:: Friday, April 16, 2004 ::

Turbulence is currently featuring Net Pirate Station, a net project by Yoshi Sodeoka. The online project offers three different online sources to choose from whose information is reinterpreted and then broadcasted as numbers. That's right, all that happens in the project is you get to hear numbers instead of words. Why is this interesting? Well this is the answer to this question by Sodeoka:

Q: Why do you believe that this will be entertaining?

This is a question that you will have to answer for yourself.

Maybe this is Sodeoka's attempt to offer us a straight ahead, good old structural experience. So try it. (How long can you put up with the numbers is of course the real question...)
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
...

Meantime in Caracas...

In times of political turmoil, hats off to those that in Venezuela keep doing beautiful work. Ricardo Benaim is such an artist.

A couple of years ago he started the Proyecto Mapa, which one could say that corresponds to Simon Bolivar's dream of the two countries South American countries (Venezuela and Colombia) in one single map. The artists encouraged contributions from artists for "interventions" * on the Colombia-Venezuela "map" that they made available on their website. They even developed the currency for this virtual country (beautifully designed bills).

You can see some of the gatherings of all the artist involved, along with the "manifesto" (convocatoria) and the concept here: http://www.artedos.com/mapa/

Once you enter the site, choose "el Encuentro" (the meeting) or "los mapas" (the maps) to see some images of the project (the physical meeting between Colombian and Venezuelan artists, the maps sent to by the artists), or if you can read Spanish explore it all.

The project is now in stand-by, which was the motivation for writing this piece - when people must dodge from bullets to stay alive it's difficult to keep the focus in your work, whatever it is, artists included... It's sad to say but things in Venezuela may not be exactly like in the documentary "The Revolution won't be Televised". But this is no place for political statements...

*Note: An artistic intervention is often used in Latin countries and in English it loses much of its meaning - it means to act, generally in a political and aesthetic way.

:: ana boa-ventura [+] ::
...

Somehow everybody seems to miss the revolutionary phase the net is going through at the moment. 1 march of this year a series of new characters were introduced that were till so far impossible to use in the address field of a browser or in an email address. The result of this introduction will be in the end a total fragmented internet, because the standard US/English qwerty keyboard just doesn't support this characters, like for example: ñ, ü or å. So it will become quite difficult to get access to Spanish, Swedish, German, etc. forums just because you don't have the right characters at hand. Browsers that already support the new characters are the latest version of Mozilla and Safari 1.2 (for Mac), for MSIE (pc) a plugin will be downloaded if you get to an url that uses the new characters. Support of all this characters will be standard in the next version of Windows (Longhorn). Read more about this change at IDN.org site.

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

Je suis à paris en ce moment et la semaine dernière j'ai été informé par Andreas Broeckmann sur le mailing spectre qui il y a pas mal de choses interresantes à aller voir. Deux choses qui n'etaient pas incluses dans son itinéraire long et très bien sont les suivantes...

"Avril.dot est la seconde édition du festival consacré aux cultures électroniques et numériques, qui se déroulera à Confluences du 8 au 24 avril 2004." Cette année, le festival presente "STEPHAN MATHIEU, TAYLOR DEUPREE, MITCHELL AKIYAMA, DOUGLAS BENFORD, JASON KAHN, GREG DAVIS, MOU LIPS !, VINCENT EPPLAY, DORINE_MURAILLE, MINIFER, FABRIQUEDECOULEURS, O.LAMM, FREDERIC NOGRAY, HERVE BOGHOSSIAN, GROUPGRIS, HYPO pour des concerts hétéroclites, SASCII (Dokidoki) pour les ambiances musicales mixées, et FIGURE C pour une expérimentation vidéo-hertzienne." Dans le Gallerie, il y a des "installations sonores et visuelles de GAEL ANGELIS, METALOGUE CORP, DAVIDE BALULA, IBRAHIM QURAISHI, et SEBASTIEN ROUX". Voir le site pour le complet programme.

Le Palais de Tokyo fait un expo / projet en ce moment s'appelle Playlist. Dans le cadre cette expo Samedi prochain (17/04/04) Daphné Blouet propose une visite guidée thématique de l'expo sous le concept - Réseaux, cybernétique : l'artiste comme moteur de recherche.

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

Mobilegaze has released a "preview" to their upcoming exhibition called Pause. Their mass-mailing, unlike the usual launch releases, simply announces the upcoming exhibit. Fair enough because when we visit the website, we can enjoy their four previous curatorial projects. I will admit that I am a fan of these archived features, and I recommend that you also visit these before "Pause" is released in a week or so.

:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
...