The exhibition shows video works by the artist Nina Sobell in an inter-relative performative context.
During the exhibition Nina Sobell creates a sculptural installation in an open atelier space as an in-gallery project. “Working with time, perception, exploring cognitive theories as art, led me further into the non-static world of video. At this point, I needed to retreat into an intimate personal dialogue, making sculpture for video camera space only, compressing time and private experience.” - Nina Sobell

Nina Sobell pioneered the use of video, computers, and interactivity in art, as well as performance on the Web. Since 1969, when she first used video to document participants’ undirected interactions with her sculptures, she investigates the extent to which video enables her to manipulate the relation between time and space, and to create a vortex for human experience, in which the mediated event coincides with public experience, memory and relationships. Groundbreaking projects include ParkBench and VirtuAlice, and the ongoing Interactive Encephalographic Brainwave Drawings. Sobell presented Brainwave Drawings and Videophone Voyeur (1977) at Joseph Beuys’ Free International University at Documenta 6. She received awards from the NEA and NYSCA for her pioneering video performance art in the 1970’s. Her work has been shown throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. An award-winning printmaker and figurative sculptor, and avid improvisational guitarist and keyboardist, she can be seen sculpting Emily in the ParkBench Performance Archives and heard playing music there as well. During the years 2007 - 2008 Nina Sobell is Artist in Residence at Location One in New York, supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her works are included in the exhibition California Video at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2008.

As a New York-based artist, Nina Sobell has produced a broad body of work embracing various themes, strategies, and mediums, including video, performance, installation, sculpture and live TV. A participant in the feminist performance movement of the 1970s, her conceptually based work ranges from taboo performances and museum installations to interactive video matrixes for public participation. Sobell began using video in the 1970s as a way to study spectators’ interactions with her sculptures, which were placed anonymously in public areas. Exploring video-sculpture, Sobell was intrigued with creating psycho-social transformations via video technology, making environments and mobile structures to physically engage the viewer. Pursuing video’s relation to the subconscious led Sobell to her well-known Brainwave Drawing piece, in which a screen monitor registered the brainwaves of two people and their silent attempt to communicate with each other.

Nina Sobell discovered that the very presence of technology alters peoples’ behavior, due to its capacity to mediate experience, to manipulate space and time, and due also to peoples’ belief in its power. She has used these phenomena to sculpt social space. In other words, she has used technology as a prop to give participants permission to overcome various types of boundaries — physical and social — to communicate with one another.

A project of Networked Realities: (Re)Connecting the Adamses, Lumens is an installation of lamps networked across three spaces: Greylock Arts, MCLA Gallery 51, and Turbulence.org. Scores of personal lamps that usually inhabit and illuminate the interiors of homes and shops have been borrowed from the residents of Adams and North Adams, Massachusetts, filling two gallery spaces: Greylock Arts in Adams and MCLA Gallery 51 Annex in North Adams. In addition, their images and stories are represented on turbulence.org, which also serves to connect the two locations telematically.

Clusters of lamps have been outfitted with proximity sensors and arduino microcontrollers. Lamps illuminate in response to a visitor’s presence and simultaneously illuminate lamps in the counterpart spaces. Thus, an individual in Adams can communicate his/her presence to an individual in North Adams, and vice versa. Additionally, as visitors investigate the history of a particular lamp online it will also illuminate in the physical gallery space.

Lumens (re)connects North Adams and Adams — originally a single community — through an exploration of location, influence, history, and the present.

Networked Realities: (Re)Connecting the Adamses is a collaboration of Greylock Arts, MCLA Gallery 51, and Turbulence. Lumens has been made possible through the generous support of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the LEF Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Physical interaction consultant Tom Igoe.
Special thanks to: Larry Alice, Michael Chapman, Abbi Hermosa.

As the DNA configuration is vertical, she’s selected a tower or an obelisk for the projection. In this illusory dimension, infinite lines generating emptiness and distances are “attracted” and skimmed one with the others, fading. Thanks to the Net-Art news, the architecture becomes an essential structure that draws a sort of fluctuating original human structure always in transformation.

WRITE HOME: ACCIDENTS HAPPEN! Poor little avatars hide behind poor little avatars! Avatars ab/use! Avatars don’t need air! You can’t weigh them! They don’t know the meaning of the word! THESE avatars don’t know anything! They’re weighed down by coordinates! They can’t fuck! Their prims bend, smash! Smashed prims are prims. Hello, hello! Video and performance spewed from a laboratory of virtual environments. IN MY WORLD, THERE ARE NO ERRORS, ONLY SEDUCTIONS!

