt in its metaphorical intent in comparison to Glitchbrowser. Although the glitched images are themselves playful and spontaneous in appearance, I perceive the aesthetics of Glitchbrowser to be ultimately more restrained because the layout of the glitched page is preserved and the dimensions and placement of the glitched images remain unaltered. Based on this, one might be tempted to argue that this restraint undermines a clear intention of presenting an alternative to commercial browsers. However, I would point out that glitches do not necessarily refer to what is large, grandiose, or overwhelming; at times they allude to the small, a subtle jerk, a wrinkle.
We humans are very adept at processing relevant data from irrelevant noise. In a sea of white noise, we often believe that we hear our own names being uttered. In a crowd of people, we can recognize familiar faces even though we have only a few points of reference to go on. Our brains are great filters. So, it only follows that, of course, our machines too would be designed to be great “noise” filtering devices.
And when we’re connected to the Internet, we have another wash of white noise flooding over our consciousness. We have to sample and dismiss what is irrelevant to us. And we have a host of tools for this. RSS feeds, blog reading instead of the usual news channel, whose impartiality we have begun to doubt the validity of. Even our lists of favorites are a form of filtering.
META[CC] attempts to take this flood of data and rework it into a political commentary. Asking us to reconsider the information we have found ways to channel through such media streaming tools as RSS feeds.
To be a part of the META[CC] process/project the user selects key words and submits RSS feeds to its database. Using the keywords, it parses through the feeds and then creates sentences for its closed caption video channeling system. The video feeds are from live broadcasts of current news events. When the captions are overlaid on these, they take on a new meaning. META[CC]re-appropriates the news broadcast and reveals its meaning in relation to the news data it is a part of.
By combining strategies employed in web-based discussion forums, blogs, tele-text subtitling, on-demand video streaming, and search engines, the open captioning format employed by META[CC] will allow users to gain multiple perspectives and resources engaging current events.
By taking the feeds from blogs, META[CC] uses the discussions that are taking place in the blogosphere, and channels them alongside the “official” news coverage. By playing the traditional news sources against the very real and strengthening opinions of blog pundits, we begin to see the play off between the two. What’s being said on screen isn’t always what is appearing in the closed caption below it. There begins to be a play between the two and in very real ways, we begin to understand that some of what we have always believed to be the truth, as told by news broadcasts, is no more than media co-opted truth.
Of course, this isn’t to say that the blogosphere is alive with truthful and accurate reportage and impartial opinion makers. But one of the options that [url:http://meta-cc.net/]META[CC][/url] gives the user is to decide on what feeds go into the database and what the keywords for searching them are going to be. So it represents not just the opinions of the blogger but, the choices of the person who is making selections.
The Meta(cc) engine successfully debuted in response to the final 2004 presidential debate, Wednesday, Oct. 13th, at the Rodan a/v lounge in Chicago, IL, for the opening of Lumpen’s Select Media 3 Festival.
What it does could be described as a form of Situationist Internationale detournement, a reappropriating of content from its original context into a new meaning. Quoting from a Situationist Text of 1969,
The two fundamental laws of detournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element “which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense” and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.
META[CC] takes the original texts and creates a new meaning for them. Positioning them as it does within the larger context of keywords, images and blogs within the database. But is it fair to describe the project within the context of a SI reading? Certainly the theoretical grounding of the SI is both political and social. As even a brief reading of the referenced text above would attest, the focus of detournement is artistic works. But the SI hoped to reinstate artistic practice as a means of giving back to the (dare I use the term) proletariat the use of art to free it from the tyranny of the Society of the Spectacle. META[CC] performs a similar slight of hand and manages to return opinion making and formulation of the information to people.
Of course, I’m summarizing much of the concepts of the SI within this brief essay. There’s so much more that can be written about this project, and that’s one of the clever things about META[CC]. Technologically, it is complex. For the user and viewer, it is straightforward. Making a difference to it is easy once you’ve registered. But once you follow the path of reasoning that it can open up, there’s a lot more to be explored.
Reference: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/315
9 Dec 2005 – 23 Jan 2006
Press Release for print (pdf 920 KB)
HTTP presents Abuse of the Public Domain, the first solo show of networked media art by UK artist Stanza.
This exhibition features large-scale projections of 2 works, which use live real-time data from CCTV cameras sited in two cities, London and New York. Security tracking data is Stanza’s chosen medium for these process led artworks.
YOU ARE MY SUBJECTS uses data from a single fixed camera in NYC, focusing on subjects as they pass below it. AUTHENTICITY [Trying to imagine the world from everyone else’s perspective, all at once] draws its imagery from cameras all over London. Both works can be viewed in a web browser via the Internet and turn us all into voyeurs of eerie ‘parallel realities’.
“CCTV systems are everywhere in the public domain. Millions of hours worth of data are recorded every day by these cameras. We are all unwitting bit-part actors, in the filming of our own lives. Usually, we cannot watch, the results are not collected for broadcast back to the public. Rather they are monitored, filtered, distributed and archived without our knowledge or permission.
