Jules et Jim by Maja Kalogera, Jimpunk and ctgr.

This is a soft, bitter work that starts off as a quirky flow of red, green and white little pop-up windows hopping about the desktop and ends brimming with intensity and sadness. It is a re-make of Henri-Pierre Roche’s novel Jules et Jim: an obscure story made famous by Francois Truffaut’s 1962 film adaptation. Like Truffaut’s film, this piece is tightly edited to the first part (perhaps up to the Script Alert) giving us a sense of the lively frivoloties of sexual and emotional goodtimes. As the relationships between the fictional threesome get kinda complex, Maya, Jimpunk and ctgr treat us to an onslaught of freeze-frames, jump-cuts and terrifyingly dizzying movement. At one point, when my desktop was shuddering under the rhythmic flickering of several grey and blood-red windows, the onlslaught became too severe and I hammered at the keyboard trying to find an escape. I was ignored, and the pulsing taunts continued, made more extreme by a tiny pause, a little breath that seemed to offer me some control, some voice. I walked away and when I returned all was calm and an elongated mock browser window sat quietly to the left as Kraftwerk’s Computer Love played gently alongside. Now if that isn’t tainted and twisted love, I don’t know what is.

Mazecorp reflects a maze-like construction which refers to the possible relationships between cinema, poetry, and networking. That maze has four starting points, encoded by terms representing witnesses of arbitrary arrests. : “a present – une arrestation – au matin – une memoire” (“by now – an arrest – in the morning – a memory”). The arbitrary arrest of the photographic act is noticed for photographies are the key elements of mazecorp’ story. Also the arbitrary arrest of the writer is clearly intimated since the verses of the poet are featured as sub-titles of a silent film. Above all, handled by the armed forces, the real discretionary arrest of any human who infringes a law is omnipresent. Mazecorp actually pays a tribute to Samira Adamu who was executed by the Belgian armed forces. In the current release of Mazecorp (volume I), 12 films no bigger then 400kb each are presented. As for other works featured on confettiS.org, we incite the visitor-actor to participate to the creation process of Mazecorp. The visitor wishing to be an actor may send either a text or a photograph, which is then be integrated to the current work. Texts and photographs must be sent to xavier@confettiS.org. Mazecorp will eventually be presented in situ as an installation, as soon as we identify a space that is able to accommodate the installation, where the perception of the audience depends on where it situates within the space. Mazecorp is also regularly released on CDRom which are available on request. (dac., 2003)

Click here for article on transitoire observable >>

Cyber-Domestic Aesthetic (or the search for a ubiquitous identity) a random – visually – annotated – hypertext – essay.” the kitchen as an interface has a ubiquity that Lev Manovich can only
dream of…”

1. I am not a theorist

2. I am NOT a theorist

3. I AM NOT A THEORIST

“We know there are many states of being between that of being a woman and that of being a man: they come from different worlds, they are born in the wind, they make rhizomes around their roots: they cannot be understood in terms of production, but only in terms of becoming”. Deleuze, G & Guattari, F Massumi, B (Translator), “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” (1987)

“Home computers are often considered as ‘domestic technology’ or part of the ‘domestic media ensemble’ as if those were simple and straightforward concepts.”Cornford, T & Habib, L “Computers in the Home: Domestic Technology and the Process of Domestication” , (2001)

Best Viewed on I.E. 5+, Flash 6 plug-in required . Will almost certainly
bugger-up safari.

http://www.the-cyber-kitchen.com/about_the_project.htm

In your mailbox, you can find titles such as V.I./\\.G.R./\\., organ enlargements, easy earnings, etc.Teo Spiller, a net.artist from Ljubljana, thinks it is new slang. Somebody tries to draw our attention, use only a few words in the subject of e-mail and is very advertising aggressive. There are also many properties of a technical nature: to outwit spam filters by using dots between characters, replacing some characters or syllables with numbers and special characters, etc.

These strange titles, like strange poetry, one after one daily fill our mailboxes. Teo Spiller’s new net.art project “SP/\\M sonnet” enters those subjects and the names of spam mail senders into a database and writes sonnets. They are composed of junk mail subjects, listed by order, depending on the time of the visit and your personal and technical data received by visiting SP/\\M Sonnet. The result is a real surprise!

Timeline (2004) is based on the device used in packages like Adobe Premiere and Macromedia for sequencing images, video clips, and sound files. There are many reasons why the metaphor of the timeline appealed to me. First, there are the obvious associations with time and aging, and this work began as a poem about getting old. But the timeline also embodies a particular kind of time–that is, it lets you replay, much as we replay for ourselves the images and words that make up our lives. On the one hand there is the sense that there’s a continuous flow, a whole video that makes up our lives, but on the other there’s the sense of the fragmentary and the random. Timeline is a metaphor for this contradiction. The user creates a poem out of random acts, i.e. by selecting images from a database of images each of which is associated with a few lines from the original poem. The associations are not known in advance. But more importantly, one doesn’t know the shape of the original poem which, like our ideologies and abstractions, may turn out, in the long run, not to be relevant to the poem that one creates out of the particulars of one’s own experience. So, the poem is in effect many poems, capable of being manifested in an enormous range of image sequences; with the Timeline software you can play and replay your combinations and recombinations of image and text.
Note: Timeline requires a minumum of IE 5.5, Netscape 7.1, or Mozilla 1.5.

Tropisms.org (vlog) started in 2002 as a personal video log or vlog, a weblog that integrated streaming video files with a travel diary. The site has become a collective movie blog with an international group of participating filmmakers.

Peter Boonstra and Marcel van Brakel (NL) are currently in Chornobyl, where they upload movies in an internet cafe. Josh Koury (VS) will trace his aunt and uncle, who have been stationed in a small section of backwoods Tennessee, by the military. Earlier this year, Luuk Bouwman (NL) went to Ethiopia to learn about computer love in a place usually associated with famine.

Tropisms is a bandwidth-heavy site. It uses Flash and QuickTime streams, so a broadband connection is needed. On Macs, Mozilla is preferable.

Production: ZigZag Amsterdam, Contact: info@tropisms.org

Revisiting Cory Arcangel’s Data Diaries.

So many lives linked, glued into the main frame. Computers have become our extra limbs as we all, daily, reach out and connect with others out there. We are no longer what we were before the Internet arrived, we have changed, formed new mannerisms, new body schisms and ailments from regular use of computers. One such ailment is Repetitive Strain Injury (R.S.I), and medical professionals also use the phrases “occupational overuse injury” or “cumulative trauma disorder” for this condition, which can result from intensive use of the hands. This is all part of the becoming – being connected, socially, physically and mentally. We are still at the beginning of what some consider to be an en masse eugenic shift. The way that we behave and think is influenced, re-constructed and re-aligned beyond traditional social, concrete terms.

In the Western world we are spoilt for choice with regard to the range of available softwares to use when creating computer-based, art related projects, whatever the function/activity is. One would of thought that it was safe to presume that Western civilians are more likely to pay for software than lower paid peoples in other cultures around the world. Well, if recent studies are to be believed from the Business Software Alliance (BSA), Western Europe is actually the main culprit in pirating and downloading illegal software.

So, technology is a sought after commodity for exploring, making and promoting creative projects, social networks, games and information. Much of the piracy and legal collection of software takes place with commercial products, resulting in the habitual addiction and use of the same programs, thus limiting scope, ideas and creative explorations in such a way that much net-based and new media art can become too similar, offering a less diverse experience for all concerned; an argument that many coders and hackivists use, when defining their own independence in relation to their refusal to use commercial applications.

Some have actively dealt with such known limitations by exploring open source networks to free up the dependency on corporate software, sharing free code, software, and operating systems such as Linux. Groups like Consume, a UK based networked collective have been gaining much recognition for setting up wireless networks, and lessening the dependency on commercial companies to connect people to the Internet, also at higher speeds than the much now typically used ADSL modem connection, and with no wires to trip over.

So what has all this to do with Cory Arcangel? Well plenty, because he is part of this movement of changing the way that we perceive computers, software, operating systems and how we see and use them, via art initiative. Net artists and new media practitioners sit in various camps. There are some like Heath Bunting and Andy Deck who are keen to stay totally in the free software and free operating systems camp, and this effects the outcomes of their work and what it looks like and how it functions. Much of their activity relates to setting up free networks as well, and this interest in the nature of the network defines their separation from Cory Arcangel, for he is generally more keen on the computer itself, as an object and what is in it, what it consists of and what he can do with the stuff in it. Unlike Bunting and Deck he does not openly challenge culture from a consciously political perspective. As a solo artist he fits well along the modernist trajectory, of singular creative practice.

He likes to use obsolete computers and hacks into computer games, re-appropriating their purpose and use, as an end in itself. In his work Data Diaries, commissioned by the progressive Turbulence.org net-based group In February 2003, this is exactly what happens. The process does not come from a philosophical or intellectually deconstructive angle for what you see is much like a painting. The finished result is visual, and even though the image moves, it is culturally contained, making no reference to worldly happenings, other than the artist’s own engagement with computers; he is really into his computers.

The viewer is told how the work is constructed, such as “the work consisted of 11 hours of video footage, tricking QuickTime into thinking that the RAM of a home computer is actually video instead. Cory Arcangel managed this by collecting and transforming his emails, music files and DSL data, running it at 15 frames per second”. And this is the only clear narrative regarding the piece, information about how the work had come about, which of course is pretty useful and helps one to understand the workings and functional intentions.

Yet, what is really interesting here, is that the audience is asked to view the soul of the computer, not the soul of the artist; view the playful dysfunctions of an object. So the medium is part of the message, what we experience is the outcome of diverting the use of programs and the defaults. He deconstructs the object, and re-directs mass data, digital substance with an irreverent punk mentality – but towards whom? The computer? Which means that whilst the work is not culturally critical or context aware, it is imaginative in how he approaches and relates to computers.

Data Diaries sits (surprisingly) well in line with (American) modernist principles of abstraction. So, is Cory Arcangel a contemporary, American Computer Abstractionist?

With a mixture of computer geek and abstraction, he pushes aside (social) narrative, creating an object d’arte. One could be forgiven for viewing it as an anti-narrative piece. If there is a dialogue, it is more to do with computer medium based, protocols rather than subjectivity. Attention to detail is given in respect of changing the notion and idea of what an object is, shifting its behaviour and use, into an art context. Therefore the work itself needs the art arena to support its own context.

This work is for hanging on your wall, not actually physically on your wall, but the motive behind it really desires to be amongst ART of that ilk. It does not wish to extend art criterias but to exist within an already accepted framework. And this is how its meaning is determined. So therefore we end up dealing with constructed references around it, to support its essence. If it did not have the support of an art institutional background to relate to it, where would it go, who would look at it?

This of course, goes beyond Cory Arcangel in the larger sense, and it reflects upon the failure of current net-related groups and institutions to come up with a successful formula in opening up fields beyond the art establishments, tight grip on how we perceive and enjoy much of net art and new media. In the attempt to make net art more institutionally friendly many curators and linked institutions have not taken on the issue of maintaining the spirit of independence, in such explorations, that really by now should of opened up the creative arena more by now.

Cory Arcangel’s work does not of course represent institutional isolationism in its own right, but it does lend itself as a buffer to those working in new media arts, who control what is and is not seen, and who would rather avoid the social and political context of much contemporary work in this field. This is not a healthy situation especially for the artist, his work is evolutionary in its own right, and offers a playful insight into how to craft technology from one function to another. Cory Arcangel’s art is not ‘Punk’, it advocates the style of it, but it certainly does not fill the void that punk fills for me. Although, I do get where he is coming from in spirit.

When visiting Data Diaries you are given the choice to view it in black and white or in colour, you can also choose different dates from its calendar. The square pixellated visuals bounce around within a small square frame, like a monitor or television screen, accompanied with fuzz, white noise, crackling sound, which changes and slices up successfully. It plays on the theme of television, and this seems appropriate when one thinks of the MTV generation and its lust for fast, changeable images. Its trashy back html pages are effective and declare his irreverence, thus seeming to ask the visitor not to take it too seriously, which I obviously have in some ways, but on the whole I think this is actually a beautifully, well crafted bit of tech-art and should be seen as such.

(Just wanted to put something straight – when i mention Turbulence.org in the review – i was not criticizing them – in fact they are one of the best net-based groups out there, and I personally feel that they have and do offer authentic creativity beyond gate keeping remits – just in case anyone chooses to get the wrong impression – I’m sure you won’t. marc)

Science and philosophy see the flux of sensation and the chaos of events and seek or put an abiding and nascent order in, above, or behind things great and small. But bodies know that the universe is a dance floor. In fact exploratory and teleological movements arise out of the dance movements of all animal life. Alphonso Lingis. 1996. ‘Hands detach themselves’

Communicating Corporeal Experience = Theatre & Bio-terrorism?

The theatre is a place where we can witness the living organism unfold and transform in many amazing ways: we plunder, pirate and retransmit stories, eternally, over and over : in a continuous [glitchy] loop that is both revolting and profound. New technologies of perception are constantly unfolding new worlds of sublimity and threat, worlds which challenge us to reconfigure the limits of ourselves and to shape the meaning of the new spaces we find ourselves in. In the past when ocular instruments extended human sight into Galileo’s heavens and Robert Hooke’s microscopic cellular regimes, they installed new explanatory spaces for the universe, spaces which reorganised the meaning of the cosmos and the actors in it. But is this a concern for biological Terrorism Task Forces?…In the complete world, not this commodified world divided into convenient categories by thought, there can be no absolute divisions, either between life and death or anything else.

As we know all too well, Orthodox media broadcasting usually has an agenda other than the ‘true’ distribution of knowledge and information – when the very notion of truth has never been more fluid or more obscure. Even more depressing is the fact that politics today is no longer about having a position or a point of view, or even any sign of a policy, but about image. So people change ‘operating systems’, they look to free, independent and tactical media, that is transmitted and received via the ether [internet sites & documentation, urls, mail lists, blogs, free radio…] for information on what is happening between and to human beings on planet earth. But that is not to say that mainstream implied social rules and protocols do not permeate the people involved in circulating ideas on net.culture, anti-globalisation movements either. However, more and more, there are laws preventing publication of scientific research, laws preventing the sharing of knowledge, an overabundance of patents and agreements that strip the human of all freedoms, including ownership, privacy, sharing, and understanding how the human being and living matter work. Specifically at this moment, artists especially in the USA are vulnerable the PATRIOT Act which has made freedom of speech questionable.

