Artist Response No 11

First Person Shooters

In the late 20th century, the entertainment industry began to converge in video and computer games. As the artists Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre, and Brody Condon state in the excerpt describing their work, the industry's focus especially lay on video games that simulate war and war-like situations. Through the present technologies in the field of video game programming, online battles can be often experienced as the real world through the mediating interfaces of game-like targeting and navigation systems. At the same time, increasingly realistic games known as "first person shooters" featured immersive, three-dimensional worlds in which players engaged in violent conflicts, depicted with near-photographic realism.

After September 11, 2001, the artists Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre, and Brody Condon were all fascinated by and critical of an internationally popular first-person shooter called Counter-Strike, in which players choose to undertake either terrorist or counter-terrorist operations in an urban environment. However, the artists claimed to have seen the game as an overly simplistic ""convergence of network shooter games and contemporary Middle Eastern politics in a game.

When playing Counter-Strike multiple players connect via the Internet to occupy the same virtual environment, fighting with or against one another in teams and communicating through text messages and voice channels. In addition, players can upload images to insert in the game space as "spray paints," or graffiti tags, to commemorate a kill or mark territory. Velvet-Strike is an artistic intervention that enables participants to insert what the artists call "counter-military graffiti" into the virtual space of Counter-Strike.

In addition, the site features screen-capture movies showing sprayers in action and examples of hate mail from Counter-Strike players angered by the artists' provocative actions, which some fans of the original game interpreted as denouncing video game violence.
Schleiner, Leandre, and Condon, however, have made it clear that Velvet-Strike is not critical of violence in video games, per se. Instead, as the three artists point out, the work forces us to wonder what exactly is at stake in the fictive virtual worlds in which both soldiers and civilians immerse themselves, at a time when real-life warfare increasingly resembles games and games increasingly resemble real life.
I have always been wondering what it exactly is that makes us so curious about those video games. Maybe these games are becoming even more popular in the future, as Schleiner, Leandre, and Condon indicate, because the games become reality and the reality becomes the games. It might also be due to the believe that one has the chance to have such a dangerous experience without actually being in risk to die.
However, I appreciate the artist's approach to such a disputable issue. Nevertheless, I doubt that users are actually prompted to wonder what exactly "is at stake in the fictive virtual worlds".

Artist Response No 10

Vectorial Elevation (1999)

Mexican-born artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer created a unique spectacle by placing eighteen robotic searchlights around Mexico City's Zócalo, the world's third-largest urban square. In his project called Vectorial Elevation (http://www.alzado.net/), first presented in Mexico City to celebrate the new millennium, participants used a Web-based interface to control the searchlights, choreographing patterns on the night sky and the urban landscape.
According to the artis himself, this type of performance is called "Relational Architecture," which he defines as "the technological actualization of buildings with alien memory." The interesting aspect about his work is that laypeople and passersby can construct new meanings for edifices with internet software and robotic lights. In other words, even a layman has the chance to produce such an outstanding spectacle. According to Lozano-Hemmer, "light projections...can achieve the desired monumental scale, can be changed in real time, and their immateriality makes their deployment more logistically feasible."

Lozano-Hemmer furthermore explains that when a participant's design for Vectorial Elevation reached the head of the Web queue, it was beamed into the sky, visible to crowds on the ground in Mexico City and, via Web cameras, to a large online audience. More than 800,000 people from 89 countries visited the Web site in a two-week period. The light show they produced was visible within a 20-kilometer radius.

As it is described by the author, the project's aesthetic effect remind us of those of the Tribute in Light (2002), a temporary public art memorial to the victims of 9/11, by Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, who utilized vertical beams supplied by 44 searchlights placed at Ground Zero in New York to project vertical beams into the night sky above the World Trade Center's destroyed Twin Towers.
However, Lozano-Hemmer describes his project as an "anti-monument" that serves primarily as a platform for public self-expression. Although Lozano-Hemmer uses technologies that suggest "panoptic regimes of control", Vectorial Elevation is primarily meant to be a celebration of the potential these technologies have to produce a new kind of participatory spectacle.