The city has millions of CCTV cameras. One can take the sounds and images off live web streams to offer them back to the public for new interpretations of the city. In essence, the city of London can be imagined as the biggest TV station in existence.”
A full collection of Stanzas work will also be available for view in the exhibition via the new website. http://www.stanza.co.uk
About Stanza
Stanza is a London based British artist who specialises in net art, multimedia, and electronic sounds. His award-winning online projects have been invited for exhibition in digital festivals around the world, and Stanza also travels extensively to present his net art, lecturing and giving performances of his audiovisual interactions. His works explore artistic and technical opportunities to enable new aesthetic perspectives, experiences and perceptions within the context of architecture, data spaces and online environments.
Awards
Videoformes Multimedia First prize France 2005, Netsa Dreamtime 2004, Art In Motion V.First prize USA 2004, Vidalife 6.0 first prize 2003, Fififestival Grand Prize France 2003, New Forms Net Art Prize Canada 2003, Fluxus Online first prize Brasil 2002, SeNef Online Grand Prix Korea 2002, Links first prize Porto 2001, Videobrasil Sao Paulo 2001 first prize, Cynet art 2000 first prize, Dresden.
DVblog Quicktime Platform
When I first visited the DVblog on June 27th, earlier this year (2005). There were only about 5 entries, but if you go back now it is a completely different story. It is a thriving, busy platform with an abundance of work submitted from all over the world with new material added daily. It features many different types of short movies, uploaded by emerging talents and established movie-makers.
“DVblog.org is a Vlog and platform for artists and scholars for presenting or publishing stand-alone quicktime works.” The deal is simple, if you are currently creating work in Quicktime, upload them and let everyone see it. As well as the central column of recently uploaded works for all to view, on the left side of the blog sits a list of archived works, tagged with various genre titles such as Trailer Cinema & Ephemera. It also has other categories such as: realtime, net art, personal, quicktime tech, quicktime VR and many more…
The site is run by artists, Doron Golan, Tim Whidden, Lew Baldwin and Yoshi Sodeoka.
Doron Golan is living and working in New York, and works in dv, computer animation and media, primarily with Quicktime streaming and codec. You can also find some of his personal works here at the9th.com. He is also the founder of Computer Fine Arts a net art collection and archive.
Tim Whidden is also pretty well known in the net art world, usually for his works with Mark Rivers, as part of the dynamic duo called MTAA (M.River & T.Whid Art Associates) who are based in Brooklyn, New York, a conceptual and net art collaboration founded in 1996. You can catch some of their current online artwork at this address www.mteww.com/mtaaRR/on-line_art.
Lew Baldwin is an artist and musician currently working in New York. His work has been shown internationally and his piece milkmilklemonade.net, which was part of the Whitney Bistreams show, which was the first net-based installation to implement a live chat wall in a public space.
Yoshi Sodeoka who is also New York based artist, designer and musician, especially known by the net art world for recreating video works originally featuring works by musicians such as The Who, Motley Crue, Beck and a few others, recycling their music video footages and turning them into alphanumerics imagery, moving-ASCII films.
Net-based movies have been appearing on the Internet alongside Net Art for a few years now. With the rapid increase of broadband the limitations that we all once experienced when first exploring the Net is now a mere memory. The difference between Net Art and movies-online is that, unlike movies- Net Art is primarily, and more usually created for the Internet from the Internet. The movie as a format, is more accepted by fine art insitutions and of course, movies are respected by the creative industries and avdertising companies, due to it being an immediate and tele-visual medium.
In a recent report in The Wall Street Journal by Becky Bright it was mentioned that “The rapid spread of broadband connections is creating a growing audience for video and animation clips of roughly five minutes or less” and “Television broadcasters are among the leading providers of streaming video on the Internet, offering both news clips and excerpts from their other shows”. The implication here is that many more companies are going to be interested in investing in such a format, tapping into it as a money making resource. Already, Warner Brothers is preparing a major new Internet service that will allow its fans to watch full episodes from more than 100 old television series. The service is called In2TV and it will be free, supported by advertising, and will start early next year. More than 4,800 episodes will be made available online in the first year.
“The Surrealist liberation of desire, for all its aesthetic accomplishments, remains no more than a subset of production–hence the wholesaling of Surrealism to the Communist Party & its Work-ist ideology (not to mention attendant misogyny & homophobia). Modern leisure, in turn, is simply a subset of Work (hence its commodification)–so it is no accident that when Surrealism closed up shop, the only customers at the garage sale were ad execs.” Hakim Bey.*
DVblog currently still displays a strong independence from commercial mannerisms and promises to provide a crucial and valuable archive of Quicktime- based artworks of all forms and intentions, creatively. It will be interesting to see how it fares in the coming tidal wave of “entertainment”.
