The BBC loves electronic art

Perusing my CRUMB list emails this morning highlighted this eloquent quote from BBC art critic Will Gompertz:

It's interesting that, as far as I am aware, no contemporary artist has yet harnessed this extraordinary technology to make a significant artwork. Of course, maybe I'm wrong and am missing something great - do you know of any net-based art works that are worth a look?

Maybe you have made one (an artwork made specifically for the medium, as opposed to a film such as the one above, which uses the net only as a means of dissemination)?

If you, like me, can't find any net-based art of note, why do you think that is? Why, when there's been such a boom in contemporary art around the world, has no artist made the medium of the web his or her canvas? And if someone were to use the net as a medium, as opposed to making an image, or a video, or even an interactive Flash animation, what would the resulting art look, or sound, or feel like?

You can read the full article here.

Responses on the list where a mix of surprise and habitual disappointment with the mainstream art press. Of particular note was the irony of a this being posted on the man's blog, and that he previously worked for the Tate (where he ran Tate online), which has commissioned several significant net art pieces.

I often try not to read comment threads on major news outlets. I end up finding my world view so out of sync with the readers that it leaves me either depressed or angry or a super hybrid of the two, but I'm not sure if it's just British people, but there was a surprising amount of politeness in the response to such an asinine statement. It's worth checking some of the recommendations provided by the polite rebukers, but you can also just follow a few of the links below.

One of the most widely popular net-art pieces of the last years is Jonathan Harris' "We Feel Fine", which was so successful they have now made a book about the project, and we all know if they cut down trees for you it means your legit.

For an elegant flash version of the contemporary urban routine try this:

http://www.molleindustria.org/everydaythesamedream/everydaythesamedream.html

But for more general repositories of all things creatively networked there are of course these staples.

Rhizome

Furtherfield

HTTP Gallery in London

and for CanCon you really can't beat the Fondation Daniel Langlois for it's media art history. Check out details on works by David Rockeby and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and surprise many of them use impressive and elegant network technologies!

Street with a View

Artengine's winter workshops got started last night with our introduction to electronic art. I shared the instructor job with the very knowledgeable and talented Elizabeth McKinnon of collective (gulp), and she brought this project to our attention which is worth sharing here.

Street with a View is a hybrid street theatre project designed to intervene in the Google Street View recording process to leave a trace of surreal tableaux's that you can witness through Google. It is a fantastic idea that I am pretty sure was much more ambitious at the outset. The group approached Google with it and had their cooperation for it, so although the final result is still very nice you get the sense that maybe Google agreed only if it would be in a back alley in Pittsburgh. The marching band is fantastic though! You can follow the rest of the scenes, marathon, knotted bed sheet escape, giant turkey by clicking through the map. It's all near the alley . . . .


View Larger Map

More workshops to come. Check out the list. We have VJ workshops, circuit bending, sound creation and custom programming. I promise you will have fun!

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Magie et toaster

Il ne vous reste que quelques semaines pour aller voir l'expo de David Hoffos au Musée des beaux-arts. Autre que "magique" je ne sais pas quel mot choisir pour décrire le travail et l'expérience. Une parfaite sortie pour la Saint-Valentin, puisque justement l'expo se termine le 14 février. Une autre expo à voir, au ROM (Toronto) jusqu'au 31 janvier, Cut/Paste: Creative Reuse in Canadian Design qui présente des créations canadiennes innovatrices fabriquées d'objets rétros, trouvés, récupérés... comme une chaise faite de bâtons de hockey, des mignonnes tables à café faites avec de cabarets d'Expo67, des lampes en bombonne d'extincteur, mais également des objets plus touchants à voir comme un toaster fait d'un étui à cigarettes en métal fabriqué par un prisonnier. Il y a aussi une machine qui presse les cennes noires en médaillons conçus par quatre artistes. Il vous faudra un toonnie et une cenne pour l'activer. Moi j'ai choisi le design de Douglas Coupland, et voici ce qu'on peut lire gravé sur ma pièce: GOVERNMENTS WANT YOU TO DESTROY MONEY. EVERY PENNY DESTROYED IS MONEY THEY NO LONGER HAVE TO ACCOUNT FOR.

La Saint-Valentin s'en vient mes amours,

Crystal Doré

Hackerspace in the Artengine Lab

Good times ahead for the renegade technologist in you as Artengine has started to work with a loose formation of geeks to bring a new hackerspace to fruition in Ottawa. It's all in very early stages, but we will be meeting again on February 10th in the M70 Lab for a bit of a work and play gathering.

