Driven- a dilemma of coexistence by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow

Two people attempt to resolve a recurring argument. Their conversation is transcribed into 2 frames in a single browser. Lag starts to interfere with the flow of statements and responses.

'Driven' can be viewed in most Internet browsers and requires no plug-ins. It can be accessed in two ways. Either by individuals with personal computers, who can click through the work at their own pace,
or projected with sound in public spaces where it has its own tempo.

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New York has long been home to generations of experimental filmmakers and video artists. This community has embraced and fostered artists working in newer media, if not because of formal similarities, then through affinities with the effort to continue expanding the means by which artists can express themselves. The city (and its next-door neighbor, Brooklyn) has been home to countless experimental cinemas, festivals, underground venues, and similar efforts, but the ever-shifting market has edged-out many once-thriving platforms. On March 25, a new space will open in Brooklyn's Sunset Park area, called Light Industry. Founded by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, two active participants in the film and new media communities, the organization is inspired by New York's history and strives to support a range of artists and practices revolving around film, electronic art, and performance. Their goal is "to explore new models for the presentation of time-based media and foster a complex dialogue amongst a wide range of artists and audiences within the city." On March 25, they will open their doors for the first of what promises to be many compelling events. (Check the upcoming roster of stellar artists & curators lined-up to organize unique programs.) In an inaugural screening curated by Light Industry's founders, entitled "The Blazing World," Keewatin Dewdney, Michael Gitlin, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Kurt Kren, Jenny Perlin, and Michael Robinson will present "films that ponder the vicissitudes of utopian scheming and the search for new ground." The following week, on April Fool's Day, Brian Frye and Bradley Eros of the collective screening project Roberta Beck Mercurial Cinema have cooked-up a recipe for folly with a long list of important shorts inspired by the art of prankery. Good times seems guaranteed, so if you have the chance, please welcome Light Industry to ...

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As with any exhibition that surveys the best of contemporary art practices, the Whitney Biennial consistently elicits its share of cheers and, more frequently, jeers: complaints about artists omitted, marginalized mediums, insider back-scratching, and so on. While the 2008 edition may also merit such criticism, it deserves some praise for introducing a performance-heavy program at the Park Avenue Armory. Spanning the first two weeks of the biennial's three-month run, the Armory series finds artists and musicians like Agathe Snow, Lucky Dragons and Gang Gang Dance crossing and re-crossing the boundaries of performance and installation in the decorous (and semi-crumbling) rooms of the 1881 New York landmark. This Saturday evening, composer and turntablist Marina Rosenfeld will debut Teenage Lontano/16 Channels (2008), a "cover version" of György Liget's Lontano (1967) that Rosenfeld specifically conceived for the Armory's 55,000-square foot Drill Hall. Rosenfeld's reworking stretches the Hungarian composer's twelve-minute work to an even thirty and subjects his exceedingly meticulous score to a slew of chance scenarios - most importantly, the translation of the orchestral piece into a vocal composition, relayed via portable mp3 players into the headphones of the thirty-five New York teenagers who comprise Rosenfeld's choir. Hanging several dozen feet above the teens, a massive speaker will rotate at 33 1/3 r.p.m., like a turntable, and fire electronic sounds into the recesses of the cavernous hall: a space-age accompaniment to Rosenfeld's acoustic community. Like her seminal performance, sheer frost orchestra, in which seventeen women administered nail-polish to floor-bound guitars, Teenage Lontano/16 Channels emphasizes Rosenfeld's professed interest in the "ideosocial construction of music-making," here taking a vernacular of contemporary listening, a generation for which technology is like a second-skin, and through them reappraising a moment of high-Modern composition. - Tyler ...

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The process behind generative art often holds as much fascination as the final product, as software artist C.E.B. Reas seems well aware, judging from his latest exhibition at Manhattan gallery Bitforms. Aptly titled "process / form," the show offers an unusually multifaceted glimpse into the methodology of the artist, who is well-known for co-creating the programming language Processing and for using code to mimic natural forms and behaviors in his own works. On display are software installations, prints, and relief sculptures created using Process 14 and Process 18, two new systems in Reas' "Process" series, first begun in 2005. At Bitforms, the software installations feature a clever set-up: side-by-side screens let viewers see two interpretations of each process unfurl. The right hand screen of Process 18 (2008) offers up a minimalist-inspired display, where simple white lines rapidly dart and cluster across a black background. In contrast, the neighboring screen offers a more lush, painterly vision: The same motion plays out there, but the lines' movements leave soft strokes of white, gray, and black, creating forms reminiscent of feathers or splinters. Similarly for Process 14 (2008) --- based on the form of a circle -- the right-hand screen shows stark round forms drifting and repelling one another like solitary amoebas, while on the display to the left, the circles leave gentle swirls like a field of blossoms. While such works defy materiality, Reas created the show's prints and relief sculptures to bring Process 14 and Process 18 into tactile form, he said in an interview at last night's exhibition opening. Especially intriguing are the two fiber-composite sculptures of Process 18-generated images, created using a milling machine. Matter-of-factly titled P18 (Object 1) (2008) and P18 (Object 2) (2008), the sculptures translate grayscale values into three dimensions, forming rocky-looking ridges suggesting a ...