Looking back, this results from the conflict between the Christian church and the new experimental science of Newtown, Galileo, and Descartes, when science was confined to material objects and measurable forces. Anything concerning purpose, value, morality, subjectivity, psyche, or even spirit, was the domain of religion and art, hence, scientists kept clear. Inner experiences, subtle perceptions and even spiritual values were not considered amenable to scientific study and therefore regarded as inferior forms of reality; “subjective” as we say. This encouraged a purely mechanistic and myopically detached attitude towards the natural world. This strange course of events has resulted in the tremendously distorted situation in the world today, since our own experience, as well as common sense, tells us that the subjective realm of the imagination and value is equally as important as the realm of material objects How this relates to 2004 is explored in the CULT OF THE NEW EVE a project by Critical Art Ensemble, or Flesh Machine.

The revival of animistic, neopagan and shamanic beliefs and practices, including the sacramental use of hallucinogenic or ethnogenic plants, represent a reunification of science other more ethno-medical plant use, which have been divorced since the rise of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century. Greater-than-human values should again become the primary motivation for scientists. It should be obvious that this direction for science would be a lot healthier for all of us, than it is now, primarily towards generating weaponry or profit. You may wonder where I am leading with this but I would like to point out that good historical knowledge can effect how issues like these are conceived of by artists.

According to the subpoenas, the FBI initially was seeking charges under Section 175 of the US Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, expanded by the recent USA PATRIOT Act. This newly modified accessing law prohibits the possession of “any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system” without the justification of “prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose.”
Check out the USA PATRIOT Act expansion from the 1989 law.

A federal grand jury began to investigate Buffalo artist and professor Steve Kurtz. Kurtz a collaborator with the Critical Art Ensemble, a group of performance artists, tactile media practitioners, who sometimes use human DNA and bacterial growths such as E.coli in their art exhibits to circulate knowledge about transgenic production and distribution, genetically modified plants. They investigate how artificial biological traits of adaptability structures are turning into ones of susceptibility, they establish model for contestational biology in an imaginative engaging theatre of live public experimentation.

The federal investigation of Kurtz, began after the death of his wife. On May 13, FBI agents in biohazard suits seized the artists work, the items reportedly included laboratory equipment, computers and bacterial cultures. The Erie County Health Department closed down the home after the FBI search and reopened it May 17, after the recovered items were evaluated in a state laboratory. Kurtz’s attorney said the items in the home were similar to those a high school student might use in science class.

At least Nine colleagues of Steve Kurtz were subpoenaed to appear before a Federal Grand Jury on June 15th: Adele Henderson, Chair of the Art Department at UB; Andrew Johnson, Professor of Art at UB; Paul Vanouse, Professor of Art at UB; Steven Barnes, FSU; Dorian Burr, Beverly Schlee, Claire Pentecost and Beatriz da Costa, Professor of Art at UCI; who apparently told The News that the FBI appears to be trying to link Kurtz to bioterrorism. One of the last people subpoenaed by the FPI, Julie Perini, an interdisciplinary artist working on a tactical media project, called ‘The Church of Julie Perini’ which critically addresses President Bush’s establishment of the Office of Faith-Based Organizations and Community Initiatives. July 8th Professor Steve Kurtz was charged by a federal grand jury in Buffalo, not with bioterrorism, as listed on the Joint Terrorism Task Force’s original search warrant and subpoenas, but with “petty larceny,” in the words of Kurtz attorney Paul Cambria. Heavily surveiled not unlike a petty criminal, required to reporting to a probation officer weekly, subject to random visits and inspections by the officer to his home and to his personal body fluids and unable to leave the country with out full justification. The next court date is July 28–Ferrell’s arraignment, which will include a discussion of the trial.

In other words, Kurtz and other members of CAE, practice the method of radical empiricism-basing their quest for sharing knowledge on their own experience, and world view and not excluding it because it didn’t fit with prevailing theories, practices, nor subsume theirselves to the erosion of civil liberties by the Patriot Act of the US government.

Even CAE’s publishing company Autonomedia have been served a subpoena and are yet to go on trial. Autonomedia is a publisher from New York well known for its socio-political movement of meanings, a mid-sized publication of books on old and new media from writers such as Hakim Bey, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. University of California at San Diego Professor of Design Engineering Natalie Jeremijenko noted that now”… They’re going to have to indict the entire scientific community.” Who else will now be targeted – all people with interesting ideas that are looking to communicate corporal and interpersonal experiences that have hitherto been ill defined, culturally marginalized or over shadowed? Once again people who work with provoking and political issues in imaginative ways is under threat. This sends into high relief the inherent conflict between networked ways of circulating information through these ‘other’ types of knowledge distribution systems by the act of making performance and art that threatens the rising intensity of authoritarian culture, and central command-and-control system of the Scientific Institution and the US Government. The outpouring of support for CAE is indeed overwhelming and rightly so. This is a direct attack upon the freedom of speech, where Protests In Solidarity have been happening around The [western] World; San Francisco, Vienna, Amsterdam, London, Paris.

The work of CAE is only the beginning of imaginatively, challenging the mechanisms of domination, not only in the US, but their work liberates ways of engaging with science-up to new definitions and possibilities for acessing information with their public theatre models. The Queen of communicating through deeply poetic and visceral language Kathy Acker writes that “culture is one way by which a community attempts to bring its past up out of senselessness and to find in dream and imagination possibilities for action. When culture isn’t this, there’s something wrong in the community, the society”. The “traditional” hierarchical understanding about what science is, and what technology is, indeed is something that always has to be negotiated. Indeed technology augments the organism of the body, it is a conduit in order to reflect emotion. On the level of creative, technical and scientific knowledge, this is a big issue. Actively engaging daily rituals and activities with a sense of subversive curiosity and imagination is paramount to this whole ‘fiasco’. Looking for the limits and collapsing them is how, as humans, we understand ourselves and the world.

This type of performance-making and distribution of knowledge, interlacing various strands, opening things up, does not come without conflict & misunderstanding, and in this case, legal involvement – BUT IT MUST CONTINUE. The worst limit is the evil habit of implied Laws and protocols, especially for artists who constantly play with time and space and the landscape of the imagination in distributing information. When what can’t be represented is abreacted into a violent act, it goes deep down inside where eventually everything self-destructs – organs, self-awareness, and life itself. As the saying goes ‘don’t hate the media: be the media’, take heed and fight for the realm of the imagination, HACK western science in safe, yet poetic ways.

To follow all info and updates, go to :
http://www.caedefensefund.org

Nancy Mauro-Flude – https://sister0.org/

Any on- or off-line project that explores different cultures, languages, and people is sure to almost always win my heart. As an American who has been fortunate to travel, volunteer, and live abroad, I have often worked hard to counter the negative stereotypes people tend to have of us “Yanks,” either due to our politicians, corporations, a bad movie they saw, or a loud tourist they encountered. I’ve often been jealous of people from other countries because I tend to get the impression from my country and others that it’s the USA and EVERYONE ELSE. How wonderful it would be to fit in with EVERYONE ELSE and be a part of the world.

Bzzzpeek, by Agatha Jacquillat and Tomi Vollauschek, is an online project that is truly about THE WORLD. In this project, we are able to click on an animal or vehicle. We are then presented with up to seventeen representations of our choice, made different by the various flags representing their language or country. So, by clicking on a police car, for example, we hear that the English one makes a “woo woo,” the German car goes “ta tu tah tah,ta tu tah tah,” the South Korean car says “bee bo bee bo,” and the Pakistani car goes “nee no nee no.”

This project explores the similarity of children everywhere mimicking the world around them and celebrates the differences in which different cultures interpret the audible world. Because most of the sounds have been contributed by 2-7 year-olds who are native speakers of their respective languages, there is an atmosphere of innocence and multiculturalism–Globalization in a good way…

This project also takes submissions and offers to add languages not yet represented. Even though the American police cars are not represented (they go “weeeeeer weeeer,” unlike Great Britain’s “woo woo”), I will happily just think of myself under the category of “English Speaker” and enjoy this growing and developing project that represents THE WORLD.

A special feature from Net Art Review. You can find more reviews and information about the NAR team at http://www.netartreview.net
2004 © Kristen Palana. All right reserved

George W. Bush is arguably the most influential and controversial performance artist in the history of Western art. Born as the son of George HW Bush senior, he learned early on how politics works. After studying at Yale and Harvard, he chose politics as his medium for art. In the 80s, like many other artists of the time, he was influenced by the French postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard. He was particularly interested in the following passage in the book “Simulacra and Simulation” :

“Go and simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no ‘objective’ difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs incline neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real.”

Bush applied the same question to art, and concluded that there is no tangible difference between being a real artist and a simulated one, that is, someone who is deemed an artist by the virtue of what he does and someone who does what he does in order to be deemed an artist, as well as an object that is deemed art by the virtue of its substance and an object that is called art in order to give it substance. This inspired him to create art about simulation which could be called art by the virtue of its substance. For this substance to be objectively apparent to the art world, he figured it must take place in a world outside of it. The obvious choice for Bush was politics, that is, to become a simulated politician as political art.

In November of 1994, he became simulated Governor of Texas by actually being elected Governor of Texas. Thereafter, his artistic career has flourished. By simulating a deep understanding of evangelical Christians, he gained in popularity unlike any other artists in history. The shockwave caused by his seminal work ‘Presidential Election 2000’ was felt throughout the world. By becoming simulated President of the United States, he has achieved the ultimate goal of many artists: To change the world through art.

In 2001, joining the chorus of other political artists, he presented a series of performances in response to the terror of 9-11 entitled ‘War Against Terrorism’. Much like Duchamp’s “Fountain” , it has since been referred to by numerous artists and critics. It has popularized the expression “evil-doers”. In January 2002, he used the State of the Union Address as the medium for one of the pieces from this series. Some critics have equated the significance of it to that of Robert Smithson’s use of earth and Dan Graham’s use of magazine pages as mediums.

Since 9-11, he has been experimenting with religious metaphors in political art. In the 80s, he became fascinated with evangelical Christianity, and began appropriating Born-Again Christianity as a conceptual kitsch in many of his works. The terror of 9-11 has further inspired him to make it the primary theme of his work, as we can see in his highly controversial piece, “Faith-Based Initiative.” It vividly reminds us of the danger of religious fanaticism.

In 2002, he introduced his first major Net.art project egov.gov. Unfortunately it did not receive much attention due to the great controversies generated by his other works from around the same period. Other net-based projects of his are best described as supplements to his performance art, and digital art in general is not considered his forte.

By far the best-known piece of his work in recent years is “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” which began as a social and historical critique of the ideology of his own father. It has since expanded its concerns to foreign diplomacy, sadomasochistic sexuality, and the psychology of lying. The principal medium of this piece was human life. He used it in such a massive scale that, next to it, Damien Hirst’s use of dead animals in formaldehyde appeared like kids play. In terms of originality, this piece is significant for several reasons. 1) It was the most expensive art ever made in history, realized entirely with public funding. 2) It was designed with no ending in mind. 3) It was viewed by the entire world in real time.

Like Hirst, people love to hate Bush. Many critics refused to accept him as an artist. In fact, part of what makes him a fascinating artist is the fact that he never claims to be one. In this sense, his simulation is impeccable. It demonstrates that when art mimics life perfectly, it ceases to be art. And, this unbeing of art is his art, which makes recognition of his art impossible. This in turn makes his art undeniably “new” as an oft-quoted remark by Jacques Derrida concurs:

“One never sees a new art, one thinks one sees it; but a ‘new art,’ as people say a little loosely, may be recognized by the fact that it is not recognized.”

This remark has been liberally used to justify every unrecognized artist and art movement, but Bush’s unrecognizability is clearly far above the rest. To stay as ‘new’ as possible, he never allows his art to be recognizable. No other artists are as committed to this ideology as he is. By the virtue of being always new, his work is also necessarily original. Virtually every work of his has some aspects that have never been done before, especially in the use of mediums as mentioned above.

Perhaps his greatest contribution to art is that he proved art can change the world. His art will probably inspire future political artists, and will give them confidence that their art is not a lost cause. Like the way Duchamp secretly worked on ‘Etant donnes’ for 20 years and revealed it posthumously, Bush will probably reveal his artistic intention only after his death. It will be a spectacular moment in history of art, but who knows? He might choose to keep it unrecognized and ‘new’ forever.

Tandem Surfing the Third Wave (5) with Randall Packer, Secretary of the US Department of Art & Technology
This interview took place via email in the Spring of 2004.

More information on Randall Packer and his work can be found at:
https://randallpacker.com/who-am-i/

RG: I’m curious about the initial formation of the US Department of Art and Technology. What was the process that led to it, and who was involved in the beginning?

RP: Four years ago, I moved to Washington, DC. After some exploration of the “nation’s capital,” with its monuments, the US Capitol, the White House, etc., I found myself in the midst of the greatest of all spectacles, the most ostentatious of all theatrical sets, the backdrop for America. I wanted to insert myself as a performance and multimedia artist into this space. I wanted to incorporate it through appropriation and transform it into an alteration of what it was originally intended to articulate as a proposal that repositions the role of the artist on the world stage. This was the germinal idea of the US Department of Art & Technology. US DAT became a site-specific performance work emulating systems of government in order to re-engineer those systems through the prism of the artistic lens.

RG: Your art and writing (and from what i gather, your teaching as well) often addresses the ever-expanding ‘totalizing’ effect of what is called ‘multimedia.’ There’s both a utopic and dystopic side present to notions of singularity. What kinds of relationships do you see between Virilio’s Total War and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk?

RP: The totalizing properties of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Artwork) have driven my own research and artistic production over the past 15 years. I was fascinated early on by Wagner’s approach to the theater, he could not fully realize his work until he had completely overhauled the “platform” of the opera house, creating a medium for immersing and directing the full attention of the viewer on the illusionary or ‘virtual’ space of the theatrical stage.

