screenlife
i hate to break
this to you but there is no cyberspace
there are no web pages no virtual reality
on the internet only strings of code travel through the wires
see even i use the word travel which suggests time
and there is no time either only download speed
it's all just you who has to have a familiar hook to approach this thing
give it a reference to what you already know
you want to recreate your experiences relive your life on the screen
make your fantasies come true
ha ha ha
it's not gonna happen man but you're welcome to try
- There is not
enough RAM in the whole universe to perform the task you
have requested.
- The operation has failed. Would you like to try again? It will only fail
again*
The two projects
in this exhibition are a result of the artists' on-line
encounters and interactions. Both of them probe the creation
and experience of simulated reality of the Internet. Aside
from a pragmatic information source and electronic business
outlet, the Internet has increasingly become a fantasy
generating dream machine for the wired masses. As another
tool for imagination, the updated answer to a "live in
your head" escape principle for anybody with a modem and
a phone line, it allows users to remake, idealize, invent
or alter their personae and surroundings. A catalyst for
techno-utopia with no password required.
Kiki Seror explores
the sexualization of the Net. She logs onto often unnecessarily
demonized porn chat rooms where she assumes different identities,
male or female, aggressive or submissive, and subsequently
creates works based on the text transcripts from such encounters.
Through Seror's work cybersex acquires an image. Explicit
dirty talk rendered through dynamic typography is a stand-in
for the absent biological body. Lust becomes erect yet
deserted architecture.
Althoff and Vaindorf's
installation is twice removed from the real world. And
then brought back. The artists met Tanya Murphy from Seattle
in Active Worlds, a vast 3D multi-user space which allows
for building complex architectural sites and communicating
with visitors via chat software. "Tanya in Twiglet Zone" is
a life size model of a virtual living room. Pixelated surfaces
and non functional furniture replicate a part of a house
created by Tanya on-line. The virtual house itself is a
precise, if idealized, copy of Tanya's real Seattle home.
For the installation she has been asked to give a guided
tour - the guests and the host unite in the publicly private
space.
Transforming and
adapting their experiences into physical, material objects,
these artists interpret the Net as a psychological/social
construct. For them, it is the tool, the subject, but not
the medium to implement ideas. The very core of the Internet
is being explored in works produced directly on-line: for
artists like Mark Napier, the web itself is the medium
as well as the subject and means of delivery. I would like
to send you to your computers to navigate through Napier's
site www.potatoland.org. There, in potatoland, the web
pages can be shredded, trashed and reconfigured, unwanted
content can be disposed of onto digital landfill, (ro)bots
can be rebuilt into new beings from preexisting elements.
That's a whole lot of fantasies reformatted. Enjoy.
Magdalena Sawon
©June 2000
*Perry Hoberman,
2000 (messages excerpted from Cathartic User Interface,
interactive multimedia installation)
Dog Day Afternoon,
appropriately held in the heat of the summer, features
new work by New York based photographer Lucas Michael and
Japanese conceptual artist Nobuhira Narumi. Both artists
study the human condition via the landscape, the former
through the lens of a camera, the latter through the eyes
of a dog. While Michael's photographs take us on a trip
to the desert, Narumi's video obliges us to wander the
city streets, literally at dog's eye level.
Disguised as a
tourist, Lucas Michael recently traveled to Death Valley,
Joshua Tree, and the Navaho desert in California. For Michael,
the desert represents the last American frontier, where
tourists take on the role of romantic hero, roaming the
landscape like the lonesome cowboy in a country ballad,
in a quest for spiritual enlightenment. Michael, as mere
observer, wishes he could go to the desert "with their
kind of energy." Referring to glorified travel photographs
or commercial landscape photography, he gives us the ultimate
travel poster with a twist.
There is a sense
of alienation, of displacement, of unfulfilled expectations
in these images of uneasy wayfarers moving through what
has become a canned experience, continually mediated and
subverted. Signs tell them where to eat, where to pee,
where to look. In the artist's mind these are tourists
who have been driven inward; therefore the only travel
worth documenting is an internal one. Michael approaches
the act of taking a photograph introspectively. Thus the
title of this body of work and wordplay:Landmind. The man-made
objects--walls, cars, and porta-potties-- that punctuate
the landscape (and blend into it, camouflaged like landmines)
bring us back to reality. We are here. Even in the desert
there is no virgin space. A panoramic view is littered
with footprints.
As civilization
breaks "the silence of the seas," our passion for travel,
with all its deceptiveness, continues to proliferate. The
packaged tours, books and posters create the illusion of
what no longer exists. As Claude Levi Strauss predicted,
the history of the past twenty-thousand years is irrevocable.
Like Lucas Michael,
Nobuhira Narumi also walks a fine line between expectation
and reality, between artlessness and artificiality. Narumi,
who was born in Japan and now divides his time between
New York and Tokyo, investigates the human world through
a dog's point of view. Attaching a micro-video camera to
the dog's head (the video triggered off and on by the movement
of the dog), he allows the various dogs he walks to lead
him through the streets of New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong,
London, and New Zealand. The dogs define his path and his
work. The resulting Dog-cam Project is being shown together
for the first time in New York at Apex Art.
Existing for some
15,000 years, the dog remains the closest "other" to man.
As we move closer to a digital world, perhaps the dog will
become the tool to reconnect ourselves to nature. The artist
began to use the dog, not because of a special affinity
with it, but rather to "find a way to objectively observe
the human species." In the artist's words, "they have information
about nature. A dog is a kind of medicine that is especially
necessary in an urban situation. In the red light district
in Tokyo a dog pisses on the neon. This is an odd situation--dogs
are very adaptable." They are a product of human intervention.
Within these videos, the dog is seen in all its roles,
as companion, hunter, guard, shepherd, and faithful servant.
A Golden Retriever,
the preferred breed in Tokyo, leads us through the crowded
streets - an ironic symbol of Western culture, a suburban
pet out of context in this urban setting. Narumi reminds
us that "pet culture" is pervasive. The dog, man's best
friend, the world's greatest surrogate child, takes on
a new role, as "artist" in this video. This transference
gives new meaning to the notion that dogs look like their
owners, and vice-versa. Narumi seems to counter Descartes'
belief that animals are mechanistic creatures without souls.
He allows his dogs to become human activists.
The filming itself
becomes a performative act, referred to by the artist as
Dognet. The videos show how integral the dog is to the
master's environment; however as an audience we experience
the streets from the dog's point of view. Our sense of
smell is heightened as our sights are lowered. A pit-bull
snuffles through trash in Harlem. A Dox-Hound leaps over
sheep in New Zealand. A Golden Retriever prowls the streets
of the red light district in Tokyo. We are there. Narumi
has taken the Dadaist gesture of walking down a street
and tripping on an object that becomes a "ready-made" to
the absurd.
Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn
©June 2000

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