What you see is almost what you get

‘What You See Is What You Get’ (WYSIWYG) is a term meaning that what you see on the screen is what you will get on output. However for artists who produce work that is output online, the reality is that what you see is almost never what you get, or more specifically what someone else will get. The sheer number of platforms, processor speeds, browser softwares, screen resolutions, font size settings etc. means that a piece is rarely the same on the artist’s screen as it is will be on the screens of the audiences.

Rather than battling against the huge fluidity of viewing conditions, idealword.org actively explores this intrinsic feature of digital art – what you see is almost what you get. For site creator Enrique Radigales, this ‘almost’ describes’ a blurred circumstance, a space for the translation between the digital and analogue states, the relationship between the contemporary human being and its coexistence with computerized environments.”

On first appearance, IdealWord is a periodically updated gallery of computer-assisted sketches. In the piece EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, we see twelve figures in suits. The scene is familiar: posture and proximity of the twelve suggests they are jurors, yet the large size of the image (2290 x 1215 pixels) requires the viewer to scroll horizontally and vertically, observing individuals or small groups instead of the twelve as a whole. This method of ‘partial display’ – large images that require scrolling to view – is intentionally used by Enrique to further draw our attention to the peculiarities of the author/viewer relationship, as well as to focus our attention on the composition and drawing technique itself.

The visual style of Enrique’s work is an intriguing blend of hand and computer drawn. The process he terms ‘MouseStrokes’ involves creating each image line-by-line, a technique that has more in common with engraving than the processes normally used in the creation of digital images. This makes the site visually unique – there are not many sketch artists who would choose such a laborious method – but the implication of engraving is a clever one, as the reproduction of engravings through printing can also be seen as a much earlier form of ‘what you see is almost what you get’.

In keeping with the tradition of reproduction, each piece on IdealWord is available as a downloadable pdf for viewing and printing offline. Enrique again anticipates the slippage from artist to viewer, and highlights the problem of ‘correct’ reproductions, by providing (different) A1 or A4 pdfs of the same image, in addition to the myriad options found within each user’s pdf viewing software and printing hardware: “the home printing revolution… offers a different reading of the serialization of a contemporary work: each user has a copy according to his/her printer and the paper he/she uses.”

Yet IdealWord’s beauty is not merely surface deep. Each drawing contains texts that have been visually camouflaged within the image. These hidden texts – in a variety of styles, and from often surprising sources – are visible by selecting and copy-pasting the piece into a blank text document, or by viewing the HTML source code.

For example, in EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE the sub-text is taken from an article describing software ‘mind tools’ and the development of artificial emotional intelligence via biofeedback, psychometrics or other computer-human interaction. A dynamic relationship is created from title to image, image to text, and text back to title; in this case perhaps asking us to question ’emotional intelligence’ in a general philosophical sense and in the specific practical case of the psychometric testing of jurors.

In DIGITAL VS ANALOGICAL the surface image depicts two wrestling figures (D & A?). Copy-pasting the page into a basic text editor reveals the letters of ‘digital’ and ‘analogical’ repeated as a process poem, formatted precisely with underscore lines. However we again experience the slippage from author to viewer: the way we actually see this poem depends entirely on our hardware and software settings.

There are more ambiguities. Copy-pasting each page into a more ‘advanced’ text editor such as Word will only copy the image and not the hidden text. Alternatively, if we view the text within the HTML source code, it naturally appears punctuated by code tags (D etc) – and although these tags may seem to be extraneous noise, we see in the pdf versions that these code tags often remain, though their formatting and appearance is now fixed. The texts sometimes also appear as illegible transcriptions over the image, creating what Enrique calls ‘stains of text’: used as an illustrative compositional technique (creating depth and texture), but also to offer yet another alternative appreciation of the text with image.

Despite the multiple levels of intention and interpretation, one of the first things you notice about IdealWord is the lack of pretension. We see a piece as soon as we arrive on the site, and there is pleasantly little in the way of artist’s statements and other pre-explanatory blurbs. Of course, the visitor will see as much as they want to see: the sub-texts are hidden, and therefore could be completely missed by the casual viewer. But the success of IdealWord is that it can be appreciated on any level, and we are perhaps made more aware that the choice of what to make of each piece we see is always up to us. Through this simple trick of emphasising the variety of possible ‘ways of seeing’, Enrique shows a great understanding of the constraints – what you see is almost what you get – and the possibilities of the digital medium: “The work created by digital artists is ready to develop its own language and a discourse specific of new media and, more specifically, of net art. It would be a mistake to ignore the possibilities of the metanarrative within this process. While we walk along this way towards a specific language we cannot create digital shadows following our analogue equivalents.”

Quotes taken from email interview with CJ, 02/2005; translation provided by Gemma Deza

prototype (test release) project Dreamlogs – by Christophe Bruno

My first visit to Dreamlogs by Christophe Bruno left me more than a little confused, but interested enough to do a bit of digging to try and figure out what was going on. There’s not much in the way of concrete instruction as to how the ‘idea association engine’ is intended to be used, though, for a project in the ‘testing stage’ this is not an insurmountable problem–particularly for a piece of web art, where it’s not unsurprising for fully realized pieces to come with no instruction at all beyond the feedback one gets from clicking around and trying things.

So I clicked around and tried some things.

On the way I learned that Dreamlogs are “The new world order” and “confront the temporality of a dreamed life with the infinite dimensionality of speech” and “an idea association engine”. “They propose another way to surf on the Internet, by disentangling the discourses that have interlaced over time” and “a new interface to the Global Text: a non-utilitarian and non-local alternative to search engines”. Cool, I’m up for that. Now, what do I do?

Choose my target language…Check.

Choose a sentence or part of a sentence, ok, put some words in…Check.

Optional: put more words in to “modulate” my search. Hrm. Since I don’t know exactly what that means in this context (though the “+” is a good clue), I probably don’t need it, yet.

Go!

Magic happens in the background, and, then I see poured onto the page a bulleted list of text excerpts from what I presume are web pages, each bulleted item showing my word(s) highlighted in the text. OK.
I’m with you so far. Now what? Read some new instructions on the left side. So…I can save it now (seems silly), end the process and start again (good to know but not yet) or do what I’m supposed to do, which is click on any words I see anywhere in the bulleted list items.
When words are clicked they appear in the new search box, right under a display of the current (previous) search(es). OK. So, I’m doing a little free associating. Cool. Clicky clicky. Clicky. Clicky Go!

“No (or very few) results were found, click here to relaunch”

Ooops. Must of done something wrong. Hrm. OK, relaunch.

Work my way back to where I was and this time be sure to pick fewer new words to search on. OK. I get it, I guess. Well. Sort of. Where’s this going?

Let’s think about this. I can put any search terms in and I get a slice of the pool of context that surrounds my terms. I can then pull new terms from that context (so they are, by definition, related, at the very least by proximity), and grab new slices of (at least proximally) related context. What for? I need to check out some of the related materials and see if I can get a handle on what’s going on here.

Back out to the first inside page. Lots of ways to go. FAQ of limited practical use. Paints the concept in brush strokes so broad I still don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Maybe there is no “supposed to be doing”. Eeep. Possible I suppose.

Back out to the first inside page. Let me do some reading on Christophe Bruno. Wow, cool. A ton of extremely intense art. Claims the earliest piece of search engine art. Excellent. I spend three hours checking out other projects Christophe has done or been involved in (my favorite so far: The Google AdWords Happening, but that should not suggest I only found one thing to enjoy, I thoroughly enjoyed the bulk of what I found).

