David Clark’s 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to be played with the Left Hand) is an interactive, non-linear net.art piece that explores the life and philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein through a series of animated vignettes. Each of the 88 sections corresponds to one of the 88 constellations in the night sky. This work considers the questions that Ludwig Wittgenstein pondered in his eventful lifetime - logic, language, the nature of thinking, the limits of knowledge - all in relation to our contemporary digital world with it’s symmetries, asymmetries, and doubles.

David Clark is a media artist who lives and works in Halifax, Canada. He is best known for his website A is for Apple that has been shown at over 50 film festivals around the world including Sundance, Transmediale in Berlin and the American Museum of the Moving Image. A is for Apple won Best in Show at the 2003 SXSW Interactive Festival in Austen, Texas and First Prize at FILE2002 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has also made a feature film, numerous shorter videos and installation works. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Program in New York, and the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. He currently teaches film and media arts at NSCAD University in Halifax.

Michelle Gay

In Michelle Gay’s work, drawing and photography are blended into low-tech animations combined with sophisticated software engines and interfaces which complicate these digital and real spaces. She employs drawing in her digital works to play the precision of the algorithm against the hand-drawn and inexact ink and graphite on paper. Concepts such as gender and its relation to technologies, the blending of synthetic and real experiences, and the possibilities of deriving meaning from non-linear narratives are grist in the mill of her studio practice. The Poemitron artware functions something like a dialogue with the computer. Employing a custom built natural language processor engine (including its mistakes), it creates texts that begin with a selected passage and morph into something entirely different.

Michelle Gay studied art and art history at the University of Toronto and then received her MFA from NSCAD in Halifax. She integrates a range of media, investigating the junctures between bodies and technologies. She builds computers to make and operate her interactive artworks. She collaborates with Colin Gay (a particle physicist). Interested in the possibilities of touch and poetics within new media projects, they develop artworks designed to play with technologies in non-useful ways. She is represented in Toronto by the Birch Libralato Gallery.

The video game as a medium and a style of life has reached its middle age along with the first generation of people who grew up playing them. The non-linear, interactive, processor based narratives, which at first mimicked Hollywood and struggled to convey their simple content with 8-bit processors, gradually became the largest entertainment industry in the history of electronic media. RESET/PLAY is an exhibition attempting a critical exploration of contemporary art inspired by video games. Questioning the history, control mechanisms, political and art-historical implications of electronic games, RESET/PLAY assembles a formidable group of international artists who made a significant impact on this growing post-game artistic sub-genre.

RESET/PLAY is organized for Arthouse by guest curators Marcin Ramocki and Paul Slocum, both of whom are practicing media artists who also run independent spaces in Brooklyn and Dallas, respectively, that focus on media art. The exhibition will be accompanied by an 8-bit music and film festival co-organized by the Austin Museum of Digital Art.

GPS Film is new media artwork from filmmaker Scott Hessels that invents a new way of watching movies based on the viewer’s location and movement. Using a GPS-enabled PDA or mobile phone, the audience creates a new type of film experience that reveals the story through their journey. Released as a free, open-source application, the project will premiere on September 4, 2008 along with the first film made specifically for the system, Singaporean filmmaker Kenny Tan’s chase comedy Nine Lives.

The GPS Film application, source code, and “Nine Lives” are available for free download on the project website. The application allows for a developer to create story spaces of any size. The movies are also interchangeable and easily matched to any place. The software default is currently Nine Lives — a prototype film comedy that can unfold in nine directions depending on the viewer’s journey around downtown Singapore.

Scott Hessels is an internationally recognised media artist and filmmaker who merges cinema with new technologies to create innovative media experiences. For GPS Film, he collaborated with film and engineering students at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

The project uses emerging technologies to bring story into real space; neighborhoods, architecture, and landscapes become part of the cinema experience. Movies can be personalized and localized. Storytelling becomes a physical, viewer-controlled experience; a journey of fiction ties directly to a journey of fact.

