Networked Art (part 1)

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Networked Art (part 1)

• Justin Wong / 16 November, 2004

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Introducing Networked Art

• In the 80s
• Data Space as a new arena for artistic creation
• Connectivity of physical and virtual space

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Telematics

• Computer Technology Telecommunication

Telematique, coined by Simon Nora and Alain
Minc in 1978
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Roy Ascott
Artist / Theorist / Educator / Founder of
Founding Director of Planetary Collegium and
CAiiA-STAR in Wales
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Roy Ascott

• Art, culture and society are interconnected
  systems of self-governing feedback loops.
  (Cybernetics)
• Instead of the artwork as the window onto a
  composed, resolved, and ordered reality, we have
  at the interface a doorway to undecidability, a
  dataspace of semantic and material potentiality.
• Viewer is always needed to complete the
  artwork
• Artist The creator of contexts for noetic
  navigation and of open-ended, evolutive systems
  in the Net.
• Through networks, creativities are being
  enlarged. (mind-at-large)

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Roy Ascott
On Creativity
Creativity is shared, authorship is distributed
On the contrary, telematic culture amplifies the
individuals capacity for creative thought and
action, for more vivid and intense experience,
for more informed perception, by enabling her to
participate in the production of global vision
through networked interaction with other minds,
other sensibilities, other sensing and thinking
systems across the planet through circulating
in the medium of data, through a multiplicity of
different cultural, geographical, social and
personal layers. Networking supports endless
redescription and recontextualization such that
no language or visual code is final and no
reality is ultimate. In the telematic culture,
pluralism and relativism shape the configurations
of ideas of image, music, and text that
circulate in the system.
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Some Pioneer Works
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• INTERPLAY (1979)
• I.P Sharp Associates (IPSA)
• Took place from 2000 to 2200 on April 1, 1979
  and linked 12 cities in Canada, US, Australia,
  Japan and Austria Network conference

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• ARTISTS USE OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE
• Slow-scan TV (SSTV) and computer conference
• San Francisco, Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto,
  Cambridge, Honolulu, Tokyp, NY, and Wien

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• ARTBOX
• Email program ? ARTEX (1983) Artists Electronic
  Exchange program
• a user group on IPSA network.
• It had about 30 members, worked until 1990

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• DIE WELT IN 24 STUNDEN (1981)
• (World in 24 Hours)
• 24 hour telecommunication projectConception and
  coordination by Robert Adrian X
• Artists from all over the world are connected
  in a nonstop series of dialogues that begin at
  noon on September 27 and end at noon on September
  28 (CET).
• Throughout this time period, visual materials are
  exchanged with transfers occurring via telephone
  or radio funk, and with the help of slow-scan TV
  or telefaksimile (Fax) sender-receiver-device.
• Wien, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Wellfleet,
  Pittsburgh, Toronto, San Francisco, Vancouver,
  Honolulu, Tokyo, Sydney, Istanbul and Athens.

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budapest

• TELEPHONE MUSIC (1983)
• An attempt to use the telephone to create a
  common space for artist across the ideological
  barriers.
• Simply connected the telephones to amplifiers
  and played live music to each other for a couple
  of hours.
• between Wien, Berlin, and Budapest

berlin
Vienna
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• LA PLISSURE DU TEXTE (1983)
• Roy Ascott
• Electra83 (in Paris)
• To use the ARTEX network both as an organising
  instrument and as a textual medium for the
  creation of a world-wide, distributed narrative -
  a collective global fairy tale.
• an experiment in collective authorship.
• Participants in 11 cities around the worlds were
  assigned roles in the fairy tale.
• http//www.t0.or.at/radrian/ARTEX/PLISSURE/plissa
  rtx2.html

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• Planetary Network
• a telecommunications project for the Venice
  Biennale XLII, 1986
• For the first 2 weeks of the Biennale, 24
  locations around the world contributed to a daily
  program of exchanges using fax, slow scan TV and
  computer communications (email and conference).
  For the rest of the period of the Biennale free
  user accounts were provided by the I.P.Sharp
  computer-timesharing network for continuous
  on-line discussion using ARTEX and Confer.
• Using email, slow-scan TV, interactive
  videodiscs and remote sensing systems
• http//www.t0.or.at/radrian/UBIQUA/

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robert adrian working at the ARTEX installation
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ARTEX installation displaying the hawaii graphic
from honolulu
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jean rené bader coordinating a slow scan tv
exchange
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the slow scan TV desk during Vancouver SSTV
transmission
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Internet as Data Space
Collaborative creation of artworks
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Douglas Davis Worlds First Collaborative
Sentence (1994) The huge difference between
broadcast TV and the Web is the keyboard. With
that people can say anything they have full
expressive capacity. This means a more intense
and personal link could occur between me and the
audience http//ca80.lehman.cuny.edu/davis/Sent
ence/sentence1.html
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• Mark Napier
• PotatoLand.org -- Landfill
• A virtual compost heap
• Napier developed an interface that allow user to
  copy data from his or her own computer or from
  other Web site, and thus, to put it plainly, to
  dump it.
• Recycling of old data
• http//www.potatoland.org

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Alex Galloway, Mark Tribe Martin Wattenberg
Rhizome.org Starry Night http//rhizome.org/star
rynight/index.php3
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Disappearing of distance
Telepresence
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• telepresence be there in the form of a
  secondary body.
• The term telepresence is originated from the
  Greek word Tele, which means remote and
  presence.
• It is a technology to allow a person to be
  present in a remote site in other form.
• Holding a real-time conversation with someone on
  the phone is an example of low-level
  telepresence. It is a place where you are there
  (your voice is representing you) and at the
  same time, you are not there.

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Paul Sermon Telematic Dreaming (from
1992) Telematic Dreaming is an installation that
exists within the ISDN digital telephone network.
Two separate interfaces are located in separate
locations. A double bed is located within both
locations, one in a blacked out space and the
other in an illuminated space. The bed in the
light location has a camera situated directly
above it, sending a live video image of the bed,
and a person ("A") lying on it, to a video
projector located above the other bed in the
blacked out location. The live video image is
projected down on to the bed with another person
("B") on it. A second camera, next to the video
projector, sends a live video image of the
projection of person "A" with person "B" back to
a series of monitors that surround the bed and
person "A" in the illuminated location. The
telepresent image functions like a mirror that
reflects one person within another persons
reflection.
http//www.hgb-leipzig.de/sermon/dream/
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• Ken Goldberg
• The Telegarden
• On exhibition at the Ars Electronica Center from
  1996-1997
• This tele-robotic installation allows WWW users
  to view and interact with a remote garden filled
  with living plants.
• Members can plant, water, and monitor the
  progress of seedlings via the tender movements of
  an industrial robot arm.
• http//www.telegarden.org/tg/