Find the oldest object in SL

The oldest object presented in the research blog at present is: 'Coffee Table, Glass & Steel', created by Alberto Linden on Tuesday, October 8, 2002 at 11:56:19 pm. It was found by Pitollus Swindlehurst on November 16, 2009 on the island 'The Hospital'.

I've never dived very deeply into Second Life, probably because it reminds me of my work on The Sims Online--a project which proved very frustrating.

That being said, The Last Days of Second Life has an interesting competition going on:

The literary research project "The Last Days of Second Life" will reward the finder of the oldest existing object in Second Life with 25,000 Linden Dollars. The project is based on the extremely audacious assertion of the researcher Pitollus Swindlehurst, who boasted that he had already found the oldest object: "Coffee Table, Glass & Steel", created by Alberto Linden on Tuesday, October 8, 2002 at 11:56:19 pm. Late in the wee hours of the morning of a party, the research leader Muji Zapedzki [aka Susanne Berkenheger] characterized this assertion as "ridiculous". At present, she is betting all her belongings to disprove this claim.

...

The deadline is January 31, 2010 (CET), that is: January 31, 2010, 3 pm (PST). The winner will be announced on the blog www.the-last-days-of-second-life.de. He or she will be able to blow the prize money from the middle of February onward.

Tobias Leingruber's "Time Machine 1.0"

Tobias Leingruber writes about his Time Machine 1.0 Firefox add-on:

Nowadays the web is designed by professionals, and everybody has a broadband connection. Ebay was overtaken by so called "Power-Sellers" and the shiny and smooth Web 2.0 Blogger-Design rules the web.

In the 90's People started creating webpages about their hobbies and dogs on geocities or other free webspace providers. As many people didn't have much content to post on their "homepages", they just put an "under construction" sign on it to show that the website was not finished yet, but maybe in a couple days.

As the people only had slow modems, it was really important to keep the data small. Otherwise the user would have to wait for like 5 minutes for a website to load. This is one reason why midi files became popular - It was the only way to listen to music on the early web. (You are listening to the great euro dance classic "Dune - Rainbow to the Stars")

This Firefox Add-on uses the syntax of any webpage, and changes it into a beautiful Web 1.0 amateur page. This is my tribute to all the pioneers of the web.

[via Ceci Moss on Rhizome]

4'33": the video game

Petri Purho creates a video game each month. Or at least he did until becoming focused on finishing and released the brilliant Crayon Physics Deluxe:


Now he's back to the monthly games. In February he released 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness, inspired by the John Cage's 4'33" composition in which the musicians do not play any notes for four minutes and 33 seconds (so that the music becomes the ambient sounds in the concert hall). A screenshot of the game:


The game play is watching the status bar for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. If no one else logs into the game during that time, you win. If someone else logs in, you're booted off and they become the "leader."

The comment section of Petri's blog is wonderful--it's full of gamers arguing whether 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness is a game or not (and using the art world as a touchstone):

• Rob Says:
  February 2nd, 2009 at 6:57 pm Cool concept, but to call this is a game is like shitting on a paper plate, signing it, and calling it art.
  
  
• Gemedet Says:
  February 2nd, 2009 at 10:25 pm I'd argue that what distinguishes games from other art forms (films, paintings) is the ability to interact. It's great to push the boundaries of a definition, but you can't throw it out completely. Otherwise we'll go the way of the art world: they've come to the point where they consider anything to be art, and so the word "art" has lost all meaning. Still, an awesome idea, and a really clever take on the Jam's theme.
  
  
• Mike Says:
  February 3rd, 2009 at 2:11 am I don't know about defining a game, but the purpose of a game is that it should be fun. This isn't.
  
  
• Jonathan Says:
  February 4th, 2009 at 2:08 am Even though it feels like starting the game is the only interaction, this game interacts with every other person playing it. The author is also exploring the boundaries of interactions.

There's also a map-based visualizer of the game, created by Jonathan Basseri, where you can see folks logging in and knocking each other off.

[via Art Fag City]

Steve Lambert: YouTube Commentary

Steve Lambert's Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 - YouTube Comments overlays a performance of the symphony with the YouTube commentary as ready aloud by actors.


Steve says:

As much as I like it, more than any other site the commenters on YouTube can be surprisingly, well, horrible. In my research I found this was true even on videos of the highest-of-high culture. Operas and symphonies had the same hostile, petty, and juvenile comments as nearly any other video on the site.