OK, so lots of search engine explorations. Dreamlogs is certainly a logical extension of that. I’m still missing something, though. I do some more reading in and around the Dreamlogs site and reread the FAQ to see if I can puzzle out some usage clues from it.

I gather I’m supposed to be adopting a discursive position and working to its opposite position in a perhaps fixed number of steps. Why would I want to do that? Nevermind, let’s try doing that.

Maybe I’m just not properly wired for free associating out of a limited pool of context in order to bridge opposing discursive positions. Maybe I’m overthinking the whole thing and I need to just have some fun with it. Oh, what’s this? View Current Dreamlogs.

Oh, okay, there’s a whole other thing happening here. After I get my steps all taken, a blog is created on the fly that contains an entry for each of my steps. The entry is composed of an image, an excerpt
from a web page, a “read more” link to the actual page in its natural habitat, a “posted by” credit, and two numbers I can’t really figure out: Interest, and, Correlation With Previous Post. I can guess what they might signify, but, I can’t figure out how, in the context of this whole experience, I’m supposed to use or influence or be influenced by them. Alright, so let’s make some and save them and see what they look like as blogs.

I made two. In the first I started with a beginning of the day phrase and figured I’d try to make it to the end of a day. Not exactly an opposite discursive position, but, not a purely random surf, either.
I’d learned that longer phrases had a tendency to return no results, and single words return a huge amount of results, so I settled in for three to four word phrases and generally kept to phrases that were naturally occurring mostly intact within the blocks of context I was presented with. When I saved it, I learned that the posts appear in descending order, last first and first last. Not a major problem, but, would have been nice to know at the outset (if I’ve been paying attention when I looked at the other finished Dreamlogs, I could have figured that out, so, partially my own fault).

In the second, knowing that the final piece was going to be presented in reverse order, I set out to compose a poem in reverse order that would (as near as possible) end as it began. The phrases I selected to further search on were now chosen in an interactive fashion, visually scanning the context pool while attempting to build lines that would stand on their own and be readable as a poem in either direction (at the line level of granularity). Instead of pulling phrases out of the context, I was pulling single words from all over the page in the order I wanted them to appear. Totally do-able, but my Correlation With Previous Post scores dropped to ridiculously low numbers, as did my Interest numbers. Maybe it’s like golf, and I’m supposed to score low! Or maybe not.
So, it all boils down to: I haven’t been able to figure out what to do with Dreamlogs. In a way, it’s like doing collaborative writing exercises with someone else, only in this case the someone else is a search interface to the text of the web. I can see it being in improvement over a human in the range of context to associatively draw from, but that means trading relevancy for number of results, quality for quantity. I can see it as a way to get at associations and connections that might not normally present themselves, but I don’t see how it’s an improvement over myriad other generative techniques, including but certainly not limited to just garden variety surfing. I do, however, love the building of the blog to house each finished Dreamlog, and, to me, viewing the finished Dreamlogs of others was more interesting than the process of building them myself.

Main image by Anne Helmond.

Feral Trade Coffee: A New Media For Social Networks

Feral Trade Coffee is imported by Kate Rich from Sociedad Cooperative de Cafecultores Nonualcos R.L. in high altitude El Salvador and traded along social networks. Whilst never actually calling itself art, this project reveals the social-context, texture and aesthetics of this venture in “new international trade relations”, with coffee as its medium.

I drank my first cup of Feral Trade coffee at the Risk Academy media lab at the CCA in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago. Every morning it cheered and revived academicians recovering from the previous nights’ excesses of Balvenie and Laphroaig. We’re told that this third shipment is a milder roast than the previous batches and having purchased a bag to drink at home, I can still taste the green in the bean at the top of my palate in this young, light bodied coffee,

Usually coffee farmers ship green coffee beans by the thousands of kilos to be roasted in factories in the Netherlands. Feral Trade coffee is roasted to order, on-site by the co-op in batches as tiny as 150 kilos. The flavour of every batch is unique, determined by the price and availability of the chosen size and variety of bean, (Borbón or Pacamara in this part of the world) as well as by the particulars of the roasting process. A long, low-temperature roast leads to a milder, deeper flavour and in this case, what connoisseurs call a buttery mouth-feel. My guess is that this would be your average Supermarket’s branding nightmare, a coffee that tastes different from one batch to the next.

Kate who works as bar manager at Cube Microplex and radio-engineer with the Bureau of Inverse Technology presented her import business with anecdotes and a demonstration of the coffee-tracking database from the Feral Trade website. And it’s “feral” as in pigeon rather than wolf. This is an important distinction, suggesting street-wise survival tactics in hostile urban environments as opposed to essentialist, romantic notions of untamed nature.

The coffee co-op has shown enthusiasm from the beginning about the potential of supplying coffee to be traded personally, between friends, along slow-networks, across great distances. The Feral Trade logo is reminiscent of old mercantile signage from a time when things moved more slowly. Kate draws the comparison between the days when freight shipped at largo along the canals. It would take weeks to travel from one end of the country to the other so what mattered was frequency; frequency rather than speed. As long as they were moving along at regular intervals, folk would continue to have their daily essentials delivered.

In the spirit of open source programming, the website also displays documentary photographs of a Heathrow Arrivals timetable, scribbled-on-roadmaps from Bristol to the airport, a fork lift truck loading a hatch-back car with coffee. Together these are intended to serve as a how-to should you wish to employ the ‘new trade relations’ methodology yourself.

There is excitement and nervousness at the opening of every new consignment. Each batch represents a considerable investment, paid up-front. The agreement is that whatever is sent from El Salvadore is then traded as Feral Trade coffee. This expression of trust and flexibility between the trader and the co-op flies in the face of fast and large distributors who according to Kate typically pay only an extra 7p per kilo to the co-op for “Fair Trade” coffee. And how much more do we consumers pay for it in our supermarkets?

Export information is also supplied on the DIY, photocopy-and-sellotape packaging. Read around the packet while the kettle boils for the particular shipping details of the current consignment: departures and arrivals, delays and “remarks”. The slogan promises a coffee ‘smooth and smoky without the bitter aftertaste of global trade exploitation’.

This really does raise the arguably cooky question about what part conscience, plays in the sensual experience of flavour. But Feral Trade also seems to be about reattaching the stories of the life and land of the farmers to the taste of the coffee along with the stories of exporters and distributors. Feral Trade coffee certainly seems to stimulate the imaginations and tickle the taste buds of the extended social network of which I am a part and it may even have made me some new friends. While we drink we wonder whether Feral Trade could take root and start to crack the concrete of big business approaches to the global export and distribution of consumables? Are we witnessing the start of a new age in distributed distribution.

This article is also featured on Mazine.ws.

Curation Mastication Preservation

There is a lot of current talk about curation and preservation of media artworks. If you logged on to the New Media Curating list or Empyre, or checked their archives for January 2005, you would see ample discussion on the subject. It appears that artists and curators are suddenly considering the longer-term implications of archiving and curating (in the context of historical consideration) their artwork. Not that artists (particularly those working in digitalis) haven’t been above hosting their works and acting as personal archivists, and Furtherfield itself is just one such site that hosts archives of new media artworks.

