Michaël Samyn
and Auriea Harvey
Entropy8Zuper!
Winner, SFMOMA Webby Prize 2000
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NEWS
Edited by Robert Atkins, Media Arts editor
15 Minutes: Virtual Fame
The latest wrinkle in Internet culture is the creation and promotion of online celebrity through off-line publicity-fest award shows. In a different context last month, News & Reviews reported on a UNESCO Web prize for two sites — one promoting peace, the other requiring a vaguely liberal, humanities orientation. Since then, the sound of award announcement and back slapping has reached the decibel level of a Metallica concert. So grab your earplugs — and tuxedo or little black dress for the next, non-virtual cyber awards.
The most prestigious and long-standing Internet art prize is the Prix Ars Electronica, which is awarded by the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria. (The diminutive trophy comes with $6,700.) Last month the international jury awarded the prize for Internet art to science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, a neo-William Gibson-esque genre writer. (Not surprisingly, Stephenson hadn't submitted an application for the visual arts award, and the jury admits it's not shackled by submissions.) The talented author of "Snow Crash" and the recent "Cryptonomicon," Stephenson is a visionary writer whose work seems to have laid down the blueprint for today's cyber-scape. Last year, the jury gave its top award for Internet art to Linux, the community-developed operating system(!). Who actually gets more attention by such designations? The (named) jurors? Or an already renowned writer (or operating system)?
By contrast, the awarding of the first set of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's online arts prizes on May 11 actually helped nurture the fledgling field of online art, instead of just driving buyers to Amazon.com. Still, folded into the existing Webby Awards, an Academy Awards-style affair presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Science, the $50,000 SFMOMA Webby Prize for Excellence in Online Art was demeaned by its relentlessly commercial context. (Just as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tends to shill for Hollywood, so too does the high falutin-sounding Academy of Digital Arts and Science service Silicon Valley while making money for its owner-operators.)
But at least the highly deserving recipient of the $30,000 Webby — and the recipients of three Honorable Mention awards (worth $6500 apiece) — are artists, not to mention artists whose works were among the 336 submitted. The Webby went to the team of Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, for their densely sensuous Entropy8Zuper site, and the Honorable Mentions to Ichiro Aikawa for his @2000 collage of graphics in motion, Young-hae Chang for her witty parables, and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer for his creation of a Web-driven interface that allowed users to manipulate search lights in a Mexico City plaza from around the world. Q: Why did the museum piggyback onto the Webby awards? Hint: Imagine the corporate funding potential in Silicon Valley and Multimedia Gulch.
Not surprisingly, corporations always best museums when it come to exercises which are little more than corporate prestige-building. Last month the fourth Pirelli INTERNETional Award (how do you spell that in Italian?) was announced in Rome. Although the prize primarily recognizes science-oriented works, MediaChannel readers may be interested in "Warriors of the Net," an animated look at how the Internet works, and the CD-ROM prize, which went to an American company for "The Atomic Archive," a history of the making of the atom bomb. Socially conscious and educational Web sites will also be honored by the Stockholm Challenge Awards, which will be presented at a June 4-5 conference at the Kulturhuset on Sergels Torg Square.
Although it's not an award, the recent closing of the Final Curtain is another example of the devaluation of media art, in this case by positioning it primarily in relation to mundane mainstream media, as opposed to art itself. Final Curtain is a memorial theme park with a Monument Gallery for artists' projects, a Pearly Gates ticket-sales booth, a Purgatory Parking Lot, and even franchise opportunities. Now the site's producer, long-time culture jammer Joey Skaggs, is circulating a press release that the Final Curtain is a hoax. (News & Reviews is shocked, shocked!) The business plan and New Jersey offices never existed and we'll never get to dine at the Heaven's Gate Café or Dante's Inferno Grill. Sadly the Final Curtain made an infinitely better conceptual-art vision of an imaginary (after)world than a media-art prank grounded in actual, dare I say real, e-commerce. And what's so hard about fooling the media these days anyway?
And as media art becomes devalued, so too it becomes usurped: In New York City on May 31, artist Miltos Manetas will hold a press conference at 7 p.m. at the Gagosian Gallery, 555 W. 26th St., to coin a new name to describe "the development of technology-based artistic production." No collaboratively produced manifesto for Manetas: He's partnered with Lexicon Branding, the California firm that created such deathless brands as WingspanBank and Subaru Outback.
