Edited by Robert Atkins, Media Arts Editor

Electronic Passage To India
Sarai: The New Media Initiative is a Digital Divide-bridging effort from Amsterdam's Society for Old and New Media (de Waag) and Delhi's Center for the Study of Developing Societies, one of India's best known research institutes. Sarai formally opens its doors in Delhi on February 23 with a three-day program, "The Public Domain," featuring lectures and panels about old and new media's relationship to contemporary culture. Three years in the making, Sarai promises forays into media history and theory, Internet and software culture, digital art and critical practice — all with a savvy-sounding emphasis on urbanism and international collaboration. From Sarai
Watch Out, Big Brother
Bristol, England's "Bugged!" festival (February 24-25) offers two evenings of screenings about surveillance, including a program of rare 16 mm films that features "Mob and Riot Control," a California prison instructional film on the handling of troublemakers. A highlight of February 24's program is sure to be a participatory performance called "Broadmead CCTV [Camera Control Television] Games Event." Staged by the Surveillance Camera Players, it's to begin at 2 p.m. at the St. James Barton tube stop and is intended to "flood the CCTV operators with spontaneously constructed occurrences." A few of the Players' suggestions that might demand a little prep: Throw wet sponges at the cameras, and identify areas with zero — or heavy — camera coverage by stencil. From Cubecinema.com
Terrible Beauty
As George W. Bush's inauguration showed us, yet again, street actions staged outside of mainstream political events rarely get much media attention. But this time they get media art attention. Reiner Strasser's Webwork "vib~ration~n" (in collaboration with Bill and Octavia Davis) is a surprisingly lyrical ode to disenfranchisement culled from photographs shot at last summer's Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. Viewers get to manipulate and juxtapose abstract elements and sets of images and sounds culled from demonstrations, which makes it possible to "play" the work. Imagine one of Robert Rauschenberg's huge, collaged evocations of the sixties — with a soundtrack.
Neo-Hippies
Culture jamming and identity politics make for a saucy stew in the work of Dyke Action Machine. DAM has frequently taken its wittily acerbic messages, about such things as new definitions of family and the American military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, to the New York streets in the form of ad-like posters. "Gynadome," their latest Web venture, is an elaborate and hilarious movie trailer-style teaser, involving "sexy techno-resisters" who go back to the land. DAM ironically terms it a "NeoLuddite reverie," but only certified geeks could have made it. From DAM
Eastern Bloc Internet
Chance and accident tend to determine history; the fall of the Berlin Wall happened to coincide with the arrival of the Internet and contemporary advances in communications technology. The myth of the Internet as frontier was even more symbolic for denizens of the Eastern Bloc than the West; it seemed to promise political openness and pluralism. Perhaps that's why so many of the foremost, communications-oriented, online artists of the past decade hail from formerly Communist countries. The new issue of Montreal's Centre International d'Art Contemporain (CIAC)'s Electronic Art Magazine explores this subject in depth, featuring articles, reviews and interviews. Rossitza Daskalova's speculative look at "The Ground for Net Art in the Former Eastern Bloc" provides a nice intro. From Centre international d'art contemporain de Montréal
Talk to Me
Since 1999, The Cupcake Project has been posing as an "adult" fetish Web site, inviting fetishists of various persuasions into its Yahoo! Club. Cupcake, the artist-hostess, befriended unsuspecting visitors with her nature-adventure photos, while simultaneously documenting and archiving all the texts and images her guests posted. The confessions and photos are simultaneously irresistible — especially a tale of puncturing river rafts with a safety pin — and disturbingly pedophilic. Equally disturbing, this project also charts a narrow ethical course by using documentation from its unwitting participants as the materials of Cupcake's art. From Sugarandsprice.org
Reading Images, Seeing Words
The relationship between screen-based texts and images has always been complex: think of TV newspeople "reading" the news. In his dazzling "Lexia to Perplexia," artist-new media writer-programmer Talan Memmott turns this format inside out, playing with the word as graphic image and creating a sort of interactive, concrete poetry. The winner of the second trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Competition, Memmott's dissociating "Lexia to Perplexia" is far easier to experience than describe. As judge Shelley Jackson aptly noted: "The visuals, though beautiful, are not only decorative but syntactical. Some of Memmott's most elegant arguments are made visually, through the logic of layout and the grammar of the link." From The Iowa Review
Millennial Art
"010101: Art in Technological Times," a collaboration between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Intel Corporation, opened with great fanfare exactly one minute into the new year. The good news about "010101" is that it offered five artists and teams commissions to create new work and offered the public critical texts to help understand them. The best works are Thomson & Craighead's "e-poltergeist," which turns your browser into a philosophical tool (be sure to use the search feature), and Matthew Ritchie's ongoing "Hard Way" project, a compelling, game-like narrative. The bad news is that, like the Intel/Whitney Museum of American Art "American Century" timeline, the show is bandwidth and plug-in (Flash 5, Pulse 3-D Player) heavy: This show is likely to crash your computer a few times, but it's worth it. From San Francisco Museum of Art

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

News & Reviews
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MINIS:

SAFE SEX SOAPS

Research from the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that 38 million U.S. viewers watch daytime TV at least twice a week and half describe learning something about disease prevention from them.

MISSING LINKS

Creative Disturbance is an online network for artists and innovators seeking collaborators and funding for art/science/technology projects.

NO BIZ LIKE SHOW BIZ

Art star and filmmaker Julian Schnabel ("Before Night Falls") explains why he prefers Hollywood to Soho.

NO ART DAY

Artists struck in Singapore on December 29 to protest censorship about the banning of the play "Talaq" [see News & Reviews, December 13]. The state-owned Strait Times didn't approve.

WEB SUDSER

"map50" is a new and gritty, 63-part Web soap set in North East London. Produced by the collective Desperate Optimists, "map50" 's first seven episodes were launched on February 9 and can be seen at map50.com. Each Friday after that, seven new episodes will be uploaded.

MINI FEST

Mikrokino FEST 2001, the international short film festival, has been rescheduled for February 19-23 as part of the Belgrade International Film Festival. 80 films will be shown.

ABOVE IT ALL

The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council offers five-month artists' residencies on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. Applications due March 9 for the summer.