Exhibition Cyberspaces reflects on the virtual over and above the use of internet as a tool
A jury comprising Rosina Gómez-Baeza, Christiane Paul, Gerfried Stocker and Alex Adriaanssens selected 10 among the 133 entries submitted
The invitation to reflect on the virtual fact beyond the use of Internet as a tool, is the nexus linking the 10 works on view at the exhibition Cyberspaces, one of the four shows planned for the opening of LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries. The other three are Feedback, Gameworld and Extensions-Anchors.
A jury made up by the director of LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries, Rosina Gómez-Baeza; the Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Christiane Paul; the Artistic Director of Ars Electronica Center and Artistic Co-Director of the Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria, Gerfried Stocker; and the Director of the V2, Institute for the Unstable Media de Rotterdam, Alex Adriaansens, announced the results of this international competition launched through the Web.
A total of 133 entries from 26 countries were received: 53 of them from Spain and 15 from Asturias-based artists or art teams. With this initiative LABoral wanted to give an instant overview of the current state of Internet art, while vindicating or rethinking the notion of cyberspace as a universal meeting place and underscoring its community aspects.
The ten works selected are:
·Alerting Infraestructure! Created by: Jonah Brucker-Cohen; Ireland. Reflects the prevalence of virtual spaces over real ones. Every time the user clicks on the LABoral website, a pneumatic jackhammer is activated and hits a point of the building?s wall.
www.coin-operated.com/projects
·I?m a net artist. Created by: Área3; Spain. An animation video that attempts to respond to the question: What is a net artist? The work uses an ironic, Iconoclast and postpunk style in combination with sound reactive animations.
·Logo. Hallucination. Created by: Christophe Bruno. Ireland. In the era of copyright and copyfight, Christophe Bruno uses technologies of image recognition in order to detect subliminal forms of logos or emblems, hidden in the visual environment or in the totality of Internet images.
http://www.logohallucination.com
·The Sheep Market. Created by: Aaron Koblin. United States. This work appropriates Amazon?s ?Mechanical Turk? online employment system to create a parallel version with a sheep made with simple drawing tools.
·www.re-move.org. Created by: Lia. Austria. Reflects the union between author and user when it comes to exercising control on event. A complex interaction, with generative visual and aural experiences. www.re-move.org
·Cartografía Táctica del Estrecho de Gibraltar. Created by: hackitectura.net and indymedia Estrecho. Spain. This piece is grounded in pioneering documentary research presented at the first Fadaiat event. http://mcs.hackitectura.net/tiki-index.php
·El giroeneleje. Created by: Gabriel González. Spain. A stereoscopic experience of non linear narrative ensuring immersion into this particular form of conceiving cyberspace. www.4thwish.euda.org/elgiro_old
·Amazon Noir- The big book crime. Created by: Ubermorgen.com, Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico. France, United States, Italy. The starting point for this work is the stealing of copyrighted books from Amazon using sophisticated technology. The work represents a subliminal fight within the world of technology, a legal conflict and revenge, using a loophole in the protection against the robbery of 3000 books. www.amazon-noir.com
·Deconstructed Music #1. Created by: RAN (Carlos Navarro, Ramón Prada and Javier Ideami). Spain. This is the only selected project created by Asturias-based artists. In it, its authors propose an initiative for the creation of a new and infinite musical piece based on the modification and combination of other previously existing ones by collective and simultaneous participation in a web environment.
·Seven Mile Boots. Created by: Belfo-Berger-Pichlmair. Finland. The centrepieces of this work are shoes equipped with wireless connections, microprocessors, amplifiers and loudspeakers, for walking through both physical and virtual Internet environments.
www.randomseed.org/sevenmilesboots
The exhibition Cyberspaces will occupy Platform 2 at LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries, and is due to open on 30th March.
The design developed for the show by Quero-Kawamura-Ganjavian assigns each artist with an individualised exhibition space, a kind of cocoon measuring 5-20 m2, and with a variable height. The common thread of the works will be the use of ?new media?. Visitors will access to a general overview of the tempos, rhythms and atmospheres of the whole of the show before entering the individual cocoons.
Cyberspaces is an initiative launched by the Projects Office with the aim of fostering a reflection o the connections existing among art, technology and industry.
Members of the jury
The committee in charge of selecting the works to be exhibited at Cyberspaces, chaired by Rosina Gómez-Baeza, Director of LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries, is made up by three international experts that have played a major and direct role in the development and evolution of cyberspace as a concept, as a place and as a space for art experimentation. Those experts are: Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of de New Media Art at the Whitney Museum of American ARt, NYC; Gerfried Stocker, director of Ars Electronica Linz; and Alex Adriansens, director of V2 Centre in Rotterdam.
Rosina Gómez-Baeza
Director of LABoral, Art and Industrial Creation Centre, Director of the 1st Architecture, Art, and Landscape Biennial of the Canaries, and President of Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo.
Graduate in Literature and English Philology from Cambridge University, Gómez-Baeza studied Pedagogy in London and French History and Civilisation in Paris. She has worked as a teacher and as a translator. She worked in Siasa as a coordinator of conferences and exhibitions. Later, she assumed the Executive Commercial Direction and Development Direction in IFEMA. For two decades she was Director of ARCO. She is a member of the Culture Council of the Regional Government of Madrid, of the Council of Arts and Sciences of the Principality of Asturias, and of the Board of Trustees of CGAC, Santiago de Compostela. She has been distinguished with many awards: Ibero-American Cooperation; Distinction to European Excellence; Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño; Cruz Chevalier de l?Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; Ciudad de Madrid International Projection Award.
Christiane Paul
Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and editor-in-chief of Intelligent Agent, a resource dedicated to digital art. She has written widely on new media art, and her book Digital Art (part of the World of Art series by Thames & Hudson, UK) was published in July 2003. She teaches in the MFA Computer Art Department at the School of Visual Arts (New York) and has lectured internationally on art and technology. She also directs Artport, the online portal of the Whitney Museum, dedicated to Internet art, and has curated exhibitions on new media at the Whitney and other exhibition centres in the USA and internationally.
Gerfried Stocker
Artistic Director of the Ars Electronica Center; Artistic Co-Director, Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, AUSTRIA. Media artist and musician. Since 1995 is artistic director of the Ars Electronica Center and with Christine Schöpf, artistic co-director of Ars Electronica Festival. In 1991 he founded x-space, a team for the creation of multidisciplinary projects. In this context, he has developed many installations and performance projects in the field of interaction, robotics and telecommunications. Stocker has also been in charge of the creation of a number of radio, television and Internet programmes, as well as of the organisation in 1995 of Horizontal Radio, a worldwide radio program and network.
Alex Adriaansens
Alex Adriaansens studied at the Royal Academy of Art and Design in Den Bosch. He then started working as a media artist. In 1981 he was one of the founders of V2_, of which he is presently the director. V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, is an interdisciplinary centre for art and media technology, and is located in Rotterdam since 1994. Alex Adriaansens is a member of the Advisory Board of Transmediale, Berlin, the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam and the Piet Zwart Institute MA programme in Media Design Research in Rotterdam. He is a member of several commissions for international funding programms and juries for international media events. He has been an advisor for different institutes, arts organisations and local and national governments in Europe, South Korea, Japan, China, Great Britain, Canada and Taiwan.