Artist Response No 9

360degrees

360degrees started out as an idea for a website almost five years ago. It has since evolved into a major initiative with the collaboration of dozens of imaginative and dedicated scholars, statisticians, activists, ex-offenders, students, educators, artists, and programmers.
According to the website (http://www.360degrees.org/360degrees.html), 360degree is a web page that is creating a database of organizations working around issues of incarcerations, crime and community development. The names who stand behind that idea are Jennifer and Kevin Mccoy. In the context of their project, they have been collecting the stories of inmates,lawyers, judges, parole officers, parents, victims and others whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system.
In connection with a new series on National Public Radio, Prison Diaries, they have conducted interviews and given inmates and officers tape recorders so that they could keep tape diaries of their experience in prison.
They claim that each story is focused around a specific case and is told from the point of view from the people involved. The amazing aspect about their project is that one is able to explore each speaker's personal space by navigating 360 degrees through their chambers or cells.
Mr and Mrs Mccoy's website state that its ambition is to involve and motivate other the web sites visitors in the fight for justice. I truly find the depiction of authentic stories and fates interesting and also inspiring at the same time. Thus, people have the unique opportunity and chance to read, hear or even understand victims' perspectives better.

Artist Response No 8

Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon: The BoarderXing (2002)

Since the internet became available to the world's public, it has been used for all different kinds of purposes. But nowadays, the internet rather represents a worldwide community connected across geographic distances by an electronic network.
However, as it is explained in the excerpt (https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Heath+Bunting+and+Kayle+Brandon),technology and mobility is limited to the privileged and the ramifications of the globalizational reality have excluded, for political, economic, or social reasons, many others from networks of communication and transportation.

Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon have created an online basis that addresses these issues. It is called BorderXing.This is an online guide to crossing European borders secretly. The site is said to be primarily addressed to activists, asylum seekers, and others who lack the requisite government documents to pass legally from one nation to the next. The guide is built around a database-driven Web site that contains information about routes between various pairs of countries in Europe. Furthermore it contains documentations of the artists' attempted crossings. Besides that, even instructions on how to cross specific borders undetected and without a passport are accompanied by hiking maps and lists of necessary tools. In interesting question would be where Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon did get these information from and how they have managed not to get caught by officials.

As it is stated in the excerpt (see link), the artists patrolled the boundaries of the BorderXing project by limiting access to some of the Web site's texts to authorized users. One critical thought about the project is the overthrow of the integrity of national European borders.

Despite the fact whether one might consider Heath Bunting's and Kayle Brandon's work art or an illegal course of action, I truly admire the political engaged nature of their work. I really wonder what the authorities think about that. However, according to them, their work is not about decoration or visual pleasure; it is about the beauty showing in BorderXing in the form of photographs taken by the artists as they travel illicitly between countries. These often-stunning images, traces of the artists' experiments in illegal migration, reveal liminal landscapes of surprising beauty.

In my opinion, this again is a perfect example for the endless boundaries of the possibilities of the World Wide Web. Nevertheless, I would be truly interested myself in these secret routes and photographs. The fact that it is illegal probably makes it so fascinating as art. Especially the pictures might cause a notable attraction and appeal because they truly correspond to reality.

Artist Response No 7

Mouchette

In 1996, a Web site that claims to be the work of an adolescent girl appeared at mouchette.org. When clicking on the link, one is inevitably confronted with a lurid close-up picture of a white,pink flower. On its petals one can see ants and flies crawling. In the left corner of the picture , a portrait of a sad-looking girl and the following text: "My name is Mouchette/I live in Amsterdam/I am nearly 13 years old/I am an artist" is depicted.

As it is pointed out in the excerpt, the site's content appears to have a deceptively innocent quality. Unfortunately, the link to her site doesn't exist anymore. Even the online search via "youtube" only offers a connection to Robert Bresson's film, "Mouchette," from 1967 about a suicidal adolescent girl who is raped in a forest at night.

However, Mouchette's homepage seemed to be equiped with many feature, interactive Web forms, including multiple-choice questions that trigger delayed-reaction e-mails to users. There is also a listing of members of Mouchette's international fan club, which includes art institutions around the world. All these contemporary web features require a lot of knowledge and know-how.
This undoubtedly arises the question if this "sophisticated" Web site could really be the work a 13-year-old girl? Probably not! Nonetheless, the true identity of the artist behind mouchette.org has remained unknown.

