Art Projects


"Lift_World"
http://www.world.net/~laudanum/lift/
http://www.world.net/~laudanum/lift/ "Lift_World," a Polish/Australian collaboration, debuted in November '96 as an Internet performance in an elevator between floors in a (virtual) building somewhere between Warsaw and Sydney. Playing with the Web's ability to transport visitors from one space to another, "Lift_World" uses an "elevator" as its interface: pushing the buttons in one frame brings you to the next level of visual experience in the adjacent frame. The interface suggests distances travelled for its passengers. (Vol. 1 No. 10, February '97)

"Living Almanac of Disasters"
http://www.westbank.org/~Calender/nstart.html
The French writer Paul Virilio once said that if you invent the train, you invent the train accident, if you invent the car, you invent the car accident, and so on and so forth. In the same macabre and illuminating spirit, behold this site by artist Cati Laporte! Disasters throughout history for every day-you can even submit your own candidates. (Vol. 1 No. 1, April '96)

"Loaded 5x"
http://www.adaweb.com/project/aitken
Doug Aitken's "Loaded 5x" opens with a short lyrical text expressing the human desire for events that give direction and meaning to our lives. Clicking on one of the lines of the text triggers the download of photographs, which do not necessarily deny the fulfillment of our desire, but focus on the appreciation of slow and gradual change. Even if this approach seems simplistic, it can't be denied that the project succeeds in making its point.(Vol. 1 No. 12, April/May '97)

"Lock Down USA"
http://www.igc.apc.org/deepdish
Deep Dish TV's "Lock Down USA" is a web of news and facts about the American prison industry and Criminal Justice System. The juxtaposition of myths, perceptions and realities provides an interesting perspective; the site manages to counterbalance the often sensationalistic image of crime and incarceration created by news media, cop shows, newspapers, and tabloids. By clicking on a map of the US, visitors to the site may access information on the prison system in the respective states. "Lock Down USA" also features "Truth Serum," a series of interviews with three experts--including Steven Donziger, author and director of the National Criminal Justice Commission--who discuss the reality of incarceration today. (Vol. 1 No. 8, December '96)

"Make me a man "
http://www.lanminds.com/local/sr/srapoport.html
Sonya Rapoport 's latest project is a reflection on the universal stereotype of manhood and how it has been sustained in diverse cultures at the expense of women. The process of "growing a man" is divided into stages such as "Initiation" (purge the female stuff absorbed from the mother), "Indoctrination" (muscles as an emblematic icon of seminal continence), as well as "Documentation," "Science/History" and "Adult Responsibility." Rapoport's hypertextual exploration of manhood provides a provocative mix of imagery and quotes, ranging from Darwin and Hitler to the Economist ("Every known human society rests firmly on the learned nurturing behavior of man." 10/28/96). "Make me a man" manages to pull off a humorous and campy rendition of rather depressing "factoids." (Vol. 2 No. 1, Fall '97)

"Memory Arena"
http://www.uni-lueneburg.de/memory/
"Memory Arena," a project by Arnold Dreyblatt and Fred Pommerehn, in development for over four years, has been "staged" in several European theaters. The Web incarnation is essentially an archive consisting of thousands of biographical fragments. Visitors to the site can take a Kafkaesque journey through a maze of files and bureaucracy: there are texts by archivists about the process of archiving; copies of original documents displayed in the exhibitions; files created from "Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933," as well as personal and biographical data of visitors to Memory Arena I, II and III. Browsing through the archive is a mesmerizing experience, a search for individual history in a web of classification and bureaucratization. (Vol. 1 No. 10, February '97)

"Metaphorium "
http://www.multimedia.bell-labs.com/metaphorium
At Bell Labs' "Metaphorium" the message is the medium. Users can explore several metaphorical environments which use real world analogies to facilitate unconventional Web communications. Two of the projects explore messaging services that are random, ephemeral and finite in a medium where messages are usually targeted and information can be stored indefinitely. "Message in a bottle" leaves visitors stranded on an island surrounded by a large sea. The only means of communication left to the stranded visitor is to place a message in a bottle and then throw it into the sea; the server determines when a particular user has access to a specific message. "SandTypewriter/SkyWriter" places visitors at random locations along the coastline where they can use the sand typewriter to leave a message in any blank area on the shore, or the sky writer to create a broadcast message in the sky. Eventually, sand messages are washed away by waves while sky messages slowly fade. The projects featured at the "Metaphorium"--created by Dorée Seligmann , Cati Laporte, Alvaro Muñoz and others--are inventive explorations of user surfaces that are subversive in a very subtle way. (Vol. 2 No. 1, Fall '97)

