Exploration of creative territories shifting between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ as well as between the dimensions of the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the field of art. [01]

The intensity of each light is automatically controlled by the voice recording of a participant who speaks into a special intercom that is in the middle of the tunnel. Silence is interpreted as zero intensity and speech modulates the brightness proportionally, creating a morse-like code of flashes. Once a recording is finished, the computer plays it back as a loop, both in the light fixtures that are closest to the intercom as well as on an inline loudspeaker.

As new people participate, old recordings get pushed away by one position down the array of lights. So that the "memory" of the installation is always getting recycled, with the oldest recordings on the edge of the tunnel and the newest ones in the middle. At any given time the tunnel is illuminated by the voices of 75 visitors. Once 75 people participate after you, your own recording disappears from the tunnel, like a memento mori.[16]

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(...) An artwork in which the public is inscribed into a site is Lozano-Hemmer's Voice Tunnel (2013), a large-scale interactive installation that transformed the Park Avenue Tunnel in New York City. The project uses 300 theatrical spotlights that run along the walls and curved ceiling of the tunnel to create vertical columns of flashing light, as well as 150 loudspeakers arranged throughout the tunnel and operating in synchronicity with the blinking bulbs. The flashing of the lights gives visual form to and is controlled by recordings of people's voices that echo through the tunnel. At an intercom located in the middle of the tunnel, visitors can make a briet voice recording that is then translated into light, with silence being interpreted as zero intensity, and speech modulating the brightness proportionally in flashes. Recordings are played back as a loop, starting in the light fixtures closest to the intercom and the accompanying loudspeaker, then gradually being pushed down from position to position in the array of lights as other participants create recordings. After seventy-five recordings, the 'oldest' one disappears from the archive. As the tunnel lights up, the public's voices echo through it, creating a temporary 'memory' and narrative of thought fragments through modulated lights and sound. [16.1]

Was part of the “Flying Spy Potatoes” consists of an installation with three video projections on three slanted screens which are positioned on the floor of the gallery. Along with the projections there is also on display an inflated weather helium balloon (5 feet diameter); attached to wireless cam apparatus which is available to the public to take from the gallery ; a mission map; a log out book and 40 folders which are displayed on a table. Each folder contains a mission card, a copy of the rules of the game and a contract that should be signed between the player and the artist.

The helium balloon is a self-contained wireless mobile unit,[fig.18.2] light and easy to use which is armed with a wireless cam and a built in transmitter which records and processes visual and audio data which is continuously transmitted to a radio receiver which is located in a range of 1.000 meters. The captured data is downloaded and archived on digital video. The aerial view of the moving balloon /cam recordings have thread venture of Godzilla-cam perspective dislocations and that magical sense of being both above and within the slanted planes of urban reality. The balloon/cam is a kind of an all seeing eye which hacks reality and reveals it as continuous patterns of pixilated images , abstract patterns, electromagnetic frequencies and create the odd intensity of saturated greens and yellows which remains as defining.

These are some images captured with the eyes of Flying Spy Potatoes [fig.18.3] wireless surveillance cam. It’s a live surveillance cam hidden under the red helium balloon which records from above strange people doing strange hings while they are on mission with the balloon on 21st Street in Chelsea, New York. The camera is wirelessly connected to a radio transmitter and sends a live video stream to a computer which is then projected in one of the screens in the gallery. People in the gallery love surveillance and they love watching and taking pictures of other people who are on mission with the balloon/cam apparatus. There are some strange and cool things that go on. But remember this is all illicit, voyeuristic and occasionally illegal. [18]

Exerpt of an interview with Alexander R. Galloway for #artoffline (2015), a film directed by Manuel Correa. Interview by Manuel Correa. Photo by Anna Kasko, 2013.

MC Alex, I’m interested to see how philosophy as such has a certain take about the ways that more conventional art has been transcribed into the realm of the Internet; the vast majority of art is produced in an analogue way and thus becomes digital.

AG One of the things I’m trying to explore now is the possibility that philosophy and digitality might actually be the same thing. At least they appear to share a similar structure. The digital is about creating discrete units of things. The digital requires the division of things; it has to separate something that is undivided and make it divided. As Laruelle has suggested, traditional metaphysics does the same thing. That’s why artists and metaphysicians both talk about representation. Art is a “philosophical” undertaking in this fundamental sense. What I mean is that, if art is always world-bound — if art is a system of representation — then the artistic relation between an image and its original is analogous to the philosophical relation between body and soul or entity and essence. That’s the digital structure of metaphysics. So if traditional art is moving into a digital space, that might be the most natural thing it could do.

