Next week from September 16-19th, San Jose will host the digital art biennial ZER01. Taking place at locations across the city, events will include a symposium on collaborative environmental art, films (with a program geared towards live cinema), public art projects throughout the city, and exhibitions at partnering institutions Anno Domini, MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, and South Hall centered around the biennial's theme "Build Your Own World" and much more.

Rhizome will show "Domain" as part of their film program, which will present live performances by Jeremy Bailey, Petra Cortright, Constant Dullaart, and JODI nightly at the Empire Drive-In inside South Hall. You can read more about the program below. If you are planning to attend the biennial, please join us!

We have recently arrived at the moment in human history when the networked computer is no longer the mystical facilitator of communication, entertainment, and research; it is an appliance, as pervasive as the microwave and nearly as boring. Developments in technology and network infrastructure have delivered a networked computing experience that is affordable, instantaneous, user-friendly, and richly interactive to a broad audience. What is most unique about this moment is not technology's inevitable deliverance of a widely accessible networked space, but the virgin cultural aptitude for navigating this space that has accompanied the computer's ascendance to the mundane.

This cultural shift towards a visceral acceptance of networked space has rendered the spectacle of its inner workings inert, and in the process has opened up tremendous possibilities for artists using these spaces to finally connect with an audience undistracted by the underlying mechanics of the interaction itself. This presents an interesting opportunity for both artist and audience alike as they can now approach the work on equal footing in a shared domain. The networked computer is as much the natural habitat of the contemporary internet user as it is the contemporary internet artist.

Domain presents four telematic performances by an international group of artists whose work is informed and mediated by the personal computer and the internet. The performances consist of live streaming video sourced directly from the artist's webcams or screencasts broadcast directly from the artist's computer. The casual nature in which this type of performance can now be pulled off echoes the process in which many contemporary internet artists create their work. Art can be made cheaply, quickly, and independently of institutional support; the bedroom is the new studio and the personal computer is the only tool they need to inform, create, and distribute their work.

Artists include: Jeremy Bailey, Petra Cortright, Constant Dullaart, and JODI

Is it still necessary to define art by intent and context? The gallery world would have us believe this to be the case, but the internet tells a more mutable story. Contrary to the long held belief that art needs intent and context, I suggest that if we look outside of galleries, we’ll find the actions, events and people that create contemporary art with or without the art world’s label.

Over the past 20 years, the theory Relational Aesthetics (referred to in this essay as RA) has interpreted social exchanges as an art form. Founding theoretician Nicholas Bourriaud describes this development as “a set of artistic practices that take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context”[1]. In reality, art erroneously known to typify RA’s theorization hasn’t strayed far from the model of the 1960’s Happening, an event beholden to the conventions of the gallery and the direction of its individual creator. In her essay Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, Claire Bishop describes Rikrit Tiravanija’s dinners as events circumscribed in advance, using their location as a crutch to differentiate the otherwise ordinary action of eating a meal as art[2]. A better example of the theory of RA succinctly put into action can be seen in anonymous group activities on the internet, where people form relations and meaning without hierarchy.

Started in 2003, 4Chan.org is one such site, and host to 50 image posting message boards, (though one board in particular, simply titled ‘/b/’, is responsible for originating many of the memes we use to burn our free time.) The site’s 700,000 daily users post and comment in complete anonymity; a bathroom-stall culture generating posts that alternate between comedic brilliance, virulent hate and both combined. Typically, the content featured is a NSFW intertextual gangbang of obscure references and in-jokes where images are created, remixed, popularized and forgotten about in a matter of hours. 4Chan keeps no permanent record of itself, making an in the moment experience the allure of participation. For all of the memes that have leaked into our inbox from it, 4Chan maintains a language, ethics and set of activities that would be incomprehensible to the unfamiliar viewer. Induction to /b/’s world is not fortified and understanding it merely requires Google searching its litany of acronymated terms or participating regularly enough to find out for yourself.

