:: Saturday, April 26, 2003 ::

A quick reminder of Mobilgaze's open call for submissions. This year the online exhibit focuses on the idea of 'pause' as understood in relation to video, CD players, VHS, DVD players, and other timebased electronic devices. The exhibtion is launched with a conference. Participating artist fees will be paid. The deadline is May 1, 2003. Those interested should visit the mobilegaze website.
Curators Valerie Lamontagne and Brad Todd
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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Spent last easter weekend in Paris getting around on the metro and got this in my inbox at the same time so felt it needed to be reviewed due to fate / irony.

"Portable Bug" by Ben Woodeson is currently featured from the 12th April -12th June 2003, as part of Free-fall, at Peterborough Digital Arts and online on the New Media Scotland website.

According to the author it "is the next generation in self-sufficient solar powered bugging devices" which takes advantage of wireless networks used by corporations to connect to the internet for free (this was pointed out in the UK by the likes of channel 4's Mark Thomas last year).

"Portable Bug" is inspired by "the trolleys used by buskers on the Paris Metro" where an amp and a speaker are built onto a wheeled trolley making them totally portable in urban areas. It uses this resemblence factor to integrate itself into the environment as a often seen device on the Paris metro yet all resemblence stops there. Instead of emitting sound into its environment, "Portable Bug" captures both sound and video making it freely accessible on the internet and hence transforming mass entertainment into mass surveillance.

Whatever about it being "the next generation" of "bugging devices" with its taped together components, this most certainly is the next generation of net.art and some directions I would certainly like to see more explored!
:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
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Anyone looking for an intense art fix should bookmark neural.it -- an excellent resource with several daily recommendations. The journal is primarly written in Italian, but even for readers unable to understand the language, just having access to the selected links makes it worth extensive browsing. On a formal note, the information architecture is both efficient and quite pleasing.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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Christina McPhee has created a series of esoteric 'browerscapes' consisting of background images combined with shockwave files. Poetry is also part of the environmental compositions. The rectangular background patterns and shockwave animations present viewers with an environment ready to be explored by scrolling up and down (feels more like walking).

McPhee considers her website to be dealing with cyberpresence. Though it may be hard to know what exactly the term may mean for the artist, it becomes obvious that she aims to explore the idea of landscape as a linguistic form of communication -- the scattered poetry can be considered a hint for such an interest. Unlike a typical landscape, McPhee's work presents flat squarish areas that defy their own boundaries by claiming a grid pattern as a way of expanding beyond what the browser is able to offer at one time.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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"Ether Side of an Empty Room" is a video project by Peter Horvath that has recently been featured as part of the Studios section of turbulence.org and is now also being exhibited at IMOMA's net.art open 2003.

Normally I refuse point blank to review video (in the strictest sense of the word) as part of net.art but feel this deserves a place with its relatively well streamlined (and hence paced) content. Its not video in the sense, one frame, one style and certainly one format with its popup multi-windowed presentation taking lessons from net.art devotees such as jimpunk and on the cinema side of things Mike Figgis. Its easy to see the artist has a desire to work within the network yet not suffer from the classical filesize restrictions and how he has negotiated a balance between what normally are (due to technical reasons) opposing fields.

Visually the project is stunning but well I would fault it on a few points. Those darn popups sometimes just are'nt big enough and you have to interact (quelle horreur!) to resize the windows, another point was the only interactive section which contained a form fell over straight away and gave an error page right in the middle of viewing the project.
:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
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The following is not necessarily a net art or new media event, but is worth checking out:

In Sunny California:

"THE COACHELLA FILM FESTIVAL--which takes place during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival Saturday, April 26 & Sunday, April 27 in Indio, CA--will screen a line-up of cutting-edge music-based documentaries, narrative shorts, videos and preview clips of hot movies to come. "
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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The second Net Art Open Exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art is underway. This year, one hundred net artists with a total of 178 links exhibit on-line. In addition to submitting a personal site, the artists were asked to recommend a not so well known website.

