mediatopia 2

[carlos katastrofsky]

> 

http://mediatopia.net 

Mediatopia.2 fresh! assembles an exciting mix of recent net-based work by a diverse group of neoteric artists, creatives and thinkers.  Their fresh, networked interfaces look to a variety of means to utilize the internet, as playground, platform or paintbrush.  Mediatopia.net is a recurring network mediated culture space for art, technology and writing.  We still believe in networked culture.  Mediatopia.net

Jessica Ivins
Carlos Katastrofsky
Michael Takeo Magruder
Jillian Mcdonald
Mike Mike
Carrie Paterson
Christina Ray and Dave Mandl
Geoffrey Thomas
Lara Bank
Aerostatic and Andrew Bucksbarg

Produced by Adhocarts.org, a non-profit arts organization
Curated by Lara Bank and Andrew Bucksbarg  

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
August 10th, 2005
 
Mediatopia.2 fresh!
http://www.mediatopia.net
 
Artists create art in cyberspace, but can you hang it on a wall?
 
Mediatopia.2 fresh! assembles an exciting mix of recent net-based work by a diverse group of neoteric artists, creatives and thinkers.  Their fresh, networked interfaces look to a variety of means to utilize the Internet, both as creative medium and as a channel to share and distribute their output.  The Internet, with its network functionality and potential for user interaction, is their creative playground:  a form to manipulate and a means of social or political expression.  Mediatopia.2 fresh! is a net-based opportunity for artists to gain exposure for their culture work. Mediatopia.2 fresh! is produced by Adhocarts.org, a non-profit media-arts organization.  Lara Bank and Andrew Bucksbarg worked together to curate a program from recent work submitted internationally that uses the Internet as a playground, platform or paintbrush.
 
Jessica Ivan’s Retrotype historically traces female representation in video games through an interface that allows the participant to personalize and question the object of their gaze.  Do you live in East L.A. and long to live closer to celebrities in a gated community?  Carlos Katastrofsky performs Neighborhood and Area Research for you, so you can discover who your IP address neighbors are in cyberspace.  On the Internet, distance is collapsed as ideologues are brought closer together.  Michael Takeo Magruder’s <event>, is an abstract filtering of headline news that reevaluates and deprograms information by re-visualizing it into a Buddhist-like flow.  Jillian McDonald’s interface art, Stand By Your Guns, blends our compulsion toward spectacle with elements of broadcast media, game play, the celebrity, masculinity and the gun.  What could be more powerful?  Take the complex genetic mixture and dispersion of humanity over time and location, composite this and then make an ideal copy.  Mike Mike’s commerce-like site asks us is this The Face of Tomorrow?  Carrie Paterson’s Everywhere at Once, and Not Just Once creates a twisted, fictional blog that chronicles the experiences of a girl in a boarding school-  “reader discretion advised.”  Psychogeography seeks to understand how our physical environment affects our emotions and behavior.  One Block Radius by Christina Ray and Dave Mandl is an obsessive documentation of a city block in Manhattan that creates a detailed archive of the area, blending media interface, database, surveillance and real reality programming.  Geoffrey Thomas’s quiet, contemplative works use game-like, animated environments and narrative to exemplify and make sense of moments of loneliness, loss and the tension between passionate response and the cool, scientific analysis in relations.  The curators, both artists in their own right, include samples of their own work on the site as well.
 
Together these disparate works signify the production, both singularly and collaboratively, of persons whose concerns go beyond the instance of capital and reach outward to the cultural center of what digital media can mean for human expression and communication.  Their work is a mirror before us that traces both our success and failure: together and separate in the network.  These words may wish to provide an overview or representation of their work, but fail to provide the one thing these artists considered as they created their work- your interaction.  This interaction forms a means to destabilize the relation of the author or creator, bringing in the user as an active director or participant in the process.
 
Artist’s work created for the Internet poses problems for persons, museums or galleries who would collect and display it.  Internet Art is not easily installed in these traditional spaces, and although digital information does not degrade, the technology that expresses it is constantly changing and upgrading. Software evolves, computers and their operating systems change, as well as progressive modifications to the human-computer interface, making it difficult to collect and archive this kind of work.  Net-based art is ephemeral under these circumstances. 
 
Artists who create “net.art,” have another problem at hand as well.  How do you create value for something that is distributed on a network and available to anyone with a computer and connection?  Historically, most art, aside from live performance, is based upon its being a one-of-a-kind object that maintains or even gains value as a collected piece.  This makes raising funds for or selling this work a difficult proposition.  Rachel Greene, author of Internet Art, writes, “Internet Art has less to do with objects of social prestige, and little, at least currently, to do with the cosmopolitan art businesses that thrive in New York, Cologne, London and other culture capitals.”  These limitations have given artists who work with the Internet a kind of freedom and revelry of exploration, as well as a particular tool for cultural and institutional critique.  Many artists see the Internet as a cause to really challenge fundamental elements of humanity:  identity, methods of communication, technology, politics and the institution.  These artists understand that people expanded by the Internet all over the world, are brought together in cyberspace.
 
The Internet was launched in 1989 by the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee.  As the use of the Internet grew, so did a community of artists who began to utilize it as a creative medium by the mid 1990s. Some of the early practitioners of Internet Art were Post-Communist East Europeans and organizations like the Ljudmila Media Center in Slovenia, supported by George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Much of the practice of Internet Art also saw support in media arts festivals in Europe during this time.  Internet Art has grown over the years as the Internet has seen increased use and is now getting more recognition from the traditional formats of museums and galleries.
 
Artists will continue to participate in the social uses of new technology.  They will take part in future network technologies and cultures, where the Internet will be augmented by shared virtual space.  People on the network will come together in synthetic worlds to create, communicate and recreate. This is already occurring in online multi-player games and environments like Second Life (http://secondlife.com), which include their own economies. Objects and land can be bought and sold and complex social transactions take place in these ephemeral, digital realms that exist on servers.  Some artists, such as Chris Burke, are hacking online multi-user games for other purposes, such as a talk show in game space (http://www.thisspartanlife.com).  

Artists have a long history of socially relevant communication from within the culture they are steeped.  Mediatopia.net and its supporting organization, Adhocarts, offer perspective to this process in the continually shifting phenomena of cyberspace.  Mediatopia.net is produced by Adhocarts (http://adhocarts.org), which sponsors a variety of expressions that fall on the lines of interconnecting disciplines, theories, technologies and cultures. Adhocarts.org is a non-profit collaboration supporting arts and culture by producing avenues for creative expression and thought both online and off.  Adhocarts.org was founded in 2000 and exists as a catalyst for work that uses technology and hypermedia, such as net.art, installation, digital video, writing and live art.
 
We still believe in net-based culture.  Mediatopia.net
 
Press contact:
Andrew Bucksbarg
Assistant Professor of Telecommunications
Indiana University
1229 East Seventh Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405-5501 USA
 
812-219-5310
Abucksba at indiana.edu