In the online excerpt is furthermore mentioned that by clicking on the word "artist" on the home page one is led to a page with the following text: "An artist? Yes. Here is a tip: I heard that the only way to become an artist is to say you are one. And then you can call "art" everything you make.... Easy, he?". Since the distiction between art und no-art has become so blury and indefinable, I partly agree with this statement. Who would actually dare to contradict an artist who claims to produce art. In earlier centuries people might have had a clearer perception of what art had to be like, but nowadays, peoples' tolerance has increased and art has become so abstract and multifaceted that almost everything can be considered to be art.

However, it really seems disputable that a statement like this came from a 13-year old girl. This point gives room to a further aspect regarding online webpages. Since it hasn't been possible to find out who or what the real "Mouchette" is, one might just argue that her home page is another example of an manipulated online identity.
Nevertheless, I picked Mouchette because it made me curious and presented something mysterious.

Artist Response No 6

The Region of the Transborder Trousers

As it is stated in the excerpt on blackboard ( http://courses.smcm.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_10810_1), at the turn of the twenty-first century, artists began to experiment with Global Positioning System (GPS) devices that track, via satellite, our movements in physical space.

In The Region of the Transborder Trousers (La región de los pantalones transfronterizos), Torolab, a Tijuana-based collective of architects, artists, designers, and musicians led by Raúl Cárdenas Osuna, use GPS transmitters to explore the logistics of daily life in the twin border cities of Tijuana and San Diego. This project not only makes visible the transnational mobility of the region's inhabitants, but also demonstrates the artistic potential of locative technologies.

For a period of five days, members of the collective carried GPS transmitters. The members also kept records of their cars' fuel consumption. In the end, the GPS and fuel data was then fed into a computer and visualized (using software reprogrammed by Torolab) as an animated map.
Regarding the picture, one should know that each tracked Torolab member appeared as a colored dot on an urban grid surrounded by a circle whose diameter indicated the amount of fuel left in his or her tank.

In my eyes, the idea of using Global Positioning System (GPS) for making daily life easier but PS a software used to give them directions while driving their car. On the other hand, one of my first associations was to track criminals. This might be due to the great amout of Hollywood movies that used this technic to spy on people ( for instance mivies like "Enemey of the State") .
As Torolab did, the possibilities offered by such advanced technology can be used to produce a kind of art that might seem new to the layman.
Yet, I think is interesting that people start using these technologies for producing new kinds of art.

Artist Response No 5

Dialtones: A Telesymphony

Dialtones: A Telesymphony, first performed in 2001 at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, is a musical project founded by Golan Levin and his collaborators Scott Gibbons, Gregory Shakar, and Yasmin Sohrawardy. The idea of the project which is based on a musical performance played on the audience's mobile phones builds on the legacy of John Cage, who used sounds from everyday life in his music, and whose work inspired generations of musicians and artists.

I truly like Golan Levin's idea to use cell phone sounds, which are mostly considered noise pollution in public spaces, to produce something so creative. As it is stated in the excerpt, mobile phones have become so omnipresent that a new etiquette appeared in movie theaters, concert halls, and other performance spaces, namly the ritual of silencing these ubiquitous devices.
In my opinion, artist who take objects or phenomenon from our daily life and try to create something new or creative that represents those objects from a different point of view, should receive far more credit for their work. Golan Levin's work somehow reminds me of this artist, I can't remember his name, who used old trash (metal objects and synthetic materials) in order tp produce something new out of it. He primarely created sculptures.

Artist Response No 4

The "Industrious Clock"

Yugo Nakamura,is according to his personal website (yugop.com) a creative director, designer and engineer exploring various forms of interactive system in digital and networked environment. The site furthermore states that Yugo has exhibited and lectured in Asia, U.S.A and Europe and that some artworks from his personal website have recenly been shown at Center Pompidou (Paris), Kunstlerhaus (Vienna), Design Museum (London). His commercial works have received many international awards including Cannes Lions, OneShow, Clio Award, and NY ADC.”
For further information about his career adn projects check out http://yugop.net/info/.

However, his project "Industrious Clock" from 2001 is a clock that tells you the time exactly to the tick. But the particularity of this clock is that it every single figure is actually written down by a human hand with a pencil.