The human figure’s place in art gets turned inside out here in this world of unfolded and refolded geometries. What remains of the body in the domain of the virtual? What survives the transition? Could this still be called a body? Where are we going in this crossing over into bits, why are we going there/nowhere and what does it say about the nature of human desire? At what point does a beautiful accident become a tragic mistake? Is there truly such a thing as a mistake?

A pioneer in virtual worlds and networked environments, Alan Sondheim brings his latest work to Odyssey, an international community of artists working on 2 servers in the networked 3D virtual world called Second Life. An autobiography of Sondheim’s career as an artist can be found here.

This exhibit is being presented in the networked environment Second Life on the Odyssey simulator. To view this work you must have a Second Life account and avatar, which is free of charge and takes about 30 minutes to set up and learn the basic functionality. To set up an account, go here. Once you are logged into Second Life, click this link in your web browser and the Second Life client will teleport your avatar to the location of the exhibit. Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate your avatar through the exhibit and be sure to press play on both the audio and video buttons located on the lower right of your Second Life client.

avatar: noun Etymology: Sanskrit avat?rah descent, from avatarati he descends, from ava- away + tarati he crosses over 1: the incarnation of a Hindu deity (as Vishnu) 2 a: an incarnation in human form b: an embodiment (as of a concept or philosophy) often in a person 3: a variant phase or version of a continuing basic entity 4: an electronic image that represents and is manipulated by a computer user (as in a computer game).

Defense Coop is a forum that connects Second Life artists and builders with public defense attorneys throughout the United States to help illustrate scenarios, using 3d graphic movies (machinima), for the defense of indigent clients at trial.

“When a defendant stands trial, it is an agonizing experience. She faces the accusations of the District Attorney, the police, and any independent witnesses the State brings to testify against him. The police are trained how to talk to and persuade juries. They know to come across as affable, good natured people; they know to look at the jury when the speak; they know how to answer the District Attorney’s questions in a way that effectively narrates the events in controversy. They have reports that they wrote just after the events in controversy, which they review prior to testifying. They understand the elements that the District Attorney must establish in order to convict a defendant. Most importantly, they testify all the time - they have lots of experience in the courtroom, and generally feel comfortable there.” — Laura Baldwin (Red76 member, and Portland, Oregon public defense lawyer)

A typical defendant has none of this and is frequently faced with limited resources, compared to those of the state, to make a compelling, memorable, believable case to the jury. This is where Second Life simulation / machinima can be of vital use.

Located in downtown Florence outside the Fortezza da Basso, The Cloud is part of the “Redesigning Fashion Trade Shows” project that Pitti Immagine launched with MIT Mobile Experience Lab in January 2007. It is a long-term project that will creatively rethink the trade show concept and will propose innovative technologies, perspectives and sensory experiences for fashion trade shows.

Two seemingly unconnected copper plates in two different locations. When a someone places a hand on the first plate, the second will begin to warm up.

A small community of land snails Helix Aspersa are each equipped with a small glass capsule attached to its shell. The capsule contains a tiny chip and coil antenna that can be activated by a reader at a range of 3 cm. Purpose built readers that provide a link between the snails and the server allowing the snail to collect and deposit packets of information are in development.

Our snails are equipped with a miniaturised electronic circuit and antenna that enables them to be assigned messages from hardware located within their enclosure. The moment you click ‘send’ your message will travel at the speed of light to our snail server where it will await collection by a snail agent.

Once associated with the tiny electronic chip on the snails shell your message will be carried around until the snail chances by the drop off point. Hardware located at this point collects the message from the snail and forwards it to its final destination.

No one is sure how many images there are on the Internet. Google has nearly a billion. Some say it is hundreds of times more than that.

For How to Talk to Images, Richard Wright has compiled a database of 50,000 random Internet images as the raw content for two artworks. “The Internet Speaks” and “The Mimeticon” use this database to create a world where we can “read” pictures, browse “libraries” of endless images or learn to draw with alphabets.

New Online Work and Film Retrospective

In this era, finding our way through the world of images is so overwhelming, that the dominant mode is to “search” rather than to “see”. An image is an answer to a question, a search query. The Internet Speaks gives us one of the simplest imaginable ways of searching this set of images, stepping through them, one by one in random order, without context. In contrast, The Mimeticon is a wilfully complex and ‘baroque’ search engine that allows us to search for images by visual similarity rather than by typing in keywords. These ’search images’ are ‘drawn’ using letters from the history of the alphabet.