There are some excellent works to view on DVblog and here a just a few of them: Chris Oakley has communicated skilfully in his well crafted ‘video to Quicktime’ work The Catalogue. The equally sinister Beauty Kit by Pleix, is definately worth watching, and you can’t go far wrong with Pavu’s PINE-LING-PAN, and as usual Alan Sondheim’s movie work always offers something in between philosophical grunge, steeped in feralness. Don’t take my word for it, visit the DVblog yourself and enjoy…
*Hakim Bey RINGING DENUNCIATION OF SURREALISM Naropa, July 9, 1988.
http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/taz/taz2e.htm
“When I was your age, we didn’t have links. We had to walk !”
“Every so often an artist makes a work of art by doing almost nothing. No hours of torturous labor, no deep emotional expression, just a simple discovery and out it pops” [1].
Glitch Art, aesthetic in an erroring way of life
The word glitch comes from the German glitschen, that means ‘to slip‘. Considered as a very short fault, the term is used in the computing and electronics industries, as well as in video games, and circuit bending. Exploiting electronics glitches has been very current in the musical world. It even became a “genre” that was experimented with by artists such as Achim Szepanski, Oval, Pan Sonic or Pole, in the 90’s.
Behind the word Glitch is now also emerging a digital art movement that explores imperfection by producing or saving unwanted images. Made with a digital camera, a printer or a scanner and based on an accident or a malfunction in a program causing a computer crash, a glitch can be defined saying that it is the on-screen output of something not working properly.
According to Tony Scott making glitches do not seem to be the end of the world and these are the type that intrigue him. He worked out a 4 step pattern that will take you to glitch notoriety. The extended version can be found here : www.beflix.com/tech.html, we can summarize it as follows :
– Wait for something to go wrong, or force something to go wrong.
– Capture it.
– Use digital imaging software to crop the image to select the best of it.
– Upload your glitch on the internet.
Maybe it is the aesthetics or the experience of capturing pure glitches that make them seem so apealing. Like chasing rare butterflies and pinning them down once they are captured. There also seems to be a certain amount of fetish involved, regarding that there is such an obsession around the Glitch process and discovery of it, and making of it; glitch artists use or provoke digital “failure” to enlarge the artistic possibilities of these momentary accidents.
Glitches are becoming more widespread in our media dominated surroundings. Glitch artist/theorist Iman Moradi distinguishes two categories of glitches the pure glitch (“the result of a Malfunction or Error.”) and the glitch-alike (“produce and create the environment that is required to invoke a glitch and anticipate one to happen,”). The glitch-alike has been seen to serve throughout our merchandised world, as in adverstising or in movies.
The infiltration of glitches in different communication modes, points out the subversive nature of it.
“In a recent project (initiated in April 2003), the Telematic Channel of the US department of Art and Technology, has proposed an ambitious remixing and deconstruction of publicly broadcasted video material, in an attempt to reclaim control over mass media for politically active artists [2].”
Not to mention, but, as we commonly know, even the words “net.art” are glitch based. The term comes from a software incompatibilty that had [url:http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk]Vuk Cosic[/url] read the words “Net.Art” in the middle of unreadable ASCII.
We can also find some glitches in video games, playable glitches such as [url:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_City]Glitch City[/url]: a glitch in the game Pokemon. Artist such as JODI have taken over these breaches, glitching a map of well known games such as Quake Arena or [url:http://www.untitled-game.org]Wolfenstein[/url].
Glitches can alos be seen as digital trash, “discarded artefact of communication technology only appreciated by technology fetishists” [2].
“Dump your trash” by Joachim Blank and Karl Heinz Jeron (www.blankjeron.com) is an artpiece that materializes glitches, being fed the by content it finds on your webpage, it tweaks it and the produced glitche-alike can be ordered carved in stone.
Cory Arcangel’s “Data Diaries” Fed with computer memory files read with Quicktime software. Here the inapropriate use of software produces a subversive way of pointing out that even the files you don’t use or can’t read can be re-evaluated. A radically new way of re-using useless accumulated digital scam.
Visual artists such as Angela Lorenz, Dimitre Lima, Patrick O Brien, PBenjamin Fischer, Tony Scott, and lots of others, have been or are working for the development of this artistic practice trying to find new ways to produce aesthetic out of an erroring way of life.
Quotes:
1 Alex Galloway, introducing Cory Arcangel’s “Data Diaries” http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel
2 “Glitch Aesthetics” written by Iman Moradi in 2004
http://www.oculasm.org/glitch
url o graphy
http://www.alorenz.net
http://www.beflix.com
http://www.blankjeron.com
http://www.dmtr.org
http://www.flickr.com/groups/glitches/pool
http://www.jodi.org
http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk
http://www.neuromirror.info
http://www.oculasm.org/glitch
http://www.TransFatty.com
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel
http://www.typedown.com
http://www.untitled-game.org
http://www.usdat.us/tel-span
http://www.wikipedia.com
http://www.worshiptheglitch.com
Although it was not until 1957 that mathematician John W. Tukey coined the term “software,” its history can be traced back to Antiquity, according to Florian Cramer [1]. One of the main advocates of Software Art and long-time researcher on the relations between literature and computing, Cramer has written the book Words Made Flesh. Code, Culture, Imagination[2] during a fellowship in the Media Design Research program at the Piet Zwart Institute [3] in Rotterdam. In this 140-page essay, he develops a historical overview of the philosophical, mystical, literary and artistic currents that lead to the present concept of software as a cultural practice.