This piece of art drew my attention because of its simplicity. What we see is an usual clock that gives you the exact time. However, the way it does make, makes it special in a way. The fact that the audience actually sees a human hand writing restlessly down each single figure somehow emphasizes the impression how fast time passes by. As soon as one figure is written down, it has to be erased because it is not actual anymore.

Artist Response No 3

1 year performance video

The work of MTAAA seems to me quite interesting because it has a different approch to the process of art making than the layman expects. Their concept, "The art happens here," emphasizing that Net art, like Process art, Performance art, and Happenings, is less an object for contemplation than an event or action that takes place over time, truly drew my attention. According to the excerpt, MTAA's project "1 year performance video" really meets the various ways of the internet age.

In the original work, a person spent an entire year living within a cage, documenting his self-induced confinement with photographs. This reminded me of a TV show from Germany called "Big Brother". In this show people, who haven't met each other before, are put into an apartment and have to master certain task to keep this show going. However, they are recorded 24/7.

But with regard to the work of MTAAA, one might consider its project as a perfect example for the increasing replacement of human activities and live experiences with those offered by computer and online worlds. Furthermore, it shows the audience the new media's ability to manipulate peoples' perceptions of time. In the same way as Ken Goldberg's work does, it covers up the distinct borders of reality and fake, making it extremely difficult to understand the process of art making in a traditional sense.

Artist Response No 2

Empire 24/7 by Wolfgang Staehle

Wolfgang Staehle is a German artist who was born in Stuttgart in 1950 lives and works in New York. As the short essay about him and his work states, he founded the internet forum "The Thing" , a creative online community where debates about art happens at the beginnings of the 1990s.

However, the first thought that came to my mind while reading about Wolfgang Staehle's work was the way how he, as a modern artist, uses new and present technology to create "art". Although I am not familiar with the history of art, I could imagine that there are only a few artist who move with the times and adapt their way of producing art. That is way, I am so interested in his project Empire 24/7, showing the Empire State Building around the clock. As already in the essay mentioned, anybody around the world who has access to the internet would have been able to witness Staehle's idea of art.

Another aspect I would like to mention is the legitimized questioning of this truly being art. Wouldn't be anybody be able to set up a digital camera pointing at the Empire State Building and thuis creatinga "virtual window, as if one could see through the Karlsruhe museum's gallery wall directly into New York City"? Well, at this point, one can draw the connection to Bart Rosier's text "What is Art?". He states that there are six critera worth considering. One of them says, "anything can be a work of art". So in the same way as Warhol already did, Wolfgang Staehle made it no longer possible to distinguish something that is art from something that is not.

Furthermore, his project Empire24/7 shows not merely the Empire State Building, but also the two twin towers and how the got destroyed. In order to depict this tragic historical event he displays five chronological pictures. The firts one depicts the New York city in all its beauty, the last one, however, shows the dust and darkened sky after the the twin towers collapsed. Through this row of pictures, the artist is able to communicate with us. It appears as if he would tell us a story and tells us what exactly happens. Here again, we can draw a connection to Rozier's text. He states that according to John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant's Woman, art is "the best, because richest, most complex and most easily comprehensible, medium of communication between human beings". So here art is defined as symbolic images as a means of communication.

Artist Response No 1

Telegarden (1995) by Ken Goldberg

Ken Goldberg's way of challenging peoples' perception is quite interesting and depicts, in my eyes, a very fascinating approach. I agree with him stating that it has become even more difficult to distinguish fake from reality in the online world. Since anyone is able to use the internet or even publish information, it has gotten harder to find reliable sources and information.

However, Ken Goldberg's idea of a garden that gets taken care off via the internet by people from all over the world at the same time might stand for a small example what else might be possible in future. Ken Goldberg just used a plantes which might be considered living objects. Who knows where this idea will end in the future. Maybe some day it won't be plants anymore that will get controlled by unknown people.

Another idea that comes to my mind was the fact that he provokes us to consider whether the garden really exists. On the internet there are probably so many things that doesn't exist in reality. Nevertheless, this phenomena seems to attract even more people all over the world. It seems that people are really searching for those non-authentic things.