~Net/Web creativity featured/hosted on furtherfield~

~More Explorations & discoveries of non-singular
Net/Web creativity featured/hosted on furtherfield~
Skin/Strip Online by Furtherfield & Completely Naked
The global digital community are invited to anonymously express their naked
identity using visual images of their bodies. Individual net users
participate in a collective, live event, confronting social and cultural
representations of the body within the net community, by revealing and
viewing their previously unknown corporeality via net-based technology.
http://www.skinstrip.net

Skin/Strip Online is a live arts project for Shooting Live Artists
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/shootinglive/), a partnership initiative between
the Arts Council of England, BBC, Yorkshire Media Production Agency's Studio
of the North (SON) and b.tv / The Culture Company, aiming to create a new
axis of digital activity in Britain.

[Separation/Separation] - Annie Abrahams in collaboration with Panoplie
[Serendipity] - Neil Jenkins
[Rethinking Wargames] - Ruth Catlow
[Dress the Nation] - Avatar Body Collision
[TuRmOiL] - Marc Garrett
[Retard Riot] Noah Lyon
[Guernica - cover up] - Neil jenkins
[Data, Dreaming] Review - Lewis LaCook

New front page splash http://www.furtherfield.org/fire_art.html
links to all the the new work - http://www.furtherfield.org/home.html

Info about new works below…

Title: Separation/Separation
Artist: Annie Abrahams in collaboration with Panoplie

'… written during a stay in the hospital in 2001. The visitor is
constrained to follow the exercises implemented by the artist. Don't be
fooled this work is working.'- Annie Abrahams

'Separation' is a reflective and insightful web work that exhorts us, as
fellow digital 'users', to recognise our state of cyborgian seizure as we
sit at our screens. The artist's dialogue with her personal computer is a
frustrated cry for the liberation of her own tired body from the autism of
the machine, locked into its own unrelenting processes. Her halting
soliloquy is interspersed with instructions for physical excercise. Through
a deliberately obstructive and controlling mode of interactivity and a
contrary and playful humour, the work offers a strictly administered
programme of eastern style physical therapy for our nerves, muscles and
spirits. This work works. - R Catlow.

Title: Serendipity
Artist: Neil jenkins

An online mapping tool for urban psychogeography, 'inspired by recent work
by urban psychogeographers, including Glowlab, Ivan Pope and Social Fiction,
forum participants were invited to embark on a 'programmed' psychogeographic
walk, following a set of instructions written as a pseudo computer program,
collecting 'data' - thoughts, images and sounds - along the way'. - Neil
Jenkins.

Psychogeography has been explored since the early days of the Internet by
artists such as Heath Bunting, Concrete Myrth and Ivan Pope. Using the
global, virtual space of the Internet and the everyday experience of local
environments. Neil Jenkin's 'Serendipity' requests visitors to declare their
own where abouts, with an outdoor context. An intutive platform, marking
people's movements around the world. Usually in a city and through aimless
drifting one records the emotions given by a particular place. This could be
in the form of mental mapping, production of mood-based maps, or descriptive
representations. Users are invited to upload images and mp3's onto the site
also. - Marc Garrett.

Title: Rethinking Wargames
Artist: Ruth Catlow

Rethinking Wargames is a participative net art project by Ruth Catlow which
calls for 'pawns to join forces to defend world peace'. It uses the game of
chess to find strategies that challenge existing power structures and their
concomitant war machineries.

The simple image of the chessboard reconfigured, with all the pawns united,
was first posted to the internet in early February 2003. The question,
'under what conditions could the pawns in this game win?', was posted to
global chess forums and net art lists; at a time when global protests to
stop the war against Iraq were attracting unprecidented popular support. The
website documents and illustrates the technical responses of chess pundits
alongside more philosophical and political replies from amateur players. The
idea of this project is to engage the attention and consideration of people
who, through chess, understand and enjoy competition, strategising, using
their intellects and winning. Chess prescribes the binding roles and
relationships between royalty, nobility, clergy, military and militia. The
game as it stands, serves as a 4 dimensional map of a social, psychological
and emotional structure; long established and mirrored in our major
institutions. By changing the game, those with a talent for strategic
thinking, contribute to the reevaluation of an evidently inhumane,
anachronistic and violent system of human institutions. - R Catlow.

Title: Dress the Nation
Artist: Avatar Body Collision

On 3rd March 2003 Avatar Body Collision, joined the Lysistra Project in a
worldwide theatre event for peace! Aristophane's play, Lysistrata, written
circa 410 b.c, describes a society where women's power rests upon their
ability to deliver or withhold sexual favours and was read by women at
public and private venues all over the world in protest against the ensuing
war against Iraq. 'Dress the Nation was conceived as the fictional response
by George. W. Bush and his key supporters, to the news that degenerate
theatre types were staging global productions of a lewd Greek play as part
of an anti-war campaign initiative.' (ABC).

