Open Vice/Virtue: The Online Art Context

“The giantism of media corporations and the ongoing deregulation of media consolidation (Ahrens), underscore the critical need for independent media sources. If it were just a matter of which cola to drink, it would not be of much concern, but media corporations control content. In this hyper-mediated age, content — whether produced by artists or journalists — crucially affects what people think about and how they understand the world. Content is not impervious to the software, protocols, and chicanery that surround its delivery. It is about time that people interested in independent voices stop believing that laissez faire capitalism is building a better media infrastructure.”–Andy Deck

HTTP Gallery is pleased to present Open Vice/Virtue: The Online Art Context a solo show by American artist Andy Deck, as part of NODE.London season. For this, his first exhibition in London UK, Deck uses the Internet, the gallery and public space to challenge corporate control over communication, tools and software, and by extension the social imagination. [Private View: HTTP Gallery 9th March 2006 7-9pm; Exhibition: HTTP Gallery 9th March – 22nd April 2006.]
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Scenes of Provincial Life

Hi,

I’ve been making little movies since 2003 now & there’s nearly 100 of them. In the meantime vlogging has really taken off, so it seems like a natural thing to present the sequence so far in this format, with any new ones I make in the meantime interspersed amongst the old. For about the next hundred days or so I’ll post pretty much everyday and afterwards as and when. You can see the first six (two of which, ‘bicycle’ & ‘counting -cell phone and strings remix’, are new) at http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/vlog/ScenesOfProvincialLife.cgi

If you’ve enjoyed my work in the past, &/or you like what you see here, maybe you’d like to subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScenesOfProvincialLife

best
michael Continue reading

Visual Communication and Co-Presence

Visual Communication and Co-Presence: Camera Phones in Japanese Life; Speakers: Mimi Ito & Daisuke Okabe; Time: Wednesday, February 1, 2006, 6-8pm; Location: USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Camera phones now represent 3/4 of all mobile phones in use in Japan today. As these devices have merged with existing practices of visual archiving, sharing, and communication, new kinds of technosocial practices have become part of everyday life in urban Japan. We will discuss the current state of camera phone use in Japan based on our ethnographic research, and outline some of the emerging trends for how related technologies and practices seem to be evolving.

Daisuke Okabe, a cognitive psychologist, lecturer at Keio’s Keitai Lab and at Yokohama University, has conducted extensive fieldwork on mobile phone and Wi-Fi use. Mizuko Ito is a cultural anthropologist who is interested in how digital media are changing relationships, identities, and communities; she researches new media and mobile phone use at Keio University and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication. Both teamed up with Misa Matsuda to edit Personal, Portable, Pedestrian, the first English-language book dedicated to mobile communication use in Japan that was published by MIT Press last summer. [blogged by Scott Fisher on Interactive Media Division Weblog]

First Feature Film Shot Entirely on Cellphone Cameras: “…They’ve been shooting for over a week now, mostly nights. Everyone’s dead tired, so this particular scene is taking a bit longer than usual to get in the bag. “Action!” says the director for at least the 20th time in as many minutes, prompting the two female leads to start doing their thing at the pool table. As the girls hit the balls, chat and flirt, their movements are recorded by the cameras embedded in two of Sony Ericsson’s slick new W900i cellphones. That’s right: once this film, SMS Sugar Man (by Aryn Kaganof), is completed, it will be the first feature film in the world to be shot entirely on cellphone cameras…

…SMS Sugar Man is emblematic of what anthropologists refer to as the “leapfrog effect”. This is when people in developing nations adopt new technology and use it in ways that allow them to overtake users in developed nations. To extract maximum value from leapfrogging, however, you must be an early adopter.

The ways in which people consume entertainment media are undergoing rapid changes…South Africa…is hungry for new content…The future is right here, right now.” From Phoning it in by Ryan Fortune, sundaytimes.co.za (via)

tomorrow is our permanent address…

Â…McLuhan claimed some decades ago but nowadays we are simply already immersed and embedded Â…Arthur C. Kroker (editor of ctheory) states that we live in the electronic culture that he (McLuhan) prophesied. And since he wrote about it, technology has become more pervasive, but silent. ItÂ’s invisible. An elder article (written 2005 to remind McLuhanÂ’s actuality 25 year after his death) gives..(an) overview on McLuhanÂ’s opinions and as well both the enthusiasm and critique his thoughts evoked.

