:: Saturday, February 28, 2004 ::

Exonemo have launched their new net.art / installation work entitled Natural Process(NP) which is in situ at the Roppongi Crossing exhibition in the Mori Art Museum, Roppongi Hills, Japan from the 07/02/04 - 11/04/04 and simultaneously being streamed via the net.

Natural Process(NP) is a work which overtly displays the process involved in transforming a piece of media from one format to another and then displaying it back through the former. Described by the duo of artists: "A web page, the work at the center of this installation, is a conversion of a well-known webpage", (Google.com yet again appearing in net.art to the extent its starting to get tiresome), "into painted form. Simply put, the painting depicts an entire webpage along with the window that frames it! Yet, at the same time, it's not just a painting, but also 'an analogization of a digital object' or 'a landscape painting of the Internet.' (After all, we see it through a 'window'!)". Finally this painting of a web page is streamed to the internet via a webcam to become a representation of the media in the media, "In short, it originates from the Web and returns back to it through what is probably the world's most-roundabout process ever!!"

As a concept piece this might have looked good on paper yet realistically this work IS JUST A PAINTING and very difficult to get excited about. The work is about real and unreal / representation / process and questioning what qualifies as art, yet it approaches the subjects in very tried and tested ways which say little that is new or give any indication of the artists viewpoint of them.

Exenomo ask "Will you come see the 'real' webpage painting at the museum? Or will you see it 'virtual' through the Web?" to which I can only reply - "virtually and very briefly!".

:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
...

Rachel Green of Rhizome wrote an extensive response on Vladimir Kovacevic's "One year After Rhizome" manifesto on the Nettime mailinglist. In her response Rachel explains amongst others Rhizome's relation with the New Museum (New York) and tells something about Rhizome's future plans. Obligatory reading for everyone who's interested in the development of the world's largest net art community.

Rachel Green's response to "One year After Rhizome".


:: Peter Luining [+] ::
...

Following is a repost of a great opportunity for our readers. The deadline of the event is coming up very soon:

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Turbulence International Juried Net.Art Competition
Deadline for Submissions: March 31, 2004
Guidelines.htm

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. is pleased to announce that with the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 5 net.art projects will be commissioned for the Turbulence web site in an international juried competition.

Each commission will be $5,000 (US).

AVENUES OF INVESTIGATION: Projects that experiment with new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and creativity and engage the user as an active participant. Collaborations may be between visual artists, sound artists, programmers, scientists, and others. Proposed works may include the use of wireless devices such as cell phones and palm pilots to access and add to the experience of the net.art work.

CRITERIA: (1) artistic merit of the proposed project; (2) originality; (3) degree of programming skill and technological innovation; and (4) extent of collaborative and interdisciplinary activity.

GUIDELINES:
Proposals must be in the form of a web site that includes:
(a) Your name, email address, country, and web site URL (if you have one).
(b) A description of the project’s core concept (500 words maximum).
(c) Details of how the project will be realized, including what
software/programming will be used. Specs for the Turbulence server are
available online at http://turbulence.org/server.htm. You may request
additional software but we cannot guarantee it.
(d) Names of collaborators, their areas of expertise, and their specific
roles in the project.
(e) A project budget, including other funding sources for this project.
(f) Your résumé/CV and one for each of your collaborators.
(g) Up to five examples of prior work accessible on the web.

PROCESS:
Email your proposal to turbulence@turbulence.org with the following in the subject field: Comp_04 Proposal.

Deadline: March 31st, 2004.

Notification: Winners will be contacted after May 15, 2004. Each winner will be asked to sign an agreement with Turbulence governing the terms of the commission. Works must be completed within 9 months.

JURORS: Luci Eyers, Marc Garrett, Eduardo Navas, Norie Neumark, and Helen Thorington.

JURORS BIOGRAPHIES

Luci Eyers is an artist based in London, UK. She works mainly on collaborative media arts projects and was one of the editors of Everything Magazine. She initiated and is a member of low-fi art
collective, an online art/curatorial project focusing on net art. Her latest work, “Cyberskiving” was recently commissioned by New Media Scotland and exhibited at The Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre. http://www.low-fi.org.uk http://www.cyberskiving.co.uk

Marc Garrett is a net artist, writer, activist, curator, and musician. He is also co-founder & co-director of Furtherfield.or. Furtherfield is an online platform for the creation, promotion, criticism and archiving of adventurous digital/net art work for public viewing, experience and interaction. furtherfield.org/

Eduardo Navas is an artist and writer whose work has been featured in several online exhibitions. He is founder, contributing editor, and webmaster of Net Art Review and is currently a Cota Robles Graduate Fellow in the Art History, Theory, and Criticism Ph.D. program at the University of Califorina in San Diego. http://www.netartreview.net/ http://www.navasse.net/docs/

Norie Neumark is a sound/new media artist who is also a professor of Media Arts and Production at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. She makes radiophonic, net.art and installation work, as well as having made the internationally acclaimed and award winning CD-Rom, Shock in the Ear” (1998). She works in collaboration with Maria Miranda as “out-of-sync.” Neumark was a juror for Thaw 2000, has given papers and published articles on sound and new media, and is co-editor of “At a Distance: Precursors to Internet Art and Activism” (forthcoming, MIT
Press). http://www.out-of-sync.com

Helen Thorington is a writer, sound composer, and media artist. Her documentary, dramatic, and sound art compositions have been aired nationally and internationally for the past twenty-two years. She has created compositions for film and installation that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, and the Whitney Museum’s annual Performance series. Thorington recently performed her own compositions with the Bill. T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at The Kitchen, New York City. Her 9_11_Scapes won two international radio awards in 2003. Thorington is both founder and executive director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc (1981-present), NewAmerican Radio and Turbulence. http://new-radio.org/helen http://somewhere.org http://turbulence.org
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:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
...