With US DAT, I was thinking about the total collapse of the fourth wall, that imaginary line between audience and the stage (still sacred in Wagner’s theater), in order to extrude the work from the stage into the space of the “real world,” to dissolve the distinction between the two. This is to me is a further implementation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, in which the totalization of the experience of art is one in which the “real world” is transformed using techniques of media and illusion. (Regarding Virilio, you could say that war as theater constitutes the ultimate transformation of the physical space.)

I was invited to speak at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin in 2002 as the Secretary of US DAT for their opening ceremonies, alongside several politicians and diplomats. No one was told I was a fake but there was great confusion in the air. It was arranged that I was to be introduced by an actual government official, the Cultural Attaché of the US Embassy in Berlin. Now if there really were a Secretary of the US Department of Art & Technology, this would be the protocol. And so he played it completely straight. He gave a stirring introduction, indicating that the US Government was now embracing a significant role for the arts. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

My speech, delivered to an audience of over 1,000, was a dadaesque collage of President Harry Truman’s address to the United Nation’s in 1945, mixed with texts appropriated from the Futurists, Berlin Dadaists, and even some of the hyper-utopian descriptions of artist works presented at Transmediale. The conclusion of the speech ended, appropriately with the following line, taken from the famous words of President Kennedy, “In this city of dada, decadence and indulgence, ich bin ein Berliner, Kunstler!). Most everyone recognized by this point it was a performance, except for one rather confused media critic whom I won’t mention by name, but who thought I was an American government official posing as an artist. I found this reversal most delicious.

RG: The breaking of the “fourth wall” you mentioned in terms of the US DAT project has of course a history with political avant-garde performance, but with more complex communication technologies, the “fourth wall” seems to transform into something of more consequence. I’m thinking of other performance-based projects like the Electronic Disturbance Theater, Critical Art Ensemble, subRosa, and US DAT where the difference between symbolic action and “real” action is not so clear. This seems to have something to do with the openness of “outside the theater” participation and effect, maybe. How do you think the practices of performance are reacting to multimedia technologies?

RP: What is actually happening here, in breaking the 4th wall, is dispensing with the theatrical space altogether. Whereas Critical Art Ensemble, and particularly Electronic Disturbance Theater, in my estimation, are more activist oriented, in terms of using electronic means to intervene or even disrupt, US DAT is more concerned with the power of illusion (an age-old political tool). It is a delicate balancing act between the real and the virtual – the emulation of government systems in order to transform them, to critique them from the inside out, rather than the outside in. US DAT is using multimedia techniques to parody the political obsession with image and the spectacle. And unlike the site-specific nature of political theater, or activist techniques that occur in the physical space, the transformations of US DAT often take final form in the digital space. This medial space is wide and varied, ranging from news releases distributed via email, to the Department Website where you can find ideologies of the artistic avant-garde superimposed with bureaucrat-speak extracted from the real government, to video works that hype Department events, initiatives and speeches of the Secretary. I consider the combined use of text, video, sound, Net, etc., in the context of live performance, to embrace the techniques of multimedia in relation to the Gesamtkunstwerk.

RG: I’m wondering what your thoughts on the potential (positive and negative) of aesthetic/conceptual collaborations with research/science are currently, especially given the fact that there is now a history (albeit a limited one) of such work. The big collaborations now are obviously biotech and IT. What are your thoughts on the known directions in these areas?

RP: US DAT in many ways parodies and exaggerates collaboration between government, arts, science, and industry, while at the same time, promoting it. While it is naive to think that artists can successfully change the thinking of the corporate world or government, US DAT constructs a utopian view of such an overblown, world-stage role for the artist. For a brief moment during a speech, while the suspension of disbelief is in full effect, the Secretary becomes quite a real possibility and the message is very clear and plausible. This is how I believe it is possible and necessary to articulate the vision of US DAT. Since it would never be taken seriously as a “real” initiative, losing its impact as an actual entity, I implement it through the power of performance and the suspension of disbelief. When reality is not a concern, the mind can reach to the most far-flung places of the imagination, and that is where I prefer to live. I am an artist, not a bureaucrat, and so I fake bureaucratic systems in order to deflate them, to transcend them, to virtualize them. Perhaps it is at that moment when you can paint a better world, to go beyond what is and show what could be. Is this changing the world? Probably not. But artists are able to visualize through models, and perhaps… change may occur.

RG: Maybe the “tactical media” model of art collectives like the EDT wasn’t a good fit for what you’re doing with the US DAT. There aren’t that many examples of this kind of theater, at least not that actually function in a larger sense. The Yes Men come to mind as a project with similarities. The relationship between the “creation of consent” and information technologies seems to create a strange situation that provides both a stage for critical, multimedia theater, as well as a curtain that renders it almost invisible, as the Yes Men illustrate quite well. Maybe you see the situation differently?

RP: The illusionary nature of US DAT’s intent is very important to the transformational effect, in which the curtain or fourth wall is meant to be invisible, or possibly seen as shifting. This is carried out through a careful consideration of various types of media. I believe this to be in line with Critical Art Ensemble’s definition of tactical media, in which the term refers to “a critical usage and theorization of media practices that draw on all forms of old and new, both lucid and sophisticated media, for achieving a variety of noncommercial goals and pushing all kinds of potentially subversive political issues.” US DAT employs a broad array of tactics and artistic strategies that range from performance, to appropriated and remixed government documents, to the use of email, the net and other electronic media, to stage a transformation and virtualization of the physical space – in this case, Washington, DC, the center of power in the Western world. Through these means, as mentioned before, I activate the “suspension of disbelief,” allowing the viewer to experience a changed environment, a set of new possibilities, new ideas, thus subverting the original intent of the US Government. It is all about ownership. Who owns the environment, the monuments, the White House, the Capitol? Who owns the government, isn’t it the people’s government? Isn’t it the job of artists to challenge the status quo? I believe it is the role of the artist to make this challenge by visualizing, re-engineering society (and government) according to their own vision, through whatever tactics of media are useful to the situation. To quote the motto of the Experimental Party, an initiative of US DAT, “Representation Through Virtualization.” This suggests that the artistic technique of representation can serve the dual purpose of envisioning for aesthetic objectives, as well as engaging in the political process through social critique.

RG: Have you received any form of responses from the US bureaucracy regarding the US DAT?

RP: The US Government has surprisingly left me alone, though I imagine someone, somewhere in the Fed has compiled quite a file. I know in fact they are aware of the project. In May of 2003, a feature article on US DAT, written by the art critic Jessica Dawson, was published in the Washington Post. The front page of the style section included a full color reproduction of the Department’s official seal. Since the article mentioned President George W. Bush, the White House press office would have been required to distribute copies to its staff, perhaps even the President. Regardless, I have been left quite alone. Perhaps we really do live in a free country? Only time will tell.

RG: There are some obvious qualities that seem endemic to the US in terms of media and government (and definitely in the relationship between the two) that allow for the US DAT to be quite effective in many respects. What are the sources that most inform the direction and thematics of projects like the US DAT for you? Does institutional critique, whether it’s Hans Haacke or Bill Moyers, provide any sort of foundation or parallel form of investigation to follow?

RP: US DAT is a critique of government systems and bureaucratic processes that functions somewhat like a virus – inserted into the system, it emulates the system, but carries a new, subversive message. The Department has been constructed as an appropriation of legal documents, government news releases, political speeches, and executive orders remixed with manifestoes of the avant-garde and other hyper-proclamations and prognostications of the contemporary digerati. This literary form has been referred to as “socio-poetic assemblages of intimate bureaucracies” in Craig Saper’s book, Networked Art. I have drawn texts from Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism, Fluxus, Situationism, etc. and used them in the transformation of political texts derived from the White House Website, Presidential speeches, and texts culled from a range of government agencies and departments. In fact, the official biography of the Secretary of US DAT is a remix of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s. I believe this is a way of subverting the status quo, transforming bureaucracies into poeticisms, what I would call a form of artistic mediation – viewing the US Government as a vast repository awaiting cultural appropriation and transformation.

RG: I’m wondering if you could talk about the working methodology that the US DAT has employed up to this point… how are decisions made via the different nodes (The Experimental Party, We the Blog (http://www.wetheblog.org), specific media projects…)? How important is collaboration (in all its different interpretations) to these projects?

RP: Collaboration is essential to the US Department of Art & Technology. I have worked very closely with many collaborators including: Mark Amerika, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Jeff Gates, Jon Henry, Lynn Hershman, Andrew Nagy, Trace Reddell, Rick Silva, Wesley Smith, as well as the 50 or so staff members of the Department, all of whom are listed with their grandiose titles on the Website. When the Secretary gave a speech to open Transmediale two years ago, he called on an international group of artists to form the Global Virtualization Council, and designated them as Ambassadors in order to “mobilize and coordinate artistic forces of virtualization internationally.” The Canadian media artist Luc Courchesne is the Secretary General and has been an ardent supporter of the Department.

In late August of 2004, in conjunction with the Republican National Convention, US DAT is staging the Experimental Party (Un)Convention and (Dis)Information Center at the LUXE Gallery in New York City – engaging delegates in hyper-political propaganda. The writer and digital artist Mark Amerika is my principal collaborator in this project, along with several others who have been participating in US DAT over the past three years. The featured project will be the Media Deconstruction Kit, created in collaboration with Wesley Smith, in which we will be re-mixing Convention coverage from the cable networks live and in real-time. The altered material will be streamed instantaneously out to the Internet. We believe these techniques can be used to swamp the mass media with total illusion as the Convention rhetoric heats up.

This is our plan – to spread the spirit of experimentalism and hyper-political propaganda through the power of artistic mediation. This is the role of the artist in society – and yes, we will prevail…

Europe? Pass me another sandwich!

Musings of a non-European at the Trans-European Picnic, 29 April-1 May 2004, Novi Sad, Serbia & Montenegro. Organised by V2 and Kuda.org

Aotearoa (New Zealand) will never be invited to join the European Union; even Serbia is sure to get the nod before us. So my kiwi perspective on the Trans-European Picnic, held to mark to accession of ten new countries to the EU, is pretty unique. Not completely unique, as much to my surprise there was another New Zealander at the picnic; someone I knew, someone from my home town even. Running into Caroline McCaw in the Balkan wilds and in the face of the expanding EU empire threw our own adolescent cultural identity into sharp relief.

The Trans-European Picnic aimed to bring artists and theorists together for two days of discussion, debate and creative reflection on what the growth of the EU means for artists, particularly those in the ever-shrinking non-EU Europe. The programme included a workshop, artists’ presentations, forums, film screenings, performances, a visit to the Chapel of Peace, a handbook and the picnic itself.

The serious part – forums around the themes of standards and mobility – asked questions like: would the EU might result in a monoculture; what are the implications for artists; and what will happen to small organisations? At some point someone asked why the EU needed to expand–a good question but one we didn’t manage to answer, although the speakers touched on everything from smelly French cheese to pornographic billboards in Bulgaria.

The language of EU documents came under scrutiny; Bojana Petric (HU/SCG) found that the word “culture” is generally associated with one of two words: “common” or “diversity”. Her analysis revealed that the EU aims to “develop”, “promote” and “bring to the fore” common culture, while cultural diversity is to be “protected” and “preserved”. This implies that cultural diversity will be relegated to the status of a museum object, while common culture is something that doesn’t exist yet so it must be invented and promoted.

Going a step further, Luchezar Boyadjiev (Bulgaria) declared that the EU doesn’t care about culture at all, and is merely using the language as a tool to sell its concept. He then suggested that on the evening of 30th April, refugees would flood across the Serbo-Hungarian border, and proposed that we drive up there to welcome them into the safety of the non-EU; this seemed like a practical idea to me, but I guess I missed the bus for that adventure.

(There were a few things I missed, such as the streaming technologies workshop – due to the diversity, as opposed to commonality, of programme information and the incompatibility between the Picnic’s web site and Serbian dial-up connections. Another was the passports and soup of the SOS Immigration Office–no idea where that happened.)

The discussions took place in the Novi Sad Cultural Centre’s Veliki Sala (Big Hall), curiously arranged with half the audience on the stage and half in the auditorium, the speakers in the middle of the stage and video screens offering a variety of perspectives. This resulted in a multi-layered visual experience for the audience to explore when the speakers drifted into theoretical netherworlds.

I was drifting away myself when the phrase “equal playing field” caught my ear and threw me back ten or 15 years to New Zealand’s days of unrestrained privatisation and new right economics, when “level playing field” was the popular method of linguistically erasing unpleasantries such as institutionalised racism, post-colonial trauma, discrimination and so on in favour of an artificial commonality. For a moment I was lost, hovering in a timeless void of political jargon and trendy platitudes, where language is twisted beyond meaning and people exist only in degrees of diversity and commonality.

Back on the ground in Novi Sad, an artistic programme accompanied the theory. I confess to skipping the artists’ presentations in favour of food, but I diligently watched all the films screened over two nights: a truly diverse programme of experimental and political videos from Turkey, Georgia, Moldova, Serbia, Poland, and the Netherlands. One western European’s whimsical journey in a wood-powered car offered an interesting contrast to “Shoes for Europe”, documenting the changing of railway carriage wheels at the Moldavian border, where the differently-sized train tracks of Russia and Europe meet: these two films gave starkly different illustrations of mobility, standards and choice. Other films dealt with topics ranging from animated 3D cockroaches to the return of Roma refugees to Serbia. Friday night culminated with an intense “multimedia pseudo-opera”, Turkish techno duo Anabala and a welcome opportunity to chill out in a yurt complete with cushions, incense and DJ.

On Saturday, two busloads of festive folk set off into a hot spring day, destined first for Sremski Karlovac and the Chapel of Peace, where in 1699 a treaty was signed between the Turks, Venetians, Austrians and Russians (the Serbs being still enslaved at the time). From this historic town we continued on a much longer than expected drive through the flat Voyvodina countryside to Fruska Gora. Caro and I could have been anywhere in the world, discussing the people and politics of Aotearoa and idly wondering where we might be being taken as we passed a duty-free shop in the middle of nowhere. Eventually, we arrived at a forest lodge where a huge meal had been prepared. Eating and socialising were prioritised and, after a quick vote, the final discussion was abridged to speed-talks and a half-hearted suggestion of a game of football. What was that about the expansion of the EU …oh, never mind!