A seminar bringing together individuals from organisations such as the Guggenheim in New York and Art Research Communication, the Edinburgh-based company developing new media projects, took place on Saturday, the 29th of January 2005. A joint venture between Vivid, the new media art organisation in Birmingham and the University of Central England invited speakers: Caitlin Jones, Martijn Stevens, Chris Byrne, Andy Webster with Jon Bird (giving a combined presentation) and Sarah Cook.

First to speak was Caitlin Jones from the Guggenheim, who chose to discuss curation issues from the vantage point of the Variablemedia project, the Guggenheim’s attempt to preserve digital works of yesteryears. Caitlin’s paradigm that she works within is formed by considering how Performance artists document and re-enact their work. The impermanence of live performances and how we might capture this in some way provides an opportunity for thinking, at the very least, about what we might have to deal with to ensure continued appreciation of the work.

The Musealisation of Digital Art, the project that Martijn Stevens is involved in, offers a chance to consider how work that may be primarily web-based, or at least exist within some virtual context, can be shown within the bricks-and-mortar environment of the traditional gallery. When net.art works are created within the home environment and most often are viewed either in the same environment or often in the workplace, how do galleries propose to deal with this dichotomy?

I feel a rift exists (despite attempts to create the illusion of this being otherwise) between traditional galleries and their online counterparts. Just as many .Com companies came to realise that you couldn’t base your business on the same models that real-world businesses operated within, so it is that real-world galleries have to begin to understand that they may try to capture the fleeting moment of the digital art work, but they’re only ever going to be playing catch-up with the internet. New business models need to be considered for this type of gallery if the traditional galleries wish to be a part of it.

With a break of sixty minutes, mid-session, attendees were allowed to enjoy lunch and spend some time having informal discussions. Jon Bird and Andy Webster’s Tabular Rasa video was playing in a room off to the side of the main seminar room. It could be argued that lunch is among the most important parts of attending seminars. As much for the chance to get to know fellow attendees as it is to have one-to-one chats with the speakers.

When Chris Byrne took his turn at the altar of digital confession, he chose to sit down. Can’t say I blame him. Chris chose to open his talk with a video tale about a caller trying to “buy” a piece of the Internet in terms of real estate purchasing. The video raised a laugh amongst the audience, setting a good tone for his talk. Chris explored ideas about the location of artworks and location-sensitive issues around curating new media work. Chris works mainly in Scotland. Separating his work from that addressed by Martijn Stevens, Byrne tries to understand how physical works change context with location. Showing examples of work that have occupied everything from small churches in remote fishing villages – with a satellite uplink that was on such a small incline to the earth’s surface that if someone parked their car nearby, they blocked the signal – to media labs placed in landscapes across the Scottish plains that housed artists.

Andy Webster and Jon Bird make a good double act. I mean that in a positive way. They acted against each other in a performance that mirrored the very process of curation that they were telling us about. There are many types of presenters and different ways of discussing subjects. The best are often like this one. Webster and Bird have taken a very experimental approach to developing models for curating. When trying to separate a selection of artists’ films for projection onto cityscapes, they chose to rely on Andy Webster’s experience working with Artificial Intelligence and the algorithms used for some simple decision-making processes. An interesting solution to a difficult problem. And probably one of the few ‘creative’ methods of curating a project that has been used for some time. Some discussion on the subject revealed that people felt the process was somehow ‘wrong’ and inaccurate, but perhaps this is because Bird and Webster have captured the essence of what many curators like to think of as an intangible process and one based on years of curatorial engagement.

Sarah Cook is co-editor of CRUMB (Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss), the website and discussion forum for new media research. Her talk looked at re-enactments, particularly the work of Nina Pope & Karen Guthrie, who have taken part in historical re-enactments to gain an understanding of how we bring past artistic endeavours into contemporary curatorial concerns. Nicely book-ending the seminar against Caitlin Jones’ talk about updating historical digital media works. Cook wondered what original work might be present if we re-create the projects in modern terms. Stepping away from purely digital works, she wondered how technology might help mediate artwork re-enactments. As part of this discussion, she previewed the projects being developed at FACT for an upcoming summer exhibition.

The difficult job of chairing the discussions fell to Helen Cadwallader of the Arts Council England. Never an easy job to chair discussions around these issues, as there is always a varying number of viewpoints for every attendee. Good chair-people manage to allow the flow of the discussion to move outwards from the papers’ main issues and into the concerns that have arisen within the audience’s minds. Helen discussed the current’ state-of-the-art’ as part of her opening speech.
So, how far did the speakers go in solving the problems of new media preservation and curation? Of course, the answer is that there will never be one satisfactory solution or methodology, only differing schools of thought. I cannot help wondering if the whole point of digital art is the ephemerality of it. Maybe we aren’t creating works that will live on forever or at least into the next century. Like Performance art, perhaps the best place for historical contextualizing artworks is from the observers’ memories. But of course, none of us wants to believe that, myself included.

This talk was the final one in a series that Vivid and UCE have presented, with a range of speakers from Brian Duffy and his Modified Toy Orchestra to Electronic Literature within the context of Space. The complete archive of papers and transcripts of discussions arising from the presentations will be published sometime in 2005 by Article Press.

Thanks to Kaye Winwood and Sian Evans at Vivid for their help writing this article.

A walk through three Mexico City blogs

This review touches cursorily on one of the many Mexico City blog cliques. Its members are for the most part unpublished writers who started their blogs between the years 2001 and 2002. Their loosely connected network is evinced by their blogrolls and occassional appearances in each other’s blogs. Some of the blogs are still active and some have become dead links. This review focuses on the way in which two bloggers that belong to this clique write about the city. It starts with the blog of poet/journalist Luis Martignon.

Perixcopio [0] is the lyrical rendition of Martignon’s life in a blog. For the people who know him, the blog may sometimes prove too hard to read from a critical distance. Those who don’t know him, tend to approach the blog with incredulity. The reason is that Martignon always seems to be at the edge of an abyss. [1]

The anger and desperation that we find in his texts are not uncommon in this part of the world. [2] Perhaps they are “specific effects that this city has on the emotions of its inhabitants”. In any case, Martignon stands out among other bloggers in his fascination with the city. And he is unwavering in his position. Even if the city does not treat him too kindly, his poetry is still going to be enraptured by it. [3]

We find numerous mentions of the Mexico City subway in Clvaro Ernesto Obregn’s two blogs. One particular poignant passage is the end of Hard Pop. [4] Clvaro has finally moved out of his parents house and the physical distance between him and his brother is expressed in terms of the subway.

Clvaro created Hard Pop in 2003 for the sole purpose of posting his first novel. It is interesting to note this in light of Blogger’s endorsement of this year’s NaNoWriMo. [5] Although Clvaro’s other blog [6] was also started with the intention of posting a few poems and short stories, it eventually developed into a more conventional online diary.

The city is the necessary backdrop to Clvaro’s two blogs. It is practically impossible to conceive of his stories without the city. And he seems to delight in weaving the urban landscape into his writing. We find elaborate descriptions of Mexico City throughout his blogs. Take for example, the first half of the “Cola de Straub” chapter in Hard Pop.

In his blogs, Clvaro frequently appears travelling in the city. He’s either on his way to work, school or just out partying. As a matter of fact, many of his entries chronicle the nights when he and his friends set out searching for something to do. We are witness to their overindulgence in drugs and British pop music. Along the side, we see them accomplish the not so easy feat of crossing the city. [7]

This review is something of a reduction. It focuses on a particular aspect of three blogs that belong to a particular blog clique within the vast Mexican blogosphere. My hope is that it serves as an starting point, as an invitation to follow the link.

