The Remedi Project Comes Alive in San Francisco
Posted by Rhizomer on January 17, 2000 12:00 am
Several hundred young people gathered at a San Francisco loft last
Friday to celebrate Remedi.al, the winter 2000 installment of The Remedi
Project. They came from as far as Italy and New York for the event, the
first time the art collective has hosted an "off-line" opening in its
two-year history.
"I never thought Remedi would have this type of effect," said Josh Ulm,
the group's 27-year-old founder, as he eyed the dense crowd around him--
packing the Mission-district loft and overflowing into a nearby
driveway. Inside, web sites and videos were projected onto three large
screens as a DJ spun moody electronica off MP3s.
A middle-aged man pressed his way through the crowd to tell Ulm that he
came all the way from Seattle for the party. "The things I've seen on
Remedi are the only things Ive seen on the web that are inspiring,"
said Larry Rouch, an architect. He said he was amazed by the rich,
poetic quality of the site. "While the rest of the web is trying to
speed things up," he said, "Remedi slows things down."
A group of Ulm's friends from Maine started The Remedi Project in 1998,
as a seasonal showcase of interactive design culled from about a dozen
rotating contributors. "I wanted to let designers be in charge," Ulm
recalled on Friday. "Remedi was the way for them to express themselves
the way clients never would," he said. Several of Remedi's contributors
now work in San Francisco's top design and interactive firms.
The current exhibition features new work by Nicola Stumpo, Shannon
Rankin, Jeremy Tai Abbett and Franziska Huebler, and Annette Loudon and
Doug Brown. As with each of the groups shows, the work is framed by a
lush interface and short interviews with the artists. In a word, the
work is slick. Perhaps it is the opposite of Heath Bunting's heady
minimalism and Jodi's browser deconstructions. The works in the Remedi
Project rarely comment on the medium itself, but instead celebrate the
high-tech potential of design, gaming, and non-linear story telling.
Stumpo's contribution, "A/B/C," is a series of animated windows with
poetry and ambient soundscapes. The first is a scrolling panorama with
a yellow angelic figure set into gray abstract architectural
backgrounds. The user pans across the background to discover the figure
in different places and poses, and is greeted by poetic fragments of
text. The next window is a richly animated collage of colors and
graphics mixed with text -- "watching things happening without learning"
zips across the screen as circles explode outward, fragments of a
cityscape float by, and a child's doll tumbles in the wind.
Another highlight of the show is Loudon and Brown's "Bounce!" After
providing a name, each user is given a smiling avatar which bounces
around a room with other participants. Users can drag and "fling" the
other avatars in real time, select their facial gestures, and chat --
injecting pop and performance into the traditional chat room. In the
project's introduction, Loudon modestly describes her motive: "I mainly
want for people to fling their avatars around and have a good old
time...I'm hoping Bounce! will make people realize that connecting
people is one of the net's coolest tricks."
Loudon praised Friday's event for giving her "instant feedback" on her
site, the chance to watch people "come together to play" and offer
criticism. She said she is nearly inundated with email about her
projects, so the event was a much-needed opportunity to meet "in the
flesh." She said half of the Remedi artists had never met before.
Ulm said he considers The Remedi Project to be more than "net art." He
says he would like to see the work grow away from the computer. "The
purpose is to get people to think differently about the world," he said,
"not about the Internet." The purpose of Friday's event was "to make
Remedi physical," he said.
On Friday, a rock trio featuring Remedi contributor Andy Slopsema
performed a pensive soundtrack to an experimental digital video. Ulm
hopes to add more filmmakers and musicians to Remedi's base of designers
and digital artists.
He said the future of Remedi is uncertain, in part because the group's
past body of work -- six online exhibitions -- was lost during the
holidays to a computer crash. Luckily, some of the work was recently
acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The group has not
yet decided whether they will reconstruct the lost work or branch out
into new directions.
"It's an opportunity in the true meaning of Remedi," Ulm said. "To do
something different."
Friday to celebrate Remedi.al, the winter 2000 installment of The Remedi
Project. They came from as far as Italy and New York for the event, the
first time the art collective has hosted an "off-line" opening in its
two-year history.
"I never thought Remedi would have this type of effect," said Josh Ulm,
the group's 27-year-old founder, as he eyed the dense crowd around him--
packing the Mission-district loft and overflowing into a nearby
driveway. Inside, web sites and videos were projected onto three large
screens as a DJ spun moody electronica off MP3s.
A middle-aged man pressed his way through the crowd to tell Ulm that he
came all the way from Seattle for the party. "The things I've seen on
Remedi are the only things Ive seen on the web that are inspiring,"
said Larry Rouch, an architect. He said he was amazed by the rich,
poetic quality of the site. "While the rest of the web is trying to
speed things up," he said, "Remedi slows things down."
A group of Ulm's friends from Maine started The Remedi Project in 1998,
as a seasonal showcase of interactive design culled from about a dozen
rotating contributors. "I wanted to let designers be in charge," Ulm
recalled on Friday. "Remedi was the way for them to express themselves
the way clients never would," he said. Several of Remedi's contributors
now work in San Francisco's top design and interactive firms.
The current exhibition features new work by Nicola Stumpo, Shannon
Rankin, Jeremy Tai Abbett and Franziska Huebler, and Annette Loudon and
Doug Brown. As with each of the groups shows, the work is framed by a
lush interface and short interviews with the artists. In a word, the
work is slick. Perhaps it is the opposite of Heath Bunting's heady
minimalism and Jodi's browser deconstructions. The works in the Remedi
Project rarely comment on the medium itself, but instead celebrate the
high-tech potential of design, gaming, and non-linear story telling.
Stumpo's contribution, "A/B/C," is a series of animated windows with
poetry and ambient soundscapes. The first is a scrolling panorama with
a yellow angelic figure set into gray abstract architectural
backgrounds. The user pans across the background to discover the figure
in different places and poses, and is greeted by poetic fragments of
text. The next window is a richly animated collage of colors and
graphics mixed with text -- "watching things happening without learning"
zips across the screen as circles explode outward, fragments of a
cityscape float by, and a child's doll tumbles in the wind.
Another highlight of the show is Loudon and Brown's "Bounce!" After
providing a name, each user is given a smiling avatar which bounces
around a room with other participants. Users can drag and "fling" the
other avatars in real time, select their facial gestures, and chat --
injecting pop and performance into the traditional chat room. In the
project's introduction, Loudon modestly describes her motive: "I mainly
want for people to fling their avatars around and have a good old
time...I'm hoping Bounce! will make people realize that connecting
people is one of the net's coolest tricks."
Loudon praised Friday's event for giving her "instant feedback" on her
site, the chance to watch people "come together to play" and offer
criticism. She said she is nearly inundated with email about her
projects, so the event was a much-needed opportunity to meet "in the
flesh." She said half of the Remedi artists had never met before.
Ulm said he considers The Remedi Project to be more than "net art." He
says he would like to see the work grow away from the computer. "The
purpose is to get people to think differently about the world," he said,
"not about the Internet." The purpose of Friday's event was "to make
Remedi physical," he said.
On Friday, a rock trio featuring Remedi contributor Andy Slopsema
performed a pensive soundtrack to an experimental digital video. Ulm
hopes to add more filmmakers and musicians to Remedi's base of designers
and digital artists.
He said the future of Remedi is uncertain, in part because the group's
past body of work -- six online exhibitions -- was lost during the
holidays to a computer crash. Luckily, some of the work was recently
acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The group has not
yet decided whether they will reconstruct the lost work or branch out
into new directions.
"It's an opportunity in the true meaning of Remedi," Ulm said. "To do
something different."
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