The commentary track I made for this video is literally the commentary from the original Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 video, read aloud by actors.

Created for the Artists' Space WebCast for January 2009. Thanks to Joseph Del Pesco, Scott Vermeire, Cynthia Yardley, Jeff Crouse, and Christina Kral.

See other videos in the YouTube Commentary Project

[via Art Fag City]

Tickets to see the sunset

In 2005 Rose Marshack convinced Ticketmaster's web outlet, Ticketweb to give her a promoter's account and allow her to post a tour of Sunset dates and times, as if the sun was going on tour. Tickets were available to the general public for purchase at Ticketweb.com.

Tickets to the Sunset website


[via John Michael Boling on Rhizome]

Clouds, clouds, clouds

Super Mario Clouds (2002)
Cory Arcangel, modified game cartridge

cloud.s (2009)
Jason Sloan, twitter-fed generative art

[via Rhizome]

clouds of clouds (2008)
Miguel Leal & Luis Sarmento, Flickr-fed generative art

Is e-literature just one big anti-climax?

Is e-literature just one big anti-climax? That's the question put forth in an interesting blog post by Andrew Gallix. Here are some excerpts:

A year later [in 1997], Mark Amerika's Grammatron transcended the fledgling genre by turning it into a multimedia extravaganza. This, I believe, was a crucial turning point. The brief alliance between literati and digerati was severed: groundbreaking electronic fiction would now be subsumed into the art world or relegated to the academic margins.

...

My contention that e-literature has been gradually sidelined by the rise of the internet as a mass medium proves controversial.

...

In fact, Dene Grigar - who chaired the Electronic Literature Organization's latest international conference - was alone in thinking that I may have a point. Interestingly enough, she argues that American universities' digital humanities departments are partly to blame because of their emphasis on digitising traditional books at the expense of promoting creative electronic writing: "In reality, unless it is a department where Kate Hayles, Matt Kirschenbaum, and a handful of other scholars reside, Michael Joyce's work will not receive the attention that James Joyce's does". Nevertheless, she is convinced that e-lit remains a "viable art form". That it may be, but is it still writing?

...

Since its inception, e-lit has been struggling to free itself from its generic limitations and now seems to be on the verge of doing so. At long last. Although interesting, its early manifestations were hardly groundbreaking. Collaborative narratives are as old as literature itself. Generative poetry simply adds a technological twist to Tzara's hat trick, the surrealists' automatic writing or Burroughs' cut-ups. Interactive fiction has its roots in Cervantes and Sterne. Hypertexts seldom improve on gamebooks like the famous Choose Your Own Adventure series, let alone BS Johnson's infamous novel-in-a-box. Besides, if you really want to add sound and pictures to words, why not make a film?

Read Gallix's entire post (and responding comments).

The Disagreeing Internet

It's a lot like Google...

http://www.thedisagreeinginternet.com/



(I'm giving this a label of "art movements"--get it? No? Well click on the damn link!)

Mark Callahan's "24 Hour Miss South Carolina"

View the artwork

Mark writes:

In 2007, a teenage beauty pageant contestant made a thirty-second speech that became a media phenomenon, fueled by millions of views on the Internet and a brief but intense outpouring of parodies. 24 Hour Miss South Carolina appropriates directly from YouTube while paying homage to Douglas Gordon's seminal 1993 installation, 24 Hour Psycho. Slowed, stretched, and silenced, the work repositions an object of short-lived attention and mass ridicule to an epic progression of still images. As the resonance of the original performance diminishes, 24 Hour Miss South Carolina silently plays on, carried to an obsessive extreme that invites fresh readings on the nature of celebrity, voyeurism, and entertainment.

For even slower media, see my earlier post on a performance of John Cage's AsSLowASPossible.

[via Rhizome]

Last Tumbarumba First Lines, #11 and 12: Tim and Heather

Just in time for the launch of our Tumbarumba add-on, my collaborator Benjamin Rosenbaum wrapped up his list of the first lines of the twelve stories included in the project:

The first lines of Tim Pratt's Tumbarumba story, "A Steadfast Tin Soldier":

The first thing the dead man spoke to was big rock. Big rock wasn't so big in absolute terms, but it was the biggest rock in that little copse of pines, and understandably proud of its place. "Hello?" the dead man said, in the soundless way of unliving things. "Hello, hello?"

