:: Saturday, May 17, 2003 ::

Here are the new additions to the New Media Fix:

Arte Red was founded in 1999 and specializes in the historization of net art.

Artfutura has been organizing new media festivals since 1997.

Also, Net Art Review's fix of the week is Intelligent Agent.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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"Whalelane" a bi-monthly journal of new writings, images and hybrid works announces its seventh issue this month. In the words of it creators it is "an online review of writing, visuals, and experimental mediums that merge both image and narrative". This month features a net.piece by well respected net.artist Curt Cloninger entitled "PlotFracture", two text works entitled "The Heck of It (Art's Sake)" and "from Celestial Mechanics" by Catherine Daly and a video/sound work entitled "Second Thoughts "by Dennis Miller.

While not a net.art review exclusively (nor claiming to be) Whalelane provides a valid place on the internet for evolving forms of art and theory, helping to identify, document and present works that otherwise would not be seen by the majority. Now my only question is where does the name "Whalelane" come from?
:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
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After the disappointing reception of the New York Digital Salon's 10th Anniversary exhibition, the net art community is searching for effective ways to present online material in a physical space. Enter Pavu.com,who recently announced their upcoming series of events that will provide perhaps a good starting point for net artists to function in a real space setting. Here is part of their press release:

"pav.com is proud to announce a next step in net.art practice in physical places that will be inaugurated in NYC the very next months. waiting for the starters, pavu.com invites you to "vous faire la main avec" (pronounce "thumbs practice") net.art and it's physical exhibiting effects with it's famous EPIC unit.

we know that net.art daily and traditional exhibition practices are seeking for a solid ground to polarize and reinforce their mutual convictions, and believe us, we are already plining the next route to offer you genuine and efficient solutions."

As various links to critical commentaries and articles dealing with the dis-service to new media by curators and institutions have been posted on Net Art review, I wonder why is there such an interest in Net Art being accepted in gallery spaces? For other areas of New Media, such as randomized digital video installations (like Soft Cinema by Lev Manovich) , it makes complete sense to present in a real space, but net-art? How to tackle the physical presentation of an art form made for a virtual network is what Pavu and others are interested in doing in the near future.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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Galerie Séquence is making a call for submissions under the title of "FLOW / COURANT" open to all Canadian net.artists.

Presented within the context of the event "TrafficART" taking place from 21/08/03 - 10/10/03 "This exhibition will look at mass-media forms of communication in relation to artistic developments on the web. FLOW / COURANT will showcase artists creating work that addresses the flow of information on the internet from data-flow, blogs to disinformation." The five choosen net.artists will be asked to present their works and fees for presentation will be paid. For more information see the website.
:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
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A new collaborative online project has been launched. Betaspace.org invites the net community to participate in the processes of exhibiting, jurying and discussing online works of art.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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FACT an "organisation for the exhibition, support and development of artists' film, video and new media projects" opened in Liverpool, England earlier this year is having an interesting event happening on Friday 23/05/03. "Networked Narrative Environments: As Imaginary Spaces of Being" is "a one day Conference & Workshop where an international group of artists, curators, performers and writers come together to explore the relationship and possibilities of interaction between the Physical and the Virtual worlds". Co-organised between FACT and Manchester Metropolitan University, with a related exhibition taking place at Holden Gallery at Manchester Metropolitan University, this promises to be a very worth while event and strongly recommended if your in the area.
:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
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Low-fi are making a call for proposals "for 3 commissioned art projects from artists working with networked technology/internet." Low-fi have been going now for a few years and seem to be doing good things for the promotion of net.art in England with connections in a few institutions, often participating in events and regular users of the new media curating list.

"A successful proposal could be realised either wholly online; or could be partially online and partially in some other media or event/performance based. However the internet will need to be an integral component. we are aiming to extend artists' current practice by offering financial assistance to the successful applicants."
:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
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Hypertext, in its early days, consisted mainly of pages that offered linked words within the narrative as a way to diversify, fragmentize, or deconstruct storytelling. Recently, approaches have become more pluralized, and the narrative is often problematized.

A fragmentary approach is taken to the extreme by Jason Nelson, who has created 7 hypertextual web projects. The decompostion of the narrative is particularly well explored in Ending 4, in which text is intermixed with basic oval and square shapes. The objects move backwards and forwards according to the clicking and moving of the mouse, and phrases, that have no immediate connection with each other, are placed behind one another. Another project that conceptually works similarly, but differs formally is Ending 7. Here, again, text fragments have no immediate connection, but they are juxtaposed and deformed according to mouse interaction.

Much of the Nelson's work is very hard to read. In his website there are other pieces that present blocks of text meant to be read, but become impossible to comprehend due to the constant obtrusion by other graphic elements. In these projects, the narrative is turned into noise. In a way, it could be said that the works point to the way most people net-surf these days. No one reads the whole text at once, but rather scans it to see if it is worth reading, or moving on. Nelson's work literalizes such activity and makes it meaningless.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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Gregory Chantonsky develops art work off and on the web. Much of his work is dependent on literary sources which he uses as part of complex interfaces. His work could be considered a late version of hypertext, but his aesthetic is obviously informed by other areas of new media as well. Chatonsky has been making art since 1989, and some of his early net projects date back to 1997.

An early project worth noting is Touch and Contact. This piece was a splash page for the early Rhizome website. Here Chatonsky presents a resizeable video loop of two hands touching each other. The imagery is accompanied by an ambient soundtrack and textual fragments which are displayed seemingly at random when the user clicks on them. The interface is mouse sensitive, so the user is able to connect with the imagery by considering mousing-over as a way of 'touching.' The abstract piece is based on writing by Jean-Luc Nancy. The video clip is actually a loop from Nouvelle Vague (Godard).

If one views the video loop for a while, the repetitive touching along with the extreme image pixelization point to humans' ambivalence toward machines. The fragmentary narrative that Chantonsky proposes falls along the lines of Godard's constant intention to expose slippages within structures of communication. This is perhaps one of the best net pieces I have so far encountered, which deliberately exposes the relationship of net technology to Cinema. And the best part is its simplicity.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
...