Featured image: Two web cam installations by Ivan Pope – Lost Magic Kingdoms and Tabletop

Web Cam Theatre – two web cam installations, Lost Magic Kingdoms and Tabletop by Ivan Pope

Objects are cast in a performative context displaying motion and time using Internet technology. By using very basic equipment, cheap web cams, cheap software, cheap objects Ivan has created a twilight world. We witness a psychogeographically influenced environment that engages a fluent mix of conceptual and poetic crossovers with performance/live action. The installation is minimal, with light settings, the quality of the image and time based changes largely uncontrollable.

When you click onto the page of ‘Lost Magic Kingdoms’, images slowly cascade before your eyes down the browser page. You discover its history, with different times and moments of the day recored by two cameras on either side of a small table, enclosed by a screen. The cameras take it in turn to transmit the scene. Inspired by an installation made in 1987 by Eduardo Paolozzi, called Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons, revealing how art could be constructed by rearranging existing objects. With ‘Tabletop’, a single camera is mounted on a tripod. The lights go on and off. The camera pans the tabletop, looking for action and a new world is created.

These two web cam installations will be live until September 20 2003. The format will remain the same, but the objects and arrangement will vary. The rate of image change will also vary.

Both works show the relational nature of objects, a kind of magical realism falls into place like an Angela Carter’s ‘Nights at the Circus (1984), half human and half mythical; between actuality, the physical and the virtual, reality and non-reality. Changing every six minutes, you know that something is going to happen but the timeline is relative to your own modem, your own situation, and your own desires.

“The Space Between Analog and Digital”: Alan Sondheim’s Recent Executables

I’ve developed, over the last few years, certain assumptions about software art. Just browse through the many entries available at runme.org (http://runme.org/), and you, too will likely come away with some of these assumptions: that software art is, at its heart, utilitarian; it functions, it does something; it’s tool-like; it’s often more software than art.

Over the last month or so, July and August 2003, the writer Alan Sondheim has been happily chipping away at those assumptions. Alan is well known to netizens for his writing, which operates at the hinge of language and machine code; what isn’t so well known about him is that he’s spent some time programming–indeed, has been programming since at least the 1970s. A careful visitor to his monumental text work Philosophy and Psychology of the Internet (also known as the Internet Text)(http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt/), will see that Alan has, embedded in the text, some brilliant source code for Quick BASIC, the revival of the old BASIC language once shipped with all Windows PCs. He has written in Perl as well–see his Julu at runme.org (http://runme.org/project/+sondheimjulu/).

I’ve developed software art with Alan’s inspiration in mind myself–the application sondheim.exe (http://runme.org/project/+sondheim/) is a text editor written in Visual Basic designed to transform user input based on a configurable timer. The idea for this piece was wholly Alan’s; in electronic conversation, Alan mentioned that he had once, in the 1970s, written a similar application.

It was shortly after I wrote sondheim.exe that I mailed Alan a copy of Visual Basic, the object-oriented application development environment, developed by Microsoft, based on the old BASIC language. Visual Basic is about as close to English as one can get in the higher-level programming languages; it eschews the funky syntax most other languages have inherited from C, and which is often one of the more apparent stumbling blocks for new coders. And yet, despite its seeming simplicity, it succeeds as one of the most powerful Rapid Application Development (RAD) packages for Windows programming; one can do with Visual Basic almost anything that can be done in C and C++; indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that VB is exclusively a Windows programming tool, it might even approach that paragon of portability and power, Java.

Alan took the tool and ran with it. His characteristically unique vision, combined with his agile sense of mathematics, has produced a series of standalone executables in Visual Basic that are challenging the very core of what I had always assumed software art was about–creating strange and wondrous tools, creating functional pieces that interacted with unsuspecting users.

Alan’s recent Visual Basic works are nothing like that at all. These are not tools in any sense of the word. They’re only minimally interactive; usually, all one of these works require to get started is one simple mouse click from the user. Instead of crafting a functional artistic tool, Alan Sondheim has, in these works, highlighted the very processes one’s computer uses. These are narrative works, in the skin of software.

Anyone who has downloaded these is doubtlessly scratching their head right now, thinking, “Narrative? What’s narrative about watching an image dissolve or be defaced in some pre-programmed way?” Well, I understand your consternation. I’m not the most stable of people. Children run away from me when I smile.

Be that as it may, I’m sticking to my thesis: these executables are narrative; what we’re watching, when we download and run this software, is, as Alan himself states, “mathesis transform(ing) semantics…” And here’s how:

The Archaea Series
This is where I first began to notice the gist of Alan’s work in Visual Basic. The Archaea series consists of ten executables; they are all predicated on the dissolving and warping of images based on mathematical processes. The most vivid in the series is archaea3, downloadable here: http://www.asondheim.org/portal/archaea3.exe .

“The programs are operating in the space between analog and digital, although totally grounded in the digital,” Alan writes. “What are they deconstructing? Language, meaning, symbols, the symbolic. Through erasure and the growth of form.”

We’re confronted with a very red image of breasts pressed up against some glass when we first open archaea3. The glass is beaded with moisture; either the light or the filter makes the water gleam a sinister red. When we click on the image, what looks like static begins to eat away at the scene from left to right, very slowly; the static looks like it’s wiping away the image, as if it were cleansing the screen of this suggestively bloody site. It’s almost like watching a linear animation–except here the story, the plot, the interest, hinges on the horizontal erasure sweeping through the image. It’s a purgative myth we’re witnessing; like the big fish vomiting Jonah up out of the sea.

What clinches process works like these as narrative is the fact that Alan uses evocative images in this software. “…these images are interpreted in terms of the underlying photographs – a lichen-like growth upon them, empathetic and cohering. In turn, they modify, deconstruct….” Alan muses. The images serve as a reference point. The story’s there, not just in the images but in the process itself–a process the user stands outside of. Like cinema, like literature, it’s a closed system until it’s in front of us, in our heads, and when we perform the magic of watching.

The other works in the series follow the same principles. In archaea9 (http://www.asondheim.org/portal/archaea9.exe), a woman (Alan’s wife and long-time collaborator, Azure Carter, whose influence on Alan’s work is ever pervasive) paddling in a swimming pool that gets “erased.” But what kind of erasure is this? The paradox of this process that Alan is using is precisely in its “lichen-like” growth. In number 9, it’s quite evident that this image isn’t being erased so much as it is being penetrated by an emptiness. Ripples from the image linger as the process spreads throughout the surface of the picture. The emptiness left behind is an entity unto itself–may, indeed, be the protagonist in these stories.

Or is the image the protagonist? archaea4’s image is basically that of a rocky hole. Found at https://alansondheim.org/, the erasure in this piece resonates strangely with this hole. Which is the emptiness? Is this a zen koan, a linear animation, or software?

This Program is not Responding
One aspect of these pieces may actually come across as a design flaw; clicking on the close button in the upper right hand corner doesn’t close them. Indeed, just trying to move the piece from one area of the screen to the other causes a major hang on CPU resources; the image blanks out completely, along with its erasure.