"Yes, hello," big rock said. "How nice to hear from you! Such a pleasure to have new company!"

Tim writes, "I've always been fascinated by stories where inanimate objects have secret lives, from the Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams to the Steadfast Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Anderson to Thomas Disch's Brave Little Toaster and the painted stick, can of beans, dessert spoon, and dirty sock from Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins. But one day it occurred to me: dead bodies are inanimate objects, too, aren't they? What if they had secret lives?"

And here are the first lines of Heather Shaw's story, "Little M@tch Girl":

A new shipment of Tweak must have hit the Mission over the weekend. Em kept her eye on the woman in front of her who was shaking and staggering across the sidewalk. At a distance, the woman almost looked as if she were listening to some experimental music, her erratic movements accompanied by unheard notes, brilliantly interpreting the difficult tonalities. But as Em got closer, the absence of headphones and the glazed eyes shattered the illusion.

For those who don't know it, Heather and Tim are co-creators of Flytrap, the illustrious "little zine with teeth". Flytrap, in which Tim and Heather published my story "Night Waking", is issuing its last just in time to advertise Tumbarumba: it has been crowded out of the nest by another of their co-creations (and as much as I loved Flytrap, I am forced to approve).

Tim and Heather claim that it is entirely coincidence that their Tumbarumba stories are both Hans-Christian-Andersen-themed.

Next entry: Tumbarumba!

Tumbarumba goes live!

After quite a few months of development, Benjamin Rosenbaum and my Tumbarumba Firefox extension has launched! Please take a moment and install it on to your browser.

Thanks to Ben, all of our participating writers (Haddayr Copley-Woods, Greg van Eekhout, Step0hen Gaskell, James Patrick Kelly, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David Moles, John Phillip Olsen, Tim Pratt, Kiini Ibura Salaam, David J. Schwartz, Heather Shaw, & Jeff Spock), and Jo-Anne & Helen at Turbulence.org for commissioning the project.

Incidentally, Turbulence is having an end-of-the-year fundraiser right now, so why not send them a donation?

Tumbarumba First Lines, #9 and 10: Jeff and John

Tumbarumba launches tomorrow! Here's the penultimate teaser from Ben, my collaborator on the project:

Hmm, well, I missed yesterday, and also it may be that I cannot exactly count. So: two today, and two tomorrow.

The first lines of John Phillip Olsen's Tumbarumba story, "Birthday":

Neil wants to drive faster, but the troop transport truck in front slows him down. In the back of the truck, the young soldiers point and laugh at Neil and his passengers.

And that of Jeff Spock's, "Of Love and Mermaids":

In the morning sun coming hard off the sea the two children are profiles, jumping and laughing on the sand. The seagulls circle above the palms, hunting unwary clams or unclaimed French fries.

We sit at a table on the hotel's terrace right by the edge of the sand, sipping coffee. My left hand lies atop her right, holding hands with the practiced indifference of people who have held the same hands for ten years or more. It is a comfort, a reflex; as re-affirming--and exciting--as pulling on an old pair of shoes or re-reading your favorite book.

I snagged these two (along with Stephen Gaskell's) at Villa Diodati 3 in Nice.

Tumbrumba ships tomorrow. I can't wait!

Tumbarumba First Lines, #8: Dave S.

Oops, in a tryptophan stupor, I forgot to repost this yesterday:

The first lines of David Schwartz's Tumbarumba story, "MonstroCities":

SEND ONE

Not the NEEDLEBOARD races on Dillinger Four or the SCISSORBALL playoffs in the Solomon system; not the solar sled slaloms of the Andromeda Games or Cosmos Flanagan's run at the smartdisc passing record. Not even the mag-hot excitement of the Team Orgy Invitational is this week's biggest sporting event. No, MAXFANS, the most-wanted assignment this week here at the mothernet is the BIG BIG BIG BATTLE ROYALE of the Second Moon Fighting League, and who do you suppose is Sending from a Wormcruiser burrowing its way towards the Jocelyn system? Me, GEIGERTRON GOGOMEZ, the most beloved chronicler of sport since Tolkien scrawled The Iliad on a papyrus scroll.

Three more days!

