Yes, We Can - Blog Again

It's time to start posting to AotN again. It's been over six months since I finished the two courses on new media  taught by Dr Christiane Paul at UC Berkeley, yet I have been incapable of producing a new post. The whole point of taking the courses was to help me write better posts.

Berkeley Big Bang: Day 3

June 3 was the last day of the Berkeley Big Bang and a celebration of forty years of Leonardo.

Introduction: 40 Years of Leonardo

Stephen Wilson kicked off the event with refections on the 40 years of Leonardo - the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. He wondered “How will the Journal survive?” given the mounting language and production issues.

He then presented a review of computers and art thirty years ago (the time he joined Leonardo and today. I can quibble with facts. He twice mentioned Wired magazine when I believe he intended to say Byte magazine. He talks about the lack of art in the computer field in 1979, yet Melvin Prueitt’s books on computer graphics had already entered their Dover reprints stage of life by 1974. But I cannot dispute his conclusions: the world of art and computers has grown from a smaller and lonelier place to a huge place that nonetheless has issues such as still being marginalized.

Berkeley Big Bang: Day 2

The reason you go to an event like BBB is to listen to highly educated people expound in a highly intelligent manner. You hope, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, that you will understand what they say and, fidgeting with talisman, that they share ideas that are thrilling. With those thoughts in mind let’s double-click on Berkeley Big Bang: Day 2.

Berkeley Big Bang: Day 1

Today was the first day of a three day “Berkeley Big Bang” event at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA). There were two events and each was quite special. The first was Lynn Hershman Leeson: Virtually Everything, Virtually at the PFA cinema. This was an eight hour marathon showing 16 Hershman films dating from 1977 to 1994. The first three hours (which I watched) provided a glimpse as to why she has attained the stature she has as a filmmaker and as an artist and as, well, an impresario of wonderment.

Up to now my contact with her work had been through her project in Second Life: Life to the Second Power: Animating the Archive in which one of her collaborators is my friend Henrik Bennetson of the Stanford Humanities Lab. So I was delighted to see that Ms Hershman appeared on the screen as RobertaWare, her Second Life Avatar, and gave us a tour of the Dante Hotel while the speaker, Steve Seid, introduced the program.

Web Artist: Ken Goldberg

Ken Goldberg is an artist. Ken Goldberg is a professor of engineering.

So what defines who is an “artist”? What enables a professor at a major university have an alter ego that can encompass whimsy, caprice and felicity? Do his two sides have an irrational connection or a rational disconnection?

Many facets of Ken’s development and output are reported in a 2005 biographical article from the East Bay Express. But there’s more and new data waiting to be explored. In 2008 I hope to be in contact with Ken via a project or two. While doing so I hope to research and report back to you at a later date what Ken is looking into these days and where he is setting his sights.

MBCBFTW

MBCBFTW is an abbreviation of "My boyfriend came back from the war" - which is the name of a web site built in 1996 by Olia Lialina et al. More details regarding the background of the site are available at the Last Real Net Art Museum.

Christiane Paul in her seminal work Digital Art says "Early net art produced some classics of the genre, among them Olia Lialina's [MBCBFTW]..."

As Ms Paul points out, Lialina:

"expanded the piece into the Last Real Net Art Museum, which used the original MBCBFTW as a starting point and then developed an archive of variations on the work by other artists. The project points to the possibilities for creation and presentation offered by digital networks, such as the infinite reconfiguration of information in an open system, but not accommodated by traditional museums."

Today, we often call this sort of endeavor a "remix". Almost immediately upon exploring the site and understanding its openness to the possibilities remixing, I began to build re-mixes myself. As of this writing I have created six variations ranging from Advent calendar to Web 2.0 versions. Most of them are not yet complete. I seem to start yet another new remix before quite finishing the prior remix.

I have created a page on the Art of the Net wiki (Click on the link below) where you can find links to all the remixes as well as much, more more about my thoughts on Lialina's work.

MBCBFTW

Audience-Sourcing FAQ

2007-12-31. This post has been copied to the Art of the Net Wiki. All further updates and edits will occur on the Wiki. Link

What is audience-sourcing?

Audience-sourcing is the act of people, while in the process of observing a work of art, transmitting some aspect of their observation process to others in some durable manner.

Web Gallery: Jim Andrews and vispo.com

I have just spent another perfectly good hour wandering around Jim Andrew's vispo.com. Jim takes visuals, poetry, music, writing, gaming, criticism, coding and much more very seriously. No, on the contrary, he is very playful with all of the above.

Jim builds Web Art Instruments such as the splendid Nio and Jig Sound. These look good, sound good and are fun to play with.

I have been to Jim's site a number of times. There's a lot to read and interact with. For the moment I don't have any great insight into Jim and his work - other than it's great and very much a part of where I think the Art of the Net is heading towards and very much worth exploring. I hope to come back to the site and talk about individual works.

vispo.com

Web-Art: triptych.tv

Progressing from 8-bit/pixel art projects, we are moving onto re-hash work from the dot-come era. Triptych is data overload. Triptych is too much of a bad thing is a good thing. Triptych is de-construction with neither instruction nor construction. Triptych is your Triple-A journey to nowhere.

Tryptych just fits in to my definition of web art. There are links and they do take you to different pages. Three of the pages are empty profile pages for the authors and two other pages bring you to archived pages that re-hash the hash that the other pages had already re-hashed. Therefore the site is not just a digital video piece. It is interactive. It is built upon a Blogger account bludgeoned into submission to be outrageous.

Do I like it? Not really. Does it make a statement about this time period? Only time will tell. Will it cause furor/consternation and intellectual discourse. Probably not.

But it is Web Art. And any and all such experiments are to be applauded. One day there will be artists that will find the wormholes into new dimensions of art through the Internet. Triptych.tv is one of those first halting steps.

triptych.tv [via rhizome]

Web Blog: Gerard Ferrandez

Gerard Ferrandez continues to turn out some of the most amazing JavaScript demos on the Internet. His latest work, Autumn II, combines superb fluidity of motion, subtle transparency and great mouse-over responsiveness. As always, this technology is set against an evocative selection of images and a very pleasant musical riff.

A new feature on the site is a very extensive selection of links. To get to the links, move your mouse over the orange arrow at the bottom of the page until the workd "Links" appears then click. Any link recommended by Gerrard is certainly going to somewhere worth investigating. An on-going feature - very rare with most artist's sites - is a forum where you can ask Gerard questions or (as most people do) sing his praise.

I visit Gerrard's site frequently. He is one of the most talented artists working on Web Art. He is also one of the most open. All the source code, images and music he writes or uses are available with a click of a button under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.

Learning to navigate through the site has a tiny learning curve. But all your efforts will be extremely rewarding.

Link