Arts Projects


"ADRIFT"
http://www5.awa.com/adrift/
A real-time performance/project to watch: "Adrift" is a networked collaboration joining three environments (sound, text and 3D vrml worlds). Performing from different locations, Helen Thorington (text), Marek Walczak (3D vrml), and Jesse Gilbert (music) explore the interrelation of wom/man/machine and the dynamics of real-time online environments. If you're looking for cutting-edge work on the Web that strives to push the networked experience to new levels, don't miss the next performance! Visit the site to check out the archive and the schedule. (Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring '98)

"Agree to Disagree: With Digressions"
http://www.users.interport.net/~gering/
The starting-point of this "argument" between Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolito is the statement: "In the future, books will be replaced by maps." Consequently, the discussion itself is charted in the form of a map: viewers can navigate through individual arguments or follow digressions, while a series of arrows visualizes the development of the argument, agreement or disagreement, in spatial terms. Even if the arguments aren't particularly 'new,' "Agree to Disagree" is an inspiring exploration of the possibilities of electronic text and its ability to mimic associative references. (Vol. 1 No. 11, March '97)

"Alter Stats"
http://www.interport.net/~gering http://adaweb.com/cgi-bin/jfsjr/obsr
John Simon, Jr.'s ALTER STATS is a constantly changing statistical profile of visitors to the virtual space. This "Self-Modifying Web Self-Visualization" is an experiment that blurs the boundaries between the observer and the observed: When you request the ALTER STATS pages, you are identified by the REMOTE_HOST variable, and ALTER STATS computes a unique image based on your interaction and returns it to your browser--in this way, you modify the image that future observers will see, and thus become part of the observed. (Vol. 1 No. 5, September '96)

"Ambitious Bitch"
http://www.edita.fi/kustannus/bitch/
Not merely a promo for Marita Liulia's installation and CD-ROM "Ambitious Bitch: A multimedia Dive into Femininity"--which strives to present a visual update of western femininity at the turn of the millennium--the website also establishes a context for the CD-ROM's subject. Apart from press reviews, tech guidance, discussion and e-mail, the site features "Me, Myself and I" (a lecture presented by art historian Leena-Maija Rossi at the Paris opening of "Ambitious Bitch"). It also includes a section called "Fact and Fiction," which examines statements concerning women's position and the statistics on which these statements have been based. (Vol. 1 No. 9, January '97)

"Arctic Circle"
http://www.thing.net/~circle/index.html
Arctic Circle is a 'travel-as-art-as-information' project by artists Felix Stephan Huber and Philip Pocock; by continuously uploading their travel documentation to cyberspace's InfoHighway, they documented their road trip in a camper van up the Alaska, Klondike and Dempster Highways to the arctic sea. As "an investigation into loneliness and ubiquity," arctic circle tries to create a connection between the virtual and physical travel space. Being there or being digital? (Vol. 1 No. 3, June '96)

"The Art of Tibetan Sand Painting"
http://www.chron.com/mandala/
This site is devoted to an experiment creating a sacred space within the virtual space of the Web. On February 4, Tibetan Buddhist monks from the Seraje Monastery began building a sand painting, the Mandala of Hayagriva, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In Tibetan Buddhism, the mandala is an instrument of meditation that visualizes a succession of perfected realms and beings. A camera suspended above the monks sent live images of the construction to the Web, which became the medium for the sacred space that is entered in the mind. On February 17, the mandala was de-sanctified and "deconstructed," but its images live on in cyperspace. (You may also hear the monks chant with RealAudio.)(Vol. 1 No. 2, May '96)

"(Art)n Laboratory presents: AVANT-POP"
http://www.artn.nwu.edu/where.html This exhibition at the site of the Oskar Friedl Gallery features a selection of PHSColograms® by (Art)n Laboratory, a group of Chicago artists and scientists formed by director Ellen Sandor. (Art)n Laboratory invented the patented digital process of Virtual Photography PHSColograms®--digital, full color, high resolution, "real 3D" images that are created directly from digital 3D data. "AVANT-POP" consists of several sections, among them "all my geniuses," "the celebrity portraits," and "the commercial images." All of these sections juxtapose Virtual Photography/PHSColograms by (Art)n Laboratory with black-and-white historical photographs. The juxtaposition of these two different kinds of photography effectively creates a new perspective on each of the subjects, and watching the virtual and historical photographs downloading next to each other highlights the differences in their materiality. (Vol. 1 No. 6, October '96)