First and foremost, the main orientation of this research towards establishing deep historical and cultural roots for the practice of software seems to be a response to what the author perceives as an underestimation of programming on the part of current media theories. In 2002, in his text Concept, Notations, Software, Art [4], Cramer stated that “the history of the digital and computer-aided arts could be told as a history of ignorance against programming and programmers”. These words echo in the conclusion of his latest book (or booklet, as he describes it), in which we read: “Software history can thus be told as intellectual history, as opposed to media theories which consider cultural imagination a secondary product of material technolog”. Software Art as a genre has a short history: in 2001, the digital art festival Transmediale was the first to give it recognition by dedicating an award solely to software art works. A member of the jury, Florian Cramer denounced in several texts that the concept of “[new] media art” focuses on the visual, acoustic or tactile product, overlooking the process that supports it: the programming code. Digital art is produced using computers and thus software, which is indispensable, yet it is the final product that is considered, the code being hidden from the user. This had led to considering software as a simple tool and completely ignoring to what extent the code is defining the artwork. In order to overcome this situation, Cramer extracts software from the context of computers, establishing parallelisms with instructions and permutations in art and literature, and relating it to the wider concept of culture (see, for example, Software Art and Writing [5], drafted with Ulrike Gabriel in 2001).
In the last line of “Concept, Notations, Software, Art”, the author left the discussion open, with the following words: “histories of instruction codes in art and investigations into the relationship of software, text and language still remain to be written”. Three years later, he has taken up the task himself by writing this well documented, yet at times a bit digressive, non-linear history of computation as a cultural practice that serves as an authorized argumentation on what had already been sketched in previous approaches.
A definition of software
In 2003, the Wikipedia’s definition of software was rather deceiving: “Software art is a term for the graphic design of visual elements contained in software, eg. GUI (Graphic User Interface), Icons etc.” (quoted from Florian Cramer’s Ten Theses about Software Art [6]). The actual definition [7] (as of november 2005) provided by the open source encyclopaedia is now much closer to Cramer’s, yet it still shows the influence of Jack Burnham’s view of software as concept art. Looking for an all-encompassing definition, Florian Cramer has extended the concept of software to a form of culture that includes programming code as well as its execution and the cultural appropriation of users (as, for instance, when we use the verb “to Google” for performing a search on the Internet). This being the final objective of the whole book, we can now trace the themes that are contained in it by examining in detail the definition of software with which the author concludes his essay:
“Software, it follows, is a cultural practice made up of (a) algorithms, (b) possibly, but not necessarily in conjunction with imaginary or actual machines, (c) human interaction in a broad sense of any cultural appropriation and use, and (d) speculative imagination. ” (p.125)
(a)algorithms: from the Sefer Yetzirah’s mystical permutations of the names of God to proteic poetry in the 16th century and Burroughs and Gysin’s experimentations in 1960, algorithms are present not only as calculations but also as a material for artistic creativity. Either as a method for developing almost infinite possibilities, introducing chance (as in Tristan Tzara’s cut ups of 1923), or creating constrains that must be creatively overcome (as in Oulipo’s experiments in 1949), algorithms become a tool that go well beyond the context of computers.
(b)possibly, but not necessarily in conjunction with imaginary or actual machines: another important point in Cramer’s discourse is specifying that software does not depend on hardware, and that hardware is not always physical. The “machines” conceived by Ramon Llull, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer or the Turing Machine itself are imaginary, their operations being a product of intellectual speculation and not of the action of mechanical or electronic systems. On the other hand, software does not need a computer to “run”, as shown by the actions based on instructions performed by the Fluxus group, among others. Furthermore, the idea of software can extend into political or social action, as demonstrated by Richard Stallman’s Free Software Movement.
(c)human interaction in a broad sense of any cultural appropriation and use: in 1968, in his book Algol, Noël Arnaud made a first attempt at using a programming language as material for poetic compositions. Later on, the hacker slang “leet”, Alan Sondheim’s Codework and Marie Anne Breeze’s Mezangelle all apply code as a material than can be recomposed to create a particular form of written language that is recognised as “computer talk”, imitating command lines but readable as some sort of English. In the same way as James Joyce experienced with language in Finnegan’s Wake, these new forms of writing create their own semantics and a meta-language with social and cultural implications. On the other hand, the work of George Pérec, Jodi, the I/O/D group, Netochka Nezvanova or Adrian Ward’s Auto-Illustrator introduce what Cramer defines as “software dystopia”, the reflection on software not as a subservient, domesticated assistant but as a fearful, obscure and incomprehensible golem that may revolt against us at any time or take its own decisions. Under this light, software becomes much more than just a tool, it is part of a broader concept of culture.
