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.

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

In Praise of Shadows

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

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

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

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

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

Weblogs and latitudes hurt by a global age.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Several thoughts on this piece.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How this is created:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AGORAXCHANGE NEEDS YOU!

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

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

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

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

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

Bravo, outstanding idea!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent projects by Ruth Catlow include Rethinking Wargames.

Turning to Chomsky by Andrew Baron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why a retrospective?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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