Field Broadcast, which kicks off tomorrow and runs through May 17th, will present unedited, live streams of a series of artworks from thirty-three artists captured in fields (yes, the green, earthy kind) to your desktop. When I first read about the show on Networked Music Review, it reminded me a bit of David Claerbout's Present, a work he created for Dia's Artist Web Projects in 2000. Present is an application that allows the user to watch the full lifespan of a flower on their desktop. Like the Field Broadcast exhibition, it inserts a semblance of the natural or the organic into the virtual environment. With so many artists involved in Field Broadcast, it will be interesting to see how they interact with their surroundings -- if the fields will factor in as a component or simply become a backdrop.

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Beryl Korot describes the impetus behind the innovative 1970s publication Radical Software, elucidating the history of video in art and the impact of mass media on society. Emerging from an independent video community that included media visionaries such as Marshall McLuhan and groups such as Televisionaries, Videofreex, People’s Video Theater, and Global Village, the first issue of Radical Software debuted in Spring of 1970 as a publication by the Raindance Corporation. Beryl Korot and Phyllis Segura (Gershuny) acted as Editors, while Michael Shamburg served as Publisher with Ira Schneider as co-Originator. Early contributors included Nam June Paik, Buckminster Fuller, Ant Farm, Frank Gillette, and Paul Ryan, among others. After eleven issues, Radical Software ceased publication in the Spring of 1974 and is now an invaluable time capsule of an era. This video is published on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the first issue.

-- DESCRIPTION FROM ART21

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Following the Seven on Seven photos we posted this morning, I thought I'd share a link to the idea proposed by Ryan Trecartin and David Karp during the conference, Project Ten. The site allows users to anonymously upload 10-second clips, which can be navigated by three tags. (Note: Project Ten is in beta form, and they aren't allowing public uploads yet.) The concept is to create a browsing experience that mimics the jump from user to user found in ChatRoulette, opening up the clips to anything at all, not just those captured on a webcam. The limit on the number of tags also allows a rudimentary means of creating narrative as you move through the videos. Project Ten seems like it has the potential to become a gigantic, collectively authored version of one of Trecartin's films, which in my opinion, is totally, totally cool. I'm really hoping that they fully develop the site!

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From April 7 to 11, during the closing days of the 2010 Images Festival, Toronto hosted nearly three hundred scholars, artists, curators and students at the Ontario College of Art & Design for the second International Experimental Media Congress. This was not the second “annual” Congress—second coming would be more appropriate. The first was convened more than twenty years ago, in 1989 as the Toronto Experimental Film Congress. Many (I can’t count myself among them) remember how political and generational agendas met in a polarizing clash of mythic proportions around the 1989 gathering. A significant group of detractors put forward an anti-manifesto and some to this day remain turned-off to the original event, as well as to the difficult project of exhuming it.

While 2010 had its fair share of deficiencies, two that I’m told plagued 1989—a limited canon and lack of women—did not make waves this year. According to filmmaker Barbara Hammer, who presented a performance in Toronto in celebration of her newly released book chronicling her life and work, "I was at the last EMC and the big complaint was gender inequality. Corrected!” However there was at least one notable casualty: “we lost the raucous edge of complaint and challenge we had twenty years ago.” I would agree that this “congress” was missing the kind of audacity, theater and conflict found in most houses of representatives. Although it was ostensibly not an academic conference, generally it felt like one. Most panelists delivered tidy presentations and the overall experience was managed and mannered, with moments of noise and inspiration. On the plus side of this, the week was smooth and friendly, with an engaging film festival and relevant exhibitions providing content for the evenings. I came curious and left satisfied.

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Eternal Sunset endeavours to ensure you can enjoy the sunset live from any location, at any time. As the sunset moves westward, Eternal Sunset continuously tunes into different webcams, chasing the sunset around the globe. This service is currently provided through the use of 198 west-facing webcams across 39 countries.

Eternal Sunset is a virtual space where time is passing but where the daily cycle of day and night has come to a freeze at sunset; a space where the sun is always going down but never goes under. Complementing the increased efficiency and productivity associated with the internet, Eternal Sunset celebrates the romantic beauty enabled by that same technology.

-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE "ETERNAL SUNSET" SITE

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Found objects have had a place in art for nearly a century, but the practice has seemed particularly pervasive in recent years, as approaches from both contemporary and historical perspectives have attempted to redefine it as appropriation, nonmonumental, unmonumental, or "combining crap with crap." Fascination with old or overlooked marginalia could be regressive melancholia spawned of the Bush era's resigned cynicism, or sympathy for the poor objects in spite of high-tech consumption. Whatever the case, the sensibility saturates Shana Moulton's Whispering Pines, a series of videos and performances. While sculptural assemblage clusters objects in space, Moulton spreads her thrift-store and gift-shop finds over time. Rather than tracing the artist's web of references through stationary contemplation, the viewer of Whispering Pines is led through the process as Cynthia, the heroine, interacts with the things she has chosen to surround herself with. A Magic Eye 3D poster transports her to a zone of free movement. A swamp-colored facial mask opens a green-screen gateway to a forest clearing. If, in a readymade or sculptural assemblage, the artist endows objects with totemic power by isolating and emphasizing their formal properties (or the subjective associations they evoke for her), then Moulton gives that principle a radically literal interpretation in Whispering Pines, where objects' properties and associations acquire the power to shape the narrative.

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For this video I played the opening riff to Nirvana's song Smells Like Teen Spirit repeatedly for the duration of the video.

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The 3D film is by no means a new technology, but post-Avatar, it's had quite a renaissance as of late, and everyone is jumping on board. In 2009, YouTube introduced a 3D player for their videos, making it easier for users to opt for the effect, and a search for "anaglyph" on Vimeo turns up hundreds of videos. It seems that alongside mainstream Hollywood's current fixation with 3D exists a parallel surge in 3D clips, ones of a more homespun variety. This post assembles some of those videos, which pair the whiz-bang of 3D with kittens, landscapes, scenes from video games, and much more.

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