"Bodies INCorporated"
http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/bodiesinc/
Victoria Vesna 's project provides a twist on the often proclaimed absence of the body in cyberspace by reinstating the body as (cyber)self. Visitors to this site get a chance to order a custom-designed, virtual body via e-mail. The order form gives you quite specific body-building options (including sexual preference). Order your body and join an online community of body-owners! Periodic information about the status of your and other bodies may be sent to you by e-mail. "This body belongs to you" sounds wonderful--but cyberspace isn't safe and virus-free either. At least you can watch the virus-induced mutation of your cyberbody from a safe distance. (Vol. 1 No. 2, May '96)

"Body Missing"
http://www.yorku.ca/BodyMissing
The Body Missing Project is a collaborative inquiry--led by Vera Frenkel and numerous artists and writers--into the art theft policies of the Third Reich and the fate of artworks missing after World War II. The "Transit Bar," a bar in Linz, functions as a center and graphic interface for the discussions on the curious relation of art and politics. The handwritten map of the website manages to capture the project's spirit: the investigation conducted in texts and images is an ongoing conversation with the past, recalling "missing bodies" through a web of personal stories. (Vol. 1 No. 3, June '96)

"Body, Space, Memory"
http://gertrude.art.uiuc.edu/ad319/bsm/bsm.html
"Body, Space, Memory" is an interactive art piece created by ad319, a collaborative group of three faculty members (Kathleen Chmelewski, Nan Goggin and Joseph Squier) at the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The piece allows the viewer to 'enter' and navigate the body as a repository for memory and emotion by using the human figure as both map and metaphor. The initial image of a digitally processed hermaphrodite links to three close-up sections of the body, which are again linked to three further subsections. Multilayered and multisensory, the body becomes a space where issues of creativity, gender, and identity can be explored in a fusion of still images, text, and sound. (Vol. 1 No. 4, July/August '96)

"Bowling Alley at Walker Art Center"
http://bowlingalley.walkerart.org
This bowling alley as cybernetic installation allows the bowling ball to roll through cyberspace and scramble communications. Bowling Alley links 3 public spaces through ISDN lines and digital sensor data--Walker Art Center's Gallery 7 and Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis, and the Bowling Alley website. Bowling at Bryant Lake Bowl effects the chain of ISDN connections and scrambles the laserdisc projection in the gallery; it also interferes with visitor's paths through the website, which presents a mix and remix of text collages open to authoring. Due to mature subject matter viewer discretion is advised. (Vol. 1 No. 2, May '96)

"Cern"
http://www.mediafilter.org/zk/conf/zindex.html
This is NOT the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Switzerland: This CERN is the European Laboratory for Network Collision, founded in 1996, and the birthplace of the Participant Accelerator Ring. Taking the concept of the supercollider to a new level, this accelerator has been designed as an environment for networking experiments. The "departments" of the network laboratory round up some of the "usual suspects": WWWART, Moscow; irational.org, London; jodi.org, Barcelona, et. al. Among the CERN-related experiments are Refresh Ring, a multi-nodal Web-Surf-Create-Session for an unspecified number of players, and Return-Path, inviting submissions for mailbox projects and then providing technical support for the selected applicants. (Vol. 1 No. 11, March '97)

"Chinese Diaspora"
http://filament.illumin.co.uk/ica/Bulletin/livearts/diaspora/
"Chinese Diaspora" is brought to you by ICA Live Arts, who have been engaged in supporting (British-)Chinese artists, and audiences for several years. The site provides access to information on the ICA and Chinese Live Arts going back to 1994, as well as "Chinese Online," a collection of hypertext poems. The poems are available in both English and Chinese and RealAudio files play a reading of the poems in Chinese. The goal of Live Arts is to engage in research and dialogue with contemporary Chinese artists and organizers around the globe with a view towards a season of British and international performances. This season--coinciding with the handover of Hong Kong to China--would be the first of its kind in Europe, and a significant contribution to the visibility of the Chinese Diaspora at the end of the millennium. (Vol. 1 No. 9, January '97)

"The Digest of Diana"
http://thing.at/diana/
This project by Hanna Schimek and Eva Wohlgemuth in collaboration with Chrono Popp is dedicated to Her Royal Highness, Princess Diana. The website presents you with everything you (n)ever wanted to know about HRH, satirizing and deconstructing Diana as a cultural phenomenon. The site's graphic design manages to capture the tabloid spirit--creating a cozy, fairy-tale world and contrasting it with its mundane and disillusioning aspects. The project delves into the 'lower levels' of media culture by cleverly using the Web to explore popular culture's obsession with royalties/celebrities. (Vol. 1 No. 6, October '96)