Tumbarumba First Lines, #7: Greg

Today's teaser from Ben about our Tumbarumba project (due to be released on December 1st):

The first lines of Greg van Eekhout's Tumbarumba story, "Temp":

On Monday she wears Spandex and black leather. Unfortunately, her mask covers only her eyes, so after the bank robbers use spasm gas, she spends the rest of the morning with facial twitches. Later, her grappling gun comes apart in her hand, and crooks in a helicopter make off with a Michelangelo.

Four more days until your computer is infected with these intrusions.

(Did I mention Tumbarumba is sponsored by Turbulence and, apparently, funded by the Jerome Foundation? Apparently it is.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tumbarumba First Lines, #5: Kiini

The first lines of Kiini Ibura Salaam's Tumbarumba story, "Bio-Anger":

rattling. rattling snaking around in my ears. echoes of rattling erupting in my temples. I hear a pop like the little explosions of air that punctuate my ear canals when I'm nearing the ocean floor. reflex. by reflex, I try to turn toward the sound, but my head is tethered in one position. the rattling dies out with a slithering hiss. sharp parallel bands of light cut across the room. my head jerks back when light hits my eyes. behind me, somebody lets loose a low, raspy laugh.

Six more days.

Tumbarumba First Lines, #4: David M.

I'm very excited about the upcoming release of Ben Rosenbaum and my Tumbarumba Firefox add-on project.

I really love this project! It's rare for my own work to surprise and delight me (usually that's an experience I try to give the viewer, but have to satisfy myself with just a sense of accomplishment), but this one does. I'm also finding that it effects the way I read text--and not just online.

Another teaser from Ben about our Tumbarumba project (to be released on Dec 1st):

The first lines of David Moles's Tumbarumba story, "Martian Dispatches":

There was a map of Mars on the wall of my apartment in Helium, souvenir of a previous tenant. Some nights, coming back late to the city, I'd just lie there staring at it, too tired to do anything but take off my breather and kick the compressor into gear. The map had been printed on Earth, in London; maybe fifty years ago, maybe more, like that first edition of Burroughs I saw an AFP stringer carrying in the rocketport on Phobos. The ink on the map had faded and the paper had gone brittle and shiny after years in the dry Martian air, laying a kind of veil over the cities and canals it depicted. On it Mars was still divided into its old territories, names like Bantoom and Okar and Jahar, and down at the bottom under the word MARS the cartographer had printed BARSOOM.

When he was guest-blogging at Jeff Vandermeer's blog, David explained the trick for generating story ideas out of discrete elements. See if you can guess what X and Y are, such that X po Y = "Martian Dispatches".

Seven more days.

Tumbarumba First Lines, #3: Mary Anne

Ben Rosenbaum has been blogging about the upcoming release of our Tumbarumba project:

The first lines of Mary Anne Mohanraj's Tumbarumba story, "Sequins":

"Sara?" Her husband stuck his head around the door of her studio. "Can you pick up Gaya from dance class this afternoon?"

"What?" Sarala blinked twice from behind her glasses, jarred from the image she'd held in her mind, the image that stubbornly refused to come out into the paint on her canvas. There was a body, she knew -- a body, and wings -- but more than that. Not as trite as a woman turning into a bird, seeking flight, freedom, escape. Along with the wings were powerful haunches, poised to leap, muscles tense and yearning. And claws, sharp and long; teeth, red at the tips. All caught at the moment of shifting, transformation, in that liminal space where every possibility hangs, glorious, waiting.

I asked Mary Anne for something in the spirit of her novel-in-stories, Bodies In Motion, "an interconnected narrative spanning two continents, two families, and four generations." "Sequins" picks up two of its minor characters. Mary Anne writes: "readers may enjoy tracing the sometimes hidden connections from one text to the other."

Eight more days until the intrusions begin frolicking...

Tumbarumba First Lines, #2: Jim

Another Tumbarumba teaser from my collaborator's website:

The first lines of James Patrick Kelly's Tumbarumba story, "Painting the Air":

"I'm sick of dusting her fans!" Jaya stepped out of her pants and tossed them at Hool, her djinn lover. They fluttered across the room and spun to rest under his bed. "Grinding pigment for that old crow's paint. Lugging bolts of silk from the market." She unstrung the laces of her shirt and let it fall from her shoulders. The damp, smoky air of the room seemed to cling to on her skin. It was a relief to be naked.

Nine more days.

Did I mention, by the way, what a tumbarumba is? It is a tmesis, as per the John O'Grady poem.

