I didn’t go- none of us did.
They thought we went, but we didn’t.

Here.

We were here.
They didn’t think so, so they screamed at us
and shot at us
and wanted us to die.
“Maluus zebr” they said about
each of us in turn.

But here it is, I still have it.

And this- see the dust
still caked into the fibers?
I shouldn’t have it, they have rules about trophies,
but this is from when we were bombed
out of bed-
well, I wasn’t in bed.

I couldn’t sleep, so I was bare and wet
in the cement shower house.
I knew I was going to die.
I sobbed under one of those
crummy metal sinks, waiting for the walls to cave in
on me or a mortar to drop into
my lap or my crazy heart to just explode.

But they didn’t and it didn’t and it didn’t,
but maybe I still did. Die. I feel dead.
I’m not a man anymore.

Please don’t look like that.
I don’t mind.
I’m good at what I do.
I’m a killing machine.
I’m a god.

This is what they make of us, and they’re damn good at it.
I was in basic with this
scrawny, nerdy wimp from
Minnesota.
Ethan. Ethan Brown.
Most boring-ass name ever.
He’s a sniper now.
He could hit you right between the eyes-
equal distance from each-
from 2000 meters.
You wouldn’t hear a thing,
and then you’d be dead.
How about that scrawny nerd from Minnesota?

Babe, don’t cry.

Yes, I like your dress.
But you know I like green on you
so much better.

White, hell, I don’t know how to
keep anything white.

I would touch you,
but you look so beautiful.
My hands are dirty.
Yes, they are. Look at them.
LOOK AT THEM.

I’m not shouting.
Ok, I’m sorry. Please don’t cry.
The dress is beautiful.

Then why are you crying?

…HIM?!

THEY KNEW?!

You didn’t write.
I wrote to you.

No.

No.

No.

…I remember.
I’m not sure than I can, either.
Not since.

Please don’t ask
me now.
I’m so tired.

Who knew that the dead slept?
I always imagined we would torment
the world of the living after nightfall.
Who knew that it was the other way around?

I’m tired.
I’m so tired.
Here, hold me.

One piece of digital art that stood out to me was “Beyond Manzanar”, an interactive virtual reality installation created in 2000 by artists Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand. A video of this piece is shown here:

What attracted me to this piece is that it functions in a way similar to a video game platform: participants use a joystick to navigate in a virtual recreation of Manzanar, an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. The installation is projected onto a wall and is life-sized, adding a touch of reality to it. The realistic size of this piece and its three-dimensional environment allows the participant to feel as though he or she is actually walking within the space created by the work and looking through the eyes of someone actually present in that alternate world.

The content of “Beyond Manzanar” is unique and interesting as well. Although the piece is titled “Beyond Manzanar”, on a larger scale it is referring to the ostracism people of a different race face in America when their native countries are on unfriendly terms with the United States. This piece uses both the Japanese American internment during World War II and the similar fate Iranian Americans faced during the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979-1980 as the basis for this message.

Iranian garden

As the participant moves around the internment camp within the interactive installation, he or she is able to move within two worlds. First, the participant starts out in the barren landscape of the internment camp, filled with military barracks. When the participant navigates his way into the barracks, images of family life and pictures reflecting cultural identity appear on the inner walls of the barracks. Approaching certain pictures may allow the participant to see additional, hidden images or landscapes. For example, in one of the barracks, when the participant walks toward a wedding photo of an Iranian man and a Caucasian woman, images of armed extremists in Iran suddenly appear. After backing away, the participant has the option of walking out of the barracks through an Iranian garden. Also, upon entering one of the other barracks, the participant suddenly finds himself looking out from the doorway of a traditional Japanese house into an elegant garden, and is able to walk through the Japanese garden. From the outside of another barracks, one can see images of Japanese Americans under internment by looking in through the windows.