“The immobility of some of the pieces, as well as the inability to resize is deliberate,” Alan maintains. “I thought of these as ‘sticky objects,’ insistent on their own processes. One of the earlier ones, of course, _does_ kind of stick to the desktop…”

I can see how this would enhance the work. When running one of these strange programs, I often feel as if to do anything at all on the computer while the process is playing itself out would be to violate the principle of the whole thing. I get the sense that what is happening in these pieces is both intense and enormous; and yet, fragile as far as the machine is concerned. This process will not tolerate any other process spinning off in the same space.

I like to leave the works running on my screen. Like a good movie, or a good novel, I’m fascinated enough by the interaction between the characters to sit still for a moment, absorb rather than react.

Featured image: printed out photographs of the streets, pasted them back onto the surfaces where they were taken, and then rephotographed them

When we visited New York this spring, we met in Willamsburg, Brooklyn with Christina Ray, founder of Glowlab, multimedia arts lab for experimental psychogeography. According to the article ‘Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation’, in Situationniste Internationale No. 1 (1958), psychogeography studies ‘the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’.

We wandered the streets, chatting and observed the effects of the emotions and behaviour of the local communities on the streets of Brooklyn. Christina described for us the significance of various tags, stickers and stencils and told us about the brewing turf wars between the recent influx of middle class artists and disgruntled locals whose families have lived in the area for generations, but who were facing the consequences of creeping gentrification and the threat of fast-rising rents. The diverse concerns of the local community were spelt out in frenetically pasted, posted, taped and painted signs, tags, images and messages of all sorts. Every wall, every piece of street furniture shares its surface with an accretion of eye-catching stickers, advertising local bands, spray painted decorations, tags and statements of protest, like ‘more yuppie bullshit’.

The Graffoto project divides into three distinct parts. Graffoto 01 documents the richly textured expressivity of the Brooklyn communities. The social commentary mixes with exuberant, colourful and stunningly executed murals and sometimes inexplicable expressions of appreciation for the absurdity of life, such as ‘saving to buy air conditioner- saving to buy a bike (written and illustrated on 2 strips of masking tape stuck to a wall heavy with graffiti). These images draw you to spin out narratives. Sometimes further clues to the complete story lie in the details of the surroundings, whilst other accounts are completely opaque to the outsider but suggest a connection of great significance to individuals, groups or events in the locality.

In Graffoto02, MOTC (man of the crowd) has printed out photographs of the streets, pasted them back onto the surfaces where they were taken, and then rephotographed them in situ. I guess that in the streets these images act as a mirror of sorts for the street artists of Brooklyn. Also as a sign that the guttural and wonderfully articulated expressions of protest, humour, threat and joie de vivre can be both appreciated and participated in but also consumed by the world of mediation. These second stage images do evoke a strange threat of surveillance.

The final layer of the Graffoto project invites us to participate by sending in images of our streets for others to print out and post in their own public localities. Alternatively we can download and print an image from the collection and paste it onto the lamp-post outside our own doors.

We can only imagine these images so rich with local texture and information will start to appear in all the lands of the world; turning up like tourists, marked out by their strange dress, stranger cultural values and the blind spots afforded them by their communities. Or perhaps more like illegal immigrants, their language will be foreign, their deepest and most obvious narratives veiled, their protests displaced and irrelevant to the communities amongst which they find themselves.

MOTC offers a strategy for border crossing. OK, we loose much of the texture, the information and with these, many pieces of the narrative but something equally important is facilitated here. The photographs and printouts of the graffiti are a sign of something foreign, mediated, stuck and mingling in a community that isn’t sure why it’s there, whether it’s any of their business and whether they like it.

August 2003

Featured image: abstract animated visual models working from the audio samples of couples engaging in sexual activities.

Frequency Love is a net art piece, not in the networked sense but conceptually filled to the brim with a net consciousness, a net object. This visual deviation playfully captures the dark side of the Internet and its globally collective and obsessive mannerist activities. It reveals a psychological nuance of the everyday Internet sexual experience.

The source material were originally sound files – mp3’s, consisting of couples copulating. Amateurs submitting and declaring their intimately entwined, feral and visceral exertions for other interested parties to hear and enjoy online. Chris Webb abstracted the audio, the data and transformed them into what now are animated gif images of couples having sex.

There is a contradiction at play built by circumstance, that such esoteric interests of sharing intimate, sexual sound files in virtual private clubs do tend to exude. The inevitable occurs. If the multitude of surfers, search hard enough on the net, they collect hidden information by hook or crook somehow; which is part of the nature of using the Internet medium.

When viewing these works it is as though they are breathing, as if they are real souls, real people, even though you know that they are invented visuals, data into sound. Then you remember that they were real people, but mutated into visual form. The ‘Plexus’, culmination of networked, linked individuals expressing proclivity and what seems an uncontrollable hunger to communicate in a way other than by words, via the motion of sexual intercourse in audio format. There has been a global shift of people exploring new territories regarding their own relational selves. The term virtual is essence of the Internet medium and we used to think that this word stood for the unreal, untouchable but now we know that this is no longer applicable. It is now part of our everyday experience, therefore real.

This strangely emotional work weaves finely tuned aesthetic formalism with polemic. Unusually for Internet-based media works (though not for much of the generative Shockwave work made by collaborators Kate Southworth and Patrick Simons of GloriusNinth), after an initial cascade of data, the piece unfolds at an intensely slow pace, inducing a mesmeric state in the viewer and winding down the desire to click, for the next feature.

To the left of the screen, the word [R]evolution builds layer on layer, becoming bolder but more disrupted, threatening to blot itself out through reiteration. In the right-hand column, smaller texts emerge and fade imperceptibly in falling fields of high colour, visual interference like every bit of news information ever displayed on any screen through history, atomised, appropriated and reworked by a new mechanical order. The tenor of these texts is that of disrupted and upset internal dialogues sparked by bewildering, morally fractured world affairs. These act in combination with the full title of the work World#—saved 10.10.01 to suggest a reference to another historical date- 9/11/01. What was saved on this date? The work or the world?

Over time, the work unfolds quiet, crafted layers to the riddle with a deliberate subtlety that suggests a kind of inspired fanaticism in its creators, a refusal to draw conclusions. This work’s intangible (or non-existent- I can’t be sure) interactivity challenges and proliferates notions of individual agency within social [r]evolution.

Link to GloriousNinth

Featured image: PANSE (Public Access Network Sound Engine) – an open platform for developing audio-visual net art.

PANSE is the latest in a series of generative audio-visual pieces created by Reykjavik-based artist Pall Thayer. PANSE or ‘Public Access Network Sound Engine’ is a server based program which creates a live audio stream based on (multi) user interaction. Alongside the continuous live mp3 stream, visitors can interact with the piece, modifying and mutating the audio created in real-time through a series of interfaces that also respond visually to the live audio data generated by PANSE and other concurrent visitors.