(d) speculative imagination: Ramón Llull’s combinatory system for developing all the possible attributes of God was a profound influence in a large series of philosophers and thinkers, that range from 17th century encyclopaedists to software for computer-aided poetry and Artificial Intelligence research. As a figure of thought, computation offers the possibility of imagining the infinite, of encompassing all possible knowledge, as is described in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel. Speculative imagination has long went after the seductive possibility that all creation could be computable and on the other hand has made this an arcane form of knowledge, haunted both by its demiurgic implications and the “ghost in the machine”.
Software culture
In the final lines of Concept, Notations, Software, Art, Florian Cramer described two opposite approaches to Software Art, that of “Software Culturalism” (represented by Matthew Fuller, Graham Harwood and the groups I/O/D and Mongrel) which regards software as a cultural and political phenomenon, and “Software Formalism” (represented by Adrian Ward, Alex McLean, Geoff Cox and the eu-gene mailing list, among others) which focuses on the aesthetics of software. Both positions leading to reductive visions of the subject, in this essay Cramer seems to finally cover all possible approaches to the practice of computation, although his view is balanced more to the side of Fuller’s group. Armed with this historical and conceptual background, software is thus extracted from the context of computing and the consideration of a mere tool to establish itself both as practice and culture.
[1] http://floriancramer.nl/
[2] https://monoskop.org/log/?p=99
[3] https://www.pzwart.nl/
[4] https://monoskop.org/File:Cramer_Florian_2002_Concepts_Notations_Software_Art.pdf
[5] Cramer, Florian, and Ulrike Gabriel. “Software Art and Writing.” American Book Review 22, no. 6 (2001): 8.
[6] https://monoskop.org/File:Cramer_Florian_2003_Ten_Theses_about_Software_Art.pdf
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_art
_Pull of The[ory] Narrative + P[H]ush of The Context_
[or:click.on.a.deer.icon]
[This article uses a threading system. Thread 1 comments + critiques the notion of narrative. The 2nd Thread lyrically describes The Endless Forest project. Intertwine at your (peri)leisure].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_Narrative [in the sense described in_link] houses engagement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context] Context (ditto) manifests as the “incomprehensible other”. Inverse-narrative manifests certain under-realities that connect + engage interaction [latent, intuitive, reactive potentialities that can subtly guide/govern cultural or nodal shifts].
[the.ebony.screen.is.plained.around.a.tiny.curled.roan.curve.
on.closer.inspection, it.has.an.antler.set.
it.is.a.deer.
ur.symbolic.game_ic[on].avatar.token.]
Narrative is reliant on biological projections [survival, chronology, echo of reproductive possibility thru “boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-girl” looping], hero rites-of-passage action_realities + physical constraint adherents [ie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces Campbell esque structuring. A Narrative pull is pervasively strong, sinking into entertainment/artistic/cultural good-vs-evil polarisations/portrayals + etched over a “willing-suspension-of-disbelief” audience skin. Narrative stretches pervasively through institutionalised vehicles of the [b(lue)]red-state-veined USA political hegemonic climate + its 1st-world hierarchical trickle_down fx [ie utilised as a life-style governance tool emptied and soiled by cardboard rhetorics + masked_villain vs hero polarisations]. Pulling threads through a gruelling history of morality/chapter playing + ethics spewed into easily recognisable meaning form, narrative operates along codified, sanctioned strategies in order to justify acceptable, status-quo comprehension [and life-forming] trajectories.
[c.licking.the.token – deer.standing.action.
left-click – starting.a.sensory.engine.
forest.audio.bleeds.into.constructed.game.graphics.
other.multi.play(d)e(e)rs.iconically.spot.the screen.
we.enter.[url:http://www.tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest/]the.Endless.Forest.[/url]]
Flipping the emphasis coin towards interpretation through Context creates instances of stripped, personalised, introspective encounters replacing the conventions, ease + predictability of narrative structuring. Contextual analysis allows for immediacy of experience as opposed to hollow structure of once-removed-fictionalised narrative parameters.
Narrowband approach to information production + reification: email lists such as fibreculture, nettime and empyre – closely align themselves with this linear information/discussion trajectory. This closed communication approach is the opposite of the notion and execution of communication holism. Contextual orientations may be offensive to those immune to more open-ended approaches to meaning construction. Narrative dependents/advocates need to locate their traditionalist-tilted perspectives inside established frameworks. Those advocates of narrative [rational adhesive] stick to theory/chronology/linear/rational/Socratic method/reason, allowing no discourse reactions beyond these channels. They expressly will not relate to the possibilities of context [contextualisation is viewed as pointless, limitless, chaotic, disordered, risky/experimental]. This indicates the antithesis of nodal [free-form branched context-feeding], which often seemingly digresses from [rather than towards] an associated train of thought.
[3rd.person.perspective.click.shift.
