By
Jacob Gaboury on
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Zach Blas is an artist and writer working at the intersections of networked media, queerness, and politics. His work includes video, sculpture, installation, and design, among other things. He is also a PhD Student in the Program in Literature at Duke University, and writes extensively on the question of art, activism, and sexuality. Zach and I discussed the question of a queer technology and just what queer theory might contribute to the fields of art and technology.
Jacob Gaboury: What is queer technology to you, and how have you previously engaged with this issue in your work?
Zach Blas: Since 2006, I have been working on and thinking through the potentials and possibilities of queer technology. I've taken many different approaches to engaging this topic. I began with a queer sex act, anal fisting. As I started to think about anal fisting through David Halperin's text Saint Foucault, I saw many parallels between the process of this act and the process of video feedback, something I was obsessed and consumed by at the time. So my first work on queer technology - which I wouldn't necessarily call a queer technology - was an interactive video work called The Hole(s) of Non-Teleology. In this piece, I tried to address the relatedness of process as well as the sexualization of technologies in popular culture: the camera as phallus (think Peeping Tom) and the monitor as feminized (as in Videodrome). Making this piece put me more in-tune with the potentials for constructing technologies from a queer political framework.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at
10:00 am
Public Supply I, WBAI, New York, 1966
For "Public Supply I," Max Neuhaus confined his role as musician to that of a "catalyst for sound-producing activities," using the largest existing network, the telephone network, which had about 500 million subscribers at the time. Using technology he had constructed himself, he was able to mix calls coming in to ten telephones in the studios of the WBAI radio station in New York in different ways, and then broadcast this melange of listeners' sounds and noises. Once the listeners who called in had switched their radios on, he played with the feedback this produced and bundled sounds from introverted and extroverted callers together.
"I realized I could open a large door into the radio studio with the telephone; if I installed telephone lines in the studio, anybody could sonically walk in from any telephone. At that time there were no live call-in shows. […] Although I was not able to articulate it in 1966, now, after having worked with this idea for a long time and talked about it and thought about it, it seems that what these works are really about is proposing to reinstate a kind of music which we have forgotten about and which is perhaps the original impulse for music in man: not making a musical product to be listened to, but forming a dialogue, a dialogue without language, a sound dialogue."
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at
10:00 am
Blast 3 from 1993
Jordan Crandall is an artist and media theorist whose work deals with the cultural and political dimensions of new technologies. Between 1991 and 1995 he was the editor of Blast, a multimedia magazine that was initially published in a box format. Blast evolved alongside the popularization of the Internet, and much of its work occurred at the intersection of publishing, digital culture, and the production and distribution of art objects. This spring, Crandall spoke with Triple Canopy about the history of Blast, the nature of the magazine as a form, and the days of accessing bulletin board systems via suitcase-size modems.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at
1:00 pm
How did the World Wide Web look before this Internet boom, before it became a riot for star backgrounds, bouncing envelopes and under construction signs?
Well, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee went live with the first web page TheProject.html located inside the hypertext/WWW/ folder on a computer called "nxoc01" at CERN. Neither him, nor any of his colleagues made an effort to preserve this first version. The only thing we know is the URL http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html and the way the first page ever looked in november 1992. That's early enough, still half a year before the Mosaic browser would be released and people outside of CERN would start to make their pages.
It is difficult to estimate how many pages created in 1993-1994 made it into the new millennium in their primordial way. If you manage to find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case display a 1995-1996 skin, like the Russian Space Science Internet -- redesigns clearly shaped by the then-new Netspace browser.
But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993. To present them to the new students I look for "Prof. Dr." in Google.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at
11:30 am
Rootkit : a type of software that is designed to gain administrative-level control over a computer system without being detected. Ping : A utility used to determine whether a particular IP address is reachable online by sending out a packet of data and waiting for a response. Ping is used to test and debug a network as well as see if a user or server is online.
By
Brian Droitcour on
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Nick DeMarco, Too Cool, 2010
"Time doesn't exist when you're... just chilling!" Topping an administrative page on the site of curatorial collective Jstchillin, this slogan rephrases a familiar bit of folk phenomenology: Time flies when you're having fun! But in denying time's existence, rather making its perceived acceleration a metaphor for losing yourself in the moment, the slogan suggests a swap of the trinity of past-present-future for something else -- a sense of time that (until the end of this essay, at least) I will call "chill time." Jstchillin is concerned with the internet, and my description of chill time will be, too. It entails an awareness of parallel threads of messages, ordered by clock-time sequence and subjective assignments of importance (cf. Facebook's feed settings: "Top News" and "Most Recent"), and the knowledge that these messages will wait until you find them (in your e-mail, in your RSS aggregator, etc.) but might be irrelevant when you do if you wait too long. Chill time is simultaneity of the recent past and lagging present, the sum of attempts to track some threads into the past and push others toward the future. Awareness of physical surroundings tends to be fuzzy as you sift through old layers of digital sediment and deposit new ones. Jstchillin founders Caitlyn Denny and Parker Ito describe it like this: "[T]o chill is to live in a constant state of multiplicities, a flow of existence between web and physicality."
