:: Monday, December 13, 2004 ::
ORIGINAL POST: Monday, December 06, 2004
BY: Garrett Lynch
Tonight saw the announcement of the Turner Prize Winner 2004 here in England. While the Turner Prize is by no means a supporting or even encouraging platform for net.art or even new media artists, in fact having hardly moved beyond video art to the extent that one of the exhibitions attendees felt it necessary to comment "we're still at video!" taking advantage of the Tate's Judge For Yourself scheme this year, politically, not really on merit, I found myself rooting for Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell.
Why? Well simply because they presented one work entitle NGO which had a sort of minimal flash aesthetic similar to something like Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries and a second entitled The House of Osama bin Laden which was made in cooperation with LAb[au] who recently presenting at Dorkbot Ghent in Belgium and are well respected in the new media community. Little steps I thought into our brave new world of new media, alas it was not to be and (in this critics opinion) the poorest, that is Jeremy Deller, of the four shortlisted artists Kutlug Ataman, Jeremy Deller, Langlands and Bell and Yinka Shonibare, won.
Oh well there is always next year and perhaps the Tate's Judge For Yourself scheme, which is also available online can be used to an advantage! To Judge For Yourself and make a comment visit the Tate Britain website.
ORIGINAL POST: Monday, December 06, 2004
BY: Daniele Balit
Another interesting exhibition in Paris is Pick up, an exhibit made of audio visual deconstructions and reconstructions. Most of all I enjoyed two videos, which are both based on some skilful editing processes: one, by Omer Fast, is a semantic work on CNN’s speakers. In the other, Martin Arnold “scratched” a movie scene from the fifties with comic and grotesque results. Moreover the idea of curator Guillaume Désanges is original: the room is entirely dark and the works are activated one after the other; in this way the exhibition becomes similar to a movie, with a beginning, an end and a length of about forty minutes. The attention of the public is indeed better focused on the individual works. A curatorial direction that deserves further developments...
ORIGINAL POST: Sunday, December 05, 2004
BY: Ana Boa-Ventura
For all the computer games aficionados out there, you still have the time to submit your paper to the "Playing the Past: Nostalgia in Video Games and Electronic Literature" conference, to be held on March 18-19 2005 at the University of Florida. For more info go to the conference site.
This piece is not so much to inform you of this conference (with a promising topic!) as it is an opportunity to leave some lines on one of its guest speakers, whose work I respect a lot: Mary Flanagan.
Flanagan's "navigating the narrative in space: gender and spatiality in virtual worlds " is an important complement to Turkle's, Bruckman's, and Donath's writings on gender and technology. If you haven't read it correct that by following the link above! The article was published on the Art Journal, in the fall of 2000.
Flanagan is co-editing with Austin Booth the much expected "reskin" (Cambridge: MIT Press), which is forthcoming in 2005. “Reskin” follows the 2002 piece by the same editors "reload: rethinking women + cyberculture" (also MIT Press). The 2005 book focuses on how technology is being used to alter the physical body.