On the journey back to Novi Sad we were treated to a spectacular lightning display – nature’s multimedia opera. We said hasty goodbyes and the bus spat me out into a torrential downpour. At a friend’s party later that night, I performed my impersonation of a New Zealand tourism promoter for an audience of Serbs, Austrians, a French guy and a Montenegrin, while thinking how nice it is to be from somewhere so remote that we can almost believe it really is a digitally-enhanced landscape filled with happy hobbits and enough magic to make dreams come true.

The desire to dream is what’s common; the dreams themselves are diverse.

Interview with Doron Golan

Doron Golan is an artist with a well- established reputation in the net art community and recent recipient of a Turbulence commission. His work and life branches out to address the new media practice of his peers in a very real and personal way in his work as collector and patron of computerfinearts.com. This “initiative of supporting net arts and the artist’s community, to form a new arts publication, presentation and distribution platform” has helped him to understand/realise his work in the context of the community and the time. The following interview focuses on his work as an artist.

My first encounter with Doron Golan’s work was with his dv projects. Canal 2 ny is presented much like night-time footage from a surveillance camera, watching over “ground zero” . The sense of quiet unease is heightened in B&L Toy Trains– dialogue for 2 events –, establishing the space within which Doron locates his work: a position of “conversational contrariety”.

These works alone conveyed an unmistakable sense of the artist’s developing concerns over time, which led me to investigate the nature of his practice as a new media artist and understand the quietly expanding content of his work. His early animations evolve, in parallel with technological advancements, to his latest web movies. Centrally fixed is the “pulse” of the work, a breath, which is unmistakably human and always present, a consciousness from which Doron observes his world. His work shows a careful balance between content and technique, a place where his “wondering” is communicated with clarity.

DV: Darshana Vora:
As an artist with evident confidence in the progression of his own voice within the growing possibilities offered by new media, I anticipate that you would wish to move beyond the label of net artist.

DG: Doron Golan:
I agree. I feel that the terms net art and new media are confining. At present, I like using the term media arts to define my practice.

DV:
In looking through your website, I can see a gradual progression in concerns from a more meditative kind of address and study of phenomenon (early animation encoding works using abstract imagery in works such as treetrunk –, contort – , Julia – ) to a more direct formulation of views using video footage, both archival and artist’s own, which you call “reproductions of critical events” in the works “pecker” – , and “hollyland” – , (from which I believe “toy trains – dialogue for 2 events” is now an independent streaming video).

I find that whilst in the early animation works, the presentation was tighter and the ideas being tied in with the composition for presentation, navigational options are carefully chosen to allow/constrain participation; and now the current streaming works and web movies are possibly more relaxed, longer, real-time, while the subject matter is somehow more defined due to the visual footage which one can identify with, though the underlying message is ambiguous.

Would you like to elaborate on how your work has developed and changed, whether you are involved in working in various streams at once, and/or choose to present certain works in a particular format due to suitability, or have your concerns moved on?

DG:
I was introduced to computer and digital art practice in 1985 and embraced it in the 90’s. At the time the issue I was interested in was the new digital aesthetics. I was excited about the new raw experience of the artistic process. In particular the hyper and fast manifestation of the creative expression as a liberating force for the subconscious. Also, I was fascinated by the monitor – the light box. (I still hold on to a theory that interaction with light is both physical and metaphysical encounters with far reaching elements of the universe. And that TV sets, computer monitors and movie theatre experiences are not just content attributed experiences.)

In ’98 I started using Apple’s QuickTime architecture as my main working tool and my choice platform for presentation. I did a body of animation work in the abstract realm. The work was meditative in nature and resembled elements of nature and the outer space. (Clouds formation, behaviour of gasses, nebulas and stars) The work was all Computer Graphics. It used experimental encoding as a creative tool and the computer and it’s mechanical means to simulate macro organism ideas and presentations.

The work also served me as study for streaming and compression for my next body of work, DV based, concerns and critical presentation of phenomena’s-events of the social order.

As broadband came into present, the subject of the Internet as a distribution tool and platform for presentation-publication of artwork became a cardinal point for me and during that time my work gradually started to use linear cinematic language.

My latest project ‘the 9th-allegro’ is a 15-min web movie that among things has been produced using rhetoric of ‘cinema verite’, my next work I will be using Hebrew talking dialogue and sub-titles. My current concerns are about enriching and refining the language of my (artist’s owned!) dv work and strengthen its conversational contrariety (ambiguity).

DV:
In your Quick time movies- “Horatio” – and “pecker” you chose to leave the controls of the individual films with the viewer, leaving the work open to more possibilities. In “goal”, where the sequence of watching the 2 movies can be controlled in time, it becomes possible to alter the perception of the historic event.

DG:
‘Interactivity’ and viewer participation was important as a tool to understand and experience the new form/structure of the media. The fact that I used several (2 and more) dv source or animations was also one literal way to show duality and contradiction in a collage form. As my language expanded, I realized the need to convey my ideas within one source of media, I felt that the level of attention is better served in this form and that I was ready for the challenge and communicate the ideas within the media itself with less dependency on the grammar and form.

DV:
Comparing the B&L Toy Trains dialogue for 2 events –and ‘Canal 2 ny’ (dv streaming projects) with ‘the 9th-allegro'(web-movie), I notice that whilst in the first 2, you adopt a stance of “quiet observer” leaving the viewer with the space to engage their own imagination; ‘the 9th-allegro’ becomes quite animates the imagination with its broader storyboard and cinematic canvas which pins down the geography and personality of the characters in a way that does not allow participation in the film. Is that because I am culturally distanced from the footage, hence find it “foreign” or is your decision to locate your film geographically, significant?

DG:
Allegro is also about broadening the boundaries. Broadband streaming as well as my cinematic canvas. Geography and personalities might be important to me but not important for experiencing the work. The locality/personality is generalized and a literal layer of the work. I do not think it is the more important one. Also allegro is open and less subject specific than the other 3. Or perhaps deals with multiple subjects at the same time. ‘The 9th-intro’ – http://66.240.176.74/the9th/index0.html is more like a painterly portrait (17 century chiaroscuro paintings) and is different from ‘the9th-allegro’.

DV:
Would ‘Toy Trains’ and ‘Canal 2 ny’and ‘the 9th-allegro’ be any different if they were artist’s videos rather than streaming dv/web-movie? Besides the “audience factor”, are there any particular choices that govern your decision to show them either/and as both?

DG:
I think that toy trains, ground zero and the9th-intro (dv streaming projects) differ from artists’ video not only because they are subject to view by computer and monitor. (Whether it is the web or a local station, the work is also played from a computer hard drive using the QuickTime architecture, browser based or stand alone application). Technically, streaming the encoded data is important aspect of the work. But visually – the use of compression to break down the image, elevating the pixels to show as the fundamental element, ideas that reflect expressionist and painterly concepts, I don’t think that video had addressed those concerns. Truth is that I am more interested (and with broadband) in blurring the lines between computer and video work. I think that with my latest work the 9th-allegro (a movie), the work could be looked at as computer and/or film &video work.

DV:

Please can you say more about your use of “conversational contrariety ” .

DG:
The ‘subtle applications’ along my work are my beliefs and observations. I think that as I have been growing up observing ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’, I found out that reality exists in multiple and fundamental numbers and levels. I have been trying to position the work in that space. Between fusion and confusion, between the serious and the absurd. I’d like the viewer stay in that space, but many choose to call their own interpretation. What I am trying to express through my work is that history and events are time and place related. They are mirrored images and not the real thing – not the grand reality. Assembling ‘charged’ contextual imagery in an absurd, perhaps surprising and somewhat contradictory way and this is all part of the language and the challenge of the work. What I am hoping for is to bring across utopian ideas in a context of uncertainty and wondering. Imposing an extravagant, showy presentation of the work (In the 9th-allegro – Beethoven for one) adds a layer of absurdity to the work but also serves the purpose of expressing the idea of grandiose objectivity. I think that the most important thing about the work is the overall feel and less important is the specific content.

NOTE: this clip is from the NonTVTV archive documenting works in their programme of real-time live Internet broadcasts. This clip can only be viewed in Windows Media Player (sorry!)

In Praise of Shadows

The Internet allows artists and audiences to communicate, engage and activate directly across social, political and cultural borders. So we connect and shine the torch lights of our intertwining consciousnesses on the concerns of the day. Unlike the corporately owned and controlled, entertainment networks, the Internet network still functions as a free platform for distributed creativity.

“Glass Rondo” was made and broadcast in 2003 by the Stockholm-based artist collective Beeoff, who has dedicated the last few years to developing the software, infrastructure and arts content for NonTVTV. The web does have its limitations as a platform for creativity; its narrow bandwidth and the dearth of opportunity for kinesthetic engagement can make it worse than the telly for eyestrain, with concurrent deprivation of all other senses. Whether working on our projects or exploring what other artists have wrought from the varied net-based media at their disposal, this medium can create a kind of morbidity in our bodies. NonTVTV has worked with the multicast protocol to raise the bandwidth and, therefore, the potential richness of the medium whilst preserving the benefits of lateral production and distribution. Establishing nodes in international public art venues has also asserted and promoted the medium as a valid extension of formal artistic expression.

To create Glass Rondo, Beeoff placed a glass or a metal vessel on a table betwixt three monitors, each emitting a different coloured light to a pulse of sound. Video cameras placed at each monitor recorded what they saw to software which recombined and edited the 3 data streams live to be broadcast at high bandwidth across the Internet and projected once again into geographically and so, culturally dispersed physical spaces. This is Internet Cubism; its expression of the artists’ relationship to the object, its exploration of the relationship and interchange between bits and atoms and its simultaneous transmission, it lives to its multifarious audience.

Glass Rondo is also very much a celebration of the poetics of shadows. In 1933, a Japanese novelist, Jun’ichiru Tanizaki, wrote an essay on aesthetics called “In Praise of Shadows”. He writes “Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery of overtones but partly suggested” (21).

Glass Rondo conjures a fluid, synaesthetic music of the spheres out of the darkness. Beeoff has synthesized a new composite temporal object “in which wavelength, topology and rhythm become one”. The rare deliciousness of the experience affected by the Glass Rondo is connected to its translation of material form, its insinuations of dust and irregularities in the object’s surface. Rather than using special effects to illuminate an imagined event unfolding to reveal every detail of its appearance, it constructs a meticulously crafted set of aesthetic relationships between sound, time and matter as a reflecting surface for the play of light, all wound together in a new, poetic interpretation of real-time object-oriented programming. – May 2004

Weblogs and latitudes hurt by a global age.

When considering Fran Ilich’s work, one cannot ignore the geography that originally gave rise to it. Fran comes from Tijuana, a city caught right in the middle of the South and North, at the Northeast corner of Mexico (and some may add) Latin America. A place where many experience the painful tensions between the third and first worlds: its sweatshops, crystal manufacturers and illegal immigrants physically lie just outside of California.

In this context, one may begin to understand why Fran would be interested in creating spaces in which people from different geographical locations would actually have to bother to listen to each other. One such space is big (b)Other , a collaborative weblog that he coordinated during February 2003 which was part of the Walker Art Center’s “How Latitudes Become Forms” exhibition. In the about section, big (b)Other describes itself as “a different kind of reality show that bothers to attempt to explore the many ‘Others’ that constitute our globally (dis)connected world”.

big (b)Other is simultaneously a “different kind of reality show” and a textual critique thereof. A shared space in which, for one month last year an international array of people wrote about their daily lives. The collaborative weblog became thus a sort of big brother house where bothersome dialogues with the ‘Other’ took place. The conversational themes were varied, reflecting a time period on a personal level as well as on a global scale. Punk, feminism, the Berlinale and anti-Bush demonstrations are just a few of the themes that the entries concern themselves with.

One may find echoes of Fran’s use of the weblog in his previous textual work. Take for example “Metro-Pop” the novel he wrote at the age of seventeen. Metro-Pop is like a weblog and is also semi-biographical. On par with big (b)Other , it is an example of art finding its basis in the lives and personalities of actual people:

Alberto (un trekkie…), Skin (…un tipo acostumbrado a vestirse como Alex de Naranja Mecanica), Alex (…baterista de un grupo hardcore punk), Daniels (un muchacho adorador de la musica industrial), Carlos (un social de esos que ya no saben en que gastarse su dinero…), Karlos (un pintor de quince a’os…)

The above, is a passage from “Metro-Pop” in which Daniel Franco describes the friends he will be joyriding with on a Thursday night. It is telling that, in big (b)Other , similar descriptions of the participants are given. It is almost as if, in collective weblogs, Fran had finally found a way for these friends to speak out for themselves. The difference is that now their collective journeys take them across oceans and geographical borders.

Overall, big (b)Other reads like a good old fashioned networking of an online forum. Friends see each other, new people meet, people have a drink together… but of course I am sharing my own opinion here. Some of the viewers/visitors may pay more attention to the hacktivism or the literature or the theorizing around it. So it’s probably best to go visit and read it oneself. I hope that I have managed to offer some indication of why, in my opinion, it was at home in “How Latitudes Become Forms”.

Fran ilich’s website is https://arteedadsilicio.com/especial-2005/2004-delete-tv-de-fran-ilich/
Ivan Monroy-Lopez’s web site.

Several thoughts on this piece.

First off, I find you are able to draw the audience into your connection of masculine heterosexuality and war. Tied in with our gender discussions, I’ve found it both amusing and annoying that the cultural norm in the states that men must aspire to reflect more or less a sweat drenched wrestler with a gun in one hand and a martini in the other, a combination of rage and cool; which has been tapped into by the current anarcho-libertarian warhawks we have in office in this country. Bush is part Marlboro Man and part Randy “Macho Man” Savage. However, I am, in my viewing of the piece, confident that other connections are there to be made. Whether it is your discussion or not your discussion; I personally feel that making the sex/war connection is not enough in a piece if it hopes to raise consciousness on the issues of war, which are certainly bountiful. However, I got some other things from the work, which may be what I brought to the table on my own, you can let me know.

For one, there’s the obvious homoeroticism in the work. But it gets me to thinking again on the concept of men and their relationship to war as a bonding ritual. Men kill with a pack to release bonding chemicals, as opposed to having sex with one another. Ultimately this connection means to imply that war is a primary social identification for men but only as a result of thinly veiled homosexual urges. Therefore- gay, or at least bisexual relationships, might somehow eliminate a need for war. Or would it reinforce it? Why aren’t women on the battlefield? And why were some of the most ferocious early European armies openly gay?