4-legged.cgi-roaming.thru.a.boundaried.looping.space.
running.thru.birdsong+flower.fields+(ename).ruins
holler/bellow>tree.rub>sniff.a.deer>delicately.sit.via collapsing.folding.chair_like.legs]
Narrative is equated with substance + the meat and marrow of acceptable storytelling. Context lies between the known + unknown, between comprehensible platforms of information + exposure to rawness of possible comprehension + potential alienation. Context allows for b-grade identifications + theoretically unattractive actualities of poesis. In fictionscapes driven primarily via narrative, meaning is derived via a mimicking mechanism that apes interconnectedness via a truncation of experiential echos. The distilling aspect of this process makes Context a poor, invalid comprehension cousin by Narrative standards.
Narrative is like a bland, dry version of a true empathetic connection/perception. It is used easily as an entertainment-engine + Canon-prop; as social patterning glue; as a ratified/institutionalised construct embedder which acts to rigidly strap meaning into dictated/expectation protocols. Context allows/encourages ethereal meaning construction; for curiosity-use/plucking/selection; for taking comprehension elements + creating specific versions guided by concepts of otherness via anti-or-non-polarised storylines.
[interaction.stri(ations)ctures.produce.variations.
no.beginnings.or.humanoid.tainted/dictated endings.here.
animal.code.shifts.thru.body.language.postures.
intent.morphs.2.action|action.translated.via.Context.
float + morph.]
The archival material consists of extracts from: Moving Times – New Words – Dead Clocks, Project Sigma: a view of Counter Culture of the 1960’s; Spontaneous University Research; Antiuniversity of London; Free International School for Creativity and Research; A Collectography of Political Art and Distribution; State of Emergency; The Art School Scum.
The material has been collected by Emily Druiff between 2004/05 with assistance from Andrew Wilson and in discussion with members of the University of Openness and Independent Art School. The display of this material at HTTP is in response to current activities at the Hornsey School of Art, who between 29.10.05 and 19.11.05 are restaging the 1968 sit-in culminating in a conference on Art and Education.
The display of this material as part of the Distributed_Library is designed to further an enquiry into the issues of self-education. Visitors are welcome to take part in this research at HTTP and to consider ‘Is education Obsolete?’, ‘What would you change about your education?’ and ‘Is self-education a viable option for cultural producers?’ ‘How can this be made more practical?’. This research will suggest open source technology as a viable means for sharing and distributing information.
“Ultimately there are only two basic states or basic phases and everything of interest takes place on the boundary between them: on the boundary between chaos and order, on the boundary of water and ice, on the boundary of finite and infinite computer process.” Tor Norretranders*
Kate Southworth and Patrick Simons have been creating audiovisual artworks, output in Shockwave, for exhibitions, projections at public gatherings of various kinds and for distribution across the Internet since the year 2000.
They live and work in Cornwall, under the name Glorious Ninth, which they describe as the space between their different approaches. Tor Norretranders, in his book, The User Illusion, tells us that when you have both ice and water in the same glass, complexity occurs at the transitional point between solidity and fluidity. It is on this boundary that really interesting things happen. By tracking back through the history of the evolution of human consciousness, he suggests that consciousness and culture both exhibit this common quality with matter.
Packet Switching is described by the artists as an encounter with the “liminal space between ocean and land, between emotions and thoughts, and between reality and virtuality”. It exists simultaneously in two forms, as an online work and, for the next two years, in physical space as part of the touring exhibition, net:reality. The first venue is 20/21 Gallery in Scunthorpe, in a deconsecrated church.
A fine mesh screen of 4′ x 5″ is suspended in the nave of the church, above visitors’ heads, with a moving image back-projected onto its surface so that it can be seen from both sides. The audio plays from speakers situated on the floor on either side of the screen forming a triangle measuring about 18 feet, on each side. The sound creates a focal point that positions the viewer in front of the work. The moving black and white image consists of a cascading repeated text “we learn to love within the womb” which ebbs and flows in waves from the top of the screen over a series of images, abstracted through the application of image filters. Unlike the Internet version of this piece, that allows the viewer to “enter” the work at the “beginning”, in the physical space one is never sure how close one is to the start or the end of the 37 minute cycle. This sets the work in infinite time-space.
Online, some minimal colour is introduced and the first image, a flickering (wild open) eye, fills the screen for a number of minutes before being obscured by the text. This image strongly influences the way in which one experiences the rest of the work. The eye is eventually replaced by increasingly subtle imagery: of foliage, of the sea against the rocks, solarised, in negative. These are in turn masked by text which flows and drags across it like black oil across glass. Combining the visual qualities of an all-over, expressionist painting and a long film loop, it is a continuously moving, pulsing abstraction.
The sound track is created from a series of field recordings. We hear a collection of mixed sounds, many of which are produced by walking: foot-fall, clothes brushing against clothes, ambient reverberations from coastal walks. The raw sound is cut, layered and serialized to suggest the whooshing rhythms of the sea or the ocean, even a locomotive train, in an imaginative recycling of the sounds of natural and mechanical motion that exist in the artists’ everyday locality.