The only downside of the exhibit is that some of the participating artists recommended well known websites -- or at least websites by well known net artists such as Mark Amerika, Natalie Bookchin, and Mark Napier -- even Matthew Barney, who is not related to net art but to performance, video and installation, made it to the recommended list. It is hard to assess the reasons why some of the participants opted to suggest 'the usual suspects,' when the Irish Museum is offering an arena for true diversity. However, this is not the case for most participants as quite a few great -- but not so well known -- web projects were recommended.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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'Invisible Cities' by Various Artists is an Installation "comprising: 8.54 x 2.44 m Inkjet Panels, 20 x CD Players, 20 x Headphones and 20 x 5 Minute Audio Loops" commissioned by Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland for the Festival at Queen's in 2002. Curated and published by Fällt "an independent publishing house specialising in experimental music, fine art, design and criticism", the entire collection has been online free to download in mp3 for a few months now but will only stay so for a limited period. The audio collection is "an intimate series of portraits" of a selection of "the world's cities painted with sound". Real gems include 'Recorded Delivery' (London) by Janek Schaefer, '11.09.02' (New York) by Taylor Deupree and 'Untitled (DC)' (Washington) by Richard Chartier.
:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
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Pau Waelder is Banner-strike's 2003 winner. Here is the official news release from Bannerart's website:

"The winner of the "Banner-Strike" contest was "Peace of Cake" by Pau Waelder. Honorable mentions go to KRN and Michael Szpakowski. "Banner-Strike" was a contest for digital graffiti and net.art that was created under specific limitations and which critically examined the war in Iraq. As the winner, Pau will receive a copy of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero when it is released in October. His banner will be featured at the top of bannerart.org for one month. The 34 entries for the contest will be turned into sprays for Counter-Strike and added to the Velvet-Strike collection. We would like to thank all the artists that participated in the contest. Additionally, special thanks goes to Joan Leandre for helping judge the competition."

Make sure to visit bannerart.org for future events.


:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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"DESSINE MOI" (draw me) is a series of automats (non-interactive) created by Joachim Lapotre. It's a simple but effective visual study on short rule-based systems, the purpose being "to synthetise some graphic movements/styles/shapes and then combine it with random generators into logic based systems". This type of work has been created many times before, the most famous being probably those created by turux.org, yet is as essential to understanding computers basic principles such as cut and paste, looping, conditional structures and code execution order as life-drawing classes are to understanding what form, texture and light and shade are. These are steps in a learning process and no doubt we will be seeing more from Joachim Lapotre in the not too distant future.
:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
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Loops have been a driving force behind moving images since the beginning of Cinema. Today, animated graphics on the web are completely dependent on loops to work efficiently.

A website that has been offering excellent looped animations for some time now is Modern Living; here, one can find a range of Flash and Gif animations that expose existential angst. Make sure to click around as much as possible, as you will find a lonely character fighting and/or condoning interactivity with a drive that could only be possible through relentless repetition. In Modern Living, a simple algorithmic conditional becomes a way to get up in everyday life.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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Furtherfield.org has a brand new look, so make sure to drop by to peruse all its resources. Also, skintrip their collaborative project with Completely Naked is still happening; submissions of images of your naked bodies are welcomed. While visiting the site, read articles by Alan Sondeim, Charlotte Frost and our own Net Art Reviewer Lewis LaCook.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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The ABC of Tactical Media was recently posted by Fran Ilich on Nettime-Lat to open up a new discussion in the mailing list. The essay is a good introduction to the motivations behind The Next Five Minutes Events. It was actually written in 1997 but as I read it realized it might be of interest to some of our readers. The English version can be found at nettime's archive of May 16, 1997. The Spanish version is available at Alepharts. Anyone interested in following the discussion can do it at nettime-lat (understanding Spanish required). And make sure to visit the waag website, where early material related to the essay can be found.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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