The connection between war and sex also raises another issue- conceptually, this is some of the same stuff we’ve seen in the “Rub Linda” catastrophe, however, having switched the sexualized gender has neutralized a lot of the resistance I have to the piece. Why is that? Part of me is asking, “Isn’t the sexualization of any act of war at least on some level supporting war through a distortion of sexuality and by the reduction of human beings to portions of their anatomy?” But I think your piece works in a way “Linda” didn’t, just because you took care not to promote an actual sexualized image, instead emphasizing the grotesque nature of sexualized war through the removal of most primary identifying characteristics; faces, etc, as well as the black and white- which, combined with the images of explosions, brings out a really disturbing contrast between the sexualization of individuals and the manner in which body parts are literally torn apart in war. (Also bringing up a notion of women being psychologically at war on a daily basis- having to look not at human beings but human being’s legs, breasts, lips, asses, etc- I wouldn’t be surprised if this is not somewhere a subtle, subconsciously engineered attempt to coerce women into the fear that our culture finds so attractive in them.) Would it be a stretch to say you took some of the “Rub Linda” dialogue into consideration when you were constructing this piece?

Lastly, the piece seems to tap into a castration anxiety. The idea of having an orgasm that blows my penis off into raging flames is not exactly my cup of tea; but you’re also looking at the element of orgasm as “petit morte” and well, war as “petit morte, grande”, though I have a problem keeping French and Spanish separate so I hope that’s right. I think you get the point either way. Species-wise, war is inherently masochistic; war derives its pleasure not only from conquest but also from annihilation and nihilism. There are reports of bezerker behavior from many wars, Vietnam being one of them, where men were overdriven by such hopelessness that it came through in excruciating acts of cruelty towards the enemy- raping wives, pissing in dead soldiers mouths, skullfucking, all elements of human behavior that are brought out as a means of deriving pleasure in the confirmation of total hopelessness and despair, and the pressure that stems from the possibility of death coming at any moment for extended periods of time. But all of this, you’ll notice, is sexual behavior.

I think this piece may be one of the best pieces of war art I’ve seen, but my test for war art is simply, does it make me want to vomit when I think about war? I always go back to Paul Goodman, in “designing pacifist films”:

“Given a film about capital punishment, for instance, a Camus will notice, and be steeled in revulsion by, the mechanism of execution: he will deny the whole thing the right to exist because it is not like us (this is the reaction-formation, denial, that is characteristic of active compassion); but a vulgar audience will identify with the victim, get involved in the suspense, thrill to the horror, and weep with pity. The effect is entertainment, not teaching or therapy; and to be entertained by such a theme is itself damaging.”

I think Goodman puts too much blame on the audience, when the artist is the one who, if s/he is a real artist, makes works that elicit responses, and which emotions that artist chooses to elicit are part of the artistry. In anti war art, nothing can be ethically allowed except for the elicitation of revulsion- to inspire us to “deny the whole thing the right to exist because it is not like us.” Otherwise, we would make art that is tolerant of war, or glorifies it.

http://www.furtherfield.org/mgarrett/men_&_bombs/

The Whispers Project was started to create an opportunity for those who did not wish to participate in debate and discussion (because of language barriers, time issues etc) to be seen equally and become involved by submitting their own and others’ creative projects. The Whispers Project shines light on the hidden talent of frequenters of the Netbehaviour list.

How this is created:

Subscribers to the NetBehaviour list add to the project by placing two links to their own work and one link to someone else’s work.

This project was first posted to the list on 19th May 2004. In a vote on 4th June 2004 NetBehaviourists decided that this networked project should be made available here for public viewing. The most recent addition was made on August 6th 2004. The public face of this networked project is updated on the request of list users. If you feel that it’s time for an update please just copy and paste the list below into the body of the email, add your own info and send to the list.

What type of work? Net artists, new media academics, soft groups, net writers, code geeks, new nedia producers, net/new media curators, net/new media activists, networkers, new media performers, net sufi’s, psychogeographical, net artist blogs, net communities etc…

Name: Jan Robert Leegte
Home: http://www.leegte.org
featured: http://www.leegte.org/works/spatial/xpodium/index.htm
chosen: http://splash.ctrlaltdel.org/zdwe.html

Name: Rich White
work: falling off a chair
work : butterfly effect
choice cut – wires : http://www.ertdfgcvb.ch/p1/wires.html

Name: Ivan Monroy-López
work: G=1=U=2=G=1=U=2 http://www195.pair.com/imonroyl/tiniestblog.html
chosen work: the photostatic retrogade archive http://psrf.detritus.net/index.html
chosen work: the island chronicles http://boingboing.net/island/

Name: Bituur Esztreym & Rico da Halvarez on behalf Elles, Otto von Strassenbach
Work: http://vnatrc.net/ –http://bigfruit.vnatrc.net/ —
http://elsa.vnatrc.net/ –http://bienvenidonumero6.biz/
Chosen work: http://www.periferico.org/

Name: Sofia Oliveira sofiaoliveira@atmosferas.net
Work ­http://www.atmosferas.net/en
Chosen work(s)- The Secret Lifes of Numbers http://www.turbulence.org/Works/nums/

Name : Clément Charmet 
http://cl3mos.free.fr
fleur: http://cl3mos.free.fr/fleur/eng/
untitled : http://clemos.free.fr ( better with IE )
chosen work : http://www.quasar.org

Name: T Wells
Contratv – http://www.contratv.net
Midiatatica.org – http://www.midiatatica.org
Chosen work – http://delete.tv

Name: Annie Abrahams
http://www.bram.org/info
‘painsong’ http://www.bram.org/pain
Chosen work : http://vnatrc.net/YAST/index_html

Name: Patrick Simons
Home: http://www.gloriousninth.com (Collaboration with Kate’ Southworth)
http://www.gloriousninth.com/flaming.html
http://www.gloriousninth.com/who_owns_them_controls.html
Chosen work: http://www.theyrule.net/theyrule.html (the Dick Cheney’ map)

Name: Ryan Griffis
temporary travel office – http://www.yougenics.net/traveloffice
subRational eRuptions (curator + interface)-http://www.turbulence.org/curators/griffis/index.html
Chosen work – Bureau of Inverse Technology’s Kits http://www.bureauit.org/kit/

Name: Ruth Catlow
rethinking wargames – http://www.low-fi.org.uk/rethinkingwargames/
domestic idols – http://www.furtherfield.org/rcatlow/domestic_idols/
Chosen work- Views from the ground floor by Jess Loseby: http://www.viewsfromthegroundfloor.com/

*Name: Phil
*Home – *http://www.medialounge.org
*project -* http://www.love-machine.org
*commercial -*http://www.spill.net

Name: Andi Stamp
Directed and produced: http://www.bbc.co.uk/shootinglive
Member of: http://www.theculturecompany.co.uk
A bit of fun: http://www.artrumour.com/

Name: Ana Carvalho
a long time ago – http://virose.pt/alingua/
and work in progress http://www.iana34.com/tale_about_urban_piracy
Chosen work: http://www.subtle.net/tunnel/

Name: lo_y
current Home – http://lo-y.de.vu
my universe – http://google.com/search?q=lo_y
Chosen work:’ Social Fiction – http://socialfiction.org

*Name: Patrick Lichty
*General – * http://www.voyd.com/voyd
*Subversive -* http://www.theyesmen.org
Chosen Work: US Dept of Art and Technology http://www.usdept-arttech.net/

Maf’j Alvarez Homepage: http://www.mafj.co.uk
Stroke: http://www.sciart.org/partners/1998/98_29.html
Chosen Work- Milkkitten by Tanya Meditzky http://www.milkkitten.com

Mark Cooley
Work­http://www.war-product-war.com
http://art-design.smsu.edu/cooley
Chosen work(s) Stop Shopping Tour­ my dads strip club http://www.mydadsstripclub.com/tour.htm

*Name: Joseph and Donna
*Mediated – *http://www.electrichands.com
*Conceptual -* http://www.corporatepa.com
*Chosen work:-‘ The POINT CDC – by various’ *http://www.thepoint.org

Name: Tamar Schori
Oodlala – http://www.oodlala.net
Memolog – http://www.memolog.net
Beadgee – http://www.tamar-schori.net/beadgee/beadgee.html
Chosen work:-‘ Memecodes – by Philipp Lenssen’ http://memecodes.outer-court.com/

Name : Chris Webb
Frequency Love – http://www.furtherfield.org/cwebb/frequency_love/
Screen Moments – http://www.furtherfield.org/cwebb/screenmoments/vsmixes
Chosen Work’ Dennis Cucumber – Remixing the web
http://www.denniscucumber.com/default1.htm

Name: Sim Winter
Home – http://www.soy.de
Colored Thoughts – http://www.soy.de/coloredThoughts/index.php3
Chosen work:-WebTV by Jimpunk – http://544×378.free.fr/(WebTV)/FFFFFF.htm

Name: Marc Garrett
Turmoil – http://www.furtherfield.org/mgarrett/turmoil/
Hardware – http://www.furtherfield.org/mgarrett/hardware/index.htm
(View only in Internet Explorer)
Chosen work:- Box Explorer – by Andy Deck
http://www.artcontext.org/list/art/2002/boxplorer.html

When viewing Ilona Huss Walin’s piece “What if I was a Rat?” immediate references to the human condition began to flow through my over-mediated cranium. We will probably never fully know whether the artist was aware of the overwhelming effect and reflective questioning of this piece. A barrage of metaphorical, multi-narratives and ironies, offer the viewer multi-layered insights and poignant subtexts’ that are not altogether affirmative, even though at first it seems quite humorous.

The rats are placed in a human-social construct and the artist asks us to watch them play out humanistic roles in a designed, physical living space. It’s a kind of real-time Big Brother scenario, with rats (obliviously) taking centre stage. The set is a scaled-down model, of Ilona’s own home; mimicking much of the contemporary family or homely trimmings we are all familiar with. The rats are surrounded with generic, domestic western furniture that has been delicately crafted with an accurate sense of detail, made to scale, specifically for the rats starring in this parodic, networked show.

In the theatre, or rather the room there is a small television and it is left on permanently, invading their imposed trappings. We can just about see what is featured on the mini television as they themselves ignore it. At first we laugh at these rats and the spectacle before us. They are like toy things. Products for our cultural entertainment, yet they do not comply with our socially constructed, emotionally standardized desires. They are doing nothing of any interest in front of us that fulfils what we would term as entertainment. We soon realize immediately that they are not exuding any thespian mannerisms or actions for us to consume emotionally, they are just doing their thing.

In this work we can see aspects of ourselves reflected back at us. Baudrillard in his study called ‘Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign’ wrote “the TV Object was becoming the centre of the household and was serving an essential ‘proof function’ that the owner was a genuine member of the consumer society”. Meaning that without a television, we feel insecure, not part of the collective state (of mind), nation or worldly loop.

What is worth acknowledging here is that using rats in such a contained environment immediately brings about the connotation of “lab rats”. Many of us are aware of the experimentations that have happened through the years on such animals, and not just rats, of course. When viewing these scuttling animals in the room set up by Ilona Huss Walin, we can easily visualise ourselves in their place, being experimented on in a cultural sense, the scene is loaded with parallels to the human condition.

One of the interesting aspects of using and exploring visual and audio creativity via an Internet-based medium such as this is that the medium and its variable futures are not fully resolved yet. The format is still fresh, and prediction is speculative regarding where it will go and how society will use it in a wider sense. It would also be useful to note that controls over future net-based broadcasting such as this and let’s not forget the Internet in this activity, might be stunted in the name of anti-terrorism, the protection of corporate interests or any other excuses handed down via such hierarchical institutions.

One thing that we can be sure of is that much inventiveness, and creative talent has been applied to in exploring the multi-various potentials of this medium to the full, consciously engaging and coming up with awesome facilities such as that designed by NonTvTv broadcasting, transmitting real-time projects that can last over a month online. The timescale itself challenges our notions of time and what it means to us and our patience. With a directed intelligence breaking away from the traditional, product-led MTV generation and the dippy futurist monotheist, misdirected fetish idea that speed is of the essence, Ilona Huss Walin used this facility successfully, managing to capture people’s imaginations whilst dealing with the practicalities of an artwork that has to be ongoing for a long duration of time, constant 24 hour viewing on the Internet.

The visceral-ness of “What if I was a Rat?” brings home to us that our physical selves are
limited by the social structures built around us, and perhaps a rediscovering of our feral selves is called for. Contemporary society has lost touch with its sense of being – predictable security, false normality, material comfort, bland entertainment, and the illusion of eternal youth. As we watch these rats nibbling away at the set around them, it reminds us of how transient and disposable those objects before us and ourselves are in the greater scheme of things.

The rats’ life was directly broadcast and projected at Art museums in Scandinavia for five weeks. Visit here Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

AGORAXCHANGE NEEDS YOU!

‘First citizenship ceremony for UK The first ceremony for immigrants granted British citizenship has taken place in London’:’Spending parents leave little inheritance More and more older people are skiing and it has nothing to do with snow and slopes: this type of skiing stands for Spending the Kids Inheritance, or SKI’:’Gay couples to get joint rights Gay and lesbian couples are to be given the chance to get similar legal rights to married couples under a new Civil Partnership Bill.’

These domestic sounding BBC news headlines of the last couple of months, that represent a microcosm of the everyday global struggles over resources, citizenship and personal freedom, would never have occurred under the new social order proposed by agoraXchange and neither would the headlines that tell of the deaths of 9 US soldiers, a Japanese hostage and 60 Iraqis in Falluja.

This net art project, commissioned by Tate Online to “Make the Game, Change the World” sets out four decrees which “form the fundamental political tenets for the new world system on which the game is based”. These are:-

1. CITIZENSHIP BY CHOICE
2. NO INHERITANCE
3. NO MARRIAGE
4. NO PRIVATE LANDRIGHTS

The stated purpose of agoraXchange is to establish “an online community for discussing and designing a massive multi-player global politics game challenging the violence and inequality of our present political system”.

Bravo, outstanding idea!