The project is an open platform for the development of audio-visual net art, with an invitation to anyone who wishes to create an interface to the engine. Further information on this is included in the site with examples and a gallery of interfaces created by Pall and contributions from french artist Joachim Lapotre.

Medrano says she doesn’t know what kind of chemical she splashed on her face, nor was she warned about the product or its potential danger — and such perilous oversights are all too common in the industry. Injuries related to chemical exposures such as Medrano’s range from skin irritation and burns to allergic reactions in the lungs or on the skin. Other hazards include lacerations from material such as broken glass left in trash cans, lung problems from removing mold, and nasty falls on slippery floors. “If the elevator is broken, I have to drag heavy bags to the basement using the stairs,” says a Salvadoran janitor who cleans dot-com offices.
– Michele Holcenberg, “Janitors and Custodians,”
http://www.buildingbetterhealth.com/topic/janitors

“If you become aware of an unusual and suspicious release of an unknown substance nearby, it doesn’t hurt to protect yourself. Quickly get away.”
-the US Dept. of Homeland Security’s http://www.ready.gov

A couple of years ago, I attended a presentation by an artist who had worked with the web-based group RTMark), among other politically-motivated arts groups, that was about political art after September 11. During the question and answer session, another attendee expressed her dislike for the work of RTMark and questioned the political commitment of such work in general. The problem was the seeming lack of risk for the artists, which was translated as a lack of genuine commitment. In other words, if the artists really meant what they said, they would be on the front lines of demonstrations risking injury, fines and jail. Or at least they’d be politicians. I left wondering what it means to consider art, or even political action, in terms of heroic risk taking.

This anecdote has stuck with me, and I often come across other situations and debates where similar terms arise. On a recent trip to Germany, I was fortunate enough to catch At Your Own Risk, an exhibition at the Shirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, and further consider the concept of risk. Curated by Markus Heinzelmann and Martina Weinhart, works were included by Christoph Buchel, Critical Art Ensemble (with Beatriz da Costa and Shyh-shiun Shyu), Camilla Dahl, gelatin, Jeppe Hein, Carsten Holler, Ann Veronica Janssens, Sven Pahlsson, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Julia Scher and Ann Maria Tavares. The particular relationship to risk varied from work to work, as was the aesthetic and conceptual strategies used by each artist.

One possible way of reading conceptual differences among the works is in how each creates a different sense of time for the viewer. Simply put, there seem to be differences in how each work positions the relationship between risk and the exhibition’s visitors. Some work, for example, creates the experience of an aftermath, a risk in the past tense. This is more significant than a simple difference in narrative approach however. How we are positioned/position ourselves in relation to our understanding of risk says a lot about how we perceive our ability to enact change in our own lives. Or as Neils Werber discusses in the catalogue, whether we are taking risks (making decisions about our own future) or experiencing danger (living with the choices of others).

The environmental/architectural installation by Christph Buchel creates such an experience of a past, a past where the outcome of taking a risk is now known. Upon entering Buchel’s work, one finds herself within a decomposing, yet not completely destroyed, apartment. A radio and electric lights still function amid the vacant rooms that include a collapsed kitchen filling with dirt and a completely flooded, and eerily still, bathroom. As a visitor, walking through with other visitors, the feeling is voyeuristic, as if you are part of a scientific team exploring an urban ecosystem post catastrophe. It’s this feeling of being an observer that provided me with the feeling of temporal distance, along with the nostalgia provided by my experiences with dated, post-apocalyptic films like Mad Max and The Omega Man. Relating to present trauma through the past is one way of making sense of new experiences, as well as a way of using traumatic experience in order to harness emotional power, for good or bad.

Many of the works dealt with an abstract sense of the present, offering the chance to make theatrical choices within the confines of the work. Camilla Dahl’s Champaign Bar dares viewers to suck champaign from rubber nipples (on their knees, of course) as it’s poured over a seductive, faux-porcelain appliance. If you like taking blank pills for fun, Carsten Huller’s Placebo Tablet Tank, a lotto-like machine that spits placebo pills out of a large aquarium, may help you out. Stepping into Ann Veronica Janssens’s fog filled room (if you don’t have asthma), it takes about five seconds before you have no idea how you got in, as you wander through a mist that changes colors from one spot to the next.

Only a couple of the works in the show dealt specifically with technological risks/dangers, and while not completely focused on an uncertain future, there certainly is a sense of looking at risks that are not, nor can be, completely decided upon in the moment. As Paul Virilio’s Unknown Quantity suggests there is the feeling (largely supported by contemporary experience) of dangers/risks increasing exponentially as the complexity and interconnectivity of technology expands.

Julia Scher’s Embedded uses closed circuit surveillance video within a seductive sculptural installation of beds to relate an ongoing story that makes each visitor a new character (Goldilocks perhaps). The story involves a simultaneous past, present and future, as visitors will see video images of those that preceded them, making them aware of a delay in the broadcast, while also aware that some unknown future visitors will be looking at images of them. While video surveillance is already ubiquitous in contemporary public life, and anyone familiar with the Web has probably seen private web cams of some sort, the future direction of surveillance technology and our understanding of “public” are not necessarily certain. Scher provides an opportunity to question both the social and personal aspects of voyeurism and control, and points to some of the epistemological problems with the public/private dichotomy in the first place.

Biotechnology has become an increasingly contentious, global topic, affecting philosophical, economic and religious ideologies. With growing evidence of the mobility of genetically modified (GM) material (GM “polluted” crops like soy, corn and canola), there is also growing resistance to the acceptance of this unregulated genetic drift. Legal cases like Monsanto vs. Percy Schmeiser, the battle for labeling standards, the Mexican governments attempts to preserve the integrity of its corn stock, and now the EU’s effort to ban the importation of GM foods from the US are some of the manifestations of this resistance. Critical Art Ensemble (with Beatriz da Costa and Shyh-shiun Shyu) project, Free Range Grain, takes the methods of risk analysis to the audience, giving EU citizens an opportunity to see if such a ban is proving successful in keeping GMOs out of the food supply. For the exhibit, a portable lab was set up in the Schirn where visitors could bring in food products and test them for evidence of GM material, demystifying both the subject of GMOs and the science behind genetic research.

In the exhibition catalogue, Neils Werber makes the argument that the dichotomy of risk/danger is unavoidable, that “no round table discussion, however broadly representative its participants, changes anything about the fact that, time and again, decisions involving high risks and lasting consequences are imposed on others as dangers.” The attempt to democratize decisions then, merely “shifts their focus.” It is this concept that I’d like to consider in conclusion and take us back to the opening quotations that I’ve yet to mention.

One of the curatorial strategies employed in making a cohesive, graphic statement with the exhibition was the approach to labeling. Instead of the standard wall tags, information was printed on those bright yellow floor signs often used to warn of slippery floors (the catalogues also had bright yellow covers with singular, black symbols familiar as hazard warnings, like those for fire or electric shock). Usually, the institutional/curatorial hand is less visible and therefore more difficult to consciously consider, so this instance of institutional visualization provides plenty for contemplation.

