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 Peter Weibel (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 540 ZKM, Selections 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 ZKM, Selections 541 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. 542 ZKM, Selections Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409402320774358 by guest on 24 September 2021 Dennis Del Favero, 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 interactive art 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. ZKM, Selections 543 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.