Imagine sitting on the rocks on a beach in Cornwall, together with a friend or lover. Surveying the shapes and rhythms where waves repeatedly meet the slopes of a beach- the ocean, alive, resonating its presence, you watch the chaotic coordination of dancing droplets, spraying and dragging shells and varied life forms across the surface of the sand. Here, the longer and more closely you observe, the more strongly you can recognise the complex audiovisual, phasing patterns that evolve in Packet Switching.
Southworth and Simons create the audio and the visual elements of the piece independently. They negotiate the content, structure, texture and the feel of the work through conversations and by creating collaboratively drawn spider diagrams. Neither strand of the work is there to illustrate or to constrain the other. One might expect this process to lead to either long periods of disjunction in the work or to an undifferentiated sameness in the relationship between audio and visual tracks. But instead it offers a demonstration of the inevitable emergence of a new complex strand arising from the dynamic interaction between established, distinct forms.
This work does not reflect one individual’s internal psychology or singular skill, but declares the artists’ mutual way of working as two individuals, exploring their experience of the world, between and around them. In the current theoretical debates surrounding media art practice there is a growing interest in the potentials of digital media to facilitate collaboration. These can range from the abstract to the ideological and claim to do some of the preparatory work for artists- to create the field. Packet Switching is an explicit examination and imaginative response to love, landscape and liminal space; rather than relying on already constructed theories or prescription it develops through process as an actual manifestation of collaborative creativity.
*The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size by Tor Norretranders
Published 1991 (in Danish), 1994 in English by Penguin Books
NET:REALITY is a touring exhibition
currently on show at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, UK”
When I was young, my grandfather would tell me stories about a nonsensical language he created with the enthusiastic participation of a few of his college buddies. The purpose for creating this language was not to devise a means to communicate with a small, select group of people; in actuality, they created this language in order to play pranks on any unsuspecting person who had the misfortune of sharing an elevator with them. Apparently he and his friends entertained themselves by getting into a nearly full elevator, talking loudly to each other using their makeshift language (“Landsdomeron sinkledork d’flobbin hobbin.” “Beschtinken woolsey itchsplick?” “Zamophlon! Dishtina gwork bibbled’schnibble!”) and later guffawing over their elevatormates’ reactions.
Putting aside my grandfather’s slightly snarky tale, there is a certain pleasure and sense of accomplishment in developing one’s own language, whether it be to describe feelings, sensations or ideas that cannot be described using an established language, or to create a means of communication between a select few meant to remain undecipherable to outsiders. It is, of course, impossible to know how many artificial/constructed languages exist (examples that are more well-known and have a certain number of adherents include Esperanto, Klingon, Elvish and Quenya), as creating one’s own personal language is often a private and solitary endeavor. Enter OnlyOneNativeSpeaker (OONS), an online collaboration facilitated by socialfiction.org that invites conlangers (a term coined by constructed language enthusiasts), shy, secretive, and otherwise, to share and disseminate their linguistic creations.
Visually, OnlyOneNativeSpeaker is simple and straightforward while the contents alternate between playful, dense, poetic and esoteric. The home page, with a white background, teal serif text and large red headers, is roughly divided vertically in half. The left half contains a chatty yet informative description of OnlyOneNativeSpeaker’s purpose, along with an exhortation for participation, while the right half contains several lists of links grouped under the headings of “Infrastructure,” “Languages,” and “Categories.” “Languages” is divided into several subcategories: “Local,” “Submitted,” and “Of interest.” “Infrastructure” contains links to the OONS wiki, the OONS del.icio.us page, and an OONS yahoogroups mailinglist, along with an email link to socialfiction.org for language submissions. “Local” contains links that take the viewer to pieces presumably written by the creator(s) of OONS, including an overview of the psychogeographic Landscape-Expression (or L-Expression) language, an L-Expression editor, and essays on parsing the language of crowds, computer language as literature, and capturing the ephemeral taxonomy of constructed languages. Below this is a relatively short list of submitted languages, including mez’ (aka Mary-Anne Breeze) mezangelle, a wiki entry on organic poetry, and sasxsek (unfortunately, clicking on a handful of some of the other submitted links resulted in a 404 not found error page). Along the right edge of the page is a substantial list of fantastic language categories, ranging from unspeakable, turriphiliac, glowinthedark and angelic languages to ultrasonic, hydsfbsjg, epram and cloud languages, to name just a few.
In regards to using the web for collaboration, OONS does not necessarily break new ground, but I don’t believe this is the point of the work. On one level, the work is educational, particularly for those who know little to nothing about linguistics, who are not versed in any other language beside their mother tongue, and whose impressions of language invention have been informed by portrayals of those who engage in it as insane, pathological or irrational (such as the female schizophrenic protagonist of the novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Nimrod from Dante’s Inferno, or the frenzied glossolalia of congregationalists in the throes of religious ecstasy). For instance, one might surmise that creating an artificial language consists solely of assigning invented words to already existing words within an established natural language, and therefore may assume a conlang web site would, say, resemble an English to Spanish dictionary. However, a visit to the sasxsek site, for example, demonstrates on a small scale the complexity of language creation and classification, complete with a lexicon and grammatical structure.