The Hackerspace people have been around for abit, but I think we have found a great complimentary energy and it's going to be good times ahead.

For a view on a much more fully formed Hackerspace check out the Foulab in Montréal. I wish I could be there for their Basic Principles of Refrigeration workshop!

Pecha Kucha in Ottawa

This clever little ideas sharing concept is coming to Ottawa this month. It started in Tokyo a number of years ago mainly focusing on networking young designers. The concept for the night is simple and quick. You get 20 slides at 20 seconds each for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds of speaking time. This leaves little time for ummming and aweing so presenters are presumably working on one specific idea or some refined Coles Notes version of their work. It holds great potential for an inspiring night as presentations need not concern themselves too much with practical details.

It should also be a great cross section of creative people working in architecture and design brought together with local artists. The full line up of speakers is available on their website, but highlights for me include Lee Bee and DAÏMÕN Artistic Director Marie-Hélène Leblanc. This first edition of the Pecha Kucha is free, which implies that the following ones may cost your more at the door so come check out this first edition!

Pecha Kucha
January 27th, 2010
Doors are at 7PM
Presentations at 8PM
Arts Court
2 Daly Avenue
Free!

Battle of the Kitten . . . more to move you with

The YouTube Battle was blast over the weekend. The Rideau Valley Roller Girls stole the show with their fishnets and dance moves and general awesomeness. They sailed throw the ranks with the audience showing their appreciation with glowsticks and bunny hops.

Our invited host, Jeremy Bailey, treated us to a nice little bit of MAX program in the form of a kitten that the audience had to move towards the side of their choosing. Their was a back up to the kitten which involved stretching Kanye's face with a combination of high pitch and high volume. Points where awarded from Kanye's face for the competitor. Big kudos to Jeremy for carrying off such a treacherous undertaking as the modest audience seemed very competitive and fairly resolute in resisting laughter even for the hot sauce foot licking video, which was a high light for me I know.

I don't have any screen caps of the kitten software, so instead you should have a look at some of Jeremy's videos. There is, of course, lots more on youtube . . .





Below is an excerpt from the performance work we originally hoped to bring up to Ottawa. It was orginally commissioned by HTTP in London, UK and I got the chance to see it in Toronto at Subtle Technologies. It's presentation at this science and art conference was hilarious because the rigorous academic types really wanted to get it right. I think they practically bumped rush the stage, motivated by their desire for more time to get it right cos they couldn't handle that the whole thing was designed to be awkward and perhaps unsuccessful . . .

Vancouver in Stereo - Channel One

Interactive Futures is a rad little festival/symposium in Vancouver. It?s theme this year was stereo. The dominant representation in that theme was stereoscopic video (3D glasses kind of stuff), but the symposium expanded the concept through into more intellectual considerations on the idea of stereo in creative technological practice. Day one IF had heavy representation from a wide variety of approaches in stereo, but day two veered off into the intellectual with presentations by Steve Dietz, Paula Levine and Ottawa's own Catherine Richards.

At first the tech loving side of me questioned the drift away from the purely stereoscopic presentations. Expanding the notions of stereo into our dual existence, divided between the technological mediated living and the un-plugged world seemed to be stretching the concept, but as each very intelligent presenter laid out their perspective I was engaged beyond my simple techno-fascination. In fact, I felt a little embarrassed at my simple boyish fetishization of the seductive left eye/right eye images. This was perhaps most pronounced when Catherine Richards pointed out the parallels between our reaction to stereo and the anecdote about the first witnesses to the power of cinema who leaped out of the way of the train on screen. My love of the stereo had been exposed for a kind of old world innocence. I felt naked without my 21^st century cynicism.

But despite the increased critical focus the academics brought to my binocular experience, I think that the fascination with the development of stereo video is warranted. The creation of culture within a critical and academic context heavily encourages the development of cerebral conceptual work, and there is much in the newly accessible stereo work that focuses on simple wonder. Wonder in art often reduces me to simplistic "Cool!" or "Awesome!" reviews of the experience, and while I try to be cautious of my own spectacle fetishism I worry about the schism in contemporary culture between spectacular and meaningful work. Few seem to be able to marry the two, but many of the artist at Interactive Futures, particularly Willy Lemaitre and Munro Ferguson, are able to create meaningful work that embraces the wonder of the technique.

Willy Lemaitre, Edia

Will follow up with more from Infteractive Futures, when I have caught up with all the work waiting for me at my desk back here at the engine.

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