A press conference will be held September 4 at the gallery with the artist, filmmakers, and programmers present as well as handheld devices for demonstration. The presentation starts at 2:00 pm, but the device will be available for trial and demonstration till 4:00 pm.

Cantata Park explores the notion of a “cut-up narrative”. By disassembling and reassembling a passage of text, the participant is free to extract unseen meaning from an existing text. The cut-up technique was popularised by Beat poets in the 1950’s-70’s as a method to “break the linearity” of written language, with William S. Burroughs using it extensively in his works. Burroughs believed non-pictorial languages contained a virus. By using non-linear writing techniques he believed the true meaning of language could be exposed, and the spoken word used as a weapon.

Cantata Park uses a passage of 256 words from Burroughs’ The Electronic Revolution (1971) and transfers the cut-up technique into a real-time 3D environment.

The work explores the possibilities of metaverse art, limitations of Second Life’s construction tools and scripting language, and the ability to appreciate conceptual art by proxy of an avatar.

Layered Histories represents an innovative approach to the use of new media as a means to engage the viewer in a personal investigation of a non-linear narrative. Cascading animations and a diffusion of sound gestures are triggered and guided by a visitor’s reading pointer movements around the surface of what appears to be an illuminated manuscript. Active gestures on the surface are mapped to a software interface, designed with Max / MSP / Jitter. As in a public reading, all visitors to the space share in the experience of collectively viewing and listening.

Layered Histories tells the imaginary story of an actual 13th century Spanish illuminated Hebrew Bible. Fleeing Spain with the 1492 Expulsion, the Bible was known to be in Safed until the mid 16th century, but then apparently disappeared until it was discovered around 1888 in the Bibliothèque Municipale in Marseilles. The story of Layered Histories is drawn from the imaginary wanderings of the Marseilles Bible, reflecting on the experience of culture as a phenomenon evolving from influences of place and cross-cultural contact.

The linear version of Layered Histories is a through-composed work. Like the interactive installation, the rhythmic display of imagery glides us seamlessly from past to present, from identifiable locations and decorative motifs of the Bible to more universal references of landscape and seascape. As in the interactive version, the sounds reveal an aesthetic parallel to that of the visuals, of veiled sources and more distinctive sounds, with each media emerging and changing independently. The linear work is available on a DVD, which can be projected in a theater or gallery, or on a home computer or DVD player.

As a collaborative work, Layered Histories reflects the differing layers of vision of its authors in describing the experience of a timeless object which has seen history, much of the world, and has many stories to tell. Music and image are melded together in the viewer’s experience, but each follows a separate course of interactivity, coming together in the moment. Evolved from real world photographs and recorded sounds, both music and image were manipulated to reflect the aesthetic experience of place, movement, and change, rather than direct documentation.

There is Still Time.. Brother is a commission for an installation that consists of an interactive projection for a 360° screen. The commission is rooted in the recording of a Wooster Group performance developed specifically to be viewed as a projection on a 360° screen. The video is revealed by way of a window that scans around the screen, never showing the whole of the projection at once. The window is controlled by an audience member or performer who selects which part of the 360° video to reveal at any given time. However, it is clear that the sections of the video that are revealed are all unfolding in one, continuous 360° space and that there is some kind of linear timeline to the sections of the performance that we are watching unfold.

This piece challenges the notions of linear narrative in theater or film by creating a time-based theatrical experience that can be experienced in a new way each time it is “performed” by the individual controlling the interface which dictates that which we see and hear in the immersive space of spacialized sound and projection. The viewer is involved in an immersive process of discovery where their chosen point of view creates the dramaturgy of the piece and literally activates the story.

It will have its European premiere at the ZKM in Karlsrhue Germany (December 2007). Commissioned by EMPAC, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute [USA]. Produced by EMPAC together with the UNSW iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research [AUS], and the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media [D] and in collaboration with The Wooster Group. With support from the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts.