"Digital Studies: Being In Cyberspace"
http://www.altx.com/ds/
Curated by Mark Amerika and Alex Galloway, the "Digital Studies" online exhibition features both net.theory and net.art--"some of the most innovative hypermedia art being coded in the electrosphere!" The group of artists and theorists includes Roy Ascott, Shelley Jackson, Vuk Cosic, Lev Manovich, Erwin Redl, INTIMA, Ricardo Dominguez, Tina Laporta and many others. "Digital Studies" provides an excellent overview of the state of cyberarts and, in terms of quality, can easily compete with the online exhibitions presented by documenta x, ISEA or Ars Electronica. (Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring '98)

"Disembodied Mind"
http://www.interaccess.org/disembodied
"Disembodied Mind" is a group exhibition of installations both online and in physical space (Toronto's electronic art gallery InterAcess). Some of the works presented here may be more interesting to explore in the physical gallery space, but the site provides an opportunity to learn about them and get interested. Among the featured projects are Jack Butler's Fate Maps for the New Brain (developing fetal embryonic cells) and David Rokeby's The Giver of Names--an investigation into the structure of language, which uses computer analysis of objects and sentence structure to give objects names (a descriptive phrase is constructed and then spoken aloud by the computer).(Vol. 1 No. 12, April/May '97)

"Earth Echo"
http://www.earthecho.com/index.html
This website consists of images made by artist Fred Casselman living at site 16 in the Allis State Park near Randolph, Vemont. It's just a few images that started as photographs Casselman took of the nature surrounding him. Each month a few more images are added. There is an ecological orientation to the site's meditative intentions. Casselman promises to continue updating the site monthly; part of the site's attraction is of course its relation to that other site in RL, where Casselman is presumably surrounded by nature. Emphasizing a slow, seasonal chronology can be a refreshing change from much of what appears on the Web.(Vol. 1 No. 5, September '96)

"Everybody has a twin"
http://www.tmn.com/community/jgates/home.html
This site by photo-conceptualist Jeff Gates explores the personal homepage as a possibility to present your (cyber)twin. Gates self-portrait is a witty hypertextual autobiography that makes excellent use of its medium--a perfect how-to guide to creating a more interesting and funny personal homepage. The site also features links to a variety of arts sources on the Web.(Vol. 1 No. 2, May '96)

"The File Room"
http://fileroom.aaup.uic.edu
The File Room provides an indexed and illustrated history of censorship throughout time and throughout the world. The site's title might lead one to expect a rather dull interface; however, the importance of the material collected here is matched by the effort that has effectively been put into making the visitor's experience a user-friendly and engaging one. The File Room began as an artist's project by Muntadas and is now produced by the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, IL, with the support of the School of Art and Design and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Cases are indexed by date, grounds for censorship, location and medium. (Vol. 1 No. 3, June '96)

"FT2K (Frontier Town 2000)"
http://www.turbulence.org
Diane Bertolo's "FT2K" uses the frontier town of the "Wild West" as a metaphor for the exploration of cyberspace. Beyond the obvious analogies of new frontiers, borders and vast space, her frontier town is a virtual theme park (complete with shooting arcade and the obligatory postcard stand) inhabited by ghosts, gunslingers and tourists--an appropriate metaphor for the continuing commercialization of the Net and its possible consequences. "FT2K" is a virtual house of mirrors confronting visitors with distortions of borders, desire, and the appropriation of space--"a vast projection of desire onto an otherwise blank slate." (Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring '98)

"Fun With Fluids"
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~lsharp/
Lloyd Sharp's "Fun with Fluids" is an online gallery of digital artworks focusing on organic/inorganic body metaphors, fluids, memory and imaging. The website evolves around four sections: "The organic texts" and "The Actual and Virtual Body" which displays stills of performances and installations; "The recreated body" and "The diseased body," which visualize the body in the form of x-ray collages, or body parts and cells displayed on a background of x-rays taken from a human skull. "Fun with Fluids" uses the "disembodied" space of the Web to play with representations of the body, and manages to recreate the body itself as a "psychedelic" territory inviting online exploration. (Vol. 1 No. 9, January '97)