[0]perixocopio

[1]perixcopio_2002_12_01

Unshaved … he tries to get up but all his bones hurt. There is blood in his nose … he is anxious, nervous, he doesn’t know what to do. It’s Monday. He repeats to himself: “There’s not much time left.” Almost no time left.

[2]perixcopio_2001_12_01

At that time of the day, the subway is fucking death … you can see the fatigue, the disgust and the desperation in [everyone’s] faces. They are fed up and it shows.

[3]perixcopio_2003_11_01

The stories of the city are too boring if told before bedtime. That’s why it’s better to go out and take a walk. The name of a city like this one is solitude. Solitude is nothing short of being alive.

[4]hardpop.blogspot.com

[5]blogging-your-novel-part-one.pyra

[6]astroman-x.blogspot

[7]astroman-x.blogspot

Lexicon, an open-source software piece by Andy Deck, begins with a page containing two sparse, rectangular black-and-white images, each resembling a maze. Contained within the image located at the top of the page is a pull-down menu. When selected, the menu displays six choices (256×256, default size, 512×512, 640×640, 768×768, and 1024×1024) that allow the viewer to determine the size of the performance space where s/he has the opportunity to generate visual effects based on Java scripts conceptualized around a particular word. Centered in the image toward the bottom of the page is a tiny icon, also a black-and-white representation of a maze. This icon serves as a navigational motif throughout the entire piece; when clicked, it takes the viewer to the site maze, which serves as the work’s navigational “hub.” Sandwiched between these two maze-like images is the title of the work, rendered in a blocky, outlined font.

Protruding from the left and right sides of the site maze are the hyperlinked words “read” and “write,” respectively. Slyly nestled within the site maze – it took me a number of visits to this particular page before I even noticed them – are the words “about,” “help,” “lexicon,” “words,” and “codes.” Because the piece is not immediately intuitive, those who are unfamiliar with Deck’s work would likely benefit from clicking on “about,” which takes the viewer to the “About Lexicon” page in which Deck describes in straightforward and readable language the ideas that have informed Lexicon’s development. Deck also explains how one might interact with the piece, from creating what he dubs “interactive montage” to composing scripts that can be added to its presently existing vocabulary. The participation and collaboration he encourages points to the conceptual foundation of Lexicon, which rests in large part with the open source philosophy of transparency: software source code belongs in the public domain, subject to public review, manipulation and development. In my mind, Lexicon also poses two interrelated questions: to what degree can (and/or should) open source diminish or eradicate what can be referred to as “the artist’s touch”? Should such diminishing or eradication be used as a yardstick to measure the success of the work?

As someone who is only partially familiar with Deck’s work, his narrative piqued my curiosity and provoked me to find the performance area where I could play. After clicking on several of the hyperlinked words embedded within the narrative and examining the various pages, I concluded that the “Lexicon scripting” page must be where I could try my hand at interacting with the piece. In the upper left hand side of the page are sixty eight buttons, each containing a different word, from “action” to “zap.” The words are alphabetized, and all letters of the alphabet are represented. On the right hand side of the page is a large, rectangular text field, with the word “script” above it, the words “clear” and “help” on its right, and an arrow located underneath its bottom edge.

Thinking at first that my entries needed to be complete sentences, I typed in “chaos ensued when I hit the bullseye,” “chaos” and “bullseye” being two of the sixty eight words, and pressed the arrow. The result was a new page displaying a square “canvas” smattered with random words, either black or white with black outlines, of varying sizes and fonts. Not realizing I could continue to click on the canvas to generate another word smattering, I pressed the “back” button on my browser and typed in another sentence constructed around the choices “streaker,” “win,” and “waffle”: “a streaker wanted to win a sweet honey waffle.” This time, all that appeared on the canvas was the letter “a.” Assuming I must have done something wrong, I clicked on the small maze icon in the upper right hand corner of the canvas to see if I could find a page with additional instructions.

It was the “Publicly-contributed word/code scripts” page, accessible by clicking on the word “read” in the site maze, that clued me in. Near the top of the page is the word “Index,” with a vertical list of hyperlinked dates and times categorized under “today,” “yesterday,” and “this week.” Playing with the submissions of past viewers, I noticed that most had created word combinations from the sixty eight buttons instead of creating sentences (it appears that words not represented on a button are extraneous and don’t count), and that a greater number of words generally (but not always) produced more interesting results. I also discovered that I could change the appearance of the image contained within the canvas by clicking within its borders and drawing on it by dragging the cursor. This is when the piece became addictive. I spent a considerable amount of time trying different word combinations, attempting to match up the black-and-white graphics with specific words, and contemplating Deck’s (and perhaps other Java-proficient contributers’) visual interpretation of these words. Some words, such as bullseye and sinkhole, are represented more literally, while others are represented by a more playful and freewheeling interpretation. At some point during my experimentation I found the pages in the site that contained textbook definitions and the source code for each word.

Because I do not know how to program in Java, the one component of the work I was not able to experience was contributing some source code and seeing the results. I was also not able to decipher whether other viewers have been adding and/or manipulating already existing source code. This led me to wonder if it would add to my appreciation of the work if I would be able to identify the contributors’ different styles with regards to the graphics their programming generates – making explicit Deck’s exploration of public creativity in cyberspace – or if it would simply be a distraction. It also led me to wonder about the requisite level of expertise one ought to have when critiquing Internet art works. A piece such as Lexicon serves as an example, since there are aspects of the work that are, for all intents and purposes, inaccessible to me.

This is by no means a criticism of what I consider to be an intriguing and intellectually cohesive piece, nor do I necessarily consider it an inherent flaw or weakness. Rather, it leads me to ask, would an art critic who knows how to program in Java, and thus able to explore all of the work’s nooks and crannies, be the most able to understand and appreciate the work? While most would not insist (to the best of my knowledge) that the most qualified critics of paintings are painters, sculptors of sculptures, etc., is there something “different” about Internet art? I wonder if it is apt to compare a work such as Lexicon to a house with a large number of rooms. I have a key that opens most of the doors of these rooms – but not all. To what degree should this matter?

Inclusive workshops with young people within VisitorsStudio (Furtherfield.org’s artware for live collaborative audiovisual remix)

“It’s really a good experience. It’s nice to try to communicate with people in a different way. It’s nice to know that people on the other side of the world are, like, normal people… I have been to America but it’s not quite the same. You don’t get to know them; you see them briefly in shops and stuff. We actually got to know them on a personal level which is nice and interact with them. I look forward to doing it again; I really look forward to doing the live mixing at Watershed.” – Young participant from The Basement, Bristol

Participants: 15 young people from Tottenham; young people from Wood Green Playstation; 25 young people in The Basement, Bristol and The Point, in the Bronx, New York

Artists: Ruth Catlow and Melissa Bliss

Between 2005 and ’07 we ran a series of projects with young people within VisitorsStudio (Furtherfield.org’s artware for live collaborative audiovisual remix). These workshops were developed with Graziano Milano.

CoMix Workshops for 15 young people from Tottenham were lead by artists Graziano Milano and Michael Szpakowski in February 2007. Participants created image and audio files inspired by their locality and then performed their mixes to a live audience of approximately 200 friends, family and community and an online audience of 20 people to celebrate the official opening of the Bruce Grove Media Centre for Young People.