If as Werber suggests, risk (agency) comes at the expense of danger (passivity), where does the transfer of control occur here? We are told that we, as viewers transformed into participants, are taking risks; that the artists are taking risks by making participatory work; that the curators are taking risks by organizing such a show; and finally that the institution is taking risks by hosting the exhibit. I certainly do not mean to minimize these risks or the significance of the acts involved, rather quite the opposite. But, if these are risks, taken knowingly and with active involvement, where is the site of danger? Well, this is a complex question, for sure, but one worth considering.

It’s possible that the signage, as insignificant as it may seem, reveals something of a subconscious here, almost like an institutional Freudian slip. The little yellow sandwich boards, warning of a just mopped floor, are institutional indicators themselves. They are standardized, isotype bearing markers of a seemingly benevolent power looking out for our wellbeing, saying, “Be careful! Don’t slip.” We see them in malls, shops, schools, hospitals, and museums: those public spaces where you may visit, work, or just pass through. So we slow down and move more carefully, aware of the risk if we don’t. But behind this institutional display of paternal caring are those like Medrano and the Salvadoran worker quoted above. Institutional risk creates personal danger for those in service or considered expendable, whether it’s one’s health or retirement savings. Of course, I don’t mean to simplify the issue to one of worker safety: institutions depend on many forms of power transference in order to sustain the illusion of control and the appearance of benevolence, whether local or global in scope. And while the problem of inequality in the risk/danger dichotomy may remain problematic, shifting the focus might not be such a bad idea. Maybe it’s who’s doing the shifting that matters.

At Your Own Risk June 27- September 7, 2003 at the Shirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
Catalogue published by Revolver, Frankfurt am Main, 2003

image: installation view, Critical Art Ensemble, Beatriz da Costa and Shyh-shiun Shyu “Free Range Grain,” with fog from Ann Veronica Janssens’s “Schirn.”
photo by Ryan Griffis

Using data from a 1966 behavioural experiment testing the influence of the perception of time categories on individual behaviour, The Relation Papers presents a fictional vision of two characters – The Simulating Subject and The Hypnotized Subject – as they undergo questioning at the hands of The Experimenter, his Confederate, and an Outside Observer.

The work is meant to explore the combination of an existing structure with fiction so that the arrangement of fragments would retain the internal direction and logic of the information yet be deliberate and subjective, with the quality of a fever dream.

Taken from the album Airstream by John Blanchard, a selection of meditative pieces for cello, piano, sitar, and orchestra. A smooth interface that reflects the feeling of the music, drawing the user into an environment that is unusually calming and relaxing for a computer interface. It also features photography created by the composer inspired by the work of Andy Goldsworthy.

A personal interactive document of the protest in London, UK, on September 28th 2002, to stop the war against Iraq. I am an artist, but on this day, I was one among 400,000 (or thereabouts) protesters. It seems more relevant these days for me as an artist to jump in with both feet, to be in the middle of a crowd of human beings when so much of our experience of the world is so passive and mediated by TV and film’. This piece uses JavaScript and is accompanied by a flash soundtrack made in collaboration with ‘Ouch Those Monkeys.

http://www.furtherfield.org/rcatlow/stop/index.html

A collaborative effort of Taped Rugs Artists, conceived and executed during spring and summer, 2002. It is credited not to any specific artist, but to “Taped Rugs Productions”. Collaborators C.Goff III, Buzzsaw, Josh Duringer, Killr “Mark” Kaswan, Eric Matchett, Mikadams, and the ‘Tapegerm Collective’ worked with Mp3s and tapes that were created using materials which were improvised live, transmitted via email, and/or sent through the post. These materials were edited and glued together in various ways to create the 28 pieces which appear on the final recording. 5 tracks featured on Furtherfield.

https://archive.org/details/Machinations

These archived visual diary accounts exude an intuitve and playful intimacy. As you journey through the collection of pages, static images, moving images, dates, times and moments; you get the sense that images are a platform for communicating what cannot be said by words alone. The user experiences a methodology, an ‘in tune’ optical awareness. The emotion and poetic mind behind these works explores life by seeing, shining light on other people’s lives as well as her own. Viewing the external world as part of her own inner world, relational identification. The use of Flash, sound and other techniques are subtle and do not distract you from the subject at hand.

Other work by Jess Loseby on Furtherfield in Archive.org
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayartist.php?artist_id=38

An amazing journey following the West Nile Virus as it starts in the Bronx Zoo, New York, then spreads across 38 States, found in both mosquitos and birds. [MEDIAMIXER] uses online surveillance to track virus outbreaks and visual broadcasts of news reporting various incidents. The documentation featured is awesome: hospitalized victims, a water monitoring form section and many other themes and formats, including performance. This site is a well-structured, comprehensive multimedia exploration via the Web. It will engulf you as you move further into the flux and spectacle of paranoia.

This requires various players: Quicktime,
Flash, Shockwave, and Realplayer can all be downloaded for free.

Bruce Eves is a ‘male’ with many shadows, declaring an intelligent and conscious disdain towards our over-consumptive, mediated Western culture(s) driven by its endless insipid, self-conscious, protocolian schemes. His healthy distrust of ‘art for family’ viewing is a refreshing non-conformist stance. Some of his best work creates a dark, honest (sometimes frightening) clarity, juxtaposing different psychological contradictions of cultures and their underlying practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; thus, falseness. He knows that hypocrisy is part of life but is not part of the realization of life. ‘Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy’ Rambler. ‘1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS’ and ‘ALL MALE ORGY’ are a perfect examples of this.

My Idea of Fun

August Highland creates literary identities that are networked, hypertextural, and poetic complexities. Their existence challenges the singular, bypassing the notion of ‘I’. August’s multi-presences function like active bacteria, digital organisms chomping into a virtual Universe. Growing perpetually and spanning Internet portals everywhere. Punk in spirit, S.C.A.R.E’s underbelly possesses many shadows; the texts originate from Microsoft programmer’s development kits and porn sites. Both aspects consist of powerful corporate intentions and are mutually entwined in dominating the Internet for profit via the desire to either get on in the world or get off in the virtual (if you see what I mean). Yet this is not August’s message, it more part of the palette, a very small part of the greater whole.

Created after hearing the news that a tapestry reproduction of Guernica, Pablo Picasso’s powerful anti-war painting, was concealed behind a blue cloth and a row of flags at the U.N. Security Council offices as White House envoy Colin Powell was making the United States case for the Iraq war (05/02/03). A UN spokesperson claimed this was not censorship and had been done to provide a suitable backdrop for TV cameras that would say ‘UN’. The entire speech is presented here, cutting through the UN blue and revealing the paintings’ stark, tormented imagery and message.

