Rhizome | ArtBase Essays

Shu Lea Cheang on Brandon

Yin Ho | Thu May 10th, 2012 9:30 a.m.

Shu Lea Cheang, Brandon, Bigdoll interface, 1998

In 1998, the Guggenheim Museum launched its first web-based art commission, Shu Lea Cheang's Brandon. Over the course of a year, the collaborative, dynamic piece would look at the complexity of gender, sexuality, and identity through the life and death of Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon, a Nebraska youth who was raped and murdered after his biological sex as a woman came to light in 1993.

Oft-cited in new media art history as one of the first widely recognized pieces of net art, the Brandon site has been offline for the last year or so; the Guggenheim plans to restore the work in the very near future.

I spoke to the artist about Brandon, 14 years after its launch:

YH: How did you first come to conceptualize Brandon? What were the circumstances for its commission?

SLC: Brandon was conceived at a time that I moved from actual space to cyber/virtual, claiming myself a cyber-nomad. It was around the mid-90s, and there was high hope for a super-highway, for a virtual world where race/gender does not matter any more. (I think it was the ad copy of MCI communications?). Meanwhile, two articles came out at Village Voice, one about Brandon Teena's rape/murder case by Donna Minkowitz and the other Julian Dibbell's A Rape in Cyberspace. I had been experimenting with boundary crossing between the actual (state/nation) and virtual (anonymous/avatars), which needed to take up a durational performative format.

By 1995, I wrote out a proposal which was to be a one-year web narrative project following my feature film Fresh Kill (1994). At the time, I guess it was unusual to conceive a durational web work, to be unfolded by episodes, by staged virtual performance 'events' supported by actual space installation. At the time, David Ross was the director of the Whitney Museum. He had the vision to expand the museum into cyberspace. Curator John Hanhardt (who has exhibited three of my major works: color schemes (a solo show in 1990), Those Fluttering Objects of Desire (1993, Whitney Biennial), and Fresh Kill (1995, Whitney Biennial)) took up the curation of Brandon. By 1998, Hanhardt had moved to the Guggenheim Museum and took Brandon with him. At the Guggenheim, Matthew Drutt, Associate Curator for Research, helped realize the curatorial admist the Guggenheim's venture into the virtual museum with Asymptote Architects...

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Beyond the Surface: 15 Years of Desktop Aesthetics

Jason Huff | Wed Mar 14th, 2012 9:56 a.m.

A desktop is a changing record of visual decisions. It speaks to the aesthetics of a particular work-flow and personal space. A desktop exhibits a diagram of your organizational habits and a screenshot of it captures a brief moment of its functional evolution. The image of your desktop becomes an intimate self-portrait and the impulse to decode an unfamiliar desktop is unavoidable.

Xerox Star 8010 Workstation - Image via plyojump.com

In January, Adam Cruces wrapped up his Desktop Views project. Cruces collected 51 images of artists’ desktops including a number of artists he worked with in his earlier project STATE.

Cruces frames Desktop Views with a quote from Alexei Shulgin’s legendary Desktop Is project, created 15 years earlier in 1997, at the dawn of “net.art.” The quote, taken from the about page of Shulgin’s project, uses the title Desktop Is as an iterative I Ching-style manifesto about the desktop. Its final lines claim in paradox, “desktop is a question, desktop is the answer.” Cruces’s description of Desktop Views is more straightforward and less poetic. To him the desktop is “the (virtual) space that serves as the foundation of the working environment.” Cruces and Shulgin, however, channel the same curiosity. The two projects are echoes that present voyeuristic peeks into artists’ personal virtual working spaces on public websites.

The Desktop Is site is a deteriorated time capsule. Its nostalgic Apple OS desktop interface links to two folders; one, leads to site information, and the second, to a list of submitted desktop images. Link rot has broken nearly half of the links in Shulgin’s list of submissions and the ones that work are a mix of cryptic handles, like Murph the surf, in contrast to full names - some followed by an email address.

In converse, Cruces’s new iteration, Desktop Views is standardized. It presents a grid of images (a sort of meta desktop) that can be sorted alphabetically by first name or chronologically in the order they were collected and released on the site. Artists’ full names label each desktop thumbnail in the grid. Cruces hosts all the images he has collected, so perhaps this archive of desktop images will remain intact for more complete future reflections. Within the order, the desktop images range from stark defaults to extreme clutter.