I was stirred up and provoked by the bold persuasive, agit-prop style of its “backstory: A Saga of Nations”, which subverts the history of man’s grand, evolutionary struggle towards civilisation with an alternative “herstory” of draconian border control and the apathy of the masses in the face of implacable state violence. This art project takes Nietzsche’s critique of the “sober realist’s” smugness (in the face of a world where things turn out to be exactly as bad as they had described), as a springboard for changing the law by changing the language. However I do feel that this art project, which also aims to liberate our creative imaginations, would be more successful with a shift of emphasis towards visual language, as a more generative, multilingual and accessible form of communication than the culturally encoded and politically loaded (in the global sense) use of (English) text.

Having gone to such lengths to implement the website to facilitate public engagement, Jacqueline Stevens and Natalie Bookchin, initiators of this project, may have created the game’s first nemesis in the form of its own online web presence- which inadvertently, through its elaborate structure and use of language, reproduces some of the problems of the insular academy rather than creating the ground-breaking, open collaborative community forum they intended. Its dense, theoretical and text-heavy content unwittingly imposes an invisible barrier to participation through an inflexible set of entry requirements for would-be contributors.

To take part in the early stages of the game design, one has to be proficient in the concepts of game theory. The “game design room” is divided and then sub-divided into categories, each of which pose general questions with incredibly complex ramifications. In the Player Representation forum we are asked to respond to the following question- “If the player is represented as an individual, what are its attributes?”, the answers to which must be contingent on one’s answers to other questions. In fact one must have a concept of a whole new game, inline with the core rules prescribed by the authors in order to contribute, unless one responds with a kind of academic, stream of consciousness inspired by the linguistic structure of the question posed.

In a previous projects The Intruder and Metapet, (an on-line virtual pet game in which a correlation is drawn between pets and employees where Biotech innovation meets corporate creativity), Bookchin has been fantastically successful at communicating and engaging players in great political games through a use of humour, irony, great visuals and a connection with popular culture.
In the agoraXchange Site Feedback forum a post by net artist, Kanarinka highlights the central problem.

“I am afraid that there is not enough at stake in this current game…Why would I ever come back to this site? Why would I care about the outcome of the discussions that take place here? Is there anything at stake for me here?”

agoraXchange sits alongside recent net art gaming activism projects such as Anne Marie Shleiner’s Velvet Strike. In Velvet Strike artists are invited to contribute to a collection of antiwar posters which can then be spray painted as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter terrorism game “Counter-Strike”. This project intersects in a very clear and genuine way with a specific online community, with tactics that the audience understands because it is the subject of the game- guerilla tactics. In the hugely entertaining, informative and slightly scary “Flamers” section of the website we can see how players feel that there is something at stake- the defence of their right to play the game without feeling morally compromised.

For a game to work, it must have a real place in one’s idea of personal or collective destiny. If it is entirely speculative, giving no indication of how it might impact on the fortunes of the world, one’s contribution is in danger of becoming merely an exercise in didacticism, an attribution in a pamphlet in the library of a prestigious Institution.

Commissioned and platformmed by Tate Online agoraXchange truly has its foundations in an institution established and flourishing (with huge popular success) on the very principles that the proposed game sets out to subvert and so it’s surprising to see the platform treated in such an art-conventional way, as an online white cube, a neutral space. By overlooking the context in which it sits, associated with the Tate Online website, alongside the documentation of private and public collections which endorse an art cannon depicting many of the inherited patriarchal values which agoraXchange challenges, this project must be missing a trick; failing to take the circumstances and opportunities of its virtual affiliation into account. Surely this project should somehow engage with the Tate’s diverse online audience in a more direct and rebellious way; find out who they are, what they might contribute on their own terms.

Even with all its problems, this ambitiously conceived project is well worth a good exploration. I for one will be lobbying for a more flexible and intuitive format so that we can get to discover how a whole load of different types of people respond to their proposal for a new world order. We can safely say that in the war on war, AGORAXCHANGE NEEDS YOU!

Recent projects by Ruth Catlow include Rethinking Wargames.

Turning to Chomsky by Andrew Baron

I live in New York City, perhaps the safest yet potentially dangerous place on earth. Therefore, when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do, before I can even see straight, is check Cnn.com to make sure there is no big red block of news alerts on top of their news site. As long as the world is not crashing down around me, the next thing I do is check Blogdex.com, to see what else is going on. Blogdex is my best source of what news everyone is talking about and often the source of underground news that hasn’t hit the mainstream yet.

On the morning of March 25th, I noticed the top, most popular link on Blogdex was one that surpassed all the rest of the links in popularity by five times. Wow, I thought, what’s this? Noam Chomsky had released a new blog called Turning the Tide and everyone was talking about it.

Chomsky seems to have resurfaced recently into pop-culture by releasing his timely works on 9/11 and now, in the heat of the 2004 US presidential elections and the quagmire called the war in Iraq, Chomsky is out in full force.

When I first visited his blog that morning, he only had one thread. It was short and terse but it was too early for me to grasp the full implications of what he was saying. I’m used to bloggers getting right to the point with a picture or a silly one liner to sum everything up and the kind of writing style that Chomsky uses reminded me of my days as a philosophy student having to wake up and read the likes of Hegel and Husserl – the kind of writing that takes a while to get into.

In addition to all of the bloggers who were linking to Turning the Tide, I noticed an exceptionally long array of comments left by random visitors. Looking at the comments section of a blog is often a good indicator of how popular the blog is, in terms of generating a reaction in the readers. The most popular online political pundits of our day, for instance, will usually spur on hundreds of comments for each post. In this case, within the short amount of time that the word got out about Chomsky’s blog and the fact that it had several hundred comments in less one day, not only alluded to the international appeal that must have occurred, but also the spirit and rage that led all of these readers to write. The density of the comments section was the major incentive I needed to wake up and re-read what Chomsky had written – to try and come to terms with what he was saying.

After spending about ten minutes reading and re-reading the posts that should have only taken me about 60 seconds by length, I came to understand not only what he was saying but also why he is so popular.

Like my favorite philosophers, Chomsky has a way with words. A short sentence of ten words can have the density of an entire volume of work. Despite the effort that is needed on the reader’s part, it is a pleasure to get, because his sentence structure and vocabulary are so unique and artistically put. I remember asking my philosophy professors who insisted my papers were not long if they would say the same thing if I was Nietzsche and handed in a short list of aphorisms. “But you are not Nietzsche”, they would say as I shrugged. Yea, I guess they were right.

Chomsky is like Nietzsche in this regard and as the days go on, I have been keeping up with his journal. Chomsky is politically fueled and opinionated, yet his opinions somehow transcend the subjective. By merely alluding to historical events, the world’s contemporary political situations of today are clearly illuminated. He is able to quickly and convincingly get right to the crux of augments such as, “Should we be fighting a war in Iraq?”, “Would it be beneficial to keep Bush in office?”, “What are the conditions that make any war okay?” In case you haven’t noticed, these topics, which seem to be so diluted with covert operations, business objectives and long winded personal rants, especially of the ridiculous and comical kind, lead to the difficulty of knowing what is going on as a matter of fact, let alone the inability to assess if they right or wrong. After only two days of postings by Chomsky, for instance, the comments section grew so large, with so much garbage, Chomsky had to take the comments section down entirely. I feel as though this was actually a good thing because you could tell from reading them that most of the visitors themselves were spending more time arguing with each other’s misinformed delusions than sticking to the topic of course.

After several more days elapsed, I started to pick up a thread. The blog, as it unfolds over time, reads like a book in the making. I found it extremely ironic when one of Chomsky’s colleagues, Rahul Mahajan, criticized Chomsky’s blog for not having “the feel” of a blog. He was right, it’s not like a typical blog which, including his own, is inconsistent from post to post, rarely with specific topics and for the most part as whimsical as the day to day lives of a ship of fools.

Therefore, I am left to conclude that Chomsky, however new to the blogosphere, has begun a master. His posts are ideal for being entirely informative, short in length, full of weight and cohesive altogether. His writing style is original and artistic. His opinions are well informed and new yet they carry the weight of the obvious. What more could anyone ask for in a blog?

Andrew Baron: http://www.rocketboom.com

While writing this review of Peter Luining’s work 7.7°, I was listening to the radio, and a message was secreted to me from a far distant realm. Actually, I am under no illusions that it was an encrypted tenet, especially for me, in fact, it was very straightforward – although I am certain the radio segment meant a great deal more to me than most others who may have been listening. A presenter was talking about sacred medieval gardens and how the waterfall in this space, symbolised a phantom. Architecturally the waterfall is the central exhibit and is a symbol of the virtual phantom from where life flows. This garden was a sacred space, a zone out of time, and a place for one to connect with the evanescent qualities of life. One could use the garden as a retreat, but that is not what the garden was for. It was a place to rediscover what the world ought to be like and to project these atmospheres back out into the world.

Why does this relate to 7.7°? I found that 7.7° is where things slip; this net art not only takes you into the future, oddly enough, with a timeless enthusiasm. It gives the feeling that you are one piece of an upscale physical process, working on the upper level of a vast network of pipes. To see it you must be part of the network.

It is also a dance, a kind of performance, because, at times, the cubes are weak, like a fluttering, fading moth. There is an incredible radiance, a smiling with an inner glowing quality that is unique. But there is something ancient about these cubes, referring to the 6th centre chess board of 64 squares used for Chaturanga, borrowed from an earlier game called Ashtapada, a racing game played in Ancient India. The moth-like quality, its slight fluttering and the feminine fragile quality you find in kabuki theatre. Turbulence / sudden contrasts/black-out, black hair and fabric over white glowing skin, concentrated stillness and fast-forward flickering sequences.

Luining uses flash software, like a camera, producing grainy sounds with an elemental black and white, film-like effects on the small framed net stage, revealing actions with textural variations, sometimes thin and stiff, too fast, not life-like, or else the image appears as if through a window, with small inexplicable, ambiguous gestures, but solid and three dimensional.

Linda Duvall’s Stained Linen throws us into the middle of a family trauma: “you’ve got five people all crazily upset about the whole situation; if she had told them in the beginning, she wouldn’t have all this happening.” As we navigate through a branching sequence of overheard conversational snippets, the circumstances of the trauma begin to become clear. Sometimes the sequence we follow has occasional small loops, so we hear some sound-bites a second time, and they take on new significance in the light of the richer narrative context.

Each fragment of conversation is set against a still photograph of a meal for twenty or so participants, who we assume are the conversationalists. As the discussion develops, the meal progresses and night falls. Then — this being a non-linear medium — the sun is up again! It’s like a hypertext version of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen/The Celebration. Only in this case, the main protagonists — Genevieve, Sean, Brian, Renee, Marianne, and Collette — are absent from the meal.

Stained Linen holds attention both in the form and content of its revelations. The first thing you want to do is make sense of what is going on. The fragments reveal how the protagonists responded to events, or speculate as to their motivation or ethics, rather than providing any direct diegesis. I’m not going to give away the story, but the one- or two-word links that appear superimposed on the photograph’s titillate with their allusiveness: ‘femininity’, ‘suck’, ‘mouth’, ‘plague’, ‘taboo’, ‘living a lie’ and, umm, ‘station wagon’.

This use of links is an inversion of standard web page conventions. Normally you see a linked word in the context of a full sentence and click on the link to find out more detail. Here the links have only an uncertain, visual setting, and you click on them to get the fuller semantic context. A bit like tabloid headlines.

As often in this form of hyper-linked narrative, the structure of the links remains hidden, though groups of sound-image fragments are clearly organised in ‘neighbourhoods’ (keeping an eye on the address bar in your browser helps you track these). The Stained Linen site invites you to apply to take part in the next ‘dinner date’, so I assume Duvall is plotting a series of these cryptic meditations on ‘family secrets’ and ‘digressive acts’. However, as well as having a skeleton or two in your cupboard, it looks as though you’ll need to have several friends and relatives able to visit northern Saskatchewan for their dinner. You can post your opinions about the site, though at the time of writing the guest book does not make inspiring reading.

Stained Linen is in some ways an extended exercise in what is known in UK slang as ‘picking up fag (cigarette) ends’: the kind of voyeuristic overhearing of others’ intimacies that encourages you to speculate on the possible scenarios that would explain the judgements being made of the principal protagonists. As a ‘user experience’ it foregrounds your own attempts to make both logical and moral sense out of what is being said. The design is simple and effective — though it would benefit from better sound editing in a few places — and makes for an engaging way of spending an hour of your surfing time.

Creating art software since 1990 and then moving onto the Internet in 1994 Andy Deck has worked with the Web using two main sites, artcontext.net and andyland.net as platforms to display his digital-based explorations.

In the net art activist world, there have been many inspiring talents who have shone through the flickering, radiated haze of our computer monitors. Andy Deck is one of those individuals who has somehow succeeded in maintaining consistent integrity in his work without glorifying himself above the work itself. Instead of falling for the whimsical self-historicizing art = personality myth, he has positioned his work in a socio-cultural context, actively questioning life’s political struggles. He also collaborates with other artists and people not seen or known as artists.

Deck’s work is critical of corporate culture and questions militarism. Challenges to such hierarchies can be seen frequently in much of his work. His decision to develop his work using the Linux operating system and publishing the source code for many of his software-based projects reflects his conduct in keeping with his anti-corporate stance. Most Linux operating systems are distributed by non-profit computer vendor organizations, offering the global population their code to create the means and process of independent networking solutions at a minuscule cost in contrast to Microsoft and Apple corporations.

Deck is developing “for the Linux system” as much as “with” it. In this way, he contributes to online content/culture in a way that’s accessible to people who choose to use alternative software/operating systems. The activism of this work lies in its contribution to the diversification of the software market by exploring possibilities and contributing new chunks of imagination to the code.

It would be too easy to align Deck’s decision to use Linux as just a political statement alone; one must remember that he is an artist, and the code-based language itself is a segment of the overall palette. It is a pigment, an ingredient, aesthetic inclusion to what helps to make up a fluid and interactive work of art, part of the craft.

It can also be viewed as a dexterous manoeuvre to explore contemporary technology via creative means consciously. Perhaps an evolutionary state of mind, pushing what we all see as art or what we perceive as art into a realm of progressive, lateral re-evaluations and functions.

” There is an integratedness that encompasses the technical experimentation and the art/activism blending. Both are ways of challenging the limits that earlier generations of artists (and spectators) have been saddled with in the art/culture market (ideology).“- Andy Deck.