"MMF--The Hall Of Humiliation "
http://www.clark.net/pub/rolf/mmf
It's a site with a mission: "Putting an end to online scammers...or at least laughing at them mercilessly." MMF stands for "Make Money Fast" and refers to the posts that are essentially old-fashioned (illegal) chain letters promising you'll be rich beyond your wildest dreams. "The Hall of Humiliation" tries to combat this phenomenon by providing information, recourse strategies as well as the MMF loser list and the most pathetic or funny MMF of the week. Virtue-al Web activism. (Vol. 2 No. 1, Fall '97)

"The Most Wanted Paintings"
http://www.diacenter.org/
see article Vol. 1 No. 1, April '96

"The Multi-Cultural Recycler "
http://shoko.calarts.edu/~alex/recycler.html
Yet another take on "Web colliders"--the sites that allow you to generate "collided" pages by grabbing random information from the Web. This collider recycles images from sites that connect video cameras to the Web. "The Multi-Cultural Recycler" selects two or three of these websites at random, and grabs the live or latest image from their cameras. The major development of this recycler is its "Make your own Cultural Compost" option: users can select the cameras themselves, or re-recycle images created by previous visitors; the Recycler performs digital image processing on the shots to recycle them into a new image. The point? As Andy Warhol put it, everybody can be famous for 15 minutes. With recycling, the time span for fame might be stretched to around twenty. (Vol. 2 No. 1, Fall '97)

"Musée Psyché"
http://www.big.or.jp/~psyche
"Musée Psyché" was founded by Kenji Saito for the purpose of acquiring and exhibiting "digital offbeat art." The site features a museum shop with bookmarks and "free" museum goods; a museum cafe (operated in collaboration with gut records ) where visitors may listen to and talk about music with the "bossa nova girls;" and the museum workshop "club vraifaux," which presents projects such as "fortune cookies" for every day of the month or "women's colouring road," which lets users dress a cyber woman. "Consumer-friendly" seems to be a better label for the museum than "offbeat," and hopefully the range of exhibits will be expanded in the future. (Vol. 2 No. 1, Fall '97)

"Museum of Forgery"
http://www.sva.edu/alumni/forger/MOF
Headed by director Antoinette LaFarge and dedicated to "The Gentle Art of Faking," "The Museum of Forgery" expresses a comforting "Faith in Fakes." Extending the western tradition of treating a work of art as a kind of brand-name product, the museum developed a program of "excessioning" --creating works that are then credited to the oeuvres of appropriate artists living or dead. Exhibited at the site are marvelous (and generic) artworks by Duchamp and Josef Albers, produced posthumously by the "Museum of Forgery." (Vol. 1 No. 11, March '97)

"My Boyfriend Came Back From The War"
http://www.design.ru/olialia/war/
Olia Lialina's project uses a frame structure to reflect on personal "wars." Clicking on the comments, questions, or images appearing in a frame causes a "split" of the frame (and conversation) into subdivisions providing more images, questions, and statements. Along with the awareness of the difficulties and impossibilities of communication, an image of more and more complexity evolves. Lialina's style is of simple elegance, proof again that even on the Web less can be more. (Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring '98)

"NexSite"
http://www0.nexsite.nttdata.jp/main/
"Nexsite" is a creative environment that tries to explore a new range of possibilities in communication and collaboration on the Net. The project is organized by NTT Data Corporation and has been conceptualized/produced by Yukiteru Nanase, Hidemi Koizumi and Masaki Mikami. At the site, you may create your "personality capsule" (=online identity) connect with friends, or publish a "group capsule." You may also take part in "World Fiction," a collaborative electronic comic book that allows you to create your own stories and chat with other characters in real time. The "Eye Think" section features opinions and commentary by some of the major players in the Japanese electronic realm and provides a good entry to the current situation of art and electronic networks in Japan. (Vol. 1 No. 8, December '96)

