Selections for the Tenth New York Digital Salon

ZKM CENTER FOR ART AND MEDIA KARLSRUHE

Bernhard Leitner, Austria Head Spaces, 1987

Chris Petit, United Kingdom Surveillance, 1993

David Link, Germany Poetry Machine, 2001

Dennis Del Favero, Agnes Hegedüs, Ian Howard, Susan Norrie, Jeffrey Shaw, and (dis)LOCATIONS, 2001

Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, United States Absolut DJ, 1998

Markus Popp, a.k.a. Oval, Germany Ovalprocess, 2000

Masaki Fujihata, Japan Beyond Pages, 1995

Shane Cooper, New Zealand Remote Control, 1999

Vuk Cosic, Slovenia ASCII History of Art for the Blind

Walid Ra’ad, United States Hostag: The Bachar Tapes, 2001

© 2002 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 35, No. 5, pp. 539–548, 2002 539

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409402320774358 by guest on 24 September 2021 Bernhard Leitner, Austria Head Spaces, 1987 Audio CD-ROM

Can the brain hear itself? The localization of acoustic stimuli and of our surroundings is among other things sensed through the phase difference between the ears. Even the movement of the head is involved in this process of identifying space through sound. When using earphones these localizers do not apply. Head Spaces, only to be experienced with earphones, are not representations of exterior space. Head Spaces are works specifically created for the interior of the head.

The head–conceived as hollow volume. Nothing but an empty, globe-like receptacle.

Lines of sound in motion and a mass of sound form space. They delineate and construe space. Time-based acoustic-geometric spaces in the head. They travel, undulate, and arch across the brain as though the brain itself had no physical mass.

Sensing, hearing space in motion within the resonant inner space of the head. Hearing, contemplating the interior, the inside - however unfathomable it may be. –Bernhard Leitner

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409402320774358 by guest on 24 September 2021 Chris Petit, United Kingdom Surveillance, 1993 Black and white video and sound 17 minutes

Visual Irony as Virus in Panoptic Structures: Logic of Fact and Anti-Truth in Chris Petit’s Surveillance

Created for the “BBC Late Show,” Surveillance is a ten-minute found–footage opera partly inspired by Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a kind of post-human involuntary thriller cinema. The film’s vocal commentary contains an emblematic Godard quotation, which explains the similarity between surveillance tapes and the silent movies of the Lumiére brothers, a cinema before stories or the industrial organization of shooting materials. It is a topographical record of time and casuality, where only the people, weather, and streets are acting.

Panoptism’s main obsession in the 21st century seems to be capturing fragments of truth in what is openly stated as an endless fiction. This tendency finds its expression, for example, in the soap-operatic “eaves- dropping” of global television programs like Big Brother. In opposition to this, the entirety of Chris Petit’s television works is an attempt to reverse the same process, to mock a reality caught live and unaware, and to transform it into a sham for the unmasking in order to reveal the existence of a deeper level of deception within the apparently objective realm of images.

The main narrative adhesive of this fictionalized world, caught by hidden cameras, is found in the rhetorical use of the time of viewing as “real-time,” the officially recognized quality of “visual truth.” The ideology of surveillance only works in present tense, deleting any sense of criticizable or even interpretable history of past events. By shifting and assembling different times of the same event, or even different events in the presumed same time, Petit creates a sort of anti-truth in Surveillance, another dimension of the visual events analogous to what is called antimatter in physics. Petit breaks the panoptic illusion by inserting the possibility of doubt, multiplicity, and contradiction into the experience of real-time vision. –Original text by Serafino Murri, freely abridged version

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409402320774358 by guest on 24 September 2021 David Link, Germany Poetry Machine, 2001 Interactive net-based installation Courtesy of David Link Supported by Center for Art and Media

The Poetry Machine by David Link is a generator for texts that is based on semantic networks. The user feeds the text generator with words via the installation itself or via a public interface in the World Wide Web. The machine responds to the user’s keyword with an endless stream of sentences which take their departure from the initial concept, return to it, and then permanently circulate around that point of departure. The machine does not utter statistically calculated or outwritten models of answers. When the machine starts streaming, its database is empty. In the beginning, the Poetry Machine is nothing more than a tabula rasa. It simply follows routines to process text and does not contain any hard-coded record. Therefore, all the text generated by the machine varies and it will never show identical results.

