The
Internet offers artists and audiences the potential to communicate,
engage and activate, directly across social, political and cultural
borders. So we connect with each other and shine the torch lights of
our intertwining consciousnesses on the concerns of the day. Unlike
the corporately owned and controlled, entertainment networks, the network
of the Internet still functions as a free platform for distributed
creativity.
‘
Glass Rondo’ was made and broadcast in 2003 by the Stockholm-based
artist collective, Beeoff, who has dedicated the last few years to developing
the software, infrastructure and arts content for NonTVTV. The web does
have its limitations as a platform for creativity; its narrow bandwidth
and the dearth of opportunity for kinesthetic engagement can make it worse
than the telly for eyestrain, with concurrent deprivation of all other
senses. Whether working on our own projects or exploring what other artists
have wrought from the varied net-based media at their disposal, this medium
can create a kind of morbidity in our bodies. NonTVTV has worked with the
multicast-protocol to raise the bandwidth and therefore the potential richness
of the medium whilst preserving the benefits of lateral production and
distribution. By establishing nodes in international public art venues
it has also asserted and promoted the medium as a valid extension of formal
artistic expression.
To create Glass Rondo, Beeoff placed a glass or a metal vessel on
a table betwixt 3 monitors, each emitting a different coloured
light to a pulse
of sound. Video cameras placed at each monitor recorded what they saw
to software which recombined and edited the 3 data streams live
to be broadcast
at high bandwidth across the Internet and projected once again into geographically
and so, culturally dispersed physical spaces. This is Internet Cubism;
in its expression of the artists’ relationship to the object, its
exploration of the relationship and interchange between bits and atoms
and its simultaneous transmission, live to its multifarious audience.
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Glass
Rondo is also very much a celebration of the poetics of shadows. In 1933
a Japanese novelist, Jun’ichiru Tanizaki wrote an essay on aesthetics
called ‘In Praise of Shadows’. He writes ‘Lacquerware
decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light to
be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark a part
here and a part there picked up by a faint light. It’s florid patterns
recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura
of depth and mystery of overtones but partly suggested’ pg21
Out of the darkness Glass Rondo conjures a fluid, synaesthetic music
of the spheres. Beeoff has synthesized a new kind of composite temporal
object ‘in
which wavelength, topology and rhythm become one’. The rare deliciousness
of the experience affected by the Glass Rondo is connected to its translation
of material form, its insinuations of dust and irregularities in the object’s
surface. Rather than using special effects to illuminate an imagined event
unfolding to reveal every detail of its appearance, it constructs a meticulously
crafted set of aesthetic relationships between sound, time and matter as
a reflecting surface for the play of light, all wound together in a new,
poetic interpretation of real-time object oriented programming. - May 2004
Originally written
for Furtherfield.org,
May 2004.
Visit Furtherfield.org
to read all their newest articles, including a net.swap of bzzzpeek
(2004) - Agathe Jacquillat & Tomi Vollauschek by NAR's Kristen
Palana.
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