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.

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 It’s goal is, as the proposal iterates, to “gather… together links to nuclear image archives (still and moving), historical documents, current news, information (and disinformation).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

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

Michael Szpakowski’s work always slices through the plethora of data when you least expect it, reminding us of what is important in this ever-troubled world; contrary to media opinion, people matter. And yet, in this piece, there are no people present, just the simplicity of nature, which seems to ooze a human consciousness. A piano wistfully accompanies you. You can hear and almost feel the wood, the keys plinking, and the air around the music as it plays; it breathes. Intimate echos, spaces between the obvious, the realm that Michael consciously touches upon, the substance of ourselves. An intimate, poignant reality that is unreachable for many artists because of a lack of depth. Drift…

A Walk Round Gilston

Oculart is a playful and visionary Internet Art piece that transcends the every day, using Flash in a way that stuns one’s expectations and emotional reasoning. One cannot help but get lost and caught up in its seemingly never-ending mesmerization. With an accompanying soundtrack reminiscent of Holger Czuckay’s ‘cannabis’, originally inspired by Stockhausen, slow hybrid, layered soundscapes with distant voices haunting the mind. It’s like hearing the lost souls of chanting transubstantiated beauty, wrapped with a sense of foreboding, shadowed with the inevitable end. Oculart is a fascinating and surreal experience, declaring a kind of honest visceralness. Mixing dreams, images of objects and people, with poetic text entwined within the structure of the interactive site. A psychological and seductive experience that leaves you with a feeling of elation, beauty, darkness and that awkward bedfellow – fear.

I’ll show you mine if you show me yours!

When sitting at a friend or colleague’s computer, have you ever “accidentally” had a quick nose at a few extra files? Do the insides of peoples’ computers reflect their minds to such an extent they become a “persona peep” show? Marc Garrett ponders PCs and Porn in his latest project [HaRdWaRe], a fusion of images, sound, Java and perhaps jouissance. Are you prepared, as he asks: “Welcome to the …secret grotto that other people seldom see. Look inside my computer & ask yourself, what if I was looking inside of yours?” Dirty Mac is optional!

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.

Fascinum by Christophe Bruno lives on the Yahoo portal. It shows the pictures from the daily news most viewed on national Yahoo websites. Compiling subjects that fascinate different countries worldwide, juxtaposed in real-time. Displaying the pictures most viewed [ranking from 1 to 10] on different national Yahoo portals.