Sara Ludy’s desktop, for example, is minimal with a blurred blue smudge of pixels centered on a black background. On the right side, vased.mov is immediately above vased.gif which might reveal a recently created animated gif. Daniel Keller’s desktop image presents a more complex space. His numerous file icons stand in an equally spaced array – small and unreadable. They vanish into an endless crowded background of solar panels stacked edge-to-edge.

Martin Murphy’s desktop, for example, has a strange background image: a hand wrapped in latex touches a warped smiling face in a pool of purple color. The face stares out of the screen. Icons, floating on the right, are grid-free and vaguely organized. Three external drive mounts show a potential need for more space while a folder announces a “project with Evan” in its name. Perhaps this counts as evidence of collaboration. Amidst bluetooth connections, a dropbox account, and a desirable suite of creative software applications in the dock below, Murphy is present. He listens to Spotify and captured his desktop image with OS X’s Grab application.

Martin Murphy's desktop from Adam Cruces's Desktop Views

Some visual clues reveal location or language, like Jon Rafman’s Canadian flag in his menu bar. His background image shows two men climbing a floating knot of infinite stairs up and down, down and up. A handgun icon labelled “TODO” floats point-blank at one man’s head. Other desktops are more mysterious. Rafael Rozendal’s blank grey background leaves everything to the imagination – his tiny system activity monitor, maxed out in red and green, is the only leading detail.

While Cruces’s project feels curatorial, Shulgin’s is more ethnographic...

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From the Rhizome Artbase: %20wrong (2000)- JODI

Natalie Saltiel | Tue Jul 5th, 2011 10:19 a.m.

In this series of posts, we will be blogging recently updated content from Rhizome's Artbase.

Founded in 1999, the Rhizome ArtBase is an online archive of new media art containing some 2503 art works, and growing. The ArtBase encompasses a vast range of project by artists all over the world that employ materials such as software, code, websites, moving images, games and browsers to aesthetics and critical ends.

%20wrong (2000)- JODI

%20wrong (2000), JODI (Screen Shot)

This work has been restored and is now being permanently hosted on the Artbase. More recently repaired works from the ArtBase can be found here.

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Why + Wherefore in the ArtBase

Natalie Saltiel | Mon Jun 20th, 2011 7:44 a.m.

Why + Wherefore is now a part of the Rhizome Artbase. Founded in 2007 by Summer Guthery, Lumi Tan, and Nicholas Weist, the collective has curated online exhibitions that explore questions of presentation and representation on the web. Over the past few years Why + Wherefore has brought together artists and curators to consider online culture across a variety of media. Their alternative and distinct approach to online exhibition has a distinct voice in the broad field of online curation.

Colby Bird, Dave and Tim, 2007 (Screengrab from Why + Wherefore's "The Inaugural Invitational: Beginnings")

For their inaugural show Beginnings, Guthery, Tan, and Weist addressed the uncertainty of a work between its conception and final completion, inviting a diverse group of artists, practicing both online and off, to submit entries around the process of beginning a piece.

In PDF, Why + Wherefore organized an online exhibition in conjunction with more than 20 international venues. PDF was installed at each of its material sites for only one day, but a reproducible selection of specially commissioned PDF files were freely available on their website along with instructions for displaying a real life exhibition of the work.

The Long Gallery, Brenna Murphy, reallybig, 2008 (fragment)

Follow up shows like their 7x7 series, where seven websites were invited to curate seven separate online exhibitions featuring seven works composed around a theme, including Rhizome's entry "The Long Gallery" organized by Brian Droitcour, explored the variability of online curating. With entries as diverse as VVORK's Unititled sound show and I Heart Photograph's (Naturally Occurring Emoticons), each exhibition feels unique, yet unified within the exhibition's format.

This One Goes Up to 11 (screen shot)

Pursing online curation across media, in the 2008 exhibition This One Goes Up to 11, the founders and curator Hanne Mugaas, chose ...

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From the Rhizome Artbase: Bodydrome (2001) - Marcello Mazzella

Natalie Saltiel | Wed Jun 15th, 2011 1:13 p.m.

In this series of posts, we will be blogging recently updated content from Rhizome's Artbase.

Founded in 1999, the Rhizome ArtBase is an online archive of new media art containing some 2503 art works, and growing. The ArtBase encompasses a vast range of project by artists all over the world that employ materials such as software, code, websites, moving images, games and browsers to aesthetics and critical ends.

Bodydrome (2001) - Marcello Mazzella