Jstchillin encompasses a number of initiatives, including the gallery show "Avatar 4D," but its flagship project is "Serial Chillers in Paradise," an online exhibition that has featured a different artist every other week since October 2009. Chill time, I think, is the central theme of "Serial Chillers," one that many commissioned artists have approached through conventional associations with chilling. Video games were the subject of an illustrated short story/film treatment by Jon Rafman, and Jonathan Vingiano's browser add-on Space Chillers was a game. Ida Lehtonen's contribution folded soothing ocean sounds into a video of exercises that computer laborers can do to stay limber during breaks, while Eilis Mcdonald's sent you scrolling through bits of pat, New-Agey advice and then to a page with equivalent visuals; both artists drew on packaged relaxation. Zach Schipko and Tucker Bennett's feature-length movie Why Are You Weird?, parceled into YouTube uploads, is a story of art-school students who spend almost all of their onscreen time at parties or hanging out in their dorm rooms, rehashing crits.
Infinite Stream Loop is an audio stream traveling through
the world wide web since the 1st of july 2010
The field of research "Laps" focuses on generating sensible representations of Internet by using it as a broadcasting space. The spatial and geographic properties of the Network are highlighted by broadcasting audio streams that travel and reverberate trough the web. Listening to these audio streams by using specific processes* allows to make audible an infinity of transformations that modify the sound as it circulates on the web. These alterations are comparable to a form of erosion caused by the network space - they are a key to allow different mental representations of this digital topography.
*Very low buffers and no error corrections
PROCESS | A sound is sent out over the network and goes through several locations on the web. Captured at the end of a loop by the original transmitter, the sound is played and then resent out with no additional modification through the web.
SOUND MATERIAL | To emphasize the changes caused by the network, the sound used for the startup is deliberately very simple - pure silence.
SPACE | Similar to a physical & resonant space, the Internet network is here used as a broadcasting space where sound gets more elaborated. The audio signal is modified by the inner properties of the network and becomes an acoustic signature of this space.
ERRORS | The audio transmission process used here allows to keep all the distortions of the original material that occurred during the process (artefacts, transmission errors, missing data...).
TOPOLOGY | The geography of the network is in perpetual motion. Web user's actions have a direct impact on the features of this "resonant space" - the sound that one can hear through Laps constantly crystallises the activity of part of the web.
EROSION | As a block of raw material subjected to an erosion, the back-and-forth of the sound on the network gradually shape the original material. The audio stream becomes a real-time sculpture - a potential acoustic portrait of the network.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, June 28th, 2010 at
11:30 am
A few months ago, we published a statement by dump.fm co-founder Ryder Ripps on the image-only chatroom, which had just been launched. Since then, the site has taken off big time. See below for some gifs from two ace memes to emerge from dump.fm - Sloth Goth and Deal With It. dump.fm have also instituted a Hall of Fame for other gems produced by users as well as an image vortex which visualizes the images dumped to the site in real time.
By
Jacob Gaboury on
Monday, June 21st, 2010 at
10:00 am
Golden Shield Music is a generative composition for eight audio channels. [...] The work is inspired by the Golden Shield Project, sometimes referred to as the 'Great Firewall of China'. [...] Golden Shield Music collects the twelve website’s IP that are most screened by the Golden Shield. Therefore IP numbers are listed in a text file which feeds an automated MIDI polyphonic synthesizer. The latter translates each IP in a single note formed by 4 voices with a specific velocity. Resulting notes are ordered by the amount of pages the Golden Shield obscured for each IP address: the website’s IP obtaining the highest page result on Google.com becomes the first note of the score and the others follow in decreasing order. Data organizes the musical notation, establishing an abstract relationship between Internet information and musical algorithms which sounds harmonious and "handcrafted".
By
John Michael Boling on
Monday, June 14th, 2010 at
10:00 am
A sequence of fair use background images arranged for aesthetic and formal reasons, paired with a short story assignment generated through Amazon's Mechanical Turk in response to the image sequence.
By
Charlotte Frost on
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at
11:30 am
Cover of Proud to be Flesh: A Mute Magazine Anthology of Cultural Politics after the Net
In 2009 the editorial team at Mute (in association with Autonomedia) published a collection of past magazine content under the title Proud to be Flesh: A Mute Magazine Anthology of Cultural Politics after the Net. It was an exercise in content curation, but not, as they point out, an attempt to assemble a greatest hits album. Rather, it reorganises a body of Mute’s diverse output around a selection of themes that are perhaps more apparent (up to) fifteen years later.
