Edited by Robert Atkins, Media Arts editor
Interfacing
Wall Street and its international affiliates continue to deflate so many high-flying, dot-com balloons. At the same time, art conferences, demos and exhibitions about our complex relationship with The Network are proliferating. Nice coincidence.
The cyber art world's hottest topic in the new millennium is the nature of intimacy between us and our digital technology, something often (narrowly) termed "the interface." If you're an AOL user or one who's left the fold to escape the conglomerate's commercialized milieu, you understand the interface's controlling power. Put another, McLuhanesque way, AOL and commercial television are, essentially, interfaces, suggesting that it may be impossible to be user-friendly and corporate-friendly, too.
Otto E. Roessler, sometimes dubbed the father of "interfaciology" (his term), has worked to shift consideration of the human-machine interface from the computer sciences to a discussion involving areas as diverse as media art and theory, cognitive systems and brain science. They'll all be under consideration from May 18-21 in a conference honoring Roessler's 60th birthday at ZKM (Center for Art and Media Technology) in Karlsruhe, Germany.
One of the most familiar, and influential, interfaces is the Web browser, our tool kit for interacting with the Internet. The browser — like many pieces of commercial software — operates using the metaphorical system of an earlier mass medium, in this case print publishing. (Witness terms like "Web pages.") But though the omnipresent Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigators hew close to the print- and, increasingly, television-derived model, it's actually an arbitrary approach.
The Netscape way isn't the only option, say artists Matthew Fuller and Simon Pope. These London-based artist-designers created a browser known as the Web Stalker, which operates on an entirely different model by slicing and dicing information from a site and presenting it, not on numerous linked Web pages, but in a single hybrid configuration. It's the difference between viewing an atlas map which provides diverse information about every city (the Stalker) versus leafing through the pages of a guidebook (conventional browsers). Hear them discuss it on May 10 at 8 p.m. at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Ahmanson Auditorium, 250 South Grand Ave., Los Angeles, in a program co-sponsored by CalArts. (The Web Stalker can be downloaded free at www.backspace.org/iod.)
But perhaps this is all ancient history, especially if we've really reached "the end of the browser," as the Third International Browserday competition posits. Thirty European students will demonstrate their winning post-browser software designs in three-minute increments of "extreme computing." (In the entertainment-tech industry, demos — making new technology and its creators perform in front of a live audience — have begun to replace static exhibitions as a means of communication and outreach.) This year's contest prospectus aptly asks: "What does the integration of Internet and television mean for users? Extended possibilities to be a producer of media oneself? Or just a new way of consuming?" May 19, at the Paradiso, Amsterdam.
Department of Cognitive Dissonance:
Two missives arrived the same day this month: The first announced the upcoming UNESCO Web Prizes, honoring Web projects in categories such as "Peace" and "interpreting subjects such as multi-culturalism, education, culture and communication." (The entries are due June 1 and the winners — to be awarded $5000 each — will be announced in November.) The second missive told of an Internet clampdown in Mecca, where a women-only cyber café in Islam's holiest city was shut down for undisclosed reasons involving "public morality." Let's hope the immoralistes weren't reading about multi-culturalism.