If one is inclined to pull out an overall message from Deck’s varied and well-informed critical artwork. You wouldn’t be venturing far off base in acknowledging that a contemporary artist or creative entity not only must confront changing technological circumstances that disrupt familiar paradigms of art and the artist, but also must possibly consider evolving and re-evaluating our inherited socially constructed attitudes, politically and emotionally. Many have discovered that it is no longer enough to be an artist alone in the singular sense of the word.

Why a retrospective?

This is Furtherfield’s first ever “artist’s retrospective”. We’ve been puzzling over what this might mean in a platform like this and why we would do such an “art world” thing. Well, in the case of the work of Andy Deck, someone’s got to do it, and why not us? It’s got to be done, and it should have been done already, so now we are doing it.

Perhaps it is also because, with Deck’s work, there is coherence, a crystal clear dedication, and a purpose to his oeuvre that offers a unique perspective on the artistic/critical history of the Internet. In committing ourselves to a retrospective, we create an alternative context, a choice. History is subjective, fickle and can be divisive, which can all too often make being seen a political situation whether one wishes it to be or not.

Furtherfield, who advocates that anyone can claim and reclaim their own identities, whether as individuals or as a group on their own terms, invites you to enjoy and thanks Andy Deck for allowing such an occasion to occur.

Caught between sleek animation and superb graphic seduction, JTwine’s net-based work “NIESATT” is alive with visual and emotional charge.

“I was dropped into the corporate world when I was 20 and I was disgusted by it. To express my unhappy situation I start literally to draw myself out of it. Power structures, technology and human relations became a Leitmotif in my work.” -JTwine.

The issues JTwine grapples with are consumption, overload and pseudo- information. The work has an intelligence that is not pontificating to make one feel uncomfortable. Arresting one’s imagination with the pace of animated graphics, the issues that belie NIESATT-PARALLEL WORLDS present themselves in short statements and sketches. And yet, the visual presentation and narrative structure, which slyly glide between advertising, web-graphic and simulated game styles, is unique enough to open the viewer to questions rather than being a dumb receptor. His stance keeps the questions in areas of exploration, seeking solutions, a space that is open-ended. In an interview, he says “I’m interested in truth not beauty. Distortion or essentialisation might be necessary to create a true image to reveal visions of the human drama on the battlefield of reality in our commercialized and machine dependent world.”

JTwine’s website, PHA GREYLAND has a number of such diaryistic logs that locate him well enough for us to feel we know him.

JTwine is a net-scribbler, fusing his sketches, observations, and videos into a mini-world with attributes of his sensations: visually audible noise. The site is constantly unfolding, click by click, revealing layer upon layer of involvement and introspection on issues of power structures, technology and human relations. In NIESATT, the notion of “parallel worlds” translates into dividing every inch of the screen into slithers of multi-layered, scrolling, exploding, animated, visual, wordy, flash, gifs; the website seems unlimited and unbound by time and space constraints. One can get lost in it, but never feel at a dead end for all the links, tunnel and merge into the world of JTwine.

Then again, we may question what draws one into this net-based work? What is it that compels us to explore it? I’d say it’s the sheer pleasure of the unexpected image, the artistic “time travel”, and the visceral hand-drawn sketch with its dynamic high voltage 2D screen avatar, which makes space for the throbbing vibrancy of the site.

Maybe this is the equivalent of submersive emotional intelligence on the net.

“Moment” by Joe Keenan is a unique piece of generative/interactive software poetry I have visited many times. If I’m not mistaken, “Moment” requires IE for the PC, by the way. I don’t tend to revisit many art works on the Net; many of them are for one or two reads or perusals or visits, or interactions, playings, whatever. And that’s fine. You visit them once, and that’s that. I revisit Joe’s “Moment” for various reasons, the primary one being I still have not seen/read it all; each time I visit it does/says something I haven’t seen. Also, what “Moment” does with text visually is sometimes a wonder to behold, yet neither is it simply ‘text as image’; the text is usually interesting. Joe Keenan is a significant poet as well as programmer and visual guy. Another reason I visit it is to get a sense of the progression of the piece, a sense of it overall as I work my way through both the functionality and the “threads” and “aspects”.

He’s from the Buffalo/New York area. He is unassuming about his poetry; you don’t hear much from him. There are some other visual poetry (non-programmed) works from him at Generator Press; his are the first four. As you see, all of the visuals are made entirely of text, ie, there are no bitmaps or vectors involved in Joe’s visual poetry, typically, as far as I know; it’s all text and color. In this regard he shares the approach of Ted Warnell, whom Joe knows and admires. But they are quite different artists. Joe’s background is first as a poet, I suspect; Ted’s is first as a visual artist; Joe’s text is readable; Ted’s often isn’t; Joe is, I would say, an unacknowledged master of visual poetry combined with strong attention to the word–both the text and the resultant image are of concern to Joe; the text is a concern of Ted’s, but the concept and the visuals typically dominate. In Ted’s work, it’s often interesting to check out the source code; the text is sometimes presented there. Ted sometimes uses bitmaps, and if so, they’re woven into the html and text; but, primarily, the ‘material’ of both Keenan and Warnell is text, html, and javascript.

The programming of “Moment” is in Javascript/DHTML. The programming is available via ‘view source’ if you want to check it out. I haven’t looked at the programming very much at all; what “Moment” does on the monitor is enough to keep you occupied for a year or so without looking at the code, though I just had a look at it now and discovered that it takes keyboard input as well as point and click input from the dropdown menus. It also has a text editing facility that allows you to input your own text. The programming is really well done, and has only stalled my browser once in all the times I’ve visited it over three or four years, which is pretty good for a piece of this extent.

“Moment” was published on BeeHive in 2001, and it appeared as a URL in Joe’s posts to webartery probably around 2000. And no one has written about it, that I know of. I think this is probably because Joe isn’t noisy about his work. But there it is on the Web, hopefully for many years to come. I regard it as one of the finer achievements in combining poetry, the visual, and programming for the Net. Also, if you know United States poetry, or more particularly, the poetics of the last twenty years in avant garde writing in the USA, you see that Joe Keenan is aware of language poetry and various strains of international visual poetry. “Moment” has its relations with various poetics, but stands as a unique achievement on its own.

no/copy/right is an online exhibition that has just been opened by no-org.net , a “new Jerusalem art network envisioned as a platform for experimental projects in the area of netbased and digital art and for the exchange of independent information on contemporary art.” Subsequent to a call for works on the theme of anti / counter copyright which went out through most mailing lists at the start of this year for a new net.art ‘space’ completely unknown to the community, I have been regularily checking the site to see how well the exhibition fared. It’s a shame but many online exhibition “spaces”, which have had promising debuts, have not been in successive exhibitions or have quite simply been pushed out by the mainstream art world. One example of the latter was the Irish Museum of Modern Art http://www.irishmuseumofmodernart.com/ – which was initially started as a protest against the sad state of affairs of new media art in Ireland (a comment I’m well qualified to make) by using a url suggestive of the state funded institution and having an online exhibition at that url, but in fact having nothing to do with the Irish Museum of Modern Art – http://www.modernart.ie/, the institiution based in Dublin. As you can see by clicking on the previous two urls, both domains are now one and the same due to legal action taken against the artist who initiated the exhibition, questioned the lack of support of new media by the recognised institution and of course the state, found himself pursued even in this virtual space for something he had legally bought, set up and run and has found all to no avail due to the continuing lack of support of new forms in the arts by the ‘real’ institution.

This seems to be the first online show no-org.net have curated yet the thought and care that has evidently been invested in it presents us with an exhibition that is current, challenging and very relevant. The exhibition is a well-chosen eclectic collection of net.art works, some not specifically net.art – yet cleverly re-appropriated for the show under the theme no/copy/right, some which are already well known and a few others completely new. It nether suffers from a lack of quality in its submissions nor fails to deliver these in an appropriate and intelligent manner touching on many themes and techniques of net.art, counter culture, subversion, cultural recycling, recontextualizing media, software as art form, minimal and conceptual to name but a few. A fantastic debut to a new net.art space, lets hope no-org.net will persevere with future net based exhibitions and set a new standard.

Eight works make up the exhibition:

A New Movie by Matt Roberts, is an application that uses the latent energy of a users mouse movement to re-edit Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958) to create – A New Movie. Technically similar to works such as Jonah Brucker-Cohen’s Desktop Subversibles, conceptually the work has been completely taken in a different direction. Instead of reveling in the pure data produced by the interaction to create an artwork, A New Movie emphasizes the non-linearity of the user’s gesture by appling the results of a non-linear process to a linear form creating a new montage of a known film – recontextualising it, reediting it and drawing into question the position / role of the creator.

AfterSherrieLevine by Michael Mandiberg, builds on a copyright controversy which occured in the late 70’s and is essential 20th century art history. “1936 Walker Evans photographed the Burroughs, a family of sharecroppers in Depression era Alabama. In 1979 in Sherrie Levine rephotographed Walker Evans’ photographs from the exhibition catalog ‘First and Last.'” In 2001 Michael Mandiberg took this a step further by scanning these same photographs, and creating the websites afterwalkerevans.com and aftersherrielevine.com. His intention was “to facilitate their dissemination as a comment on how we come to know information in this burgeoning digital age”. While not classical net.art in the forms and modes we are used to, it is the reprodution and dissemination of these works in the electronic domain, building on the previous initiative and achieving the next logical step for these works which necessitates their recognition as net.art.

Beadgee by Tamar Schori “is based on the book ‘Three Young Rats and other rhymes’, a collection of 19th century nursery rhymes + drawings by Calder”. Here a correlation between image and word is made. Each part of each drawing is associated with a rhyme and the user is invited to deconstruct Calder’s appropriated drawings via Schori’s interface to create new images and new rhymes. The act of deconstruction not alone allows the user to dismantle and contribute to the evolution of, not one but two, art works but also allows the user to share that act of creation through appropriation by saving these ‘new’ works to a gallery space.

co~dec by Michael Takeo Magruder informs us about the subversion “of copyrighted media information for the creation of artworks which reflect upon the dualistic nature of media as both information source and cultural stimulant”. A movie for the net, co~dec converts information to art with the application of processes. Translations, dissections, compressions and the digital artifacts they leave behind all added to the piece create a thing of beauty yet mysticise their contents.

digitalrecycling by Gaulon is essentially a collective users, trash web browser – let me explain. Users can upload files of nearly any content type (text, image etc.) to the site. These get stored according to type on the server and can then be viewed and downloaded by other users to possibly be used to create new works of net.art. Digitalrecycling is in fact a work as repository reflecting the society of archiving and recompilation that exists today.

STEALTH WALTZ by Manu & Mukul imagines a “future of arts and music in its most cynical and well-regulated manner’ where computerised systems hold stead and intellectual copyright owned by corporations has spun out of control. Primarily focusing on music and its possible distribution methods, STEALTH WALTZ is not the easiest of works to penetrate in terms of its concept yet holds true as a realisation of the direction our post napster society is pointed in.

tooGle by Fabio Franchino like co~dec uses the subversion of information to create its content. It is a highly technical and experimental work which has reminiscences of works such as Mark Napier’s Feed and the more recent Googlehouse by Marika Dermineur & Stephane Degoutin. Using Google’s news feed as it’s source material, tooGle uses each word from the headlines to compile a sequence of images into a movie, continually dissecting the information into a chaotic sequence – a remixed anti-news feed.

The Record Machine by Talia Israeli is the one of the two primary conceptual works of the exhibition (the other being AfterSherrieLevine) which simply uses images to discuss the image and its reproduction in the digital age. Here each photograph, the first of a recording device, the second of a printing device, present simply and chronologically the age of the image. Its inception via caption devices and then the need to diffuse it via printing methods, the work all the while suggesting the insignificance of these now through the medium they are presented.

A special feature from Net Art Review. You can find more reviews and information about the NAR team at http://www.netartreview.net

Google and Saussure

While there’s a lot in hypermedia theorist Lev Manovich’s work I vehemently disagree with, there are also beautiful caverns to spelunk. That much popular software, in the very basics of its cut/copy/paste routines, mirrors early 20th century avante-garde practice is undeniable; that hypermedia is a form of cinema is debatable, and I think based less on a survey of practice, especially in browser-based work, than on (alas, unavoidably!) personal taste.

What intrigues me most about Manovich is that he quite early on (1999! At least in his article “Database as a Symbolic Form”) grasped the concept of database logic, and its seeming opposition to narrative. Manovich has an interesting approach to this opposition, borrowed from French linguist Ferdinand Saussure via French semiotician Roland Barthes. In describing their relation, Manovich writes:

According to this model, originally formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure to describe natural languages such as English and later expanded by Roland Barthes and others to apply to other sign systems (narrative, fashion, food, etc.), the elements of a system can be related on two dimensions: syntagmatic and paradigmatic. As defined by Barthes, “the syntagm is a combination of signs, which has space as a support.” To use the example of natural language, the speaker produces an utterance by stringing together the elements, one after another, in a linear sequence. This is the syntagmatic dimension. Now, let us look at the paradigm. To continue with an example of a language user, each new element is chosen from a set of other related elements. For instance, all nouns form a set; all synonyms of a particular word form another set. In the original formulation of Saussure, “the units which have something in common are associated in theory and thus form groups within which various relationships can be found.” This is the paradigmatic dimension.

In other words, the sign system I’m writing from now carries with it the trace of all potential specimens of the system. And, as Manovich points out, much hypermedia foregrounds the paradigm, as opposed to the syntagm. This is, he asserts, the opposite of what earlier media does, focusing instead on what needs “space as a support.”

It’s in the spirit of this Database Logic that Dutch software artist Douwe Osinga works. Osinga–obviously intrigued by the O’Reilly book Google Hacks–has explored ways of expressively searching the Google database that are, in fact, syntagmatic. His Visual Poetry for example, while being unfortunately titled, is a small application written in the Delphi language. The user enters text; the app searches the Google databases for sites containing images corresponding to said text. A slideshow of images culled from the web and interspersed with the user’s text follows.

The application is a beautiful experience. I get the feeling, using it, that a rolling syntax is emerging from the screen. Osinga chose a slow pace for the slideshow, complete with fade-ins and fade out’s. This envelopes the user in a form of reactivity that is too often lacking in hypermedia: cognitive interactivity. Yes, one not only must but wants to think about the sequence of images and words drawn across the screen.