Fed with one word, the machine sends bots into the gigantic text masses of the Internet to search for information assso- ciated with the given word. By doing this, the machine observes the “mouth of the people.”

In the semantic networks, words are defined by their neighbors. A network contains, on average, 50,000 connections between aproximately 10,000 words. The more often the system observes the connection between two words, the stronger the connection between the two words. Once a semantic network is called upon, the stream preferentially fol- lows the stronger connections. In consequence, the machine finds its material and fits it into syntactical frames, which are also taken from the searched text. The chaotic complexity of the network is reduced to the linearity of the text.

On one screen, the installation shows the text stream being generated. On the other, the visitor can observe the bots doing their job: Searching in the various text-based databases of the World Wide Web.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409402320774358 by guest on 24 September 2021 , Agnes Hegedüs, Ian Howard, Susan Norrie, Jeffrey Shaw, and Peter Weibel (dis)LOCATIONS, 2001 DVD-ROM with booklet Photo byPeter Weibel Interactive artworks by Dennis Del Favero, Agnes Hegedüs, Ian Howard, Susan Norrie, Jeffrey Shaw, and Peter Weibel Book (English, 112 pages) featuring texts by Jill Bennett, James Donald, Ursula Frohne, Charles Green, Lev Manovich, Anna Munster, and Peter Weibel. ISBN 3-7757-1087-6. ZKM Digital Arts Edition | DVD-ROM Eds. ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, and The College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2001 Co-produced by Cinemedia Melbourne Courtesy of ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

In a myriad of ways, the effects of the rapid uptake and convergence of new media technologies are felt and expe- rienced by populations and individuals at the level of a virtual and actual sense of dislocation. Fragmentation of “community,” urbanization, and the collapse of locale and neighborhood, the erosion of the private spaces of the sexual and the familial–all these have emerged as themes attributable to the restructuring and divergent flows of new information economies and mediascapes. –Anna Munste

Photography, video, dance, and music were the media and subjects of the first four issues of the ZKM Digital Arts Edition, which were published in 1998 and 1999. While the first installments in this series were devoted to important works of that appeared on CD-ROM, the new medium of DVD-ROM was the chosen vehi- cle of 2001. That issue deals with innovative narrative forms of interactive film in the widest possible sense. The (dis)LOCATIONS DVD-ROM presents new works by Australian and European artists. Varied in form and subject matter, the individual works by Dennis Del Favero, Agnes Hegedüs, Ian Howard, Susan Norrie, Jeffrey Shaw, and Peter Weibel address the specific challenges of interactive narrative conception and design. (dis)LOCATIONS is part of the wider Cinema Project (exhibition, publication, Web site, and conference), dedicated to exploring developments in interactive cinema and conducted collaboratively by the University of New South Wales (Sydney), Cinemedia (Melbourne), and the ZKM (Karlsruhe). Essays by authors including Jill Bennett, Lev Manovich, and Peter Weibel in the accompanying book comment upon the featured works and analyze theoretical aspects of interactive cinema and digital communications media.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409402320774358 by guest on 24 September 2021 Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, United States Absolut DJ v1.0, 1998 Internet and CD-ROM ©Absolut Vodka Producers: TBWA/Red Sky Creative Directors: Dan Braun and Kirk Gibbons Courtesy of DJ Spooky

The musical input of the software module “Absolut DJ,” provided by DJ Spooky, combines basic components and typical procedures generally known from the DJ movement–the use of samples, loops, and developing patterns–with the opportunities of computers and the World Wide Web. There are symbols that represent dif- ferent complex sounds that can be chosen with a mouse-click and placed into a pattern to be played by two moving cursors as performed sounds. Four directional arrows can also be placed into a pattern that allows the cursors to follow labyrinthine ways. The DJ, whose work is normally founded to a large degree on recycled raw material, reduces his own role to become no more than a material and system supplier, opening the chain of creativity towards the audience.