[...]

MC Do you think that works absorbed in the familiarity of the Internet loose their protocol of reverential respect? Why or why not?

AG A difficult question. The straightforward answer is yes. (But we’ll want to complicate that in a moment.) Consider Benjamin’s notion of the destruction of the aura. It’s certainly possible to observe such corruption or decay of aura. In the old fashioned sense, it can certainly be valuable to recreate the particularity or authenticity of certain experiences. Such approaches are increasingly valuable in a world where authenticity and particularity are devalued. But there is a different way to answer that question. I’m thinking of someone like Bernard Stiegler, or even Marshall McLuhan, and the way in which mankind’s relationship to technology is not absolute. The relationship is always provisional or local, and susceptible to evolution. The question is not “Is there some absolute distinction between mankind’s essence and a technological prosthetic alien to it?” That’s the wrong question. Instead we might investigate the gap, where it lies and how it moves over time. I can write with a pencil and not feel fatally corrupted by some alien technology. It’s a pencil; it has been integrated. [03]

The New York-based Olson combines performance, video, sound, drawing and installation to address cultural history and the evolution of technology. Also a curator, critic and cultural theorist, she studied fine art at Goldsmiths College-London, the history of consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her work has been presented in major museums and art spaces nationally and internationally.In 2007, Olson created a performance video, “Golden Oldies,” [14] commenting on the consumption and removal of new and outdated devices in relationship to the environment. In the 32-minute video, Olson established communication between analog equipment that included a boom box, a child's record player, vinyl records, VHS tapes, cassette tapes and CDs. She posted an excerpt of her video on YouTube and wrote, “Like the garbage that piles up as we upgrade our phones and computers, the detritus accumulated in these efforts gets blindly swept aside in this ultimately fruitless effort.” [14]

In another series, “Time Capsules,” [14.1]Olson created sculptures using cassette tapes painted in shimmering gold. The sculptures, reminiscent of minimal installations, were exhibited in site-specific assemblages resembling landfills or garbage piles, had become endangered units of time, rescued from elimination and painted gold in reclamation of their value. The “Time Capsules” series led to a broader body of work that addressed pollution produced by our upgrade consumer culture. Last spring, Olson had a solo exhibition at Bard College in New York. “Noise Pollution” exhibited works that dealt with concerns of increased informational “noise” and the largely hidden costs of technology on the natural environment. In “Monument to DJ Culture #2,” the artist created an installation of 63 gold-painted milk crates stacked seven crates high by three crates deep on a worn, warehouse pallet. [14.2]

Text Rain is an interactive installation in which participants use the familiar instrument of their bodies, to do what seems magical—to lift and play with falling letters that do not really exist. In the Text Rain installation participants stand or move in front of a large projection screen. On the screen they see a mirrored video projection of themselves in black and white, combined with a color animation of falling letters. Like rain or snow, the letters appears to land on participants’ heads and arms. The letters respond to the participants’ motions and can be caught, lifted, and then let fall again. The falling text will ‘land’ on anything darker than a certain threshold, and ‘fall’ whenever that obstacle is removed. If a participant accumulates enough letters along their outstretched arms, or along the silhouette of any dark object, they can sometimes catch an entire word, or even a phrase. The falling letters are not random, but form lines of a poem about bodies and language. ‘Reading’ the phrases in the Text Rain installation becomes a physical as well as a cerebral endeavor. [16]

The Net Art Anthology wants to retell “the history of net art from the 1980s through the present day” and “aims to address the shortage of historical perspectives on a field in which even the most prominent artworks are often inaccessible. The series takes on the complex task of identifying, preserving, and presenting exemplary works in a field characterized by broad participation, diverse practices, promiscuous collaboration, and rapidly shifting formal and aesthetic standards, sketching a possible net art canon.” As this mission statement shows, the initiative sits in between preservation, historiography and storytelling, thus mirroring Rhizome in its multiform nature of respected institution grounded on a community and with a focus on the preservation of digital, net-based art practices. Founded in 1996 as a mailing list, after a short-lived attempt to exist as a dotcom, in 1999 Rhizome turned no-profit and founded the ArtBase, which soon turned it into the largest collection of digital artworks ever, grown out of its community base through a mix of curatorial selection and submissions. [03]

Galloway and Rabinowitz were living in France at the time, where they had been introduced by philosopher Félix Guattari. Both artists shared an interest in telecommunications infrastructure—not just what is communicated, but how it is communicated—and they built a partnership in life and work.