In many respects – through the early newspapers, magazines, websites and recent print-on-demand journals – Mute has long engaged in providing content navigation systems for internet-inspired knowledge and the darker side thereof. And they have been doing so in an era defined by its obsession with charting and re-charting the information landscape. What Proud to be Flesh does, therefore, is offer up yet another entry portal to Mute’s rich and important net-knowledge while, in its very book-i-ness, commenting on the current upheaval in text interface products.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at
12:30 pm
The following interviews were sourced from netpioneers 1.0, a research initiative active from 2007 to 2009 that was devoted to early net-based art, organized by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research. in Linz, Austria. All the interviews were conducted by Dr. Dieter Daniels.
By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, April 16th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Avatar 4D video by Chris Coy
In 1966, Allan Kaprow made the following statement in the Manifestos pamphlet:
Contemporary art, which tends to “think” in multi-media, intermedia, overlays,
fusions and hybridizations, is a closer parallel to modern mental life than we have realized. Its judgments, therefore, may be acute. “Art” may soon become a meaningless
word. In its place,“communications programming” would be a more imaginative label,
attesting to our new jargon, our technological and managerial fantasies, and to our pervasive electronic contact with one another.
Fast-forward to 2010, and one wonders what Kaprow would make of "Avatar 4D," an evening of performances -- or, more precisely, a happening -- by seventeen internet-based artists "set up as chaotically choreographed circumstances that exist in a reality of virtual proportions." Taking its cue from the dually alienating and revelatory push-and-pull of our hyper-connected lives, and the existence of "pervasive electronic contact" taken to the nth degree, artists will webcam, stream, project, and otherwise stage work in both San Francisco's NOMA Gallery and Richmond's Reference Gallery this Saturday, April 17th. The event is curated by the collaborative curatorial team JstChillin (Caitlin Denny and Parker Ito), who are also behind the original and often humorous online exhibit series Serial Chillers in Paradise. The press release describes the artists in "Avatar 4D" as "reality hackers" -- citing Petra Cortright’swebcam videos and Ben Vickers' disclosure of his personal usernames and passwords as examples -- who experiment with "the theoretical apparatus of struggle" in the context of "the ever changing modes of the net" and its impact on the self. It seems the artists behind "Avatar 4D" are attempting to insert "art" into a reality lived in anticipation of its constant representation and performance online, perhaps becoming a form of "communications programming" within a self-programmed reality. Whatever the case may be, with so many talented artists involved, Saturday's event promises to deliver a spectacle -- in two, three, and possibly four dimensions.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at
11:00 am
Eilis McDonald's Rapture Heap is a multi-phased project that centres around the occupation of one of Dublin's many empty retail spaces. The first installment of the project saw McDonald curate an exhibition that highlighted the artists that influence her and brought to Ireland some of today's most prominent internet based artists (http://www.raptureheap.com/v1). "Back to Reality" is the second installment of the series. Here McDonald delivers a body of work that is a result of her 6 month residency in the retail space. Commissioned under the Per Cent for Art Scheme for Dublin City Council’s Liberty Corner, the residency period afforded the artist time and space to explore the wealth of diverse activity in the surrounding area - from the various cultural institutions, such as the LAB and DanceHouse, to the Buddhist Centre, €2 shops, financial institutions, beauty salons and 24-hour internet cafés. With this particular urban spectrum serving as her backdrop, McDonald searches for the sublime and ethereal by seeking out the spiritual and subliminal. McDonald recontextualises the discarded artefacts of the local domesticity found in charity shops and fuses them with video assemblages that include a transient public contacted through advertising and classifieds in the CityAds Weekly newspaper. "Back to Reality"; the research phase of the Rapture Heap project brings together a number of varied strands of interests and motivations. The projects future online presence provides access to a broad national and international public and an opportunity to relate to a wider demographic, while the installation provides a visceral, immersive physical environment. "Back to Reality" presents a story-thus-far in preparation for the 3rd installment of the Rapture Heap Project.