Guernica – cover up [2003] http://www.devoid.co.uk/guernica/

Neil Jenkins – https://netpraxis.net/

Noah Lyon’s work is energetic, visceral and direct. Graffiti-like scrawlings reflecting back to the viewer a punk existentialism that unashamedly points out humanity’s seemingly perpetual dysfunction. This honest and poetic melee of personal reasonings and experience, mixed up with America’s own socio-political confusions, offer a realism that much art caught up in its own (high art) mythology ignores at its own cost. A Picasso spirit lives on in Noah’s work, not consciously or by active reference but via a combination of brut instinct, intimacy and intuitive play on various subject matters.

A Picasso spirit lives on in Noah’s work, not consciously or by active refrence but via a combinationof brut instinct, intimacy and intuitive play on various subject matters.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031218163133/http://www.retardriot.com/

Viewing Marc Garrett’s TuRmOil is hardly anguish. Instead, expect a menu miming a file tree, reminiscent of some of Alexi Shulgin’s early work, providing iconic links to popup DHTML animations. My favorite of the ten offered works is Darkness, in which an SOS icon is superimposed over a grayscale mirrored mushroom cloud. Clicking on the surface of the cloud moves the SOS to your mouse position; the mouse down event drops the icon to the bottom of the frame, where it bounces. Other pages make liberal use of barcodes and faces, interspersing these loaded images with Dubuffet-inspired graphics. Ten pieces speaking eloquently about the precarity of the individual and the world around her, Garrett has here captured the dominant metaphors of our times and scripted them…with JavaScript.

Separation is a reflective and insightful web work that exhorts us, as fellow digital ‘users’, to recognise our state of cyborgian seizure as we sit at our screens. The artist’s dialogue with her computer is a frustrated cry for the liberation of her tired body from the autism of the machine, locked into its own unrelenting processes. Her halting soliloquy is interspersed with instructions for physical exercise. Using a deliberately obstructive and controlling mode of interactivity, the work offers a strictly administered programme of Eastern style physical therapy for our nerves, muscles and spirits. This work works.

February 2003

To say that Joy Garnett’s Bomb Project is monumental would be an understatement. To say that it’s a necessary reminder of the power unleashed at the end of World War II, and of the power the whole world cringed under during the Cold War–that would be more like it. And yet there’s more going on here than activism (as if that weren’t enough).

When I first encountered Garnett’s work on this project, I was excited by the concept, yet had difficulties accepting it as a work of net art. For one thing, it’s not…pretty. Having become accustomed to the technical pyrotechnics of so many other pieces, The Bomb Project seemed less like an art work and more like an information archive.

Which it is, really. This is an exhaustive “on-line artists’ resource for nuclear documentation, ” as the proposal states. It’s meant to be used, by artists (Garnett intends). In that, it’s a generative work; this art object will give birth to other art objects (Garnett says the project will post periodic calls for work). This is one of the ways net art differs from more traditional, non-networked forms; it relies on the net itself to both distribute its presence and to create itself–i.e. collaborate with the user.

It’s not clear at all whether Garnett considers The Bomb Project to be an artwork in itself. It’s goal is, as the proposal iterates, to “gather… together links to nuclear image archives (still and moving), historical documents, current news, information (and disinformation). It makes accessible the declassified files and graphic documentation produced by the nuclear industry itself, providing a platform for comparative study, analysis and creativity. ” And yet, here’s what the proposal has to say about this work’s raison d’etre: ” The Bomb Project will help us assess our cultural attraction/repulsion vis-a-vis images of mass destruction and apocalypse.” Which sounds like an aesthetic goal to me.

I would argue that The Bomb Project is a work of art. Of net art in particular. If one of net art’s hallowed goals is to use the network to greater aesthetic advantage, I can think of no more spectacular way to do that than the method Joy Garnett has chosen here. Sure, it’s not as frenetic as some works of net art are–it doesn’t search the web and display pages according to some odd algorithm, the way browser art does, nor is it a Flash piece or Java Applet that breaches the boundary between computer game and literature. It functions more like software art, really, but without the generative code; it doesn’t do anything, really. It leaves the work up to you.

Seeing the computer as an anthropomorphic entity is nothing new. Hackers have been known to pat their machines affectionately on the case, calling them by familiar names. “Ole Martha;s struggling with some low-RAM issues,” they say. I myself have an affectionate name for my machine: I call her Katherine, which is my girlfriend’s middle name…

Of course, taking this logic a few steps further is no problem at all. If we can look at the machine as a living entity, then it’s only natural that this entity have all the qualities we do. After all, computers operate on memory–which, all too often, is what we operate on as well. And if the machine thinks as we do, and if the machine remembers, it must dream, eh?

This is what comes to mind in viewing Cory Arcangel’s Data Diaries, commissioned by turbulence.org. For this piece, Arcangel hacked the QuickTime media player into thinking his computer’s random-access memory (the RAM) was a video file. “Lots of artists talk about memory,” Alex Galloway writes in his introduction to the project. “But for artists working with computers, memory has a very specific technical definition. If ever computers had a subconscious, this is it. Cory describes it as “watching your computer suffocate and yell at the same time.” They look like digital dreams–the pure shapes and tones of real computer memory.”

Watching Cory’s Data Diaries is, as one Rhizome member put it on that list, like watching your computer defragment itself. Blocks of primary color skip and twitch across the screen to a hissing, popping, exploding soundtrack. It’s engaging in the same way staring off into a bonfire is engaging, or gazing at clouds–there’s a Zenist absorption when you allow your eyes to skip over it, not really searching for anything recognizable, just enjoying the motion and the color and the sound of phenomena. This is the primarily sensual component to the Data Diaries.

This work, when turbulence announced it, caused quite a spirited discussion on both the Rhizome and Webartery lists. Michael Szpakowski, who runs the web art site somedancersand musicians, seemed appalled by the work: “There’s no way the viewer can know that what is on the screen has some connection to Cory’s this and that except by way of the artist statement… Take the concept away and the poverty of the thing immediately becomes apparent – if the artist simply constructed the images we see we might say, OK that’s vaguely interesting and attractive in a kind of wallpaper way for about 2 seconds but 11 hours…please!” Others, like t.whid of http://www.mteww.com/, found the work to be valid and innovative on a conceptual level.”there’s nothing wrong with having to know a few things to appreciate an artwork,” he maintained. “you’ve been trained from birth to look at media in different ways and there is no reason why you shouldm’t learn something that takes 15 seconds to read to appreciate another level of this work…the work itself is very interesting to look at without knowing anything about it. what’s interesting is it’s organic yet machine-like animation. it’s full of surprises if you watch it for a little while…”

These comments form the core of the issues raised by a work such as this. Its offline lineage runs through the finest of conceptual art–the Art and Language Group in the seventies and eighties, for instance–though here we do indeed have a sensual object to cling to (some would argue that nothing on the net has a material quality, which is true in a sense; however, in this case, as in many other cases of net and web art, there is something to look at and experience, as opposed to the raw concept). And one can, as I stated earlier, enjoy the work in a zen fashion–it’s a show in itself, without the knowledge that Cory used his machine’s RAM as the meat of the work. This added knowledge simply heightens one’s appreciation of the piece. Does knowing how old Michaelangelo was when he painted the Sistine ceiling have any bearing on how we view the work? For some, yes. But the work can and does stand beyond such literary knowledge.