Tumbarumba First Lines, #1: Haddayr

I'm busily finishing up the Tumbarumba project, so my blogging may be a bit thin through the end of the month. Benjamin Rosenbaum (my collaborator on the project) is giving teasers about the project on his blog, so I'm going to just shamelessly crib from him:

The first lines of Haddayr Copley-Woods's Tumbarumba story, "Listen to Me":

Does it really matter how I got here?

I got shot.

Haddayr writes:

Dora Goss told me that her piece The Belt was an ugly story, so she wanted to tell it in the most beautiful way possible. I decided to write a beautiful story in the ugliest way possible.

Ten more days until you can get Tumbarumba'd; and then you'll be able to find Haddayr's story.

Maybe.

(It will help if you're lucky, intrepid, and perceptive....)

Support internet art

My two favorite internet art organizations are having end-of-the-year fundraisers. Both organizations support internet-based art via art commissions and community building. Since there is not real commercial market for internet art, it is very important to have this kind of non-profit support. Dig deep into your pocket & donate!

Donate to Rhizome
Donate to Turbulence

Tumbarumba

My posting quality will probably dip a bit for the next couple of weeks while I finish up Tumbarumba, a project I'm working on with Benjamin Rosenbaum.

Keep an eye on Ben's blog for details about the project (which premieres on December 1st)... Ben recently wrote:

Ethan Ham and I have a new art project (cf. Anthroptic, or last one), which we will be rolling out on the first of December. It essentially takes, on one level, the form of an anthology of short stories -- at least, the work I've been doing on it, especially this last month, is essentially the work of editing an original anthology. On another level, it is a conceptual artwork, kind of a ubiquitous web installation... well, you'll see. It is called "Tumbarumba: a frolic of intrusions". More here soon on that topic.

Social Networks, Privacy, and Self-Portraiture

Media N, the journal of the New Media Caucus, just published my essay Social Networks, Privacy, and Self-Portraiture.

China Channel Firefox Add-on

The China Channel Firefox add-on was developed by Aram Bartholl, Evan Roth and Tobias Leingruber. It allows users to browse the web as if in China--i.e., experience mainland China's internet censorship. The add-on's authors say:

Unlike many tools which enable Chinese people to freely surf the web via connections to computers outside of China, this plugin routes all internet traffic to computers on the inside of the Chinese firewall, allowing web surfers to experience an Internet identical to that of Chinese.

...

For the most part the Chinese web will feel a lot like home. You will, however, begin to notices differences if you start asking Google about sensitive issues (for example Tananmen Square protests, or Pro Tibetan issues).

eteam

Second Life Dumpster, eteam, 2007-2008

Marisa Olson recently interviewed eteam for Rhizome. The interview is here. From her introduction:

eteam is the New York-based duo of German artists Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger. In 2008 they received a Rhizome Commission for their Second Life Dumpster project in which the levels of consumption and disposal typically occurring blindly in the virtual world are manifest in the form of an ever-evolving garbage heap composed of deleted items tagged with a decay script by the artists. This exploration of the social life of spaces and systemic behavior within them is an interesting follow-up to their incredibly ambitious International Airport Montello project in which, after purchasing a piece of land in rural Nevada on eBay for the sum of US$1, they created an airport employing locals -- which they call "an impossible machine, which is perpetually in motion and sometimes on strike." Despite flying a handful of art world insiders there (putting commissioning organization Art in General's curators to work as flight attendants), eteam worked to underscore Montello's outsider status. The contested frontier between the so-called real world and spaces and cultures operating at the edges of constructed reality provided a nice point of comparison between Second Life Dumpster and International Airport Montello in this interview with the artists. - Marisa Olson

"Untethered" at Eyebeam

The Untethered show at Eyebeam ended on October 25th, but you can still see a nice round-up it at wmmna.

Dead Star, Michel de Broin, 2008

Buttons, Sascha Pohflepp, 2006

Buttons is a camera without optical parts. When the camera’s button is pressed, the camera does not record an image, instead it records the time. It then wirelessly searches the Internet for photographs that were taken by someone else at the very moment of the button press. Pohflepp says:

After a few minutes or hours, depending on how soon someone else shares their photo on the web, an image will appear on the [camera’s] screen... In a way, it belongs half to the person who had pressed the button and still remembers that moment. Because of that connection, the photos are never dismissed as random, no matter how enigmatic they may be.

