Alison Cornyn + Sue Johnson, USA
Since1980 the US prison population has quadrupled to over two million, most of whom are black or Hispanic, and poor. 360 degrees grew out of the artist's concern regarding the impact of incarceration on the people directly involved, on their families and on the wider community. Positing that the social policies that sustain this punitive system are based on fear and lack of understanding this is a website where people with diverse stories of the legal system - from judges to prisoners to the general site visitors - can share their experiences and opinions, and engage in a productive dialogue.
About Face
Steve Appleton, USA
Contending that differences and similarities in faces raise questions about individual and group representation, About Face places the audience into the work itself. A video camera captures the viewer's image and reworks it into a nearby large-scale projection. Seeing one's own face projected on screen can be a seductive or a disturbing spectacle, and while a person's face may be a component of a larger image, an individual can just as easily be represented as the sum of many others.
Borderland
Hart Laurent + Julien Alma, France
Rejecting the standard dream-like aesthetics of computer gaming this interactive video game offers a cast of 55 'real' people - with background histories - and 280 urban environments. Players can stage a tournament between an elderly woman and her neighbor in a deserted playground, or pitch a bricklayer against an account executive in a parking lot. By projecting our familiar universe into the symbolic space system of the game world Borderland uses the prism of the fight game to set up an infinity of encounters - an urban parody of violence at the unstable border between game and reality.
Conversations with the Countess of Castiglione
Anne Walsh + Chris Kubick, USA
Critics and historians have a field day with dead artists. One author vanishes, replaced by another: the interpreter. Conversations with the Countess of Castiglione is an audio cd which investigates the relationship between those two authors. The cd documents four interviews - conducted via seances with four different spirit mediums - with the Countess of Castiglione, an Italian noblewoman whose huge output of self-portraits in the 1850s-90s is often cited as a naive precursor to Cindy Sherman, Claude Cahun, and other 20th century artists whose works problematize notions of identity.
Digital Atmosphere
Aaron Rincover, USA
Using a small device that floats between dancers in a crowd this real-time manipulative surround sound system allows even the musically challenged to compose the sounds they're moving to. Exhibition visitors can interact with the device through the three days of the festival and participate in a live performance with Dj Kool-Aid at the AIM II reception, Saturday, February 17, 9pm.
Geoff Cox, Mike Phillips, Adrian Ward, et al., England
Autoicon simulates both the physical presence and elements of the creative personality of the artist Donald Rodney, who, after initiating the project, died of sickle-cell anemia in March,1998. Users of this web site will encounter a "live" presence through a "body" of data, be able to engage in simulated dialogue (derived from interviews and memories), and in turn affect an auto-generative montage-machine that assembles images collected from the user's hard drive. Through Autoicon, participants can generate new work in the spirit of Donald's art practice as well as offer a challenge to ideas of monolithic creativity.
Autoicon includes contributions from Eddie Chambers, Richard Hylton, Angelika Koechert, Virginia Nimarkoh, Keith Piper, Gary Stewart, and Diane Symons. Images courtesy of the estate of Donald Rodney.
everything and nothing (from the ongoing project 'untitled')
Jayce Solloum, Canada
This ongoing multi-channel video installation continues Salloum's series of projects that address social and political realities and representations, manifestations and enunciations. It focuses on borders/nationalisms/movements, and subjectivity, and the condition of living between polarities of culture, geography, history and ideology.
Creating an atmosphere of visual collision, collaboration, contextualization
and critical interference the work includes an intimate dialogue with ex-Lebanese
National Resistance fighter Soha Bechara, and interviews with Eastern European
refugees, migrants, students, workers, cultural producers, and asylum seekers.
The dialectical relationship of the speaker and the spoken is highlighted,
and difference is articulated around the metaphorical spaces of displacement
and dwelling. Additionally, Untitled investigates the types of freedom
that allow people to stay home and the types that force them to move. Histories
of movement are examined along lines of gender, class and race; and legacies
of empire, conflict and capital, and the contested notions of 'homeland,'
'nation', 'diaspora,' 'exile,' 'assimilation,' 'refuge,' 'native,' and 'other'
are taken into consideration; in an attempt to challenge our realities and
perceptions and, in doing so, reclaim and reconstruct an agency that is
complex and self determining.
Karen Guthrie + Nina Pope, England
On 09.16.00 a one-day live event and webcast from the Grizedale Theatre, Grizedale, Cumbria, UK, focused on the improbable but popular sport of Cumbrian lying (tall tale telling). Each artist supplied a liar with autobiographical material and commissioned a new collaborative "lie" for the finale of the event. The festival day comprised a series of thematic talks by speakers from diverse fields that included journalism, parapsychology, and dot com companies, as well as a local children's lying competition. A live audience attended and the event was web cast.
Forest of Signs
David Crow, England
This cd-rom functions as an interactive sketchbook, with supporting text and animations, that draws together a series of personal visual experiments based around the theme of language. Forest of Signs attempts to bring theoretical ideas together with visual arts practice through a variety of different media.
From the Back of the Eyelids
Juliet Conlon, USA
Seated at desk installed with a touchpad and video eyeglasses the user is invited to engage in a private, virtual, erotic space within the public setting of a gallery. Navigating by 'touch' the user strokes the touchpad to generate video-capsules that collectively create a rich red and gold portrait of the erogenous body.
Juvenate
Andrew Hutchison + Marie-Louise Xavier, Australia
This analogue exploration of the fragility of existence and the opposing
emotions of hope and despair employs an interactive narrative to evoke sensations
of joy and loss, rejuvenation and decay. Juvenate encourages an interaction
paradigm shift in challenge to existing, artificially evolved, conventions
of computer interaction. It has no menus or buttons and, having once double-clicked
to begin interaction, the user need never click the mouse again. Instead
the cursor is employed for an intimate investigation of this audio-visually
rich cd-rom.