Lead Artists: Graziano Milano and Michael Szpakowski

Partners: Haringey Youth Services, Bruce Grove Media Centre for Young People

As part of our Game/Play exhibition we ran summer workshops at HTTP Gallery in July 2006, in which young people from Wood Green Playstation connected online and mixed their audiovisual files with young people from Q-Arts in Derby. Their performances were watched by audiences at Q-Arts.

Lead Artists: Ruth Catlow and Melissa Bliss

Partners: Q-Arts (now Quad), Haringey Youth Services, Wood Green Playstation

Furthernoise.org (our sister organisation) facilitated a series of collaborative workshops, within VisitorsStudio, between 25 young people in The Basement, Bristol and The Point, in the Bronx, New York. Participants gave a performance of their work at The Watershed in Bristol in March 2006.

Partners: The Basement, Bristol and The Point, NY.

Related links: VisitorsStudio

1st – 27th March 2005

This warm and evocative cyber domestic work is a convergence of personal and political aesthetics that is reflective and declares a conscious subjectivity. Loseby’s internationally recognised net artworks demonstrate keen alertness to her’s and her viewers’ positioning in physical, virtual and political space.

In this exhibition, visitors are offered another experience of these relational dynamics. A bank of newspaper-covered TVs loop 10 video loops using a touch screen to display a large scale digital painting over-layed with headlines streamed live from online news networks.

Loseby’s internationally recognised net artworks always demonstrate keen alertness to her’s and her viewers’ positioning in physical, virtual and political space. In this exhibition, visitors are offered another experience of these relational dynamics.

A bank of newspaper-covered TVs loop 10 video clips of meal-times in the artist’s house. Viewers are invited to interact with the same video loops using a touch screen to display a large scale digital painting overlayed with headlines streamed live from online news networks.

We invite you to the opening of the exhibition to view the work and to meet the artist in person. 7 pm Tuesday 1st March 2005.

Images from the exhibition.

Eating Canvas is supported by the Arts Council of England.

Data Agency is a SCAN showcase of live, real-time, online media arts. Combining found data with content produced by webcams, streamed audio, generative programmes and their own sounds and visuals, these artists reconfigure the original function and meaning of the data to create their own new devices and meanings to enhance online arts projects.

We invite you to the opening of the exhibition to view the work and to meet some of the artists in person.

Susan Collins

Fenlandia features a series of gradually unfolding, digital landscapes created by images harvested from webcams in rural, technological sites (Silicon Fen in Norfolk, Silicon Valley in the M4 corridor, and Silicon Glen in Scotland) around the UK. The data feed on the webcams updates the images pixel by pixel, recording fluctuation in light and movement throughout the day.

At any one time, the viewer experiences a different version of the image as the pixels change and the piece expands – Fenlandia extrapolates and develops traditional devices of the landscape tradition in painting. Commissioned for the Silicon Fen project, a collaboration between Norwich School of Art & Design and Film and Video Umbrella

A landscape from beyond the edges of the browser window that gives glimpses of unseen places. dotdotdot is constructed using several different motion capture systems and improvised performances creating abstract digital portraits. These animated avatars move and react to players inputs within an online virtual environment. Commissioned by Future Physical and Essexdance. The online version was produced in association with SCAN.

Reverb by Lorie Novak examines the cultural relevance of photographs by interspacing media images of significant moments from the last 50 years with highly personal images which place the viewer within a deeply political and historical context. Direct broadcasts and archived sounds of historical events, political speeches, and personal testimonies create different sound/image permutations each time the piece is played. Reverb, made as an installation as part of an ArtSway Production Residency. Online version commissioned by SCAN.

Neil C Smith

(AS)RAM…Through improvisation and self-generating artworks, Oxford-based artist Neil C Smith places the creative process in real-time, often remixing the work of other artists; much of his work is unrecorded and ephemeral. (AS)RAM is an online development of Neil’s solo performance Radio Access Memory, an improvised remix of live radio.

Data Agency is a SCAN exhibition produced in association with Furtherfield at HTTP.

Online exhibition www.scansite.org December 2004 – May 2005

About SCAN.

SCAN is the new media arts agency in the South of England with a commitment to the delivery and facilitation of collaborative works. The organisation provides a fertile space for individuals and organisations to share resources in the realisation of quality projects and experimental initiatives using emergent technologies and practices. Using the SCAN website, the physical spaces of our member organisations and the expertise of our partner organisations, it provides a focal point for a wide spectrum of digital arts practice.

Welcome to Hack A Day (beta), a web-zine project that is feverishly “dedicated in cataloging all the best hacks and D.I.Y projects on the Internet”. This mischievous group do emphasize that it is in beta mode, although since Oct 7, 2004 there have been plenty of explorative hackers out there willing to contribute their everyday, creative hacking experiences with others via this very informative and useful web site. It is a non-art parallel to runme.org.

There are many inventive submissions on this site. An old 1940s phone is turned into a Bluetooth headset, an etch-a-sketch is turned into an electr-o-sketch, which attaches to a hacked mouse, a guide to hacking the ipod remote and how to control it in various other ways, like wiring up your jacket, or wrist watch. This site has all the info, connections, signals and protocols to pull it off.

Phillip Torrone, who set up the ‘Hack A Day (beta)’ site with some other enthusiastic friends, says, “i thought it was time to have one spot on the web with all the things you can do with iPods, digital cameras, consoles, portables, locks, macs, pcs, anything that can be changed, updated or hacked. A lot of the desire to do this is so i don’t have to hunt around as much for ideas. The goal is for anyone who has an old pda, a tivo, an atari, an ipod, xbox, or any device just sitting around, then hits hackaday.com, bang, sees all the things that folks can do with it to void the already expired warranty or get more out of it”.

Not only is this a great project with an accessible format and a refreshingly playful attitude, it successfully breaks down the tiresome barriers that specialists, geekdom sites and affiliated groups often inadvertently create. It is a geek’s paradise, yet simultaneously a welcoming forum for those who are truly interested in extending their electronic equipment but are usually put off by much of the usual mystifying jargonistic language. Anyone can use this site, regardless of their hacking experience. Just go to Hack A Day (beta), and I am sure you will find something that will improve or enhance your knowledge of hacking. It is straightforward and direct, communicating in a way that challenges the fetishism around the use of technology.

Featured image: MIKA TAANILA – Erkki Kurenniemi : The Dawn of Dimi

Press Release for print (pdf 650k)

HTTP’s debut exhibition brings you work by two extraordinary Finnish artists. This show offers London an exhilarating introduction to the intriguing and dynamic world of technological art practice. The first of a series of exhibitions and events showing mixes of screen-based and physical artworks. Mika Taanila’s documentary film ‘The Future Is Not What It Used To Be’ entwines the past with the present.

In this exhibition, his representation of Erkki Kurenniemi’s philosophical journey through digital possibility is juxtaposed, projected in the same space with a physical artwork from that same history, in the form of DIMI-A machine (Digital Music Instrument, Associative Memory).

We invite you to come to the opening of the exhibition and the gallery to view the work and to meet the artists in person.

Mika Taanila
Born 1965 in Helsinki where he lives and works. Mika Taanila is an artist working fluently in the fields of documentary filmmaking and visual arts. His films deal with the the significant and alarming issues of human engineering and urban artificial surroundings. Taanila specializes in the futuristic ideas and utopias of contemporary science.

