LABcyberspaces, first initiative launched by the Projects Office
10 out of the 133 entries received go on display at one of the opening shows at Laboral Centre for Art and Creative Industries
LABcyberspaces is an open international initiative fostering reflections on the connection between art, technology and industry. It gets the Projects Office programme off to a start and will be materialised in the Cyberspaces exhibition, a show in the LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries opening programme , planned for 30th March
A total of 133 entries from 26 countries were received at the Projects Office: 53 from Spain and 15 from Asturias-based artists or art teams. With this initiative LABoral wants to provide an instant view of the current state of Internet art, while intending to vindicate or rethink the notion of cyberspace as a universal meeting place and underscore its community aspects.
According to the Unesco, cyberspace is a new human and technological environment for expression, information and economic transactions. It consists of individuals from all countries, cultures and languages, of all ages and professions, providing and requiring information; a worldwide network of computers interconnected through telecommunication structures, allowing the information circulating to be digitally processed and transmitted.?
The term "cyberspace" was coined by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer, published in 1984, although he had already used it in Burning Chrome, published by Omni magazine in 1982.
One of the most important cyberpunk writers and thinkers, Bruce Sterling, claims that cyberspace is not something specific to our days, and that it has been around for quite some time. For him, its origin can be traced to the invention of the telephone. Cyberspace is the place where telephone conversations take place. It is not the actual telephone, but the place in-between telephones. That is, rather than something tangible, it is something conceptual. Nowadays, cyberspace is understood as a virtual place or an eminently social space: a place for universal communion.
The jury will select the 10 works judged most capable of establishing a discourse on the notion of cyberspace, and comprising an exhibition proposal opening up a debate and reflecting the situation of this shared space.
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 who 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.