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Gaming visionary Gary Gygax, co-creator of the Dungeons and Dragons universe, passed away on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008. He was 69. Gygax is credited as the father of role-playing games (RPGs), but D&D's influence has permeated almost every genre of gaming since it was first published in 1974. Perhaps what's most remarkable about the game is that, in its basic form, D&D is only a set of rules and suggestions. The creative aspects of the game are left in the hands of the players. With only a few multi-sided dice, a pencil, and some graph paper, D&D players devise fantastic worlds, develop complex characters, and engage in dynamic group experiences. The imaginative agency provided by the game and its participatory nature may be its greatest contribution to the foundations of contemporary game design. Video games have been particularly inspired by D&D, as many of the designers and coders behind some of the most important titles in video game history grew up rolling a 20-sided die. It's hard to imagine the existence of Richard Allen Garriott's Ultima series, Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yoshitaka Amano's Final Fantasy series, or Blizzard's World of Warcraft without the game play mechanics established in D&D. Even the internet itself owes a little bit to Gygax. From late-70's MUDs to the massively multiplayer online games of today, the development of networked, D&D influenced RPGs has both paralleled and pushed the development of the web towards creativity and collaboration. Artists such as Brody Condon have translated the form of role-playing to the gallery. For Untitled War (2004), Condon invited twelve warriors to fight until their "death" at the Los Angeles space Machine Project. The taxing two hour long performance, accompanied by the music of the Winks ...

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Voices from the Paradise Network by John Hudak, with Flash programming by erational.org [Needs Flash Player and speakers on]

John writes: My mother-in-law passed away recently, reminding me of a technique that a parapsychologist named Dr. Konstantin Raudive (1906-1974) used to record what he purported to be voices of deceased spirits. With the amount of information moving around on the internet these days, and the passing of my mother-in-law, who I thought would want to get in touch (if possible), I thought I'd give Raudive's technique a try within the digital realm.

Voices from the Paradise Network is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.

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Seeping into San Francisco, next week, is an exhibit that rounds up an assortment of activist artists who will address changes in air quality. Southern Exposure, long-known for presenting important socially-engaged work, will host the exhibition, entitled "Vapor," from March 14-May 3. The show has a strong orientation towards architecture and design solutions for environmental issues and features work by Amy Balkin, Futurefarmers, Natalie Jeremijenko, The Living, Eric Paulos, and Preemptive Media. The curatorial description shows promise of works that "react to the sources of climate change through the use of technologies--sensors, databases, and communications equipment--that are only recently accessible outside a lab." The show's title is intended to not only address the air, but also new more fluid modes of practice and research that extend beyond physical institutions. The organizers hope "Vapor" will suggest "new ways of modeling, testing and finding solutions to the problems of air quality and greenhouse gas emissions" and they've scheduled a variety of programs and workshops at which the public can learn how to get involved. - Marisa Olson

Image Credit: Eric Paulos, Participatory Urbanism

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Clever internet sourcing may be a common practice for a younger generation of artists, but rarely is it deployed with as much sinister aplomb as in the work of Cliff Evans. In Evans' skilled hands, a veritable parade of pixilated characters - from trade show women to stormtroopers, politicians to smiling couples - are reconstituted as the spokes, gears and pistons of ubiquitous, twenty-first century war machines: at once eerily futuristic and all too reminiscent of recent neoconservative empire-building initiatives. The resulting look of these photomontage animations is "excessive, flat, quasi-random, and circuitous," Evans describes: "all qualities inherent within the environment of the web." In Road to Mount Weather (2006), a three-channel installation spanning a 32-foot wide screen, fragmentary image groupings produce an unexpected narrative, increasingly assembling into secret military sites, underground testing facilities and others domains of the political id. Complicating what could otherwise be the somewhat conventional propagation of conspiratorial lore is Evans' self-conscious conception of his own authorial role. The artist alternately labels himself "a co-conspirator with the powers presented" and "a paranoid heretic attempting to subvert the powers of control," a bifurcated position he believes to be inevitable to a creative process reliant upon the appropriation of countless photographs - and, implicitly, lives - from the internet's vast reserves. In a way, Evans-as-author performs an overly dramatic version of our own complicity, as virtual navigators and political subjects, with the powers that be; but in lieu of fatalism, he offers animations too epic and interpretatively open to not suggest that there are more than a few routes into the future. - Tyler Coburn

Image: Cliff Evans, Road to Mount Weather (Image Stills), 2006

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Rhizome is pleased to announce that Luis Silva has started working with us as Curatorial Fellow. In this position, Silva will oversee and develop the ArtBase as well as conduct research, forge international partnerships and organize projects and events. Silva studied Social Sciences and has a post-graduate degree in Communication, Culture and Information Technologies from Universidade de Lisboa (Lisbon University). He has curated several new media projects, namely Online - Portuguese Netart 1997-2004, Source Code, Sound Visions, and I tag you tag me: a folksonomy of internet art. In 2006 he created the Lisbon node of the Upgrade!, an international network of gatherings concerning art, technology and culture and is currently curating LX 2.0, Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporanea's net art program. Silva has published various reviews and texts addressing the issues of art and technology. Silva has also developed his activity producing contemporary art shows since 2003, mainly of Portuguese contemporary artists.

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