"Ocean Walk "
http://www.atom.co.jp/vrml2/ocean/index.html
Ryoichiro Debuchi 's "Ocean Walk" mixes fact, legend and speculation in an underwater VRML world. "Ocean Walk" is inspired by a mysterious underwater site that was discovered by a diver at the southern bay of Yonaguni Island, Okinawa, in 1986--whether the "ruins" that look like a gigantic staircase pyramid made of stone are a product of nature or the human race is still debated. Visitors can explore the underwater world, ride on a sea turtle or dolphin, and discover the hidden link to the "Dragon Sea Palace" described in the legend of Urashima Taro. It may not be real life diving, but there are similarities: users can dive into a different world--which creates a feeling of both immersion and detachment--and see it through their "mask." (Vol. 2 No. 1, Fall '97)

"Online TV"
http://zero.tolerance.org/onlinetv.htm
Designed by Andreas Troeger, this site offers its visitors real time transmissions of exterior scenes in New York City shot with a camera attached to a computer. The rapidity with which the images change is at most every sixty seconds, but perhaps because of this limitation, or perhaps because of the aura of randomness, there is a poetic majesty to this constantly evolving project. (Vol. 1 No. 3, June '96)

"On Translation - The Internet Project"
www.adaweb.com/influx/muntadas
"On Translation - The Internet Project" is part of the series "On Translation" that Antonio Muntadas started in 1994. The project focuses on interpretation, transformation, and changes of meaning through the process of translation. A sentence such as "Communication systems provide the possibility of developing a better understanding between people: in which language?" goes through a chain of translators, who may or may not be using translation devices. The sentence is translated from English to Japanese to German and multiple other languages until the circle is closed with a translation back into English, and the process begins again. Visitors to the website may move their cursors over the image of a spiral, which is "broken down" into the different languages, and follow the results of the translation process or post their own suggestions for a translation. In the age of the "global village," Muntadas uses the Internet to point to cultural differences reflected in language and to the fine line between global communication and global distortion, connection and disconnection. (Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring '98)

"Paris Reseau"
http://panoramix.univ-paris1.fr/CERAPLA/preseau.html
"Paris Reseau" is a collaborative hypertext exploration of Paris by Karen O'Rourke and others. The hyperfiction's links are often connected to words like "taxi" or "Metro," i.e. means of transportation, or specific locations. Even if you're not familiar with the sites and places mentioned, they function as a map and means of orientation to guide the reading process; using this stylistic device, the hypertext successfully manages to recreate Paris in cyberspace and to take visitors on a tour through the virtual city. (Vol. 1 No. 9, January '97)

"Peter Stanick"
http://www.usa.net/~exitart/BIO.html
This online exhibition by the gallery Exit Art provides a look at the work of an artist whose sharp wit resembles a kind of contemporary updating of Pop art. Stanick uses a commercially-saturated style familiar from popular culture as a way to draw his audience's glancing attention and then attempts to drive our expectation into a detour. The works have a comic-book feel; each one contains a caption that seems to knock the image's no-nonsense glossy silence off-center. Stanick's work constantly alludes to the history of painting in subtle ways; this is an exhibition that works well on the Web. (Vol. 1 No. 4, July/August '96)

"Port"
http://artnetweb.com/port/
"PORT" is an exhibition of networked digital worlds on the Internet organized by artnetweb for the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The exhibition runs from January 25 through March 29, 1997, and presents scheduled time-based Internet projects by individuals and groups; these works are projected into the Reference Gallery space at the List Center, and are also accessible over the Internet through a variety of technologies. "PORT" is a place to visit for everybody interested in the future of new media: its main goal is to serve as a laboratory for the development of models for future exhibitions. The "PORT" website provides information on the show and documents the exhibition process. (Vol. 1 No. 9, January '97)

"Replicators"
http://www.adaweb.com/adaweb/influx/tyson/explanation.html#top
Artist Keith Tyson has put together a website that promises to elicit the excitement of an antfarm: watch art replicate. Each participant is asked to create a work of art from another person's description of the previously submitted artwork; the new replicant is in turn described, and the next participant creates a work from the new description. When we last looked, ain't much happening yet... like certain reptiles during the daytime. But--hey!--what's that?! Become an ant. (Vol. 1 No. 7, November '96)