Workspace Unlimited’s They Watch is also a commission for the 360° screen or other immersive projection space. Using a modified computer game engine, artificial intelligence, and an immersive projection environment, They Watch creates an ambiguous hybrid space where the virtual blends with the real, and where encounters with simulated characters challenge our ideas of presence, place, perception and identity.

Workspace Unlimited is an internationally renowned collective that creates virtual worlds and interactive installations at the point where art, architecture and digital technologies converge.

Beginning in the last decades of the 20th century, the increasing expansion of multimedia has made the digital synthesis of image, interactivity, non-linearity and intermediality not only ephemeral practices of contemporary art, but also prevalent and established characteristics of popular culture. These are also expectations and demands towards a contemporary cinematic work resulting in the creative processes, models of production, distribution and perception of a film art gradually moving away from traditional forms.

Do the contemporary experiments with digital techniques have a chance to invariably permeate the tools of film creators? How does the Internet change the appearance of film distribution? What influence will the narrative structures of interactive computer games have on the classic cinematic storytelling? Which of the ever-increasing repertoire of possibilities and promises of the digital media are liable to transform cinema as profoundly as did the expansion of video in the 80s?

The conference, organized by Media Desk Poland in programmatic co-operation with WRO Art Center is an attempt to present the consequences and possibilities that interactivity, mobility and multi-platform availability, along with the technological progression of communication tools, can contribute to film production and distribution.

Gathering arguments of artists, established international experts and practitioners from such interrelated fields as the theory of games, telecommunication industry, media sciences, sociology and media art, the conference defines the phenomena currently changing the state of cinematography.

Participants:

Richard Bartle, the co-author of MUD, the first multiuser narrative game; University of Essex, UK
Jakub Brzęczkowski, specialist in TV/VoD technology implementation, Orange/France Telecom, PL/FR
Mirosław Filiciak, media theoretician, Warsaw School of Social Psychology, PL
Paweł Janicki, independent media artist, curator and producer, WRO Art Center, PL
Piotr Krajewski, expert in contemporary art and media culture, WRO Art Center, PL
Michael Lew, media artist and research engineer, LEV Studio, CH/UY
Dawid Marcinkowski, creator of interactive music videos and the net-based film Sufferrosa, PL
Henk van der Meulen, television producer, musician and composer, NPS/IMZ, NL
Tom Putzki, author and producer of computer games, phenomedia publishing Gmbh, D
Aleksander Tarkowski, sociologist, Warsaw University, Creative Commons, PL

Interrogating the Invisible is a project of the Federal Bureau of Information (FBI) of the District of Leistavia. The District of Leistavia is a hybrid cultural entity with formative influences of Pitcairn Island, Norfolk Island and Estonia. During ISEA 2004, voting toward a constitution was conducted, following which a constitution was created, a unique document clearly influenced by the formative cultures.

The use of the word invisible in the title of this project for ISEA 2006, is a reference to the invisibility of certain cultural groupings. For example, at ethnic festivals, many cultures celebrate their traditional roots. These traditions are celebrated by the wearing of traditional costumes and the performance of traditional dance and song. Traditional culture is highly visible on such occasions.

In contrast, hybrid cultures, which have cultural influences but often no fixed traditions of dance, song and costume are not easily distinguishable. If a person has New Zealand Maori and Scottish ancestry, or Mexican and Vietnamese for example, what sort of clothing or song is appropriate at ethnic festivals? On the one hand this is a difficult question but on the other, surely people with these cultural identifications exist, and are even proud of their heritage.

One aim of this project is to give people with multiple cultural identifications visibility. The works exhibited in San Jose directly examine the issue: what is the difference between those indicating one cultural identification and those indicating two? One answer is given by the still images presented in San Jose. An animation formatted for DVD has been created which shows the individual responses of participants, and provides a unique sequence of portraits of the cultural identification beliefs of those taking part.