The Central City offers the user an interactive Internet experience. Stanza presents a view of London that resembles an organic network of urban sights and sounds. Each section of the site holds a multitude of soundtracks and imagery, as well as generative audio and visual environments built into 3-D spaces. The organic dynamic of the site contrasts with manmade structures and elements of urban design. By traversing through and interacting with all of the levels of The Central City, 200 different video combinations can be explored by the viewer.

Stanza is an artist who deals with net art, multimedia electronic music and painting. The work has gained an international reputation for net specific artworks and number of these interactive audio visual online net artworks have been exhibited internationally. This main stanza site features lots of work including, the internet art project, The Central City as well as lots of soundtoys, interactive movies, gallery of fine art. The intention is to make an interesting, interactive, multimedia website, with sounds, pictures and artworks. The site also contains multimedia work and electronic music; cd players are built into the site so that you can listen to my music as you browse. You can navigate around from each of the cells on the home page and you can go to various experimental interactive audio visual pieces. Also online are paintings, photos and conceptual pieces from 1984 when at Goldsmiths', to the present day. Within the site are generative areas, areas where you can mix sounds, interact with images, there is a jukebox on the stanza main site and a karoake machine in the central city area. Projects include subvergence, which subverts and fragments the notion of our old browser. Instead we have full screen desktop takeover.

Inspired by pre-cinematic devices like projection lanterns, Menagerie reevaluates the idea of the theatrical machine. Tchakmakian's piece removes the viewing experience from the single screen, moving it to a grouping of large, mechanized, slowly spinning projection surfaces.

Half of the screens are made out of opalescent Plexiglas and the other half are made out of white reticulated foam. Some of these allow viewers to see their own reflections upon their surfaces, drawing them into the work itself. The porous surface of the remaining screens allows the projected images to spill through from one screen onto another. This spillage creates an effect of magnification and decreased saturation. The arrangement of screens and materials results in images that are fragmented, multiplied, enlarged, and superimposed at timed intervals.

In the Dream of the Planet appropriates the made-for-TV movie "The Day After" (1983) in its entirety, condensing the film down to 56 seconds. Valdes repeats these 56 seconds 6 times, and in each repetition edits into the movie to convey themes that mirror the research she has done during the past year regarding the media's presentation of nuclear arms information to the public. These themes include human relationships, the media, the military, science, and medicine. The viewer experiences both a sensation of memory flashback and the instantaneous virtual destruction of the world.

Claudia X. Valdes is a multimedia artist concerned primarily with issues of time, memory, and perception. She was born in Santiago, Chile in 1972. Valdes received an MFA and was awarded the Eisner Prize in Art from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally: at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Berkeley Art Museum; Pacific Film Archive; SXSW Film Festival and Conference; Art in General, NY; Centro Multimedia/Centro National de las Artes, Mexico, and the Werkstatten und Kulturhaus, Austria. Valdes has taught new media courses at UC Berkeley, and Diablo Valley College, and is a current Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Crowds and Power uses mediated imagary to explore the relationship between space, memory and territory. Windows containing image fragments emphasize the displacement of individuals and the transformation of urban space where large gatherings, demonstrations and struggles are represented. By juxtaposing charged images with theoretical and philosophical texts about the nature of crowds, this website explores internal and external conflicts. The blind interface delivers the unexpected. Users click on fragmented images triggering events - pop-up windows - containing larger images, animations and texts. The fusion of desire and expectation - between the human and the non-human - causes frustration as the user loses control of the space of the screen.

Jody Zellen is an artist living in Santa Monica, California. She works in many media simultaneously making photographs, installations, net art, public art, as well as artists' books that explore the subject of the urban environment. Crowds and Power (2002) was the October portal page for the Whitney Museum's Artport. She works as an independent web designer and has taught photography and design at UCLA, among other institutions. She received her MFA from the California Institute for the Arts. She is currently an assistant professor of art at Cal Poly Pomona. In addition to Ghost City her other web projects include Random Paths (www.randompaths.com) and Visual Chaos (www.visualchaos.org).

A live computer-based interactive narrative situated in downtown Los Angeles’ warehouse district, in 34 North 118 West a GPS device, Tablet PC, and custom software determine the participant’s location and deliver sound and images accordingly. The user sees a map of downtown Los Angeles from 1906 on the screen of the Tablet PC. Faintly visible on the map are “hot spots” – the points on the visitor’s journey which trigger sounds. Navigating the city streets, the user hears the voices and activities of those who lived and worked in the area many years ago: a cook at the former passenger station location, a railroad worker on Santa Fe, a child at the corner of Stephenson and Hewitt. Terrain becomes interface; participants’ movement acts as input.

For exhibition schedule, directions, and further information, please view the 34 North 118 West website at: www.34n118w.net

Jurors’ Remarks on 34 North 118 West

These artists act upon their ideas about interface and perform them as a kind of public service with the city as their studio, the satellite as their mentor and the art context as their medium. We can learn about convergence, communication and commitment from this project.
– Julie Lazar

Media arts have grown around our abilities to record various aspects of sensible reality - still images, sound, moving images. Now we have the new capacity to capture the location, and it is opening up all kinds of new possibilities. 34 North 118 West goes beyond the previous artistic experiments in location-based media by combining the inventive use of GPS technology and rich cultural content. The project lets the user uncover samples of Los Angeles's hidden history as s/he navigates through the multi-layered depths of downtown's most poetic and surreal space. The result is a new kind of "scripted space" (Norman Klein): a motion experience, which is emotionally moving.
– Lev Manovich

This work is both experimental and visionary. I love the idea of being able to explore the city using such consumer technology devices of the not-too-distant-future, and look forward to having a tool like this as part of my personal travel utilities.
– Christian Moeller

Naomi Spelman (concept, visuals, administration) is a transmedia artist whose work includes networked art, video and intractive backdrops for the stage, and graphic prints. She is currently teaching in he university of California San Diego’s Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Program.

Jeff Knowlton (concept and programming) shows online and in galleries and symposiums internationally. His work was included in Siggraph 2000, New Orleans and imagine 2001, Gavle, Sweden. His interactive VRML work “Reading the Future” was commissioned by the Centre for Global Dialogue in Rueschlikon, Switzerland. He is a recipient of a NEW and Rockefeller Foundation grant. Jeff teaches at the Art Institute of Los Angeles in Orange County and Antelope Valley College.

Jeremy Hight (concept and writing) is an internationally published writer and poet who has created numerous works for multimedia and for exhibition. A recent collaborative work, “Hike Hike Hike” is currently touring animation festivals worldwide. He teaches Writing for Multimedia at Mission College in Los Angeles.

The Gambit is a portable, interactive, new-media work located in the lobby of the Westin-Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, which overlays a fictive narrative over a spatial one. Each viewer is given a PDA attached to a digital compass and invited to wander around the hotel lobby. As the participant moves, the PDA relays a story through both sound and image. The narrative playback depends on the turning and displacement read by the compass as the viewer explores the lobby.

For further information, directions, or to make an appointment to view the piece, please visit the artist’s website at: www.thegambit.org

Kati Rubinyi is an artist and architect living in Los Angeles. She is currently teaching architectural history at Woodbury University and curating an exhibition about function in architecture for Chapman University, which will open in the Spring of 2003. Her recent work includes an article in X-Tra magazine about the 1960’s performances of James Lee Byars.