The Future Is Not What It Used To Be (Finland 2002)
The Future is Not What It Used To Be is a documentary by Mika Taanila, the director of Futuro – A New Stance for Tomorrow (1998). It features never-before-seen archival material from the early years of electronic art, including excerpts from Kurenniemi’s unfinished experimental short films. The documentary entwines the past with the present, i.e. with the protagonist’s manic archival project, in which Kurenniemi records his thoughts, everyday observations, images and objects, constantly and obsessively. All this in an effort to combine man and machine – to reconstruct the soul of man. (avanto festival, 2002)

Erkki Kurenniemi
Born 1941 in Hämeenlinna, Finland. A pioneer of electronic art in Finland, Erkki Kurenniemi, composed computer-based music and designed his own instruments as early as the 1960’s. His career embraces music, film, computers, robotics – in other words, both art and science – with natural ease. He is a nuclear scientist/inventor/artist, whose projects and ideas have been surprisingly ahead of their times.

He is best known as a designer of unique electronic instruments at Helsinki University’s Department of Music during the 1960s. He subsequently had an impressive career as a pioneer of industrial automation at Rosenlew in the 70s, an automation designer in Nokia’s cable division in the early 80s, and as head of exhibition planning at the Heureka Science Centre in 1987-1999.

An exploratory search for totally new kinds of user interfaces for musical instruments and the semiautomatic generation of music have been among Kurenniemi’s main goals throughout all these years.

DIMI-A (Digital Music Instrument, Associative Memory)

The first “automated instrument” he invented was the Andromatic, a synthesizer purchased in 1968 by the Swedish composers Leo Nilsson and Ralph Lundsten. That same year, an old friend, M. A. Numminen, invited him to design a new kind of electronic “collective instrument”. The result was called the Sähkökvartetti (“Electric uartet”), a mind-boggling combination basically made up of four instruments rolled into one: a drum machine, violin machine, voice machine and melody machine. After that, Kurenniemi developed a range of digital instruments. The first in the series was the DIMI-A (Digital Music Instrument, Associative Memory), which was played using two ‘electric pens’. With the DIMI-S (“The Sexophone”) four players generated six-voice music by touching each other. The instrument measured the electrical resistance between all the pairs of players. Kurenniemi also designed an instrument called the Electroencephalophone (DIMI-T), in which the electronic sound was controlled by electrodes behind the player’s ears, recording changes in their brain activity. The DIMI-O (Digital Music Instrument, Optical Input, 1971) transformed video images into music in real-time.

According to Kurenniemi’s own “principle of unity”, all his projects – articles, plans, visions of the future, films, home videos, lectures, TV interviews, his work at the Heureka Science Centre, musical compositions and the fantastic electric instruments he has built – reflect the same holistic ideas.
– Mika Taanila

Copied with permission from Frame.
For further information contact: live from Frieze Art Fair
Monday 18th October 3-4pm GMT.

Mika Taanila and Erkki Kurenniemi in conversation with Ruth Catlow and Tobi Maier on Resonance 104.4FM

Curated by: Tobi Maier and Furtherfield

This exhibition is supported by the Finnish Fund for Art Exchange (FRAME) and the Finnish Institute in London.

Stanza’s Amorphoscapes contains twenty audio-visual Shockwave pieces built using generative principles, with varying degrees of interactivity. The works currently on view were made between 1998 and 2003.

While many may think of Stanza mainly in terms of the interactive sound elements of his apparently prolific output in interactive sound art (Stanza also curates the Soundtoys.net site and has many other projects featured at www.stanza.co.uk), the visual element of the amorphoscape pieces has a strong presence. As Stanza says in the introduction to the Soundscraper Amorphoscape, “It’s not about sound at the expense of the visual element. My work is about the marriage and synthesis of the audio visual potential exploring the internet as a medium in its own right”. Though, having said that, Stanza also envisages some of the amorphoscapes having a second life as gallery installations or immersive environments.

He elaborates: “Amorphoscapes are a new type of image and a new type of painting. A definition could be: ‘a self contained online image experience’. They react to users and are in turn influenced by the users movement.”

The work on the site divides between several pieces that have a dark dystopian feel, and some more colourful and more playful, lighter work. Cancer is, unsurprisingly, an example of the former and like all members of this ‘sub-family’ it uses no colour, and the sound is a brooding ‘dark ambient’ soundscape that evokes the work of Alan Splet (sound designer for several David Lynch films): claustrophobic breathing sounds and the distant rumble of what might be an operating theatre in a Victorian hospital. The piece is based on cancer cells generating, moving in parallel, ‘birthing’ new cells and killing off old ones.

Cancer is generative but not interactive, while other pieces allow you to affect the audio or the visuals. In Multiplicity, the visual forms are more concrete and you can click on square elements to change the sample loop. But the music is still threatening, and again the visuals are black and white.

Traces, meanwhile, is described by the artist as a “a sort of ‘drawing machine'” — but it is not clear what the controls do (there is no clear visual feedback on their effects). It’s not a machine that you feel you could ever master. And Subverted (or Subvergence?) blows up samples of programming and mark-up code, recycling them in an unholy quick-fire cut-up.

Subverted is one of another sub-family of amorphoscapes that use ‘found objects’ as the molecules from which online paintings are generated. Where Subverted uses code, Chemikix uses symbols from organic chemistry, and Genomutant uses chromosome diagrams from the genome project — presumably a sketch for Stanza’s more extended Genomixer piece at www.genomixer.com. Some of these work better visually than others. The replicated chromosomes generate visuals more redolent of mass-production machinery than the human beings whose ‘code’ they constitute.

Alongside these darker amorphoscapes are some that are more purely abstract, and less claustrophobic, sonically and visually, in their sense of space. Landscapes falls into this category, and Automonton (aka Convergence) is a kind of friendly-sister-piece to Subverted: similar in construction, but more even-handed and less threatening in tone. Sublime lives up to its name: another generative, non-interactive piece, it is like a speeded up version of Brian Eno’s video sculptures, with its rich colours, constantly bleeding and fading. (Is it supposed to be speeded up like this? I wonder if viewing 1999 artworks on a computer with a 2003 processor makes everything run in fast forward?)

So Stanza’s portfolio of amorphoscapes demonstrates a range of approaches that blend audio, visual and haptic senses in different ways, to different effects. But what I found all the pieces shared was a deliberate lack of transparency of process (or of interaction, in the pieces where interactivity was available). I was never quite able to figure out fully what was going on. Even though three or four of the interactive pieces seemed to have the same layout of visual controls, the feedback from using these controls was so oblique that I never completely got the hang of which element had what effect. In early examples of the ‘soundtoy’ genre, such as those produced by the antirom collective, the interaction style was often openly perverse, but you were still able to get the hang of it after a bit and almost ‘play’ the toy like an instrument. You never feel that you could play an amorphoscape. It has its own mind, and it will take only passing and unpredictable notice of what you do to it.

This feeling gives an interesting twist to speculation about how the amorphoscapes might operate on a larger ‘canvas’, away from the Internet. Stanza has written: “Amorphoscapes are audio visual paintings, and can be installed into ‘real’ environments, where the movement of people in the room or gallery triggers the interactivity within the work. They could be thought of as drawing and painting machines, in the future to be projected, onto buildings, on clothes and on cars, and on large plasma screens in your living room.” When an amorphoscape goes out into the world, the terms under which it generates and interacts change, subtly but significantly. It moves from the private realm to the public, and viewers’ expectations of control and transparency alter accordingly. I’d like to see it.