I met with sisters Sarah and Lara Grant of Felted Signal Processing the other week at their Brooklyn apartment. Felted Signal Processing is an ongoing project, which came out of their individual research as graduate students in NYU’s ITP program. Sarah entered the program to further her skills in new media and Lara went to learn how to program, play with hardware and generally learn the electronic side to apply to her interactive fashion. Now graduated, they have teamed together up in their Felted Signal Processing project, which allows them to explore their joint passion for soft circuitry and wearable technology. Together, they build colorful, handmade felt interfaces that allow users to manipulate sound through physical interaction such as pulling, scrunching or stroking. Most of their interfaces are built to output sound, but they are also interested in the development of new materials and techniques for fabricating soft sensors for interfaces that can be hooked up to a variety of outputs. Lara has been felting for 7 years, and they explained that felt is their “dream medium.” Sarah was the first of the two to apply the medium to soft circuitry; the name “Felted Signal Processing” actually came from her thesis, where she hacked a guitar pedal and integrated conductive felt into the circuit, letting users squeeze and scrunch the material in order to literally shape sound. Once Lara embarked on her thesis, she chose to develop a skill set of techniques to create and control variable resistance in soft circuitry. Sarah, a programmer with a background in new media art and a long standing interest in sound, focuses on the software and hardware side of their projects while Lara, who spent years working in fashion and textiles with an emphasis in conceptual, interactive design, handles the logistical side of interface and soft circuit design. They explained that once they start developing and producing their projects, they draw from their individual strengths and skill sets, where they share equal responsibilities and interests in all aspects of the projects creatively and technically.

The felt works as a variable resistor, meaning it doesn’t have fixed resistance and its conductivity can fluctuate when plugged into the circuit. In order to attain this property in soft circuitry, FSP designs with a variety of natural wools and metallic wools, as well as using conductive threads, yarns and fabrics. Merino wool is combined through with steel wool through a process called carding, in which the two materials are essentially combed together to achieve a blend. The material is then turned into durable textile by dry felting with barbed needles or by using a wet felting technique that involves hot water, soap, and pressure.

On the electronics side, Sarah and Lara breadboard all their circuits, making it easier for them to experiment. Once they find a stage in the circuit that they think would be interesting to let the user play with, they replace the hard resistor, capacitor or pot with the soft resistor, or the felt sensor, by connecting the textiles directly to the board.

Sarah and Lara first showed me this pink interface, which I had also seen briefly at the ITP thesis show this past Spring. This pink interface uses a handmade stroke sensor, housed in the tendrils that are designed to invite people to pinch and stroke it. Each tendril is made of resistive and conductive thread stitched onto pieces of felt and embedded within the casing. There is more resistance at the bottom and less at the top, so pulling the tendril upwards increases the intensity of the sound, hooked up to a sound producing circuit. The tendrils also respond to pinching, where each pinch along its length locates a specific place on the linear path.

On the back of the felt square are alligator clamps that connect the signal from the circuits to an octave divider. The octave divider regulates the input frequency and outputs in various octaves, and this output is then plugged into the 555 timer, which makes basic square waves. This signal is then sent to a speaker, so you can hear it.

For their new project, they are building a quilt-like structure that will operate like one large modular analog synth. Sarah and Lara showed me one square of this structure.

These patches represent one module, and work as one circuit. There is an input and output on both the top and the bottom, and a stretch sensor made of crocheted wool connects these two with snaps. The crocheted wool cord is a stretch sensor – meaning that if pulled or stretched, it regulates the frequency of electricity and therefore manipulates the sound. Like the tendrils on the pink square, it is a variable resistor.

Once the project is complete, it will operate like a grid. There will be multiple patches like this – and the crocheted wool cords can be used to connect modules, shifting the sound around the grid. Additionally, as variable resistors, the cords themselves can be pulled and stretched to change the sound.

Lara also discussed the similarities between the DIY culture of felting and that of electronics. She hopes that these communities will pick up the techniques used in Felted Signal Processing, and towards this end, started putting tutorials online and is currently considering creating kits so that people can make their own soft circuits. For those who may want to learn soft circuitry in person, the Grants will be giving a workshop during the upcoming In/Out Fest happening on September 17th and 18th at the Tank in New York City. The subject of their workshop is textiles and electronics, and they will be teaching various techniques of soft circuitry while instructing participants on how to connect the textile to a circuit.

Thank you Sarah and Lara for the visit! Be sure to check their site for upcoming projects and announcements.

Shadow, Glare explores such experiential disruptions through a subtle visual intervention: Without altering the computer's normal operations, the program renders a morphing series of translucent forms that seem to float between the screen's real surface and the immaterial desktop. This simulation can blend unobtrusively with any actual shadows that happen to be cast on the screen; users may continue to work or browse while only peripherally aware that the program is running. But the slowly evolving forms can also occlude the desktop and interrupt the user's focus. To Shirreff, these subtle shifts in attention characterize the experience of working at a computer: "Time evaporates, and while at points I'm engaged, for the most part I'm folded into the experience, while somehow still scanning its surface." Unlike an object in an art gallery designed for close observation, Shadow, Glare operates between the multiple levels of awareness encouraged by a computer interface.

