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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://archive.org/details/Machinations

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

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

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

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

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

My Idea of Fun

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

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

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

Neil Jenkins – https://netpraxis.net/

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

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

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

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

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

February 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Negative 5

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

A varied collection of agitprop writings, featuring his infamous ironic email shorts ‘Sleazy Art Meetings’ (sliced stories, art speak, critical philosophies, mixed with text stolen from sex sites on the Internet) and stories, or rather fables touching on how technology plays on our sub-conscience, issues of personal freedom, sexual identity, masculinity and politics. Some have termed his stories as cyber-novels. ‘I don’t mind the term, but I feel that the stories declare life and all its confusions beyond labels and are more about dealing with the issue of transmutation. The site also features ‘Critical Text’ and ‘Poetry/Prose’, all worth a visit.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150604064036/http://www.furtherfield.org/mgarrett/mgw/index.htm

Drawn to the big human subjects but ever unsure how to approach them. I think of these short films like inappropriate gestures, physical actions or shouts in public spaces. They are about seeing shamanistic hedonism and animism in shopping centres, the confusions and difficulties of taking responsibility for the state of the world in a fractured community, shifting identity (finding myself behind someone else’s eyes), subjectivity and perspective. I’ve got a wooden spoon in my hand and I’m stirring the chthonic soup. All the clips are taken in public spaces in Walthamstow, where I live in the east end of London, UK.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071031044105/http://www.furtherfield.org/rcatlow/shorts/index.html

A comprehensive online compendium of nuclear-related links, imagery and documentation. Intended as a resource for artists and encourages those working in all media, from net.art, film and video, eco-intervention and site-specific installation to more traditional forms of agitprop, to use this site to search for raw material. The Bomb Project has gathered links to nuclear image archives (still and moving), historical documents, current news, NGOs and activist organizations, and government labs and arms treaties. It makes accessible the declassified files and graphic documentation produced by the nuclear industry, providing a context for comparative study, analysis and creativity.

Three works explore the less disenchanted states of being. In one of her works ‘Miranda Matthews’ starts to locate the migrant ‘soul’ of myth & magic via performance, installation & sculpture. With ‘Seal Suits’, I decided to locate my own seal spirit and make my seal skin. The ‘seal suit’ is made from neoprene, used to make wet suits. “It feels like an extra layer of the self. The silkies are creatures of Celtic myth who have a hidden seal identity. The tale goes that women (and sometimes men) would hide their seal skins in a place known only to themselves. Tired of their ordinary existence, they would slip into their seal skins and swim into the oceans”.

Two docu/info/diary/performative pieces by ‘Joseph & Donna McElroy’. ‘Sailing’ is JavaScript work incorporating photographic images that change once you click on the page. It features interviews with people about their experiences and perceptions of life, ways of living in New York, working and living on the River. ‘White Mice’ is a JavaScript work with automated images. Accompanied by a verbal reflection about the sensory experience of the mouth, its flavours, the kiss and the memory. Discover the performance, fun and functionality in the works of this corporate, dynamic duo.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150603040348/http://www.furtherfield.org/jfdmcelroy/sailing_mice/index.html

‘Wrapping Our Warped Minds’ are visual and multimedia artists; exploring imaginative visual-scapes that users can interact with. You can either be the ‘VJ’ and change what you see before your eyes as pixels, code and images shift and glide like a ‘virtual contemporary Joseph Albers’ on your screen. Or the ‘DJ-sound mixer’ changing the sound levels of the music on each sound/viz- scape’. The beauty of it is that there is an intimacy in the way it hangs around floating, unbothered about whether someone is interacting, although participants are encouraged to create new moods using the phasers supplied.

Original version – https://wowm.org/picture/moodish/index.html

Later version – https://wowm.org/maya/archives/219