The live online performances in a Palace chat room environment are
documented in this website with comic strips and transcripts. The key
players of this war: the leaders, the advisors, the victims and the silent,
oppressed civillians, include 'bubba bush' , 'toe-knee blur' and 'the women
in black' (women wearing the hijab) and are represented by avatars which
move around against back drops of battlefields, flags and other war
associated imagery. Their scripted dialogues appear as speach bubbles and
are irreverently counterpointed by unscripted audience interventions. The
interplay of scripted and spontaneous speach and the incongruity of violent
world leaders in uninhibited conversation with civillians (consisting of
manga style characters and smileys), reveals a truer reflection of chaotic
world politics than we currently see presented in our propagandised news
media. - R Catlow.

Title: TuRmOiL
Artist: Marc Garrett

Viewing Marc Garrett's TuRmOil is hardly anguish. Instead, expect a menu
miming a file tree, reminiscent of some of Alexi Shulgin's early work,
providing iconic links to popup DHTML animations. My favorite of the ten
offered works is Darkness, in which an SOS icon is superimposed over a
grayscale mirrored mushroom cloud. Clicking on the surface of the cloud
moves the SOS to your mouse position; the mouse down event drops the icon to
the bottom of the frame, where it bounces. Other pages make liberal use of
barcodes and faces, interspersing these loaded images with Dubuffet-inspired
graphics. Ten pieces speaking eloquently about the precarity of the
individual and the world around her, Garrett has captured the dominant
metaphors of our times and scripted them…with JavaScript. - Lewis LaCook.

Title: Retard Riot
Artist: Noah Lyon

Noah Lyon's work is energetic, visceral and direct. Graffiti like scrawlings
reflecting back to the viewer a punk existentialism that unashamedly points
out humanity's seemingly perpetual dysfunction. This honest and poetic
miliase of personal reasonings and experience, mixed up with America's own
confusions. Offer a realism that much art caught up in its own (high art)
mythology ignores at its own cost. A Picasso spirit lives on in Noah's work,
not consciously or by active reference but via a combination of brut
instinct, intimacy and intuitive play on various subject matters. It is
refreshing to view such work that is not worried whether it is accepted by
the art world, Noah has other and more important things to be getting on
with, like making art that exists on its own terms. - Marc Garrett.

Title: Guernica [cover up]
Artist: Neil jenkins

Created after hearing the news that a tapestry reproduction of Guernica,
Pablo Picasso's powerful anti-war painting, was concealed behind a blue
cloth and a row of flags at the U.N. Security Council offices as White House
envoy Colin Powell was making the United States case for war (05/02/03). A
UN spokesperson claimed that this was not censorship, and had been done to
provide a suitable backdrop for TV cameras, that would say 'UN'. The entire
speech is presented here, cutting through the UN blue, and revealing the
paintings' stark, tormented imagery and message. - Neil Jenkins.

In an act with extraordinary historical resonance, United Nations officials
covered up a tapestry reproduction of Pablo Picasso's anti-war mural
'Guernica' during US Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5
presentation of the American case for war against Iraq.
Picasso's painting commemorates a small Basque village bombed by German
forces in April 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The painter, in desolate
black, white and grey, depicts a nightmarish scene of men, women, children
and animals under bombardment. The twisted, writhing forms include images of
a screaming mother holding a dead child, a corpse with wide-open eyes and a
gored horse. The reproduction has hung outside the Security Council chamber
at UN headquarters in New York since its donation by the estate of Nelson A.
Rockefeller in 1985. As the council gathered to hear Powell on Wednesday,
workers placed a blue curtain and flags of the council's member countries in
front of the tapestry. By David Walsh, 8 February 2003. World Socialist Web
Site.

Title: Data, Dreaming
Review: Lewis LaCook on Cory Arcangel's latest piece

Seeing the computer as an anthropomorphic entity is nothing new. Hackers
have been known to pat their machines affectionately on the case, calling
them by familiar names. "Ole Martha's struggling with some low-RAM issues,"
they say. I myself have an affectionate name for my machine: I call her
Katherine, which is my girlfriend's middle name…

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Furtherfield is an non profit independent online platform for the creation,
promotion, and archiving of new work for public viewing and interaction.
Furtherfield collaborates with independent visual artists, digital/net
artists, writers, critical thinkers, musicians and noisemakers with a
special focus on work developed and produced outside the recognised
institutional support structures. We explore new and imaginative strategies
for communicating ideas and issues in a range of digital & terrestrial media
contexts.

Furtherfield's activities focus on presenting works online and organising
global, contributory projects, which exist simultaneously on the Internet,
the streets and public venues.
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