Tag: sawad brooks
Categories
Bowling Alley
Website artists Sawad Brooks + Beth Stryker + Christa Erickson
In conjunction with Bowling Alley installation commissioned by the Walker Art Center 1995-96 and conceived by Shu Lea Cheang.
Categories
Invertigo
INVERTIGO stages a blurring of boundaries in and between bodies in disparate spaces, between the public space of the gallery and the electronic network of the World Wide Web.
Upon entering the gallery, the viewer encounters the screen space of a video projection which is inhabited by the ethereal presence of individuals on the web. With the presence of each new visitor to the web site, a trace of a new body appears in the projection. Each ‘webpresence’ is also marked by numerical figures, traces of individuals’ IP addresses, scrolling on a suspended monitor on the gallery’s far wall.
In the physical space of the gallery, a solitary swing acts as the main component and driving mechanism of the piece, spanning ‘real’ and virtual space, and acting as a feedback mechanism between the two. Through the physical act of swinging, audience members edit the video images that appear on the video screen. As they move, the images shift between representations that evoke feelings of psychological distance and more intimate ones, flickering between a fast cut and a soft caress. Each swing arc marks time and the rhythm of movement, while conjuring up cinematic fragments and the sensations of bodily feedback. The web ‘screen’ space mimics this editing and generates ‘webpresence’ in the gallery.
Webpresence is marked by a rush of black-and-white bodies across the scrims. A fleeting IP address trace on a monitor opposite the scrims also records this virtual body. The gallery viewer becomes an editor of the imagery, collapsing landscapes. Webpresence interrupts the gallery editing.
Two spy cameras surveyed the state of the gallery installation. A camera mounted spy-style on the ceiling sent an overview to the web. A camera on the swingtop translated the body-motion of each viewer. Their points of view were uploaded and saved every 15 seconds to break-down activity in the gallery frame-by-frame.
Images from moments on several days were archived on the invertigo website Moving the cursor over the frames switched points of view.
During the exhibition, this applet revealed the presence of web viewers and counted the number of swings in the gallery. Webpresence was marked by an IP address that scrolled up and faded away.
The applet was visible to people in the gallery on a monitor suspended opposite the scrims. It was also visible from the website (accessible in a corner of the gallery or remotely).
Categories
Illaminations
Online: http://netarts.org/mcmogatk/1996/us10kir/index.html [running, but browser doesn’t display properly]
ILLAMINATIONS:
“bricoleurs” (jack-of-all-trades), construct things (the world) with what is handy. The”engineer” plans everything from scratch. an engineer god made organic nature. Organic structure is deep, even hidden. Out of “bricks” we build walls and layers–laminations. The world is not inviolable, but always already violated–by the hand of man, the social, the bricoleur, jack, jill, technology.
TOOLS AND TOYS, dolls and cutouts: collages appropriate the found, the manufactured. Up close we see the layers. Structures. Architectures. What is appropriated is the mechanical brushstroke. “‘The hand’ is closer to intention than the machine.” This is said out of stupidity and out of fear. The fear is that the machine being further from intention (ours?) will gain its own.
Categories
DissemiNET
Walker Art Center Digital Studies CollectionDesigned as a Java-based client-server system, dissemiNET is a curated and public participatory system conceived to elaborate a diaspora on the web. Creating a repository for personal and social memory, dissemiNET uses Internet technologies to give visual form to the transactions (deposits, retrievals, and loss)through which we experience memory. On a boundary between identity (i.e. national and personal) and its dispersal over the web, dissemiNET is conceived to trace connections between people in terms of “digi-texts,” creating a cross-linked, communal storytelling space. Drawing parallels between diasporas and the dispersal of meaning over the web, dissemiNET provides spaces for people to recall and recollect, gathering there to re-tell stories about their own experiences with homelessness and dispersal. Overtime, dissemiNET has become a collection of such stories of errancy
1 + 1 is an artwork for the internet. It is created as a growing exposition of reflections on the Tower of Babel, an allegory about the architectural origin of telecommunication technology.
Java, Perl, and Wordnet (www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/) were technologies used to create this work.
To view, the Java applet requires a Java-enabled web browser, such as Internet Explorer 5, and an Internet connection.