From december till the end of januari Jodi had a soloshow at Mediamatic Supermarket in Amsterdam. At this exhibition called "My%Desktop" the works "INSTALL.EXE", "JET SET WILLY Variations" and "Morse", a projection of a huge lightbulb sending out morsecode, were presented. Besides that, Jodi's new DVD "All wrongs reversed ©1982" was worldpremiered. Very disappointing was to see that the show had totally no local or (inter)national media coverage and passed by in silence. The only things that remain are some pictures of the show on the Mediamatic website and a review I wrote about Jodi's new DVD for the Dutch art magazine Metropolis M (february/ march 2004 edition). My review is now also available online, but beware it's written in Dutch. For those who are really interested, it can be more or less translated through the World Lingo Translator by typing the url of the webpage with my review.

Jodi "All wrongs reversed ©1982" review (Dutch)
World Lingo Translator (for translation Dutch to English)



:: Peter Luining [+] ::
...

In addition to my earlier investigation of the selling of netart works here are 3 new ones. First I totally forgot John F. Simon Jr. piece every icon of which several have been sold and that's still for sale at Amazon for $20.00.
Second Suzan Ryan responded with this mail on the nettime mailinglist:

"I think an important addition to the list (which does not appear to be
exclusively German) would be Douglas Davis's "World's First Collaborative
Sentence" commissioned by the Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY, in
1994, and acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995."

And third, Mouchette sold her piece Squint (which momentarily is on exhibition at Postartum's p2p show) last year to the Belfort collection (France) for 2500 euros.


:: Peter Luining [+] ::
...

As a response to Eduardo Navas's text about ikatun.org's work "reimaginings" (see below) here some thoughts about net art projects that need user input. First off I did such a sort of project by myself. Or better I started a project (called ZNC browser) and after some time people began to start doing special made pages for it. When I received several spontaneous made contributions I decided to put a special submission page up and made a call for urls. This lead to over 60 submissions so far, most of them being made in the weeks after the call. I tell this as introduction, because I think especially in the art arena a lot of people are doing or think about doing community based works, but are not totally aware that a lot of visitors are not so easy to provide input or content for the work; and that interest of this kind of works quite soon faints after introduction. As far as I know there are only a few community based artworks that really succeeded over a longer time and attracted a real user base (build a real community). Some names of projects that really done well are Graham harwood's "nine", Atty's wartime project and David Still. I think there are 2 decisive factors in the failure or succes of this projects. The first being the easiness of the input possibilities and along with this, that it is backed by ideas that go further than some abstract or technical input. So it needs something that also engages people. And second the artist being rooted in some kind of (net) culture already. Because even calls on several mailinglists and/ or printed media often will not produce an userbase if nobody knows the person who initiates the project.
So far about the factors that can make a community based work a succes. What maybe is more important is to think of this projects in terms of quality, because an interesting art project can fail to attract a user base where an uninteresting project can succeed. And can you in such a case say that the first is a bad project? Or should you say that a project is only a succes if there's a lot of written about by the artpress, or if it wins prizes at art festivals? This are important questions which till so far hardly have been answered.

:: Peter Luining [+] ::
...

Turbulence.org is currently featuring reimaginings by ikatun.org, a collaborative project dependent on submissions of Instant Messaging conversations between two people. Inspired by Newton and his 7 color spectrum, Ikatun aims to expand the possibilities of the "classical" spectrum based on user submissions. By doing this, the project plans to reevaluate the sharing of "information packets" across the internet, as Ikatun explains:

/reimaginings/ is a critique of the current culture of data visualization, hyperlinking and relationship mapping. Databases, visual graphing tools, and other internet technologies have made it possible to connect any packet of data to any other packet of data. The illustration of these relationships through research papers, graphs, animations and dramatic reenactments is often a display of technical wizardry designed to assert the importance of the case being made and to intimidate with complexity and rhetoric.

And raises these questions:

Who makes the decisions about how meaningful relationships between data points are constructed? Who designs the database and the user survey? Who writes conclusions? More than anything, who transforms data into information? /reimaginings/ makes the case that these functions are anything but neutral in a world of information overload.

reimaginings looks very promising. The project, however, needs major input from the community to be developed. So log on and make some art.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
...

I-love-u has had dwindling support in the past few months and it would be a shame to see this long running net e-zine which publishes under a copyleft licence fade away because of a lack of submissions.

I-love-u is currently making its call for works, primarily images but they are very receptive to text's / flash / director and wav's or mov's, for March under the theme of "addict" and for April under the theme of "sale".

Please send all contributions, articles, pictures, artworks for the March theme until the 27.2.2004 to
response@i-love-u.ch.

:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
...