While in France, the duo began to conceptualize what interaction across distance via satellite transmission might be like. However, they had failed to gain access to the technology itself. When the NASA open call was issued, they left for the US and began working on a proposal for artistic experiments to be carried out via satellite. After months of rehearsals, Satellite Artsultimately took place across four days, with performers at the Educational TV Center located on the grounds of the Catholic Archdiocese in Mountain View, California and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, linked by NASA satellite. [24]

“Satellite Arts... set up what the artists considered ‘alternative social worlds as laboratories for resocialization’ as places for experimentation and retraining, for repurposing mass media “as technologies of the self...” – Philip Glahn and Cary Levine

This new version of The Legible City (1989) encompasses all the experiences offered by the original version, but introduces an important new multi-user functionalty that to a large extent becomes its predominant feature. In the Distributed Legible City there are two or more bicyclists at remote locations who are simultaneously present in the virtual environment. They can meet each other (by accident or intentionally), see abstracted avatar representations of each other, and when they come close to each other they can verbally communicate with each other. While the Distributed Legible City shows the same urban textual landscape as the original Legible City, this database now takes on a new meaning. The texts are no longer the sole focus of the user's experience, but instead becomes the con_text (both in terms of scenery and content) for the possible meetings and resulting conversations (meta_texts) between the bicyclists. In this way a rich new space of co-mingled spoken and readable texts is generated. In other words the artwork changes from being merely a visual experience, into becoming a visual ambiance for social exchange between visitors to that artwork.[25]

Print can be considered as the quintes-sence of the web: it is distributing a smaller quantity of information available on the web, usually in a longer and much better edited form.

(...) sometimes indulge in something like a ‘miscalculation’ of the web itself — the ne-gotiation of this transduction is reducing the web to a finite printable dimension, denatu-ralising it. According to Publishers Launch Conferences’ cofounder Mike Shatzkin, in the next stage “publishing will become a function... not a capability reserved to an industry” (Shatzkin).

This ‘functional’ aspect of publishing, at its highest level, implies the production of con-tent that is not merely transferred from one source to another, but is instead produced through a calculated process in which con-tent is manipulated before being delivered. A few good examples can be found in pre-web avant-garde movements and experimental literature in which content was unpredict-ably ‘generated’ by software-like processes. Dada poems, for example, as described by Tristan Tzara, are based on the generation of text, arbitrarily created out of cut-up text from other works (Cramer).[28]

In the arts-based research project originalcopy we develop a working model that subjects the dichotomy of original and copy to a re-evaluation from a post-digital perspective and sheds light on this contradictory phenomenon. Our research focuses on the tensions between the supposed immateriality of digital technologies and their material manifestations by appropriating contemporary methods of copying and exposing them to artistic processes of transformation and translation.

In originalcopy we are less interested in the results of a recycling derived from the double act of copying copying strategies, rather the processes that lead to them. Our main question is how copying practices can be rendered productive for the investigation of the same. [31]

Shows a collection of new blank documents opened while starting a digital desktop or pad software, dealing with writing, drawing, painting or sketching. These print-screen pages show how computer technology relate to real sketch-book-look from very simple, empty looking pages to more well-equipped palettes of tools, offering to users many instruments and functions to make the creative process faster and less complicated.

Looking at these screen-shots in a book give us a feeling we've never experienced before. Looking at them in a horizontal position with artboards surrounded by tens of functions then sometimes reducing the size of an artboard to a very small area. It can raise a question of when imitation of reality goes too far — sometimes you can recognize almost a real note-book look, containing a leather cover or a part of an o-wire binding. At the same time the publication is also illuminating an archive of software that we might have never used before. In fact it still deals with digital culture and the popular obsession and with having your own sketchbook to make notes or just to record your creativity in the exact moment. [32]