So are Cory’s Data Diaries an act of voyeurism for those with a strong artificial intelligence bent? Watching these stuttering, popping movies, are we in fact peering into the very conciousness of the machine? Would Freud or Jung (or Lacan) find anything useful in the stream of data these visual oddities embody? It depends on how you look at your computer. As for me, I can tell that Katherine like Cory’s work; she loads his streams eagerly. And whatever makes Katherine happy often makes life easier for me.

Jess Loseby is slick. Well, maybe Jess herself isn’t slick; I mean, I’m sure she doesn’t shine in certain turns of light (or maybe she does?), but her art is slick. And that, despite all the often pejorative implications attached to the word slick, is actually a good thing.

This slick Bristisher, whose main site, is a feast of eye candy and thoughtful composition in several media (new media literature, images and poetry), creates work that centers around the “cyber-domestic” aesthetic, as her CV’s artistic statement puts it. “Is there room in the global arena that is the net for the small, the domestic and the whims of a neurotic woman?” she asks there, and those of us lucky enough to have stumbled across her work usually answer…well, yeah.

I first learned of Jess’ work through the rhizome list-serv, where I remember, either earlier this year or late last, her posting a link to a piece (I believe it was The Dream…go there now…see what I mean by slick? All those ominous somehow phosphorescent black clouds floating a steely gray poetry across the sun-warped negative of what looks like a stranded child…and the music, by her husband, musician Clive Loseby…). At the time, I was on dial-up, and loading this piece seemed to take forever. Happily, now, I use a cable connection, so I can view The Dream as much as I want to, whenever I want to.

Jess’ work was brought back to me as part of a feature at furtherfield, a rather subversive art site (check out all the erotic material there, especially The Feeler Twins take on the “nature” of the erotic, wink wink) that seems a strange place for her brand of cyber-domesticity to take root.

And yet, despite Jess’ claims of domesticity, there is something rather feral in some of these works (the threat of that child being carried away by wolves pervades The Dream, and fear itself comes under the slippery Loseby lens in Code Scares Me, where a short poem –“If i could only get rid/of this darkness//I could see you//and you could see/me”–gets buried in floating skein of html code the user can manipulate slightly by way of a few small click boxes at the bottom on the screen). It’s domesticity pushed to its homicidal, fight-or-flight dark side; the loving mother will, of course, kill anything that threatens to harm her children.

Often these days I wonder what academics will make of this particular period of artistic endeavor, and how hypermedia will be perceived. The only thing I don’t like here, in the online art of Jess Loseby, is that at times I find myself wishing for interfaces that were more complex. In Hello, Loseby speaks to us one word at a time in white Times Roman on a matte black screen; no music, no click-and-go, just one word popping up right after the other to form a friendly, breezy paragraph.

However, my gender may be getting in the way of my enjoyment of pieces like this: like theory, code may someday come to seem a patriarchal concept. a leftover whiff of the father, who may or may not be hungry enough to eat his own young. In the same way Gertrude Stein’s work has been lauded by some feminist critics for omitting by degrees the phallocentric narrative and development ghost, Jess’ work here may be quite conceptually solid (as if a work really ever needs to be): I miss the code because I’m male, and I want action, movement, as opposed to this rather quiet and domestic teletype text. It’s talking to me, slowly, but I’m not listening. I want food.

I was a bit put off by Yucef Merhi’s statement accompanying his sequence of flash works ~ Poetic Dialogues 1.0 currently online at turbulence.org.

In it, Merhi writes, ” In the last few years the propagation of Net Art has established a market for the study and exploration of this dynamic field of contemporary art. However, most of the works that are categorized as Net Art don’t make sense. Maybe this is just a reflection of today’s society, or maybe most of the net/contemporary artists are nothing but postmodernists.” Nothing but postmodernists! I fumed. I’ve always had this weird conception of words like “sense” and “meaning,” especially when they’re used in sentences like “This (work) makes no sense” or “This (object) has no meaning”; I’ve always thought they were cop-outs. The concept of “meaning,” I’ve always reasoned, is so much wider (and wilder) than common usage allows; everything means something, even if that “sense” falls outside the realm of the narrow confines of what is conventionally termed meaningful. Everything that seems at first glance to “not make sense” is a tiny crack looking out onto a world that admits much more than contemporary consciousness (shaped so slimly by corporate interests and ideological state apparati like education, church and television) often cares to acknowledge.

That said, however, I must admit that I like this work of Merhi’s. Poetic Dialogues 1.0 is a series of 18 different flash movies made with a wristwatch camera. In these movies, various people (grouped on the screen in threes) recite lines of poetry written by Merhi. The juxtaposition of the lines is what makes the piece move; in each incarnation of the screen, the user is given a haiku comprised of lines seemingly seeded at random. When the sequence has played itself out, the user can hit a “Play Again” button that refreshes the screen, loading three more portrait-lines for her perusal.
While I like the juxtaposition of the poetry itself (said poetry being pretty decent, if a bit contrived: lines like “She melts her rage to the night” are a bit too heavy on the old prophetic-poetic voice of the nineteenth century for my taste, but do tingle with a certain lyricism), I often wondered, watching the trio of faces load and reload, just how this piece fulfilled the “dialogue” portion of Merhi’s title.

Sure, it’s interesting to watch the faces, but these people are speaking Merhi’s lines, not their own, and other than the fact that the piece seems to seed the lines at random, it does no surrendering of ye olde tyrannical authorial control. And why bother with these faces, really, if all they’re contributing to the piece is Merhi’s poems? Is it the individual phrasing Merhi’s after here, or is it the chance to show off a little technological gadget (the watch-camera)?

Yes, the piece is entertaining; but, if you’re going to start a statement with the complaint that much of current net art “makes no sense,” why bother with randomly-seeded juxtaposition at all? If, in fact, an artist wishes above all to “make sense,” wouldn’t it be a safer bet to proceed in a more linear fashion (not that this work is “nonlinear”), rather than risk the chance of the output courting chaos by allowing the machine/event to determine the work’s form? Perhaps Merhi’s statement was delivered tongue-in-cheek; perhaps Merhi is really bemoaning the fact that too much net art is too conventional. But if this were the case, why does authorial intent play such a huge part in this work?

Though Merhi’s Poetic Dialogues 1.0 does seem to fail when it comes to any true dialogue between the user and the piece, it does raise these questions…which, after all, is what online art should do.

Jason Nelson makes claims that he isn’t a musician. I am deprived of the physical ability to play an instrument, he says: I only manipulate preexisting sound. And yet, one of the most striking things about his new work Plush and indeed about much of his work in general, is the spacious use of sound.