As part of How to Talk to Images, Richard Wright’s first solo exhibition in London, a selection of Wright’s animated films demonstrates the development of his current interest in the Baroque. The exhibition is also the occasion of publication of a limited-edition poster featuring an essay by the artist illustrated by the entire visual history of the Western alphabet – from its pictorial Egyptian origins 5,000 years ago to its perfected form under the Romans, as well as a new book documenting the artists twenty year long practice.

Richard Wright has been making digital animation and interactive pieces since the eighties. Heliocentrum, an animation about Louis XIV, was described by writer Hari Kunzru as “…an amazingly effective way of showing how a sovereign manipulated power” and The Bank of Time was nominated for a BAFTA in 2001. Richard was most recently a member of artists group Mongrel and is currently working on an urban media project called “decorative surveillance”. Since summer 2007 he has been Artist in Residence at Furtherfield.org.

HTTP Gallery is Furtherfield.org’s dedicated space for exhibiting networked media art. Furtherfield.org is a not-for-profit, artist-led organisation. Based in Harringay, North London, we provide an online and physical platform for creating, exhibiting, commissioning, and discussing networked media arts.

The Association of Lebanese Artists presents Lebanon Now, the art exhibition of the new media. Sponsored by USAID, this exhibition shows works done with the latest technological means. These works question Lebanon today, which is more disconcerting and intriguing than ever. The artists experiment with the binary code and look at Information and Communication Technology from a new perspective. There is no doubt that the sociocultural and the sociopolitical are featured. The artists « tell » their Lebanon through the elements of their numerical world, i.e. images, sound, and words. This event transposes the observer (turned into user) into a new esthetic experiment. It is the long-awaited occasion both by the artists and an art (and technology)-loving public to experience together a form of contemporary art involving not only the observer but also an important team of scientists and computer engineers without whom the new media art would simply be disembodied.

The participating artists:

Message not delivered by Jean-Louis Eddé and Hayla Saab Demelero

Through their « Message not delivered », the two artists build a representation of themselves in society, where elements from their respective lives in relation with their real-life experiences are featured. They deal with the issues of immigration and long-distance relationships through a telepresence system.

6 O’clock by Charbel Haber and Yara Raffoul

The work of these two artists is defined as a leisurely walk that can be perceived in two manners. On the one hand it is a graphic and visual stroll accompanied by music, noises, and sound patches. This same road can also be perceived in the opposite direction: it is the graphic that represents the music. This walk remains a free walk of traditional page layout, proportion, typography, and even readability.

How he lost his right hand finger by Mansour El-Habre

Mansour El-Habre presents a website where the user browses around and collects elements aiming to answer the question: « What did he do to lose his right hand middle finger as a child? ». The reply is attained through a labyrinthine navigation that puts the user in front of numerous disturbing possibilities that question the reality of the civil war of 1975.

Lebanon everywhere by Rabih Khalil

The artist presents a Search Engine under the name “Lebanon everywhere”. It is a letter collector that searches exclusively for the letters composing the word “Lebanon”. In any text appearing on any website, the letters that constitute the word “Lebanon” are automatically selected, reassembled, and displayed.

Digital visuals from Lebanon by Ricardo Mbarkho

Ricardo Mbarkho presents « Digital visuals from Lebanon », a series of digital images printed on large format photo papers based on the numerous agreements signed by the Lebanese State since the independence of Lebanon. In order to obtain these images, the artist made the computer “believe” that the files containing the texts of these agreements are image files. The computer calculated the binary code of each text file and generated the corresponding image. The series comprises images of binary codes of texts such as: the Doha agreement, the Taef accord, the Lebanon-Syria Treaty of Brotherhood, Cooperation and Coordination, the tripartite agreement, the Cairo agreement, the national pact, the Lebanese constitution, as well as the word « Lebanon » itself.

Dialogue by Nadia Oufrid

Nadia Oufrid presents an online play entitled « Dialogue ». Once the user is connected to the project’s website, he is greeted by two virtual actors on a virtual stage. They recite texts taken from two URL addresses randomly selected by the system. The user can change the URL addresses to his liking and therefore change the dialogue of the actors, as by drawing from various Lebanese sites (political, artistic, or other). The various emotions that characterize the lines are rendered by the tone of the voice, the noises, and the music.

Construct Lebanon by Shawki Youssef

Shawki Youssef’s project is an online game on the possibilities of a potential « construction » of Lebanon, based on the daily political speeches. The screen displays the pieces of a puzzle that constitutes the map of Lebanon. The player has to manually assemble the pieces, but his success depends on the choice of the “words” of politicians that are published in newspapers. Some “words” might lead the player to victory and end the game whereas others would lead to a higher difficulty level and thus extend the game’s duration.