When Orpheus’ beloved Eurydice dies, he cajoles his way into the underworld with his musical charms and his lyre. Wanting her but not her shade, he cannot forbear looking back to physically see her and so loses her forever. In this modern day Orphean tale, an anonymous narrator also desperately searches for a lost love. Rather than the charms of the lyre, contemporary technological tools, Google Street View and Google Earth, beckon as the pathway for our narrator to regain memories and recapture traces of his lost love. In the film, they are as captivating and enthralling as charming as any lyre in retrieving the other: at first they might seem an open retort to critics of new technology who bemoan the lack of the tangible presence of the other in our interactions on the Internet.

Our narrator remembers that once, with her back turned while facing the Adriatic Sea, a Google Street View car drove by and took a picture of his beloved, who detested being photographed, without her realizing it. Our narrator cherishes this photograph and the entire relationship becomes encapsulated in the screen capture replacing all other experiences and memories. Soon it is not enough. Our narrator cannot imagine that, in a world where everything is recorded, that someone could completely disappear. In daily systematic searches for photographs of the nameless other, Google Street View and Google Earth allow him to move seamlessly through vast detailed three-dimensional space. This extraordinary geographical and social exploration is favored by Google satellite images, user-created 3D renderings of Stonehenge and Machu Picchu and Street View panoramas of favorite vacation spots. As an undifferentiated series of cultural, historical and contemporary symbols float together or follow one another in rapid succession, in a world where Dutch anthropologists discover pre-Socratic fragments on Turkish islands, perhaps we come to wonder as to the significance of anything and the place of tradition and history itself. Unlike Orpheus, our narrator is not seeking for his lost love but for photos of his love, he yearns for records of the relationship not the woman herself or the relationship itself. In the ultimate irony when he returns to the original photograph, it has been removed. By getting as close to possible to the world through technology, has our narrator not unwittingly distanced himself from this world? But maybe even more than a doomed quest, does not this whirlwind tour of an individual’s personal history and the world’s cultural history, this modern tale of loss, retrieval and loss again, expose that the change in our consciousness has preceded the change in our technology?

“Wherever I go, there I am” is the old adage, be it Yogi Berra or the Buddha. The detached gaze of a satellite image or an automatic Street View camera confronts a human consciousness whose ability to seek connectedness and meaning has already been compromised. Contemporary technological tools simultaneously open and close vistas on our inner and outer worlds.

16777216 is a new online work by Richard S. Mitchell, a San Francisco-based artist with a background in video. 16777216 is viewable through the Jancar Jones Gallery's website from August 28th until September 4th, click here to see it. The work consists of over 16.7 million frames, each a color in the RGB color model, displayed at 25 frames per a second. Colors are displayed when the web browser synchronizes with the server, where the colors slowly move from black towards white.

Your project 16777216 launches on the Jancar Jones Gallery's website this week - can you talk a little more about this project - what are you trying to achieve with this work?

I've been interested in using the Web as a medium for art for a long time. By medium I mean the place, center, and means of production, and not simply as a way to distribute work produced elsewhere. One early idea was a dynamic HTML spinning beach ball, using the inherent capabilities of a Web browser to display color and change its display over time, even without interaction from a user. I didn’t follow through on the beachball because I felt it was too much a one-liner, not multi-dimensional.

Issues surrounding sequencing, series, and serialization have been a major point in my video work for several years now: including numbers, text, and colors (from color sample sheets, etc.). Obviously, the RGB system is a numbered sequence of colors with many possible routes through it depending on how you map the total number of colors, a 24-bit number, to each of the 8-bit channels, which are semi-independent.

My goal with 16777216 is, on the one hand, to make tangible certain aspects of the computer’s representation of reality and, on the other, to produce a work pleasing to look at and contemplate.

What are some of the techniques you've used in your video work to address serialization and sequencing? Are your videos analog or digital - does this difference in format come into the conversation at all?

At this point my videos are entirely digital. I am striving, however, for an aesthetic that relates to film but isn't merely imitating it. In my latest video Zing, all the images are digital but I processed them only in ways analogous to film processing: double exposure, negative/positive, fades and dissolves, looping, etc. I uploaded 'Zing' to my website today.

I scan a lot of stuff and use scripting in Photoshop to generate the video frames. The material I scan ranges from 8, 16, and 35mm film to sheets of plastic or paint. I'm also partial to things which form series like color samples and color correction cards. I collected my bus transfers for several years and used them in a count down sequence, mimicking the countdown you see on video/film. I also use Max/MSP Jitter for audio and visual processing.