By
Jacob Gaboury on
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at
1:00 pm
(Left to Right) Maryanne Casasanta, Abigail McGuane, Lili Huston-Herterich, Aaron Graham
An Immaterial Survey of Our Peers is a group show currently on display at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Curated by Web collective JOGGING, the exhibit brings together the work of a group of artists whose art is primarily displayed and distributed via the Web. Given the immaterial quality of much of the work, the show does not physically take place within the gallery space itself. Instead, the artwork has been collected and arranged over photos of the empty gallery space using digital compositing techniques. These photos are then displayed as documentation of the exhibit on the show website, and projected onto the walls of the gallery space for the show's duration. Artists on display include AIDS-3D, Kari Altmann, Jon Rafman, Travess Smalley, Ben Schumacher, and Hermonie Only, among many others. The show is currently on display both online and at the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at
1:30 pm
Gene McHugh, Rhizome's former Editorial Fellow and a periodic contributor to the site, received the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts’ Writers Grant earlier this year and has used these funds to begin the "Post Internet" blog. His project aims to build a space to reflect on "...art responding to an existential condition that may also be described as 'Post Internet'–when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps this is closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'–a term that I’m sure I will be thinking through here sooner or later." The blog is essentially a bare-bones workspace for his loose, often train-of-thought musings on contemporary internet-based art, and covers everything from Google's Parisian Love ad to Seth Price.
By
Ryder Ripps on
Friday, March 5th, 2010 at
1:30 pm
Editor's Note: Ryder Ripps, of Internet Archaeology, along with Tim Baker (Delicious) and Scott Van Damme (MIT Exhibit), recently launched a beta version of dump.fm, a chat room where participants communicate solely through images. The site combines the creative back and forth of surf clubs, tumblr’s loose and rapid-fire network of image transmission, and the real time spontaneity of an old school chat room. Right now dump.fm is strictly invite-only, but Ryder was generous enough to offer a special invite code to Rhizome readers - “RHIZOME” - so they can play around with the site. Ryder drafted a statement about his concept and aspirations for dump.fm, below.
I remember going into AOL chat rooms, and experiencing instantaneous glee. The hyper-everything world; where experiences come and go at the pace of your typing. Instantaneous collaboration and connection. These are the feelings I wanted to recreate in conceptualizing dump.fm. Dump.fm is a place where you can share images from anywhere on the web, your hard drive or right from your webcam, in real time with other people. Today content moves so fast, making a blog post from a week ago irrelevant. Dump.fm is a place where content is hyper-transient and used to facilitate connections and induce creativity. I think in the future people will produce and consume content much faster and because of this we must reconsider the value of content. For the surf club Spirit Surfers, content is a way to document and make public the most powerful content in the hypnotic surf, “Most of the really enlightening surfs I've had did not end with a post to a surf club -- surfing is so private, it rarely ends in a public act.”, as club creator Kevin Bewersdorf states. Where surfing was a private act from computer to computer, friend to friend, and node to node; dump.fm makes it a public, real time and collaborative act. The surf becomes discovery and the discovery becomes collective.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, March 1st, 2010 at
1:30 pm
This gallery-installation/internet-art hybrid automatically created sculptures using spam and e-mail to trigger the sculpting process. It consisted of a steel frame surrounding a large block of biodegradable (starch-based) Styrofoam. Attached to the frame is the Eroder: a mobile sprayer that squirted colored water on to the foam.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at
1:00 pm
A fountain and its natural form, the spring, are symbols of the miraculous life-begetting 'élan vital' that permeates the universe. In fact, life on earth is now thought to have begun in the nutrient-rich plumes of undersea hydrothermal vents, real-life fountains of life. But, when the image of the source is mimicked as Water Feature, a merely decorative, self-contained electric fountain, the maternalistic life-force is perverted into what amounts to abject MILF porn. The Water Feature is so wasteful and self-indulgent that it becomes the straw man in the argument against contemporary art as useless blubber for the tasteless elite. But— can't home and garden decor give back a little bit? Can't we efficiently retrofit some of our 'criminal ornaments' for a fairer future? If there is some leftover space inside their faux-marble fiberglass hollowness, we can definitely squeeze some useful nanotech in there— right? Let's finally answer Joseph Bueys famous challenge, “Kann Plastik die Welt verandern?"—can sculpture change the world? with a resounding “YES!"…as long as that sculpture contains a state-of-the-art-kick-ass-energy-efficient-linux-micro-PC that is totally discovering a cure for cancer.
A group of spectacular cast-fiberglass fountains stand together on an elevated server-room floor. A Fit PC 2 (the smallest PC currently available, 96% more energy efficient than a standard desktop) is installed in each water feature. Whenever the fountains are plugged in, the Linux PC's will automatically boot up and run World Community Grid software, a distributed computing project which uses a massive network of PC’s around the world to model solutions for various humanitarian problems, such as: “Clean Energy Project”, “Influenza Antiviral Drug Search”, “ Fight Aids@home” and “Nutritious Rice for the World". The delightful splashing of the water and twinkle of the energy-efficient LED’s act as relaxing and meditative status-light for the computers, tirelessly laboring within. Although there is no screen visible in the installation, the computation progress can be remotely monitored through a dedicated website.