Plush is a hypertextish flash piece; by that I mean that it follows the hypertext logic (it is primarily a textual and still image object, accessible via an interface that allows the user to read the texts and images in a non-sequential, nonhierarchical order); user-interaction is encapsulated in navigational choice. This logic, around the early to mid-nineties, was quite a leap; it challenged the purported linearity of the book, and the politics surrounding it: hierarchy, authorial control, etc. etc.

In the hands of a lesser artist, this technique would seem dated. But when I think of Nelson’s work, I think of candy–not in the pejorative sense, as in the dismissive “eye-candy,” but in the sense of a cleanness of architecture, a clearness of design. Nelson here is raiding the annals of Pop aesthetic; the pieces opening frame contains both work-title and author-name in a figure reminiscent of brand logos, which is definitely not to suggest any alignment of Nelson with corporate artworks: Nelson’s underground, albeit he is an artist quite interested in the traditional aspirations toward beauty and wholeness.

Naturally, this is not as simple as it seems; the resonances Nelson sets up between the image of the towel (a soft, enveloping world) and the individuals who inhabit them (for drying, for comfort) are at the heart of these prose poems. All through her reading, the user is soothed by a repetitive musical phrase, against which at times smaller flash documents radiate from the interface; in some, a voice sings about domestic objects: toothbrushes, socks; that which clings to our body and defines it in its relations to the space. Nelson’s vocal clips are verses in a complex song that also incorporates images and alternating transmogrifying text.

These are images of nudity mostly, body parts (presumably of Sondheim and his wife Azure Carter) magnified and (at least in the beginning of the image-sentence) cut off from context: penis and vagina, sphincter and buttocks, gracefully moving from close-up to full-body shots (the Sondheims are photographed draped across the sheet-covered back of a sofa). Each photograph is accompanied by Sondheim’s text, which is, predictably, about text. The images and the text both mesh and contrast; one gets the feeling that when Sondheim writes of text, he is writing also of the body, and that his theory encompasses both, not necessarily making a distinction between the two.

Nelson’s musicianship consist in his ability to carve a delicious three-minute pop song from these elements. Not the song that the radio station streams to you over and over, but one that you compose along with him, thereby fusing your own aspirations to his musings on the domestic. Nelson’s domestic is our pop. It tastes good.

There are certain artists out there in the network that frustrate me. Here I am, day in and day out, trying to formulate some sort of useful taxonomy of all the art forms I see emerging on the net, and do the artists care? Noooo! Some of them just go along mixing and warping and wilding the media until I just sit in front of my lousy machine wondering guiltily why the sun was out and everything was green when I sat down to look at their sites and now it’s cold and there’s snow on the ground and my girlfriend left a note on our printer telling me in the most polite terms possible for such an exchange that she’s leaving me for Brian Kim Stefans because his pedigree is more legitimate than mine, he being well beloved by the folks at Iowa Review Web and I being reviled (they send me dead rats in the post, actual dead rats, with cute little notes attached telling me I’d better give up making art or I’ll be in the same predicament as ole Algernon here) by same said benchmark institution. It’s enough to make a net artist/critic cry in his monitor.

The tears, though, are far outweighed by the thrills, especially when it’s the work of Jtwine I’m looking at. Jtwine’s site, available at http://www.jtwine.com/, is one of those thoroughly entertaining and unpredictable sites that keeps me coming back to the net for my art entertainment needs. Jtwine is a visual artist primarily, one whose work closely resembles the old expressionism of Dubuffet and the newer expressionism of Jean Michel Basquiat–two of my favorites as far as visual art goes. Wandering through Jtwine’s domain is like watching the work of these two artists come to life with dynamic animated gifs and Flash animations. He loves frames, Jtwine does, and his use of frames is startling; clicking on a link in a sidebar one watches expressionistic, almost childlike scenes of the power structures inherent in adult corporate life. It’s a definite feast for the eyes, and probably one of the wildest art sites I’ve ever seen.

Recently I had the chance to interview Jtwine. He burst into my home at 3:00 in the morning, eyes glassy and enflamed. I thought he was there to get back the Kid Rock album I’d borrowed from him two years ago (I’m such a huge fan I couldn’t bear to part with it), but no: he wanted to talk about his art. He had to get it off his chest. Being an artist myself, I understood, and invited him to pull up a kitchen chair and hold court.

Q:How was the transition to net-based work for you? What were some of the problems you faced in assembling your site? How has the work’s presence on a network changed the nature of what you do?

A: The transition to net based work was like a powerful drug getting hooked right away. There where no real problems except multiple system crashes, lost data and tendencies towards carpool tunnel syndrome. The core of my work didn’t really change I’m still driven by drawing in real space but my projects became more conceptual over the years.

Q: Describe for me your first experience online. What needs could you at the time forsee the network fulfilling for you? What needs has it fulfilled that you didn’t imagine?

A :The first experience was waiting while loading but it was exciting anyway to have a new medium to work in. A slow modem and not enough ram at that time made it difficult to develop an image based web site. I got a bigger audience. I didn’t imagine that people write about my work or being included in museum shows.

Q: Do you feel having a bigger audience and wider distribution has influenced the way you work? You mentioned becoming more conceptual on the network—why do you think this is?

A: The net-audience is more or less anonymous so it didn’t really influence my work in terms of comercialisation, intension, style and content. The first rush of intuitive, imidiate exploration was transformed through experience into projects that involve more planing, research and time.
Q:Tell me about your favorite tools, both software and offline. What do you use to do what you do?

A: A pen with black ink and what ever software that allows me to manipulate images.

Q: How do you feel about digital images? Knowing underneath that they’re basically information, as opposed to the “concreteness” of pen and paper? (Of course, pen and paper are also information…)
A: I like the pixelized flatness of digital images, they become the objectification of hand drawn images The underlying code of digital images is not important to me in terms of content and immediate perception.

Q: I’ve noticed on your site a proliferation of animated gifs, sometimes in a flash format. Did animation interest you before you went online? What prompted the move from static images to moving ones?

A: Before I went online I was experimenting with video and super 8.
To achieve an intensified visual impact and to transport more content it was a necessary step to create animations for my website. Animations make the net more exciting to me.

Q:What were some of your influences? I detect a strong expressionist or neo-expressionist bent in your art. To what do you owe your style?

A:I was dropped into the corporate world when I was 20 and I was disgusted by it. To express my unhappy situation I start literally to draw myself out of it. The influences changed over the years but I always liked Gruenewald, Goya and Grosz.

Q: All of these artists used various methods of distortion as a path to the harmony of their works. How do you feel about distortion and beauty? Is beauty for you symmetry, or something else, something deeper? Is beauty connected to distortion?

A: To me beauty is sealed inside the realms of aesthetics and fashion and represents a superficial surface. Im interested in truth not beauty. Distortion or essentailisation might be necessary to create a true image to reveal visions of the human drama on the battlefield of reality in our commercialized and machine dependent world.