I still collect images and objects that have some property of sequence. I'm also turning my attention to close examination of things and patterns around me---common things, visual and audio---that I can investigate, speed up, slow down, magnify, and convert to sequences.

You had mentioned in our correspondence the 1966 essay by Bruno Munari "12,000 Different Colours"- how does this essay connect with 16777216?

“Red, green, yellow, blue, white, brown, violet, orange, turquoise, grey … a list of colors such as this ends almost as soon as it has begun, but there are in fact twelve thousand colours in existence, like cockleshells all in a row. Think of it. Maybe it is not possible to tell them all apart, but they are there all the same. They exist in the catalogue of an American company which produces plastics, and their purpose is to guarantee a constant production that will always satisfy the needs of the market….

“How does one arrive at such a vast number of colours? There are various methods…. So we may in theory set about obtaining a great number of colours in the following way: let us imagine a red which contains not even the most infinitesimal quantity of yellow, blue, or other colour. Take this red … and paint a disc as big as a penny on a very long strip of paper. Add one drop of black to the red and paint another disc. Then another drop, another disc—and so on until the red has turned black. On the same strip, working towards the other end, paint other red discs, but this time progressively lightened by the addition of white, one drop at a time. By the time we have finished we will be extremely tired and our strip of paper will be several miles long. We can then repeat the operation starting with another red, for example with one drop of yellow added to the original pure colour. Then we start with a red with two drops of yellow added….”
—Bruno Munari. Design as Art. 1966.

When I read the Munari essay it seemed a perfect fit, strategy, or solution, to bringing out the properties of computer color and display we don't normally notice—the huge number of colors and their sequence and structure, and how they are tied to numbering/counting. I wanted to reveal this, to make it palpable, tangible. Something you can watch.

In the past, you've worked primarily in film and photography - when did you decide to also implement the internet into your practice? Have you worked on other online projects?

I have been working on Web stuff for a long time. The first website I built, in 1995, was to display works by me and other artists involved in a group I belonged to called untitled. As the number of artists on the site grew, the problem of keeping the data up to date and correct led to my interest in content management development. I had been working as a programmer since the mid 80's and was familiar with databases. So it seemed natural to use a database to manage the content of a site. (Incidentally, I'm an artist who took up programming, not vice versa. I went to college intending to major in chemistry but graduated with a degree in fine art/painting and almost a minor in music.)

It strikes me there are two ways of using the Web for artistic purposes: as a form of production and/or as the means of distribution. My early efforts focused on digitizing existing works and publishing them on the Web. One could also create the works digitally, but that site of creation is still outside the browser. I wanted to use a partnership between the page code and the browser itself as the site of creation. As I say this, it seems rather difficult to assign clear boundaries to where creation takes place. The idea arises in my head; I code it, test it, code it some more; I distribute it over the internet; the browser parses the code and displays the work. Is there an analogy here with painting or film? Or is video art more analogous? In this case it’s self-generating, purely iconic, i.e. with no indexical or symbolic dimension.

16777216 uses the Web for both production and distribution: the piece 'performs' in a web browser, is distributed via the Web, and is synched through the server. No matter where a user/viewer is, the 'performance' happens at the same time, discounting network latency and inaccurate clocks on clients.

This sculpture generates a three scene narrative with the scene lengths and order controlled by a mechanical randomizing mechanism which is also part of the sculpture. All video and audio switching occurs via mechanical switches.

With this latest work, the Texas-based artist duo breaks new ground in the development of their sophisticated "story-telling machines". Cliff Hanger's narrative is assembled from five separate scene-generating contraptions that output timed segments of a choreographed black and white "movie". The atmosphere of their work is akin to Ansel Adams and Hiroshi Sugimoto photography imbued with early David Lynch film noir.

The creation of these works is a collaborative process between the artists: Shore develops the mechanics and the set-scenes, while Fisher programs the microchips and composes the soundtracks using original compositions, digital audio samples and mechanically operated instruments. The combination of all these elements results in a poetic complexity that is both surreal and cinematic.

Dream Sequence is a two-channel video installation in which a series of dream images from Jenn and Kevin respectively are seen rotating over our sleeping heads.