No Playstation. No TV. Real Life. For a week.

‘Being Boring’ an evolutive net.film by Fran Ilich.

The story is quite simple: 2 girls lose their TV so they have to find a life of their own until the TV is repaired, which will take at least a week. A week without Telenovelas, without MTV, without the Discovery Channel, without Big Brother, without TV ads, without talk shows, without Coca-Cola ads, no world news updates, no dream cars to win, no money to cash in, and worse, all those full days with nothing to do.

Fran Ilich – novelist, filmmaker, media-artist, director of the narrative media seminar of the Universidad Internacional de Andalucia, in Sevilla (Spain), and curator of borderhack showing here an evolutive net.film that deals with addiction.

Episode 1, opens with a ‘We have to find a life’ statement. They try to re-invent their own time using various strategies. They call emergency numbers to find out if someone can help them, share their last valium. Become tourists in their own town, run like Athenian athletes and they inhale canned air to overcome their huge boredom. Chatting on the internet even leads them to the idea of making the ‘revolution of media’ as they call it, with nothing to revolutionize, no manifesto, just by pressing the ‘enter’ key on their keyboards and wearing ‘the revolution will not be televised’ and ‘psychic TV’ t-shirts.

When watching these girls trying their best to deal with their TV addiction, and voting to choose what will happen next, one cannot help but think about the Real TV dimension of the 17 films. Nothing to do means nothing to see, Fran Illitch invites the visitor to share the girls’ idleness.

As Fabrice Richard said in a recent interview: “A high dose of TV would make a fool out of anybody. These young girls are TV junkies. And drugs have always been a way of escaping a boring everyday life. But what is the point in showing young good-for-nothing girls crying about the absence of their television? Is the answer to be found in the artist warning us (at the beginning) that the work’s title is, Being Boring?”

The story is bathed in an excess and juvenile hysteria, dealing with a monumental fiasco, for they cannot bypass their TV addiction. They finally find themselves in front of the reparation store waiting for dawn to come, for their TV to come back home, and for their nightmare to end.

Other net.films by Fran Ilich can be found at http://delete.tv/net.films. Fran is currently curating the exhibition ‘another narrative is possible!’ at the Centro multimedia del Centro Nacional de las artes, http://www.cenart.gob.mx/html/cmmp.html in Mexico City.

Fabrice Richard is an ex-student of the “political sciences”school. He is studying about art’s relationship with its environment, and is running towards a “specialised studies” diploma dealing with the cultural policies of towns.

To take a snapshot is to capture a moment of time. A decision is made by the photographer, the shutter is pressed and there you have it. What Jess Loseby has done is to discover the photos of others by searching for particular phrases via a search engine and seeing what images are brought up by keywords like “at the shops” or “in the lane”. It’s a bit like finding photos at a flea market that have been arranged by subject matter. There is an anonymity that comes from not knowing the people in the photos, yet there is also the intimacy between the subject and the photographer in the most successful images: whether it’s a dead on gaze at the camera, or a vulnerability that might only be allowed to be captured by someone trusted.

” A remnant of the witness. In places I have never been, people I have never seen Jess Loseby finds other people’s moments and instils new meaning by choice of focus.”

The piece opens up with an image that has one central point in focus and the rest blurred out. Almost imperceptibly the focus shifts to a different subject and then slowly returns to the first. Then equally slowly the image changes altogether. On the bottom of the screen the keyword search is indicated with blinking text. This is the format of Jess’s piece. Initially, I spent some time clicking on the screen expecting interaction and thinking that the focus points might be due to where my mouse was. Once I realized this was not the case I settled down to observe the work and found myself utterly engrossed. The slow pace of the piece and the lack of interactivity work in Jess’s favor. One is forced to just observe, and take time doing it. After a bit I found it impossible to watch the shifting within the images and not create a narrative. Some of them seem to simply create different protagonists. For example “at the shops” focuses on a man facing the camera on the street who seems to be just caught on film rather than posing for the photographer. The image shifts and the focus rests on a woman walking in the other direction. The feeling is not of a relationship between the two subjects. Rather simply two different stories that could be told depending on who is seen clearly.

As there are many different images which are manipulated in the same manner, the piece runs the risk of becoming a bit gimmicky or turning into merely a guessing game where the viewer is only trying to ascertain who will come into focus next. I found this to be particularly true with images like “up a mountain” and “at the end”. These had less human interaction within the chosen image and thus ran the risk of becoming an exercise of the technique and rather flat with no new dimension added by the manipulation. Conversely, “afterwards” and “out at night” were two that stood out as having additional depth through Jess’s choices. In “afterwards”, in the center of the photo there is a woman in a formal dress on the beach with a bouquet of flowers looking down and smiling. There are a few other women in the image out of focus and on the periphery and the back of the man in the foreground. With the woman in focus it is as though whatever is the occasion, it belongs to her. The moment is seen through her perspective. When the focus shifts she becomes blurred out and it is the man in the foreground, observing the scene with his back to the camera who becomes the subject. With this shift in focus the meaning in the image changes. Now it is as though he is an outsider looking in. He is the only man in the picture and compositionally he is removed and the sharp focus reinforces this. Perhaps there is a relationship between the man and woman, or perhaps we are simply privy to their points of view on a particular day. It is open to interpretation, but regardless of the meaning the manipulation creates a connection between the viewer of the image and the subject.

“Out at night” shows some older couples dancing. At first the man in the central couple is in focus. Although he is part of a couple, his being singled out creates a sense of isolation and loneliness. When the image shifts focus it is to a woman who is part of another couple. Again there is a sense of isolation, but now a connection has been created between these two people and one wonders if they are unknowingly soul mates.

Jess created an interesting exercise: put in search words, choose among the images that correlate, and manipulate them in a particular manner. Through the timing, selection and choices this work at times transforms to more than an exercise and becomes instead mini-narratives that reveal more about human nature and through our interpretation can reveal us to ourselves.

Belgrade, Friday 16 July 2004, 7.15pm: 45 minutes before show time and the internet connection has gone down. As I mentally prepare to cancel the performance, Donna identifies the problem and organises women to rip up cables, bypass the router and improvise a long line to the stage. Suddenly, we’re back online and the fifth performance of swim by avatarbodycollision begins only ten minutes late. I perform the opening routine, plug in my laptop and there are my fellow Colliders, performing on stage in Belgrade from London, Helsinki and New Zealand.

This drama unfolded at the end of the Eclectic Tech Carnival (/etc), and the women who came to our rescue were the tutors and participants of the event. Organised by the Gender Changers together this year with local women’s activists Zene na Delu (Women at Work), the aim of /etc is to provide a fun and supportive environment for women to exchange technical skills, explore the innards of the hardware and learn the hows and whys of open source software. Workshops ranged from Linux basics to juggling, Perl to cyberformance, and security issues to screen-printing – all taking place within a carnival atmosphere.

Because I was performing, assisting with another performance and teaching a workshop, I wasn’t able to participate in as many of the workshops as I wanted – but just being in the environment was inspiring. All around me were women discussing the intricacies of wireless networks, pouring through screens of code, sticking little screwdrivers into the open guts of computers and generally having a good time doing it. They came from all over Europe as well as many local women; all the tutors were voluntary and many were using their holidays to participate.