“For the first time, the central nervous system has been ‘exteriorized,” says Kroker, U Vic’s Canada Research Chair in technology, culture and theory. “It is our plight to be processed through the technological simulacrumÂ…in a “technostructure” which is nothing but a vast simulation and amplification of the bodily senses.” McLuhanÂ’s early (1960s) wake-up call about the extent to which peopleÂ’s very identities are determined by the tools that they themselves invent can be listened to via these two links of the old recordings. Continue reading

Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director

“..Director recasts the information-processing computer as a movie-making machine, or a signification engine bolstered by interactivity that can be mechanically scripted with finite options or driven by the fluid dynamics of video game methodologies. But when one introduces the program to the cinematic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the compositional approaches of John Cage it can become something else entirely. When interactive media is introduced to Deleuze’s radical theories of cinema-thought and Cageian silence–which can be understood as the dynamics of a system that is left to “be itself”–a sort of “idle” artificial awareness becomes possible…

…In his 1937 essay “The Future of Music,” avant-garde composer John Cage wrote that “the ‘frame’ or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time” as far as the composer of sound was concerned. Cage was already prepared to think in terms of music as cinematic apparatus composed via a system driven by external events and not prescriptions. Cage was prepared to accommodate accident within structure, and was not afraid of electronic instruments. If we switch the phrase “composer of sound” for “author of media” we find ourselves in some version of Cage’s predicted frame-driven future. From megahertz to refresh rates, the computing environment is a choreography of events possessing the complexity and precision of a Balinese gamelan, operating at speeds that border on the unimaginable…” From EnterFrame: Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director - multimedia authoring software - Evaluation Afterimage, July-August, 2002 , by David Goldberg. Continue reading

States of Interdependence

There is a Sufi fable in which a group of foreigners sit at breakfast, excitedly discussing their previous night’s exploration. One starts saying “…and what about that great beast we came across in the darkest part of the Jungle? It was like a massive, rough wall.” The others look perplexed. “No it wasn’t!” says one, “It was some kind of python”. “Yeah…” another half-agrees, “…but it also had powerful wings”. The shortest of the group looks bemused- “well it felt like a tree trunk to me.”

This fable aptly illustrates many aspects of the NODE.London experience. The name, which stands for Networked Open Distributed Events in London, indicates the open, lateral structure adopted to develop a season of media arts. It is intentionally extensible, suggesting possible future NODE(s), Rio, Moscow, Mumbai etc. As participants/instigators in the projectÂ’s ongoing conceptualization and praxis, we are just two individuals positioned on the interlaced, scale-free networks of NODE.L (more on these later). As such, our descriptions of this collectively authored project are inevitably incomplete and contestable, with a complete picture emerging only in negotiation with others. Continue reading

Hypertext as a Means for Structuring Digital Dance

“Introduction: In order to produce a dance piece the choreographer must first create a movement vocabulary. Once this selection of movements has been generated, the issue of how to configure the action arises. If the choreographer chooses to move away from the much tried and tested structural forms, what other possibilities exist for these artists?

As we embrace the twenty-first century, the age of interdisciplinary arts, we can see new structuring mechanisms occurring when art forms relate. In this study I will be looking specifically at the blending of literary theory and dance composition, to identify whether the relatively new idea of hypertext, a system for structuring text in a non-linear, interactive form, can credibly be utilised as a means of structuring digital dance. My research which shall employ both print media and hypermedia, in the form of online articles and hypertext systems, will be led by the questions that I have encountered throughout my own investigative process and that of others.” From Hypertext as a Structuring System Within a Digital Choreographic Context, by Charlotte Miles, University College Chichester, May 2005. [via Hyperchoreography] Continue reading

An Examination of Online Dance

“Abstract: The essay’s opening section identifies the pioneering photographic work of Eadweard Muybridge as a catalyst for development in the cinema and technological industries during the twentieth century. This section also examines how key developments in both of these spheres, such as the emergence of a body of screen-specific dance work, and the growth of digital and new media arts practices, have fed into the genesis of online dance work as a potentially distinct genre. These elements are also examined in relation to the creation of Motion Studies (2003).

The essay’s second section begins the process of inquiry into the nature of online dance work utilising a set of criteria developed by U.K. based choreographer Richard Lord. Using these criteria, a range of online dance content, such as promotional websites, webcasting and information databases are examined. These, however, ultimately fail to conform to the requirements for categorisation as online dance work. Five dance works created for Internet-specific presentation by British and U.S. artists are also examined and analysed as a means of determining properties or approaches common to the creation of online dance. The practical, artistic and technical issues involved in the creation of Motion Studies are also outlined in this section, including discussion of the role of the choreographer within current practice, and the importance of improvisation as an element within the piece. Continue reading

The Return of the Author

“Abstract: The article transposes the text of Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” (La Mort de LÂ’auteur) (1968), to the arena of happenings in cyberspace, and examines the implications from the point of view of author-reader-text, active in the electronic environment. Cyberspace has become one united text (hypertext), that allows any author to add to it, and any reader to read the content. The act of reading the text from the network simulates the cyberspace hyper-text wave function collapsing by means of the readerÂ’s submitted query. The text that was in a state of superposition throughout the network, or in BarthesÂ’ definition “multi-dimensional space in which many and varied writings are combined and meet, and none are foremost” becomes a single peak wave function that appears on the readerÂ’s display. Cyberspace accelerated the reading process to the speed of light, and led to a dramatic turning point of the disappearing of the traditional author, text, and reader, and the birth of the new Super-Reader-Author. This unification creates a paradigmatic shift from dualistic, Aristotelian object-subject thought, to the holistic thought of being, realized in the singularity of consciousness and connecting real space, the spiritual and cyberspace.” The Return of the Author, Avi Rosen, December 2005. Continue reading