I'm in the Bay Area this week, and I stopped by Important Projects in the Rockridge area of Oakland. Started by SAIC grads and recent Chicago transplants Jason Benson, Sean Buckelew and Joel Dean, Important Projects is run out of the top floor of their house. It reminded me of some of New York's pocket-sized exhibition spaces I've discussed here on Rhizome, like Art Since the Summer of '69. All the exhibits at Important Projects last for four weeks, and so far, they've organized seven shows in total.

They are currently showing Michelle Ceja's M O M E N T U M until September 10th. A fully immersive installation accompanied by a continually building ambient sound loop, the work seemed to deliberately intensify one's sense of claustrophobia and confusion. In that sense, it felt like an enclosed physical version of Ceja's project Silicon Velocity for Jstchillin, while the use of black paint, lights and mirrors recalled Banks Violette's sculptures, but on a smaller scale. I took some shots of the show, see below.

OFF BEAT REPEAT is a pattern making machine developed and designed by Sally Thurer and Mylinh Nguyen with the help of Dan Michaelson.

Montreal's art and science organization the Daniel Langlois Foundation announced a new collection of online materials for Canadian artist David Rokeby's work Very Nervous System (1983-), an interactive sound installation that reacts to the movement of visitors. The work has developed over the years, and has exhibited in many contexts. This particular collection of documentation is interesting because they bring in the audience's response to the work, through a series of interviews. You can read more about the project and their approach in the excerpt below from the "Introduction to the Collection" by Caitlin Jones and Lizzie Muller.

This is the second documentary collection that we have created for artworks by David Rokeby. In 2007 we produced a collection for the artwork Giver of Names (1991-), through which we developed a documentary approach to media art that captures the relationship between the artist’s intentions and the audience’s experience or, as we have described it, “between real and ideal” (1). The aim of this strategy is to acknowledge the fundamental importance of audience experience to the existence of media artworks and to create a place for the audience within the documentary record.

We believe this approach offers a productive way to reconcile how media artworks exist in the world and how they are represented in an archival context. In recent publications, we have begun to refer to the product of this approach as an “Indeterminate Archive”: a collection of materials that provides multiple perspectives of the work, as well as multiple layers of information, held together with—but not secondary to—the idea of the artist's intent (2). This indeterminate archive, we have argued, captures the mutability and contingency of the artwork’s existence, creating a more, not less, “complete” account. For a full explanation of how we developed this approach as well as a fuller discussion of the issues surrounding documentation, archives and audience experience, please see the introduction to our 2007 collection for the Giver of Names on the Daniel Langlois Web site (3).

The invitation to produce a second collection for Rokeby’s Very Nervous System (1981- ) came from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research in Linz, Austria. This artwork is a particularly interesting case study for the Indeterminate Archive for two reasons. Firstly, it offers an unmatched demonstration of the importance of experience in media art. Very Nervous System is, as many audience members pointed out in our interviews with them, essentially an empty room until someone walks in and activates it. It is a work that is brought into being very literally through experience.

Secondly, it is a seminal work in the history of media art, with a lifespan of more than 28 years. Its celebrity and longevity pose some particularly interesting questions about documentation and contextualisation of media artworks over time and through change. The Very Nervous System’s celebrity makes it a fascinating focus from the point of view of the relationship between real and ideal. The work is, for many, one of the first successful artistic experiments in gestural, embodied interaction. An enormous number of texts have been written about it, and many curators and critics of media art have read about it without ever having experienced it themselves. This notion of an “ideal” Very Nervous System has, therefore, a powerful role within the discourse of media art. This begs the question of how the “real” individual experience of the work, here and now, relates to this powerful ideal.

A little shameless self promotion, guys. Nick Hasty, Rhizome's Director of Technology, has proposed a panel on "Emerging Trends in Internet Art" for SXSW Interactive in 2011. The panels are selected by votes - see a little description of the panel below, and vote here. Note: Voting ends 11:59 CDT on Friday, August 27th and you must register to vote!

Artists working with the Internet have to adapt, adopt, and respond to a continually developing medium with ever expanding potential. In this panel, we'll talk with leading artists about their practice and the current state of Internet art. Artists will discuss how recent developments, like the boom in online video, the proliferation of social media, mobile technology, and introduction of HTML5, has prompted new artistic strategies and aesthetics. The conversation will foreground how artists are some of the first to experiment with, and think through new possibilities and limits of, new technologies. Rhizome is a leading organization dedicated to Internet art. Founded in 1996, the organization has tracked and supported the development of this field since its inception. Rhizome supports artists working at the furthest reaches of technological experimentation as well as those responding to the broader aesthetic and political implications of new tools and media. We are affiliated with and based out of the New Museum in New York.