Living
Greg Kucera, USA
Using the expanded apparatus of video postproduction Living addresses the sublime awareness of lived potential that exists within each moment. By overlaying two or more moments in time to expand the temporal dimensionality of a static frame, Kucera weaves individual moments together using monologue/ dialogue as a unifying element-critical to the rhythm and flow of the scene, yet incomplete and fleeting.
Ken Kobland + E. Jay Sims, with Bill Waldman, USA
Moscow in September 1990 is a city on the edge of historic change, hanging somewhere between perestroika and collapse. Manezh Square records a mass, pro-democracy demonstration held just outside the Kremlin walls. It is a kind of 'advent-calendar' of the last days of the Soviet Union. By clicking on the faces in the 360 degree panorama of the crowd site visitors can activate various spoken or visual 'interior monologues' , and can respond with their own thoughts which will be incorporated into an evolving series of 'inner monologues' to form further on-screen content.
Mysteries and Desire:
Searching the Worlds of John Rechy
John Rechy + the Labyrinth Project, USA
Combining a wealth of diverse source material-including original drawings, live action video, three-dimensional VR panoramas, family photographs, letters, religious imagery, historic documents from Mexico and El Paso, archival footage, taped interviews and commentaries, word games, and popular representations of the male body-Mysteries and Desire maps both Rechy's inner landscape and America's most notorious gay cruising sites, which his fiction helped make famous. The cd-rom lets players move through three interrelated realms, each with its own daring repertoire of gestural interfaces that can be used to solve mysteries or generate new fictions.
Mark Amerika, USA
Originally commissioned by the Walker Art Center's Gallery 9, PHON:E:ME asks site users to expand traditional notions of authorship and narrative and invites them to 're:mix' their own textual-auditory experience over the Web. Using the m.o 'surf, sample, manipulate' sounds and texts are recombined to create an original composition that blurs the borders between spoken, written, and sculpted artistic forms. Part oral narrative, part experimental sound collage, and part written hypertext, PHON:E:ME also addresses the new possibilities of conceptual and performance art in network culture.
The Postfuturistic Encyclopedia
Staffan Backlund, Sweden
"Postfuturism", writes Backlund, "doesn't really explain anything. It pays attention with a specific range of consciousness that is above and beyond deception by verbal formula." The Postfuturistic Encyclopedia can be interpreted as an ongoing creative process, on cd-rom, where the user-selected images and sounds - linked to each other in a pseudo-organic way - form dynamic patterns that later determine new images and sounds.
Eduardo Navas, USA
At the center of this website is the short story Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote in which Luis Borges challenges his own authority as the writer who is merely trying to correct a misconception of a novel that never existed, but whose original inspiration has become an institution itself. Navas uses Borges' tale to expose the formal aspects of the web and show how an old idea can become innovative once again if it is presented eloquently through a new medium.
Jonah Brucker-Cohen, USA
Site-Traffic is a telepresence project that involves both a physical installation
and a web-based interface component. The project functions as a fully programmable
remote sequencer that allows for non-verbal communication between users
in the physical and on-line spaces. Users are invited to login to the Site_Traffic
server where they can compose a song and send it to one of nine physical
buttons. Users in the physical space can push the buttons and listen to
the songs. They can then compose their own song by pressing multiple buttons
and sending the note information and composition back to the online participants.
theBot (One Infesting the Horse)
*Intelefilm Award for Creative Excellence
Amy Alexander, USA
Search engines have become our navigators. They determine our knowledge
of, and relationship with, the Web. TheBot (one infesting the horse)
takes the process through which search engines index web content and reverses
it to show (in real time) the resulting path in the form of a stream of
visual and speaking text "packets." Recontextualized in this manner,
the text of the Web can be seen as narrative, even poetry-at least for the
bot.
Um, (space), and Vagueness
Susan Giles, USA
The three videos that comprise Um, (space), and Vagueness are each made using fragments edited together from monologues spoken by the artist. Um consists exclusively of the "ums" spoken during the monologue, and locates a private moment by extending the artist's withdrawal from the viewer. (space) utilizes only the gaps between words to expose a place of transition and anxiety, and Vagueness presents the artist's imprecise expressions that fail to communicate specific meaning.
WorldMix Los Angeles
Tony Allard, USA
With his collaborator Dwight Frizzell, Tony Allard has created WorldMix
LA - an interactive radio and internet performance/broadcast that combines
a live mix of indigenous 'audio fossils' collected from around the world
and locally in Santa Monica. Unlike the traditional one-way model of broadcast
radio, which involves a single transmitter transmitting to many receivers,
this radio/internet station operates on the principle of many transmitters
and many receivers transmitting and receiving in "real time" simultaneously
on multiple radio frequencies and on the internet.Tony Allard will collect
'audio fossils' and interviews with gallery visitors: 11am-2pm, Thursday/Friday,
15 +16 February; and perform live mixes: 3-6pm, Thursday /Friday 15 +16
February; and 7 - 7.30pm, Saturday 17 February.
The Writing Machine
*Intelefilm Award for Creative Excellence
*AIM II Audience Choice Award
Gwyan Rhabyt, USA
Performing for up to six hours per day Gwyan Rhabyt sits at a desk writing on a continuously moving strip of paper. Striving to maintain an improvised stream of consciousness monologue he writes as fast as he can - while the paper is drawn away by a motor and fed into a flame that turns all of his thoughts into ashes.
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Manezh Square
