Networked Art (part 1)Justin Wong / 16 November, 2004

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

TelematicsComputer Technology + Telecommunication

[ Telematique, coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc in 1978 ]

Roy AscottArtist / Theorist / Educator /

Founder of Founding Director of Planetary Collegium and CAiiA-STAR in Wales

• 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)

Roy Ascott

On Creativity

Roy Ascott

Creativity is shared, authorship is distributed …On the contrary, telematic culture amplifies the individual’s 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.

Some Pioneer Works

INTERPLAY (1979)

• I.P Sharp Associates (IPSA) • Took place from 20:00 to 22:00 on April 1, 1979 and linked 12 cities in Canada, US, Australia, Japan and Austria – Network conference

ARTIST’S USE OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS CONFERENCE

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

ARTBOX

• Email program ARTEX (1983) Artist’s Electronic Exchange program• a “user group” on IPSA network.• It had about 30 members, worked until 1990

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.

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

budapest

Vienna

LA PLISSURE DU TEXTE (1983) Roy Ascott

• Electra’83 (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/plissartx2.html

Planetary Networka 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/

robert adrian working at the ARTEX installation

ARTEX installation displaying the hawaii graphic from honolulu

jean rené bader coordinating a slow scan tv exchange

the slow scan TV desk during Vancouver SSTV transmission

Internet as Data Space Collaborative creation of artworks

Douglas DavisWorld’s 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/Sentence/sentence1.html

Mark NapierPotatoLand.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

Alex Galloway, Mark Tribe & Martin Wattenberg Rhizome.orgStarry Night

http://rhizome.org/starrynight/index.php3

Disappearing of distance Telepresence

‘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.

Paul SermonTelematic 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/

Ken GoldbergThe 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/