Markus Popp, a.k.a. Oval, Germany Ovalprocess, 2000 Interactive music software embedded in an environment

Ovalprocess is an interdisciplinary, modular, dynamic music project consisting of a software application, a series of audio CDs, a lecture, and three interactive sound installation objects of varying sizes and dimensions. All components are conceptually interwoven and modeled after the unique “oval” strategies of sound, structure, and musical aesthetics.

Ovalprocess is an attempt to suggest a model for one possible alternative approach to audio productivity in contemporary electronic music, allowing for a definition of music-as-software. Formatted as a series of retail CD formats, sound installation objects, concert events, and lectures, its ambition is to represent a discursive, engaging, user-centric, and potentially controversial effort in order to propose a new dialogue and to shift the focus of attention to problems and questions of software design, ergonomics, and multimedia authoring. Additional criteria are then suggested for electronic music discourse.

Ovalprocess and its sequel, Commers, are more than just spin-off products. Rather, they are audible milestones documenting the ongoing development of the “oval” audio content work-flow, the process software application, and its sound installation counterparts. The audio CD releases are both representative works in their own right, each pursuing a distinctive, contrasting musical rhetoric. Each CD aims to interpret and fundamentally transform the underlying tech-nical specs and formal boundaries of the process concept.

The actual process software application (programmed by Richard Ross) is a first attempt to represent a model for a typical workflow in contemporary digital audio productivity. The pro-cess sound installation objects were created in cooperation with the architecture company Sko-toparc, Berlin, and are designed to serve as a tangible, interactive front-end to the process software and the included original sound-file content.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409402320774358 by guest on 24 September 2021 Masaki Fujihata, Japan Beyond Pages, 1995 Interactive environment 3 x 5.5 x 3.7 meters, Projection on wall 2.28 x 3.05 meters, projection on table 42 x 59.4 centimeters (Power Macintosh 8100/100AV, 2 LCD projectors, computer speakers) Wacom digitizer tablet A2 in the table, cordless pen 1 user, chair, table, lamp, Macromedia Director Concept and realization: Masaki Fujihata Courtesy of ZKM | Media Museum

In Beyond Pages, the observer enters an inviting and natural situation. While working, the dramaturgy is fixed: One sits down at a table and finds a book and a pen. This arrangement is clear and forces an evaluation of the medium. From childhood on, people in most cultures are familiar with the actions of turning pages and reading. For Fujihata, the book represents an information conveyer and storage medium, also serving as a symbol for textual culture and the practice of a lin- ear method of reading. His interest in the testing and use of multi-media technology allows him to analyze the qualities and push against the limits of the medium.

Although Beyond Pages presents a book as interface and simulates the action of turning pages, the two-dimensional limits of the surface and the inflexibility of the symbol are elegantly exceeded. To expand the usually quiet and still form of illustrated text, Fujihata introduces moments of surprise. Three-dimensional moving elements appear on the surface of the pages, their movement coupled with acoustic signals. The observer’s continual smile speaks for the effect of these wonderful moments and underscores the tension between perception and recognition. The amazement inten- sifies as the scope of events is broadened by an unexpected and sudden change: The lamps light up and a very short projection of a smiling child within a door appears. In Beyond Pages, Fujihata refers to technology’s potential for shaping valuable content with fantasy, concentration, and curiosity.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409402320774358 by guest on 24 September 2021 Shane Cooper, New Zealand Remote Control, 1999 Interactive net-based installation Photo by Franz Wamhof Credits: Torsten Belschner, Annika Blunk, Jan Gerigk, Matthias Gommel, Manfred Hauffen, Dirk Heesakker, Sabine Hirtes, Bernd Lintermann, Kai Richter, Jeffrey Shaw, Nicole Weber, Peter Weibel, Christina Zartmann, Torsten Ziegler. Courtesy of ZKM | Media Museum