Blendie, Kelly Dobson, 2003-2004

From Dobson's statement on Blendie:

Blendie is an interactive, sensitive, intelligent, voice controlled blender with a mind of its own. Materials are a 1950's Osterizer blender altered with custom made hardware and software for sound analysis and motor control.

People induce the blender to spin by sounding the sounds of its motor in action. A person may growl low pitch blender-like sounds to get it to spin slow (Blendie pitch and power matches the person) and the person can growl blender-style at higher pitches to speed up Blendie. The experience for the participant is to speak the language of the machine and thus to more deeply understand and connect with the machine. The action may also bring about personal revelations in the participant. The participant empathizes with Blendie and in this new approach to a domestic appliance, a conscious and personally meaningful relationship is facilitated.

Marisa Writes Her Disseratation

Marisa Olson, performance-techno-artist/new-media-critic/curator, is writing her PhD dissertation as an online performance in 31 acts. From the project's website:

Veterans of web-based autobiographical performance, Olson and "Coach Mandiberg" have teamed-up to get Marisa through her dissertation by framing it as an act of endurance. Every day for the month of September, Olson will spend all day writing while webcam shots and screencaps of her desktop are automatically uploaded to the net every 60 seconds. This gesture of transparency is a continuation of Olson's research into the role of sousveillance in "The Art of Protest in Network Culture."

[via Networked_Performance]

100 $ Grants

JSG Boggs, "$1 FUNback," 1998.

ASDF is a set of collaborative projects by Mylinh Trieu Nguyen and David Horvitz.

One of their current project is One Hundred $1 Grants, which offers, well, one hundred $1 grants:

ASDF is offering One Hundred $1 Grants. All selected projects will be available in a downloadable exhibition in February 2009. Anyone is eligible. There are no restrictions on proposed projects. All forms of creative activity are encouraged. Money can be used for cost of production or for monetary compensation.

The deadline is November 30, 2008

All recipients will be announced December 31, 2008. Projects should be completed January 31, 2009.

We will review each application.

To Apply:

Download the proposal form here. Email us when you have completed it.

Please put "100 $1 Grant Proposal" in your email subject.

[ via Art Fag City]

Joe McKay's mapped vehicles

Joe McKay has created collaged images (ala David Hockney) of the the Google "steet view" van (top) and MapJack (a company that's emulating Google) from reflections of the vehicles in store windows.

Not familiar with Street View? Here a view of The New Museum being built. (Hint, click on the street arrows to move, click & drag to rotate).


View Larger Map

[via Rhizome]

Add-Art

Earlier I posted about Add-Art, a FireFox browser extension that replaces advertisements on websites with curated art.

Well, the latest version of Add-Art includes an enhancement done by yours truly... Add-Art will now automatically download new art shows when they're available (instead of requiring the extension to be re-installed).

Incidentally, the current show (curated by Charles Broskoski) is clever... it is a collection of solid black paintings done by artists such as Malevich, Rauchenberg, & Rothko.

Install the extension

All the news

Martin John Callanan's I Wanted to See All of the News From Today displays the front pages of hundreds of newspapers.

I find the title interesting... "See" is the right verb, not "Read." Very little of the text is legible--either the type is too small or the language is unknown.

I initially found the project interesting, but was a bit frustrated that I couldn't click on a front page and get a closer look at it. Wondering if this was an artistic choice or a technical limitation I took a closer look to see where Callanan gathers his images from, which led to Press Display.

For a reader, Press Display's interface is much more useful than Callanan's collaging of it. On Press Display the reader can look up particular newspapers, blow up the page so that it is readable, sort on language, country, search on a particular word or phrase, etc.

Perhaps the "I" pronoun in the title is significant. Is the project a whimsical thing thrown together to satisfy Callanan's visual curiosity? Or is there an intention beyond that; something that he wants to provide us viewers? Maybe just the awareness of news coverage beyond the few outlets we choose to use? Perhaps forcing us into being viewers, not readers?

Add-Art

From the Add-Art website:

Add-Art is a free FireFox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with curated art images. The art shows are updated every two weeks and feature contemporary artists and curators.