On another level OONS also frames language creation as a form of creative expression, comparative to model-making or role playing. Language Expression (e.g., L-Expression), for instance, while derivative of logical languages and at first glance appears to be not much more than computer code, utilizes the rules of mathematical logic along with the visual structure and visual elements of code to build a scaffold for describing both the tangible and the intangible experiences associated with wandering through a landscape. The artist uses the metaphor of “linguistic exoskeleton” to describe L-Expression, a language which “encapsulates self-defined segments of perception: angle, mood, shape, history, movement, sense of perception and what have you…” One obviously does not create descriptions with L-Expression for the purpose of plugging the code into a compiler and running the results – it seems the function of this language is to suggest the feasibility of applying the strictures of machine logic toward to the ends of capturing the ineffable and evanescent.
Another interesting aspect of OONS, in my view, is its mere presence on the web. As mentioned earlier, constructing one’s own language can be an intensely private undertaking, and it is rare to find a conlanger who, unlike auxlangers (e.g., creators of auxiliary languages), harbors a desire for a wide body of listeners or users. With the development of net lists such as CONLANG, for instance, conlangers are now able to share with a wider audience what was once generally kept to one’s self – Tolkien has referred to the “shame” associated with the practice of inventing languages, and some conlangers have even compared conlanging to being gay and closeted and admitting to others their conlanging practices to coming out. With OONS, there is not even the slightest hint of such shame or secrecy, no provoking the sense that one has stumbled upon a diary, say, and why would there be? The web has evolved to permit human beings sophisticated and extremely public methods of self-documentation, along with worldwide dissemination; as a result, certain parameters regarding privacy have been shunted aside by the use of technological artifacts such as webcams and blogs. Based on such notions involving privacy and secrecy, I would not hesitate to describe OONS as a vehicle that allows people to invest their private words (and the private worlds that accompany them) with public meaning.
Black Holes and Networked Lives
One of the questions that faces those of us who wish to frame and seek answers to the question of what is Net.Art, (or at least, what it could be) is the consideration of what part of the project is Net dependant? Has the artist used the internet merely as the carrier for the art work, and therefore used it as a free and worldwide form of art gallery, or is the work intrinsically borne on the web and unable to exist in any other form? Is the artwork using the networked environment in such a way that its content is in part formed by the medium?
Net Arts and Media Arts are still relatively new and fresh. Even though we may consider the “history” of the Internet and have historical reference points to compare and contrast with, we are still exploring how artists can explore this art form and still deciding what might be considered “good” Art or otherwise. As well as these questions, it might be important to ask: how does this work address the question of what it means to live in a networked world?
Black Holes is one such work that tries to encompass this question as part of its exploration of networked literacy. Written by Lewis LaCook from one location, across the Internet to his home computer, the texts that made up his on-line presence have been remoulded into a poetic landscape of content that slowly unravels itself as the reader moves the cursor into the text itself, allowing the words to grow and move about the screen.
The music that accompanies the poem is generated randomly as well. Created using sound files and as LaCook says in his artists’ statement “Sure, there are motifs used throughout.” But they are triggered by as random a trigger as is possible using the software. The soundtrack is at once amusing and thoughtful without trying to tie the listener/viewer down too much into following a prescribed narrative of sounds. Whilst the music reflects the format of seemingly random text well, it would exist nicely as an independent piece.
Of course, Black Holes is also a record of Lewis LaCook’s life at the time of writing stage. Names of his partner and friends appear through the text: “There is no smell like hers,” appears in one opening sequence. Such a soft and important statement about what it is like to be alive and in love, and one that fixes this piece within the life and emotive thoughts of the author. Where some of the text reads like a Brion Gysin and William Burroughs cut-up, breaking through original meaning to become something else, a statement like this slices through any reviewer rhetoric and asks us all to remember that digital art is also human art: as much about the human condition as it is about the technology.
And what of the images within the piece? Fed in from external sources, they suggest a fragility and delicacy that reinforces some textual references, not merely within the subject of the images but in the way they are fed in from external sources, to the readers’ web page. LaCook allows the work to depend a little on the randomness of the Internet. If a server that houses an image he references goes down, or the owner decides to remove the image, it is lost from Black Holes. What you see today might not be seen on a second viewing tomorrow. Or you might see the same image repeatedly, causing it to be burnt into the mind so that you come away with vague recollections of some but definite knowledge of others.
Some text is like this as well. Especially when the speed of it scrolling across the screen increases. Often, it isn’t so much what you read of Black Holes, as what it chooses you to read of it. But the Internet is like that sometimes. You read some things slowly or you flick through others without more than a glance. Modern life is like that and LaCook asks that we read Black Holes in that way too and to consider that our lives might be alike. Even given the vast sphere of Internet and real world space that the readers of black Holes might occupy.
If the title is in some way a reference to the idea of the web being a large vacuous space that everything disappears into, then LaCook alters our perception of that and points out that humanity is in there too.
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