A regular television occupies a furnished white room. On the television is what appears to be a normal news broad- cast in-progress. The news broadcast is, in fact, entirely computer generated. All graphics, the character, the voice, and all images are generated in real-time. The news text itself is continually accessed from Internet news sources. It is a live, continuously self-updating television program.

A remote control unit near the sofa has only two buttons: TRUTH1 and TRUTH2. These allow the user to choose between just two channels. On one channel the anchorman reverses the truth of the news, and on the other channel supports it. The effect is two news channels reporting the same information, but opposite in truth. (An underlying linguistic manipulation program makes this possible.) Depending on whether the underlying remote news sources are accurate, one of the channels will be true and the other will be false. Since one channel presents the meaning of every sentence reversed, and the other, the meaning of every sentence supported, one channel is guaranteed to be true whether or not the news itself is.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409402320774358 by guest on 24 September 2021 Vuk Cosic, Slovenia ASCII History of Art for the Blind Interactive net-based installation www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/blind/

ASCII History of Art for the Blind allows a picture to become audible. Initially transformed into ASCII Code, which is a keyboard norm code, and then encoded in the form of sounds and finally saved in an archive, works of historically important art are accessible for visitors in an audio format. This is a hybrid construction combining the fields of art, science, and technology as well as low and high technology and the domains of the analog and the digital, bringing together diverse forms of media history. By transferring the content from one media that has become obsolete to another, this work also reflects the question of data transferring and data formats–a significant theme in the 1960s.

Artists dealing with technology today are falling in the trap of accepting somebody else’s creativity as their limit and in this way they are becoming advertisers for equipment. One possible reaction for an artist is to investigate the misusage of technology as a gesture of freedom, and in this way oppose the mainstream taste and expectations. Works and experiments with moving ASCII, ASCII audio, ASCII camera and such are all directed towards conversions of contents between one media platform and another, every time carefully directed at their full uselessness from the viewpoint of everyday high tech and all its consequences. I try to look into the past and continue the upgrading of some margin- alized or forgotten technology. –Gebhard Sengmüller, calling this the “fake archaeology of media.”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409402320774358 by guest on 24 September 2021 Walid Ra’ad, United States Hostag: The Bachar Tapes (English Version), 2001 Mini-DV, 16:54 minutes Courtesy of Walid Ra’ad.

Hostag: The Bachar Tapes (English Version) is an experimental documentary about The Western Hostage Crisis. The crisis refers to the abduction and detention in Lebanon in the 1980s and early 1990s of Western men like Terry Anderson and Terry Waite by Islamic militants. This episode directly and indirectly consumed Lebanese, American, French, and British political and public life, and precipitated a number of high-profile political scandals like the Iran-Contra affair in the United States.

In Hostag: The Bachar Tapes (English Version), The Western Hostage Crisis is examined through the testimony of Souheil Bachar. Mr. Bachar was held hostage in Lebanon between 1983 and 1993. What is remarkable about Souheil’s captivity is that he was the only Arab man to have been detained with the Western hostages kidnapped in Beirut in the 1980s. In fact, Souheil was held for three months in 1985 in the same cell as five American men: Terry Anderson, Thomas Sutherland, Benjamin Weir, Marting Jenco, and David Jacobsen.

In 1999, Bachar collaborated with The Atlas Group (a non-profit cultural research foundation based in Lebanon) to produce 53 videotapes about his captivity. Tapes #17 and #31 are the only two tapes Bachar makes available outside of Lebanon. In the tapes, Bachar addresses the cultural, textual, and sexual aspects of his detention with the Americans.

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