Some People

Some People is Harrell Fletcher's new web-based project. Like Learning to Love You More, his earlier collaboration with Miranda July, the project is platform for others to publish their interpretation of an artistic-ish task. Whereas Learning to Love You More has a growing list of tasks to choose from, Some People focuses on people documenting others' lives.

From the website:

Some people get to be well known and other people live their lives in obscurity. For this project you get to choose and present someone that you think other people should know about by making a documentary about them. Your documentary can take any form that can be presented on the web — video, sound, images, text or any combination of those things. The hope is that this will eventually become an archive of interesting people that previously were not well known, from all over the world.

Some People very neatly combines Fletcher's work that prompts others to take part in a social, creative act and his work that takes the form of documenting another's life/interests such as Boy (a 1999 show about a ten year old Seattle boy named Gregory).

[via Marisa Olson @ Rhizome]

"Cantata Park" by Metamatic Collective

Second Life has been attracting a lot of attention as a platform for media artists... some of the work isn't all that interesting (especially if it mainly depends on the aging novelty of avatars virtual spaces)... but some of it is quite interesting such as Eteam's Second Life Dumpster (Marisa Olson describes it here);

Turbulence's Networked_Performance blog reported on another intriguing Second Life project:

Cantata Park 1 (2006) [Teleport to Mashup Park, Marni (206, 35, 23)] -- by Metamatic (Christopher Dodds and Adam Nash) -- is an interactive, spatialised sound sculpture built in the virtual world Second Life. The sculpture is made from 256 individual nodes in a 16 x 16 grid. Each node is embedded with a single word, triggered by a participant's movement through the work. Each participant creates a random narrative, assembled on-the-fly, and in real-time.

Cantata Park explores the notion of a "cut-up narrative". By disassembling and reassembling a passage of text, the participant is free to extract unseen meaning from an existing text. The cut-up technique was popularised by Beat poets in the 1950's-70's as a method to "break the linearity" of written language, with William S. Burroughs using it extensively in his works. Burroughs believed non-pictorial languages contained a virus. By using non-linear writing techniques he believed the true meaning of language could be exposed, and the spoken word used as a weapon.

Cantata Park uses a passage of 256 words from Burroughs' The Electronic Revolution (1971) and transfers the cut-up technique into a real-time 3D environment.

The work explores the possibilities of metaverse art, limitations of Second Life's construction tools and scripting language, and the ability to appreciate conceptual art by proxy of an avatar.

MTAA's One Year Performance (aka samHsiehUpdate)

Last week I posted about Tehching "Sam" Hsieh's one year performances. The art collaborative MTAA did a web-based update of Hsieh's first performance ("The Cage Piece," 1978-1979). That performance consisted of Hsieh living in a cage he built in his Tribeca loft. He stayed in the cage for a year without reading, writing, watching tv, talking, etc. His meals were delivered and his excrement was taken out in a bucket. He had occasional (once or twice a month) scheduled days were the public could come and view the performance.

MTAA's introduction to their 1 year performance video commissioned & hosted by Turbulence.org:

We, M.River & T.Whid, ask that you view a 1 year performance video, to begin today, March 26, 2008.

We shall seal images of ourselves in images of our studio, seemingly in solitary confinement inside seemingly identical images of cell-like rooms measuring 10ft x 10ft x 10ft.

We seemingly shall not converse, listen to the radio or watch television, until -- after you have viewed them for one year -- we unseal our images.

We shall appear to have food every day.

Our friend the web site, www.turbulence.org, will facilitate this piece by serving our images to the World Wide Web.

Please login (upper right) to begin viewing.

MTAA's performance is a reversal... the artists are on a looped video that the viewer is asked to watch for a year. The project's introduction page has a "leader board" of top viewers:

1. sashamaslansky
   310 days, 12h 43m 0s
2. register
   294 days, 14h 26m 0s
3. sheeppower
   285 days, 22h 13m 0s
4. endtime34
   251 days, 6h 24m 0s
5. rickerby
   241 days, 0h 7m 0s

People who watch for an entire year receive a reward of the data associated with the project:

Once the piece is viewed for one year, you the viewer are eligible to receive a unique collection of "art data" contained in 2 separate XML documents. At this point you the viewer becomes you the collector.

The story of Arthur the Rat

Check out this work by Christopher at supercentral.

[via Rhizome]

feelings

We Feel Fine is an interesting data visualizing project with a heart that comes by way of Harrell Fletcher.

From the We Feel Fine website:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.