Q: Tell me about the corporate world. Do you feel it’s informed your work in any way?
A: It definitely did. Power structures, technology and human relations became a Leitmotif in my work.

Indeed they did. The splash page for his site cautions: “Be aware of your surroundings and exercise caution when visual reflections refer to you.” It’s an awareness of just how much of human perception is grounded in human predisposition. One piece on his site, “mindgame”, opens a flash animation of a seated figure (it’s one of those egg-shaped chairs, in fact, supposed to yield such comfort in the office) superimposed against an exploding color background that keeps declaring, looped, ad infinitem, “empty refill.”

My favorite piece on the site, though, is Jtwine’s homage to September 11. “9.11” offers the user a scrolling sketchbook of reactions to the terrorist attacks; the sketches are organic (they were quite obviously scanned in from an actual realtime sketchbook, and converted to transparent gifs, quite possibly with the magic eraser tool in Photoshop); expressionistic drawings of the event coexist with handwritten poetry, all scrolling down into a bath of digital flames licking up from the bottom of the screen. “some people feel dead inside,” he asserts in this piece, and it rings true here, punctuated as it is by sideswipes of sketches upswipes of flames. This is a graphic examination of power teetering, the mundane frustrated by disaster. It’s a statement you won’t soon forget.

At some point in the distant future, I would venture to say that Alan Sondheim’s name will be mentioned along with Whitman’s and Dickinson’s as being one of the American pioneers of a new aesthetic.

Not only is Sondheim a prolific and thoughtful writer (he’s written books–Being on Line: Net Subjectivity(Lusitania, 1996), Disorders of the Real (Station Hill, 1988)–as well as an exhaustive and fascinating Jabes-tinged phenomenology of net culture, the Internet Text [url]http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt[/url] but he’s also composed some of the most sensual and startling digital paintings available on the net. In addition to all this (as if these shockwaves weren’t enough!), Sondheim has made movies. A wonderful sampling of his work is now available at futherfield.org under the title Skein & Theory.

One of the unusual things about Skein & Theory is that there’s very little text–quite strange, considering that Sondheim is a prolific writer. The exhibition consists mostly of his digital images (derived via various algorithmic manipulations using imaging software like Mathematica) and quick time movies. True to the furtherfield credo, many of the images are racy. While the first set (the skein series) starts off with some rather brilliant and colorful abstractions, they soon digress into images of Sondheim immersed in water. In one he lies face down in water manipulated red: quite haunting, especially as this is placed in the first set of images (it’s as if the over-cited “death of the author” had become quite literal; or is it a reference to the “death” referenced in many accounts of tribal shamanism, wherein the corporeal existence of the shaman initiate is destroyed, often violently, to make way for the cosmic consciousness of the spirit realm?). In one, amid a blood-red plain of undulating water, Sondheim appears to be swimming toward a glowing ram (an astrological reference? Or another stain of shamanistic phenomenology?

If these images form their own syntax (and furtherfield’s presentation of them, in a JavaScript slideshow format, with the user clicking through them one-by-one, it is clearly reminiscent of a syntactical structure), the abstractions leading to swimming images of the skein series is predicated by the theory images, which are where furtherfield’s transgressive aesthetic comes at one full-swing.

These are images of nudity mostly, body parts (presumably of Sondheim and his wife Azure Carter) magnified and (at least in the beginning of the image-sentence) cut off from context: penis and vagina, sphincter and buttocks, gracefully moving from close-up to full-body shots (the Sondheims are photographed draped across the sheet-covered back of a sofa). Each photograph is accompanied by Sondheim’s text, which is, predictably, about text. The images and the text both mesh and contrast; one gets the feeling that when Sondheim writes of text, he is writing also of the body, and that his theory encompasses both, not necessarily making a distinction between the two.

The skein and theory images are accompanied by three of Sondheim’s quick time videos. In these films, Sondheim fully explores the distinctly American paranoia left over from the September 11 bombings. In one, a naked Sondheim clutches a naked Carter, rubbing her feet against his genitals, murmuring against a background of soothing music about how he’d like to watch as his beautiful wife had sex with terrorists.

To me, this strikes to the very heart of American paranoia not only in wake of the terrorist bombings, but American ethnic paranoia in general; it’s the same attitude that gave birth to the mythology of African-American sexuality.

“He would not be as ungainly as I am,” Sondheim moans, driving the self-loathing at the heart of American racism home. It’s a brave gesture, and one that perhaps Mr. Ashcroft needs to see.

On 3rd March 2003, Avatar Body Collision joined the Lysistra Project in a worldwide theatre event for peace! Aristophane’s play, Lysistrata, written circa 410 b.c, describes a society where women’s power rests upon their ability to deliver or withhold sexual favours and was read by women at public and private venues all over the world in protest against the ensuing war against Iraq. ‘Dress the Nation was conceived as the fictional response by George. W. Bush and his key supporters, to the news that degenerate theatre types were staging global productions of a lewd Greek play as part of an anti-war campaign initiative.’ (ABC).

The live online performances in a Palace chat room environment are documented on this website with comic strips and transcripts. The key players of this war: the leaders, the advisers, the victims and the silent, oppressed civilians, include ‘bubba bush’, ‘toe-knee blur’ and ‘the women in black’ (women wearing the hijab) and are represented by avatars which move around against backdrops of battlefields, flags and other war associated imagery. Their scripted dialogues appear as speech bubbles and are irreverently counterpointed by unscripted audience interventions. The interplay of scripted and spontaneous speech and the incongruity of violent world leaders in uninhibited conversation with civilians (consisting of manga-style characters and smileys), reveals a truer reflection of chaotic world politics than we currently see presented in our propagandised news media.

Main Image: Lysistrata. (2023, November 29). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysistrata

Visit the living room, the study, the hallway and other various homely environments in this new erotic, interactive artwork by Ruth Catlow using pipe cleaners as raw art material. Expect to witness an intuitive sense of playfulness in various domestic settings. Accompanied by sounds & noises by the Internet mystery band ‘Ouch Those Monkeys’. Sex is the subject matter here, wrapped with an intimacy that dips into a realm of visualized mutual pleasures for all to enjoy and share.

https://variants.artbase.rhizome.org/Q2487/domestic_idols/

An ongoing collaboration and exploration by critical avant-garde poet-writers/artists Lewis Lacook and Alan Sondheim. This unself-conscious and interactive Flash-enhanced vista is a visual chaos radiating a mischievous zest. Consisting of sound and cut-up sentences harmonized by noise/sounds. A teacher writes on the Black board the word ‘Anthra’.

Negative 5

Collection of ‘Banner’ animations for all to use at will, created for use in areas of websites more commonly used for web advertisements. Also featured on the Banner Art Collective server http://www.bannerart.org. Add these banners to the pages of your website. Alexandra Reill’s flickering black-and-white marvels declare a contemporary existential blackness. Like ‘lost and found’, family negatives. Ghostly souls animated and jammed into a frame by a stroke of fate.