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Tibor Kalman
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Sloganism
The back of a milk carton says: "Success = Boredom." Tourists in Times Square look up to read: "Consumption is a treatable disease," on the screen below the Cup O' Noodles. This is the engagingly titled "Tibor In Orbit" (a near palindrome), one of
a pair of concurrent exhibitions devoted to Tibor Kalman, the late
media-oriented designer. "Tiborisms" are appearing on 1 million half
gallons of Parmalat/Sunnydale milk and on the NBC Astrovision board in
Times Square at 59 minutes past each hour (until June 15). Meanwhile,
inside the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, "Tiborocity:
Design and Undesign by Tibor Kalman, 1979-1999" runs through August 2. It
presents works by the artist such as (the Benneton-sponsored) Colors, a
multicultural magazine, and his "unadvertisement" for Benneton that
famously featured a dark-skinned Queen Elizabeth II.
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The Worldwide Graffiti Song
We don't hear much about graffiti since Norman Mailer valorized it as rebel expression and artists like Keith Haring brought the outlaw mass-medium into galleries during the '80s. Now artist Stephen Skrynka will enable us to actually hear graffiti. After meticulously photographing the walls of Glasgow's 47-year-old Clyde Pedestrian and Cycle Tunnel, Skrynka is turning the paint and scratch into sound. The final work, an orchestration of the words of the graffiti artists, some spoken by the authors, and found sounds collected from the city and the Clyde River, will be created online by visitors to his Web site and broadcast live inside the tunnel. Logging into the world's largest "global sound mixer," up to 16 site visitors at once can not only trigger the sounds of their choice, but precisely position and control the movement of these sounds within the tunnel.
(To collaborate in the composition, visitors must download free custom software, from www.casm.net. The project runs from May 28 to June 18.)
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The Art of Commerce
Online, the term "protocol" implies technical standards, but "Protocol Prone" is "an investigation of art and commerce, artistic practice and curatorial role." Despite the obfuscating artspeak, the show — Jennifer Crowe's master's exhibition for Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies — features three of our favorite online media artists and teams: Mark Napier, whose increasingly evolved, multi-user browser now allows for the slicing and dicing of three sites into a single, collaged amalgam; RTMark, whose "mutual funding" of anti-corporate sabotage has been aided by a donation from curator Crowe; and the not-sufficiently well known MTAA, a group whose "Website Unseen" series entices patrons to buy a site from a list of unbuilt, but titled, options. (The price is $100.) The handsome selection from the series, "Mind Control by Flashing Lights," enables visitors to rate artists' sites, if they're not dazed, like a deer in headlights.
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Urban Sublime
The Web site Central City, another riff on today's metropolis, also suggests the multi-media shape of the Net to come. Nearly as rich and nuanced as a CD-Rom, this abstract ode to urban grit is a hypnotic voyage through city sites with names like indus, randomizer, videotron and universa. Video and text augmented by 200 short movies and 30 minutes of industrial ambient music equals one compelling experience. Note for novice Web surfers: You'll need the free Shockwave plug-in to experience the sound, but don't let that stop you. The Net's a pretty quiet place without it these days.
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Deep Dish
Catalan conceptualist Joan Rabascall has long used a variety of forms to create artworks about the mass media. "Media," his current show in Barcelona, is a weirdly compelling amalgam of handsome photographs of what should be normal picture-postcard fare. Instead he offers a global mediascape of images of satellite dishes from Rio to Rabat. Though the sun will set in these crystalline skies, we know that the dishes will be ever-operational. Centre d'Art, Santa Monica, through July 31.
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Wall Power
There are art worlds that exist entirely apart from the commodity-driven museum and gallery mainstream, and mural art is one of them. Philadelphia — the city of brotherly love — boasts more murals than any other city in the United States. The city-wide celebration, "Wall Power," places this contemporary renaissance within the context of earlier public works ranging from unsanctioned memorial walls to community-history projects. The Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial presents historical material in "Philadelphia Murals: 1970-2000," and the Institute of Contemporary Art offers "Forest" and "Indelible Market," exhibitions by, respectively, conceptualist Joseph Bartscherer and graffitists Barry McGee, Stephen Powers and Todd James. The threesome will also create outdoor
billboards, and Bartscherer will transform the famed 30th Street Station into a "photo-forest." May 13 through July 30.
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AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE
MEDIA.
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