It’s clear here that Osinga has built something less syntagmatic but more paradigmatic if we adhere to Manovich’s model. What this application truly is is an empty box. The content of the piece–the work’s drama–is in how the user relates to the text-and-image sequence, which in turn has been generated by her. It’s a work that examines the interface between the user, the individual, and the web itself, the database, and the collective. It uses that sign system which is always both achingly familiar and forebodingly alien: language. An application like this makes of the paradigm a syntagm.

Another Google Hack worth mentioning here is Google Talk. Input text begins a textual performance by the database–another syntagm extracted from the paradigm. And again, what we have here, from a formal standpoint, is an empty box. Think of the source code of a work like this: it’s seamlessly contentless, and needs the user to supply it with content, to select from the database. What we’ve traditionally defined as writing or painting or art-making in constructing these Google Hacks disappears–in a way, Osinga is simply outlining corners in canvases, or even setting furniture in a room to strategies, to make of ergonomics a sensual experience.

It follows, of course, that Osinga would experiment with artificial life. Indeed, it’s only an adjustment of function parameters between a work like Google Talk and something a bit more standalone, such as Archean, in which the user can breed quarters of colorful animations with each other. Archean is an experiment in visual and virtual genetics. Unplugged from Google and earlier than Osinga’s series of search-engine manipulations, this one comes in two flavors: the executable, written in Delphi, and an online Java applet. The executable is more complex than the Java class, and one user-comment on Osinga’s homepage urges him to make a version for the web. One can see how, instead of making a self-organizing engine like Archean, Osinga makes a blend of user-and-self organizing manipulation pieces with the web…

This tension between syntagm and paradigm, this mediation of the two drives, database and narrative, is the signature of hypermedia. As a metaphor, it’s rich: it’s political, the narrative being a vertical, hierarchic ordering; database flat, relations between members of the set associative, the weight of adjacency. It’s you, and you, and them, and us.

California Dreaming: a book review of The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy
David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park
New York University Press, 2002

“Assembly line hysteria.” Most of us can only conjure up situations of boredom, fatigue and repetitive motion similar to typing all day in a cubicle, maybe. If we’re well read in feminist literature, we’d be aware of the historically gendered etymology of the second part of the term. But the phrase has a specific meaning for factory workers, especially those working in the high tech manufacturing sector. This little figure of speech has been used by companies and governments to dismiss claims of work-related health problems by, mostly female, workers for decades. A large semiconductor producer named Signetics used it in 1978 to dismiss, literally and figuratively, three women workers who became known as the “Signetics Three” – workers who had informed company management about strange symptoms they had experienced that seemed to be related to chemical fumes they were regularly exposed to on the job.

We do not ask for the influence or effect of technology on the human individuals. For they are themselves an integral part and factor of technology, not only as the men who invent or attend to machinery but also as the social groups which direct its application and utilisation.
Herbert Marcuse [2]

The critique of economic rationality and technological instrumentality is nothing new – the Frankfurt School covered that pretty well. But assertions like Marcuse’s can be seen as indicative of a position that can afford to “not ask for the influence or effect of technology on the human individuals.” The Signetics Three could not. Nor can the numbers of contemporary workers manufacturing microelectronics. This does not make such critiques useless, of course, only partial. A more rigorous case would have to involve those not part of the “social groups which direct its application and utilisation,” though are certainly part of its production.

This involvement is what The Silicon Valley of Dreams, a book by Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow, sets out to accomplish. The book functions on a few different levels. On one hand, it represents a scholarly account of both the microchip industry and its relationship with labour and issues of environmental justice. But it is also a practical application of what the authors call “participatory research,” through their direct involvement with advocacy organisations like the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and Santa Clara Center for Occupational Health and Safety. Another, and important, facet of the book is its attempts at making leaps of logic and theory to generate a story that means more than the sum of its parts. Not unlike Mike Davis, another polemical documentarian of California’s dystopia, Park and Pellow weave a story that combines relatively disparate historical narratives. Starting with the subjugation of the Ohlone native peoples and the California landscape by the Spanish, we’re led through the social history of the region, including the gold rush and agricultural boom, into the present. In this narrative, the working conditions experienced by the current Silicon Valley workforce, 70 to 80 percent of which is made up of Asian and Latino/a immigrants, are part of a trajectory that was set in motion with the arrival of the Spanish in “Alta California” during the mid 18th Century.

There is a virtual encyclopedic body of work, including theory and art production, on the emerging uses, effects and possibilities of the networked technologies made possible for users by the ever-shrinking microchip. This makes perfect sense, given the drastic changes that have occurred in almost every sector of daily life because of computers. There has also been an elevated amount of discussion regarding “embodied computing” and physical interfaces recently. And certainly, open source, copyleft, and other challenges to the neo-liberal software order have generated sensitivity to the modes of access for information technologies. But, as Silicon Valley of Dreams makes clear, the costs and benefits of connectivity are not shared equally.

Interestingly, the book steers clear, for the most part, from the “digital divide” dilemma. The divide the authors are interested in is not one that separates the technocracy from the digitally marginal, but rather the one creating social and environmental barriers that place immigrants and women in unnecessarily toxic conditions. The digital can only be separated from its ecological and bio-chemical effects if “we fail to look behind the ‘Silicon Curtain,'” seeing only the “sheen, the sleek outer shell” an image created for mass consumption by public relations firms and the mainstream media. As they document, the costs of producing our digital lifestyles extends beyond the monetary to include chronic and fatal illness from contaminated working and living environments, disproportionately experienced by women of colour.

The two most regulated elements of the social world, are, first, what can enter the body, and second, what a body may be in proximity to and/or intermingle with.
Critical Art Ensemble [3]

Harmful working conditions are often seen as unintentional byproducts of the pursuit of profit. This is how we can fault deregulation of industry for labour and environmental abuses; corporations will do what they can get away with. But, if, as CAE remarks, the body is the most regulated sphere of social life, then we could begin to view industry exploitation of the body as an instance of hyper-regulation rather than deregulation. Epidemiological studies that reveal rates of occupational illness in Silicon Valley production workers over three times that found in other industries would be viewed as part of regulatory procedure, rather than as a failure of it. Such an assertion may sound absurd, but just consider the strictly controlled production environment: the “clean room” and the “bunny suit.” As Park and Pellow point out, both of these technologies are designed to protect the product from the worker, who is considered a “major source of contamination”:a potentially 2 billion particle emitter, not the worker from widely-used toxic substances like xylene and glycol ethers. [4]

Obviously, this is not just an issue in Santa Clara County, California. Throughout Silicon Valley of Dreams, mention of the global economy is present, and the authors do not turn a blind eye to the increasing manufacturing facilities being opened by transnationals in the Global East and South. The last chapter, in particular focuses on the paradigm that most of us relate to as the “death of distance.” Despite the miniaturisation of iPods, laptops and cell phones, we in the North are using more resources than ever, and much of them are still coming from subjugated economies in the Southern Hemisphere. In contrast to the weightlessness experienced while cruising the Internet on a broadband wireless connection in an airport coffee shop, is the materiality of the Tantalum powder found in most wireless devices. The powder comes from a substance called Coltan, often illegally mined in places like the Okapi Faunal Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Looking through archives of industrial stock photography, the images used by the digital industry in creating their public image, one sees no evidence of the industrial processes. No immigrant workforce, no drums of unmarked petrochemicals, no company directed medical tests that are kept from the workers and the public. Only clean, precise, pure digital magic. It would seem that we, as users of the technology are the ones suffering from mass hysteria.

How else can we explain the hyperbolic rhetoric of ephemeral instantaneousness surrounding the desire to be ‘connected’? What is it we are connecting to, if not a delusion that negates the bodies of those that make the connections possible? If we, as artists, theorists, coders, writers and pranksters, can envision creative methods for connecting the wired to new experiences of pleasure, expression and knowledge, can we not envision the connections with those bodies in clean rooms and garages breathing in xylene fumes?

1. from “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” 1941
2. from “Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance”)
3. “Clean Room Clothing Performance,” Robin Howie

related resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Toxics_Coalition
https://turbulence.org/Works/mythichybrid/index.html

With her recent project, Views from the ground floor, Jess Loseby’s digital-based, net.art and new media practice has taken a evolutionary leap forward from her smaller net based artworks, into a larger production of interactive net.film. This ambitious experiment fully incorporates layered slices of text, audio and visual composites, each declaring independent dialogues in their own right. When stitched together, this series of flash and html pages, amalgamate into a closely woven multi-narrative tapestry of consecutive pieces.

‘When do we get too old to have fears dictated by strangers?’ is one of the less complex pieces, accompanied with a looped piano score playing in the background and three images of a young child, situated as a triptych. The young child is sucking on a thumb as a faded, animated background moves slowly, which looks like someone entering a room through a see-through door.

Whilst one listens to the piano with its meditative pace, subjective experience comes alive, forcing one to reflect on childhood fears and the various vulnerable feelings that we may possess now. The images flickering behind the child evoke a very real sense of the other as relational experience, reverberations of dream-like interactions; triggers for our own minds, to redefine, mental images that we have ourselves collected, symbolizing moods of moments in time. It does not necessarily communicate fear as an essential part of innocence. It declares rather an emotional intelligence of what is must be. Our imaginations are poetic, psycho-tools that reason with the influx of fluid memories and the accumulation of intricate sensation.

The work has a latent extra dimension, in that it was created to be exhibited, not only on the Internet, but also in a physical space as a variable dimension installation. The piece may be seen in the form of two interactive projections, with a sculptural element in the presentation. This is a conscious effort by Loseby to open up the work to audiences new to net art.

The title, Views from the ground floor, suggests a reference to the attention paid by the artist to domestic, personal and emotional context as opposed to historical overview. The visitor journeys gently from one scene to the next interacting with each segment accordingly, getting further entwined into the fabric of Loseby’s emotionally tuned lair. Each scene of this mini-epic is complete, exploring separate themes, sensations, sub-plots and stories. This montage plays to create subtle shifts and connections within the overall plot, continually emphasizing how multi-layered the work actually is.

Even though Jess Loseby’s work has expanded in terms of its formal creation and presentation, much of the content and subjective nuances persist, with the continuation of ironic reflections of her family life and situation from a mother’s standpoint, also from the perspective of a creative individual. Her identity is a significant part of her work, declaring a kind of visceral realness that does not rely on the medium itself to justify who she is. In other words, Jess does not hide behind the medium.

“Mainstream art history has filed the personal and emotional under kitsch and feminist art – addressing everyday experiences. The only ‘something else’ linked to net-art is the technology. I think it is probably not emotional laziness but an attempt to separate net-art as a different kind of thing. It’s a shame, I would regret that ….” Jess Loseby & Tara Noid.

Her personal presence and emotional reasoning are an intrinsic part of the work, and this includes the drama of the everyday, daily life is a valuable resource. This is another aspect of the work that communicates on various levels, making it possible to reach people who do not necessarily understand the aesthetics of new media and all its variants. Anyone can get something out this artwork for it touches on human frailty and personal politics that we all have to contend with.

“Views from the ground floor”, was helped with the financial assistance of The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology.

In the guise of a business corporation, Holy Soft sell us the Internet user, packaged faiths in Plug & Pray, an imaginative play on “choose your religion, choose your politics”. The web site itself is well designed, presented with an accurate and meticulous verve. If you were to take the time to observe official software-selling sites on the Internet you’d notice the blanketing of dubious commercial presentations with sober identities that Plug & Pray have consciously mimicked. It seems authentic at first glance, (almost) believable.

If you are tempted by the offers that Holy Soft have kindly put together for you the net consumer, there are various kits available so you can acquire a faith of your choice such as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism. You may choose from a selection of popular standard and deluxe packages for the contemporary, postmodern religious chameleon packaged CD-ROMs. The Plug & Pray site also suggests that if you have recently been through the experience of a new Taliban invasion or you think that your life as a good Christian is jeopardized, you can switch faiths accordingly.

In their press release it says “The Plug & Pray” concept borrows its name and reinterprets the famous idea behind ‘plug and play’ technology. PnP is now a synonym for easy hardware installation and hassle-free software set up that allows you to immediately start using a new HW device or SW application. “Play” becomes “Pray” – your conversion is instantaneous, smooth and seamless.

This cultural subversion of net-based commerce by Internet art activists is one of a number of such conceptual adventures explored and enjoyed by many of us over the years. Alexei Shulgin’s FuckU-FuckMe created in 1999 is a suitable reference for a critical response and an imaginative approach to selling IT packages. It succeeds in breaking down the definition, or illusion of what is presumed authentic. In the FAQ section of the site it says “FuckU-FuckMe is the most powerful, pleasurable, inexpensive, and only dual-party Internet remote intercourse tool on the market today.” Like Plug & Pray it offers a parodic technological solution for our personal needs with a virtual product.
OK, let’s take another step back, three years in time to 1996. Heath Bunting set up a project called Skint – The Internet Beggar. And it’s still accessible as a single, simple web form. On it, the Internet Beggar persona asks for online donations from visiting net surfers. At the top of the page is a statement from the beggar “lurking in piss and puke stinking alleys of the info supa high way squatting almost invisibly in piles of corporate data trash the internet beggar only concerned with his own addictions tries to blag a dollar off disgusted passers-by”.

Unlike Heath Bunting who actually put the online payments into his bank account. Holy Soft’s web site offers an order form page, which asks the customer to buy one of the member’s t-shirts instead. With Heath’s piece the product salves your debilitated conscience. By buying a Plug & Pray t-shirt one is buying into the capitalist game that is being prayed.

Whenever this type of ironic activist net-play on moral values is mixed with the actual possibility of transaction, it can declare tensions. Bringing to the fore questions such as – what is fraud? And who says what is really fraud? Theoretically, Holy Soft could be challenged by law – for actively selling false (immaterial) products under the International Trade Descriptions Act, for selling poly-mythologies, packaged religions. One begins to mentally clock the many other spoofs that have plagued us in our ever confusing “Hyper-real” world. It throws in our face the realization that our consciousnesses are a pliable currency, and are up for grabs.

FuckU-FuckMe (Alexei Shulgin).
Skint – The Internet Beggar – (Heath Bunting)