:: Monday, January 03, 2005 ::
The new year is coming and as Contributing Editor I would like to take the time to focus on Net Art Review's collaborators. I want to thank the netKru for keeping up the energy for the last two years. I want to particularly thank Lora McPhail for her fine job as Editor-in-Chief during the last year and three months; the site has greatly improved its quality under her guidance. The netKru has changed since NAR was founded in February of 2003. The current netKru is perhaps the most diverse up to date; just one of the many hints of where we hope to go in the near future as an international collaboration.
Thank you netKru.
And we are:
Lora McPhail -- Editor in Chief (Los Angeles, CA, US)
Eduardo Navas -- Founder/Contributing Editor/ Webmaster (Los Angeles/San Diego, CA, US)
Yong S. Kim -- Copy Editor (Los Angeles, CA, US)
Garrett Lynch -- Information Architecture Developer/Contributing Writer (Kent, UK)
Garland Kirkpatrick -- Design Consultant (Santa Monica, CA, US)
Daniele Balit (Rome, IT/Paris, FR)
Ana Boa-Ventura (Austin, TX, US)
Linda Carroli (Brisbane, AU)
Nicholas Economos (Alfred, NY, US)
Molly Hankwitz (Brisbane, AU/San Francisco, US)
Peter Luining (Amsterdam, NL)
Francesca De Nicolò (Rome, IT)
Ignacio Nieto (Santiago, CL)
Kristen Palana (New Jersey, US)
Isabel Saij (Cologne, GE/Paris, FR)
Ludmil Trenkov (Pasadena, CA, US)
Ana Valdés (Sweden)
Collaborators:
Furtherfield.org (London, UK)
Evelyne Rogue - artcogitans.com (Paris, FR)
Happy New Year!
Eduardo Navas
NET_ANNOUNCEMENT: MISSION TO EARTH (Soft Cinema Edition)
A Media Installation by Lev Manovich
New York, NY – Lev Manovich will present Mission to Earth in The Project Room @ Chelsea Art Museum from January 8 through January 26. The exhibition includes a public reception, the release presentation of Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database, (a new DVD by Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky ), and a panel all taking place on Saturday, January 8, 2.00 – 4.30pm, 2004.
The following comes from the official press release for this project. Additional information can me found by following the links below the project statement.
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What kind of cinema is appropriate for the age of Palm Pilot and Google? Automatic surveillance and self-guided missiles? Consumer profiling and CNN? To investigate answers to this question Lev Manovich - one of today’s most influential thinkers in the fields of media arts and digital culture – has paired with award-winning new media artist and designer Andreas Kratky to create the Soft Cinema project. They have also invited contributions from such other leading cultural figures as DJ Spooky, Scanner, George Lewis and Jóhann Jóhannsson (music), servo (architecture), Schoenerwissen/Office for Computational Design (data visualization), and Ross Cooper Studios (media design).
SOFT CINEMA: Navigating the Database is the Soft Cinema project’s first DVD publication published and distributed by The MIT Press (2005). It presents three ‘films’, including Mission to Earth, that were created within the framework of the project. Although the ‘films’ on the DVD reference the familiar genres of cinema, the process by which they were created and the resulting aesthetics fully belong to the software age. They demonstrate the possibilities of soft(ware) cinema - a 'cinema' in
which human subjectivity and the variable choices made by custom software combine to create films that can run infinitely without ever exactly repeating the same image sequences, screen layouts and narratives.
MISSION TO EARTH (Soft Cinema edition) is a science fiction allegory of the immigrant experience that adopts the variable choices and multi-frame layout of the Soft Cinema system to represent ‘variable identity’. In this gallery installation the film is being assembled in real-time by the Soft Cinema software from a large database of media elements. While the narrative stays the same and repeats every 23 minutes, all other elements can potentially change. As a result, there is no single ‘unique’ version of the film – every run produces a new version.
Lev Manovich, the leader of the Soft Cinema project and the videographer, editor, and author of Mission to Earth, is an
internationally recognized leader in the field of new media culture. He is the author of The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) and Little Movies (1994), the first film project created specifically for the World Wide Web. His computer-driven installations and films have been exhibited in numerous museums, galleries, media and film festivals
in the US, Europe and Asia, including ZKM, Karlsruhe; the ICA, London; SENEF, Seoul; and the ICC, Tokyo. In addition, Soft Cinema received an honorary mention at Transmediale 2003 festival, Berlin and is the subject of a short documentary by ARTE-TV.
Andreas Kratky, the author of the Soft Cinema software, has been responsible for media design and co-direction of a number of groundbreaking new media projects, including the award-winning DVDs That’s Kyogen and Bleeding Through – Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986 (both published by ZKM).
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FURTHER INFORMATION
Soft Cinema Project: www.softcinema.net
Complete text used in Mission to Earth is available at www.softcinema.net/mission_to_earth.htm
Opening and Panel at Chelsea Art Museum SATURDAY January 6, 2:00 - 4:30
PM with: Lev Manovich, associate professor of new media, University of California, San Diego; Christiane Paul, adjunct new media curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; Barbara London, curator, video and digital media, Museum of Modern Art; Sue Hubbard, art critic, Independent Newspaper, London; Ken Feinstein, artist/professor of experimental video
The Project Room @ Chelsea Art Museum, 556 West 22nd Street, @ 11th Avenue, New York, NY 10011 USA
www.chelseaartmuseum.org