"The Great Chicago Fire"
http://www.chicagohs.org/fire/index.html
To mark the 125th anniversary of the Chicago fire of October 8-10, 1871, the Chicago Historical Society in collaboration with Academic Technologies of Northwestern University mounted the two-part online exhibition "The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory". "The Great Chicago Fire" focuses on the fire and the city's recovery, while "The Web of Memory" evolves around eyewitness accounts, examples of contemporary journalism as well as poetry, painting, and works of fiction. Both parts are divided into various chapters, each comprising three sections: an essay, a thematic gallery and a library of relevant texts. This online exhibition is made both educational and engaging by the effective use of the Web as a medium for creating a web of memory. (Vol. 1 No. 9, January '97)

"History of Art For Airports"
http://remote.aec.at/history
Without Vuc Cosic (who also brought us the clone of the documenta pages after the site had "officially" been taken off the Web) we would have less fun on the Net. "History of Art for Airports" is a study of the iconography we encounter at airports (or as part of other transportation systems): Cosic designs icons that carry the distinctive signature of masters such as Cezanne, Duchamp or Warhol or creatures such as King Kong. Bottom line: at cyber terminals, arrival/departure procedures are a lot more fun! (Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring '98)

"Hypnagogue"
http://www.hypnagogue.com
"Hypnagogue"--an interactive film on CD-ROM--is a non-linear narrative created by artist/musician Perry Hall and architect Ed Keller. Visitors to the "Hypnagogue" website are able to navigate through stills of digital paintings, architectural stills, animations, QT films and QTVR environments. The journey is accompanied by music recorded on electric bass, which is "composed" by the viewer's movement through the world of "Hypnagogue." The enigmatic visuals encourage exploration, but the linking sometimes is quite hierarchical (you have to go back to move on). Since "Hypnagogue" is an image-intensive environment, the long downloading time may make you wish for the CD-ROM. (Vol. 1 No. 7, November '96)

"In Our Sights: Artists Look at Guns"
http://cmp1.ucr.edu/gun_show/
"In our sights" is an exhibition organized by Nancy Floyd, William Laven and Kevin Jon Boyle that was on view at the UCR/California Museum of Photography through May, 1996. Those who missed the show can still visit its Web incarnation. Some of the artists have created special Web works for the show. Among those works is Nancy Floyd's "Stopping Power," which uses "gun shots" (in the photographic sense) as an interface; "Stopping Power" is a series of portraits of women who either own guns or are opposed to guns, combined with a series of staged photographs illustrating women's changing attitudes towards gun ownership. The disembodied nature of cyberspace provides this gun show with an eerie twist. (Vol. 1 No. 5, September '96)

"Institute of Media Diseases"
http://www.moving-art-studio.com/september/media_diseases_eng.html
Dr. Markus Kach has opened the Institute of Media Diseases, which is dedicated to the diagnosis, analysis and cure of skin and body parts (read cyber skin and cyber body parts) infected by media diseases. The case studies cover symptoms such as the drop-shadow, magic-eraser or magic-wand syndrome--imagine your Photoshop tools gone out of control and you can picture the effects of these syndromes on the (cyber)body. The site also includes an online hospital and features public health campaigns--finally somebody addresses the ailments and limitations of the media-reproduced body.(Vol. 1 No. 12, April/May '97)

"Jackpot"
http://www.adaweb.com/context/jackpot
Maciej Wisniewski's "Jackpot" is the latest, and certainly most playful, version of the web collider (the collided pages being created by selecting random information from the Web). "Jackpot" makes creative use of a slotmachine's interface: three randomly selected websites are displayed in frames of the browser window along with their top level domain names (.org, .edu, .gov etc.). To win the game, players have to match any of the top levels domains: randomness and organization collide. (Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring '98)

"Jayne Loader's Public Shelter"
http://www.publicshelter.com/main/index.html
This site is built around the ground-breaking documentary Atomic Cafe by one of the film's creators, Jayne Loader. The site is imbued with energy and wit. It is also saturated with links; for example, click on "Babe" and you find yourself at a site devoted to the film by the same name. Links here are often as random and plentiful as associations; at other times, they're organized around specific topics related to the site's Cold War subject. Loader relates how "Atomic Cafe" grew out of an intense collaborative search and viewing of archives. Jayne Loader is a valuable person to take along as a virtual colleague on the Web. (Vol. 1 No. 5, September '96)