So who are these Gender Changers? A gender changer is an adaptor that connects ports and plugs. Not surprisingly, ports and plugs with pins that stick out are called male, and with holes are called female. When you want to join male-male or female-female, you simply bring a gender changer into the picture and ta-da, gender becomes fluid (if only it were so easy in real life… ). The founders of Gender Changers were amazed by the sexualisation of computer parts and decided to adopt the name. For the group, a Gender Changer is someone who addresses the imbalance of computer knowledge and skills between men and women. Since 1999, the Gender Changers have been “encourag(ing) women to crash computers and to put it all back together again. Preferably with an improved installation” from Amsterdam to London, Toronto, Philadelphia, Athens and now Belgrade.

The philosophy of the Gender Changers is one of sharing and facilitating learning in a self-directed, hands-on environment: less lecturing and more DIY practical experimentation. The structure of the week was very open, in keeping with the carnival theme. Instead of a fixed schedule determined beforehand, the programme was finalised the day before it all began. Everything that was scheduled took place at more or less the scheduled time, and as more people arrived during the week, further workshops were offered and slotted in. An HTML workshop was taught online by a tutor in Canada using IRC, and the software I was teaching, UpStage, was used on the final day to give an online presentation about the whole event for friends and family afar.

Daily warm-ups, juggling workshops and the “Pippi Kalora HubDub session” as well as an evening programme of performance and socialising ensured that there was plenty of activity AFK. Some women worked during the week on a large collage, replicating the /etc logo with computer ephemera and other objects. Most of us managed to screenprint a t-shirt and even a rabbit got involved in the leathercraft workshop.

The venue was Rex Cultural Centre, the main site for new media events in Belgrade. Its big hall was designated a women-only space, with most of the workshops happening there and a couple spilling over into the smaller CybeRex. As well as Avatar Body Collision’s performance of swim, local performers Act Women presented their satirical infomercial “Transkuhinski Raj”. Long evenings were spent in kafanas over dinner and there was a bit of late-night lurking around fountains in city parks with bottles of beer.

The first Eclectic Tech Carnival took place in Pula, Croatia in 2002, last year it happened in Athens, Greece, and already plans are afoot for /etc 2005 in a location to be announced. Each event has been organised by local women inspired by the previous /etc, and by the desire to create a positive space for women to learn about and play with computers. As long as this grass-roots desire exists, there will be an /etc. What drives /etc, and what brought the internet back from the dead for our performance of “swim”, is this spirit of co-operation, sharing and of getting on and doing what needs to be done.

The furminator: analogue is cool, too

The unstoppable human-shaped killing machine known as The Terminator first appeared in the movie by James Cameron in 1984. It then represented the fear that, in the future, machines would rule the earth and exterminate humanity. This somewhat luddistic view of technology was popular when desktop PCs were still uncommon and computers were seen as big things owned by corporations. Seven years later, in Terminator 2 the flesh-and-iron cyborg had to face a much more effective opponent, the T1000, a new generation robot made of liquid steel that could change its shape at will. The film became very popular for its innovative use of CG effects, and many saw the fight of the two terminators as a metaphor of the clash of analogue versus digital.

Today, artists Roman Kirschner, Tilman Reiff and Volker Morawe have sided with the analogue in their latest project: the furminator. When most video games develop realistic, immersive 3D environments, the furminator invites the player to plunge his head inside a classic pinball machine, his nose right behind the flipper fingers, only a few centimetres away from the ball. From this first-person perspective, the player feels the same immersive experience with a VR helmet but in a fully mechatronic environment. A force-feedback helmet shakes the player’s head, his hands controlling the flipper fingers as the only defence against the threatening iron ball rolling high speed towards his face. Five cameras and three mini LCD screens provide views of the playfield that cannot be seen from the player’s perspective. The machine is a sort of oversized helmet that adapts to the player’s height so that standing up, his hands on the QuickShot II joysticks, his head is swallowed into the pinball playfield. Just as with any other pinball, it is possible to shake your head and body to change the ball’s direction.

Kirschner, Reiff and Morawe met at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and decided to create //////////fur//// – art entertainment interfaces. Their work has since been dedicated to finding new ways of interaction, in their own words: “fighting massive-single-user-isolation”. One of their most successful projects has been the Painstation (2001), a two-player enhanced Pong game in which players get physically punished when they miss the ball. In this project, the player’s body becomes (painfully) involved in the game as an experiment in user-machine interaction. But there is also a hint of criticism towards the whole gaming industry and the need to go beyond the actual level of interactivity. The combination of one of the oldest videogames ever made, with its ascetic interface, and a device that caused pain to the player turned into a big success, and there were plans to turn the machine into a commercial entertainment device, Painstation2 (2003), which to date hasn’t been distributed.

Although it is an entertainment device, Painstation brought to mind some serious thoughts about user-machine interaction, gaming as culture and pain as part of the game. Now, the furminator reminds us of the old machines swept away by more sophisticated devices and virtual environments. It is not by chance that the player holds two QuickShot II Joysticks from the Commodore 64 era and that the pinball is decorated with the metallic skull of the T101 from Terminator 2. The furminator, with its mechatronic immersive environment, is a claim for the good old analogue versus the overwhelming digital.

Your mouse is hurt (not an expression but a proposition about pain)

Annie Abrahams, Dutch artist living in france, is the creator of the Being Human website. Being Human plays with the simple fact – that she enounces in the interview by Bertrand Gauguet for Archée  – that is : the words that we think we understand, are not exactly the ones that we think we understand.

Painsong opens with a simple interface, two images (red dots, freckles ?) on both sides of 15 embeded mp3 players. Below this, is a link to a related artwork called pain. When the page loads an autostart trigger plays all the 15 sounds at once, resulting with an incomprehensible chaotic sound mix. The first sound heard is ‘aie’, as if someone was hurt and the last sound is a voice singing “we are all alone with you”. The whole soundwork is composed of sentences, onomatopoeias, and little songs, pronounced in french, english and dutch.

Listening to pain
The visitor is directly confronted with expressions of felt pain (aie !, Âiow !), to text about pain related situations, that seem to be connected to Annie Abraham’s own personal pain, such as ‘dear dad, it seems i have a pain in my back because of you …’ once the page is fully loaded, the visitor is able to play every part of the song again as often as he/she wants, even mix sounds together to create something new, or simply listen to them one by one as if reading a diary.

Generating pain
By replaying the sound we provoke pain (don’t touch me). The visitor is questioned on what it feels like to hurt and be hurt, does this give him/her pleasure or is it producing consolation? The visitor is forced to react to the action of clicking; due to the situation of no longer being able to ignore the meaning of what is being listened to. Is playing with the mouse hurting someone or something. Who is the visitor hurting or what are they hurting? Is Painsong about hurting someone, or hurting a computer?

Creating a new pain
The machine/computer, is a neccesary tool for the execution of this work – like a DJ’s deck. By using this relationship, and mixing the sounds together the visitor creates new sounds of pain, like a nightmare or a sweet dream out of which one cannot escape or run away from without closing the window.

Mechanic pain
With an extreme lucidity of language, through a work that leaves us confused, Annie Abraham creates a relation between Mechanic and organic pain, in Painsong  she writes for us with her songs/sounds, like Antonin Artaud said in respect of writing for the illiterates.

Painsong has been presented at:
Packet Curated by Richard Rinehart, (New Langton Arts, December 2004)
FILE 2004, (Sao Paulo).
Interview with Annie Abrahams for Archée by Bertrand Gauguet http://archee.qc.ca/ar.php?page=imp&no=116

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.