Image of Japanese Americans' life in Manzanar

Thiel and Houshmand effectively juxtapose images in “Beyond Manzanar” to “[illustrate] a chasm of cultural identity, contrasting a dream world of cultural heritage with a reality of political injustice” (p. 130 in Digital Art, by Christiane Paul). The artists’ transformation of the barracks’ interiors into images and simulations of cultural identity—traditional gardens and pictures of family ancestral history—suggests that the Japanese Americans and Iranian Americans were treated unfairly based solely on their racial background: they were under internment for their heritage, not because they personally committed any crimes. Hence, Thiel and Houshmand use “Beyond Manzanar” to convey the emotional and psychological trauma persecuted and outcast peoples face. The fact that “Beyond Manzanar” is an interactive virtual reality art piece allows participants to experience firsthand what it feels like to be ostracized by the society one thought he belongs in. The three-dimensional nature of the piece makes the participant feel like he or she is actually present at the internment camp. The bare, desert-like environment, as well as the crude, plain barracks, gives the participant a feeling of depression and gloom, much like how the Japanese Americans and Iranian Americans must have felt when they were targeted by political injustice. The images within the barracks remind the participant of what the “American Dream” should look like, but upon leaving, the participant is once again exposed to the harsh camp environment. Each participant for this piece may visit different barracks and choose their own path, but regardless of what path he may choose, he will always end up with the same ending: watching from the point of view of a fighter jet swooping down upon the camp. This invokes a sense of horror within the participant because the internment camp he had just visited, containing barracks filled with cultural identity in the form of pictures and traditional gardens, is about to be destroyed by the fighter jet.

Point of view of a fighter jet over the camp

“Beyond Manzanar” instills the feelings of those who were unfairly treated due to their cultural background within the participants of the art piece. This reveals the uniqueness of interactive digital art in changing the way in which people experience art. Such a feat would not have been possible with more traditional forms of art that do not involve the use of digital media. The participants’ perception of an alternate reality of the “American Dream” within the alternate reality of the internment camp blurs the line between our physical existence and that of the virtual realm.

References:

Paul, Christiane. Digital Art, 2^nd Edition

http://www.mission-base.com/manzanar/index.html

http://www.mission-base.com/manzanar/demos.html

Thiel, Tamiko. “Beyond Manzanar: Constructing Meaning in Interactive Virtual Reality”. http://www.mission-base.com/manzanar/articles/cosign/cosign.html

http://eyebeam.org/people/christiane-paul

http://www.nps.gov/manz/index.htm

http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/lesson_plans/japanese_internment/index.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/carter-hostage-crisis/

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/american+dream

This is all thanks to James W. Morris. He is the author and artist – not the cat.

Often we go to see artwork that enlightens us about the non-statistical part of the human condition. Our emotions and relations are often popular subjects. However, Camille Utterback was commissioned to complete an artwork called Drawing from Life.

This work was simple in its design and concept, but brings to light the real concept of DNA. The point has always been driven home to us in science classes that DNA is composed of four amino acid proteins arranged in a sequence that is like a code for every physical and biological trait we have in our body. The idea that everything about our form can be expressed definitely in a language we can now decipher can be quite unnerving. Individuality becomes almost digital as we are forced to look at ourselves like computers, with the 1’s and O’s becoming cytosine, guanine, thiamine, and adenine (CATG). However, rather than being based in data, Utterback takes a visual and interactive approach to her artwork.

Drawing from Life was commissioned for a show called “Genetic Revolution” at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.¹ The piece uses motion sensors and cameras to display on a large screen the people and figures moving in front of the screen. Rather than showing the figures themselves, the figures are deconstructed into shadows of colored letters on a black screen formed from the letters C, A, T and G. And to make the figures more aesthetic, “The color saturation of any particular letter is based on the brightness of the color in the incoming video, so some amount of detail about each person is visible.”² This means the light and dark parts of the video are reflected in the light and dark colors of the letters in the figure.

The figure also draws on some techniques used in shadow art. Similar to the Japanese technique of shoji shadow art, this artwork projects the shadows of users onto a screen.³ This traditional shadow art is found not just in Japan, but also in China, Indonesia, and India. The difference now is that the users don’t view shadows created by other performers as in shoji now the users themselves create their own shadows, and these shadows reflect not abstraction but a more intimate look at their own genetic making.

The artwork forces the audience members to look at themselves in a biological sense and forces them to see the genes “swimming around” in their bodies. The fact that the entire figure is made of the four simple genes brings the minimal number of genes and their incredible ability to form the makings of our body to light.

Compared to Utterback’s artwork Text Rain, Drawing from Life is very similar in its interface and display because it makes the user more aware of themselves and their bodies in the context of letters.⁴ While Text Rain uses the body as a boundary to falling streams of letters, here the letters of DNA are bounded within the forms of moving people.

When seeing this artwork, I was astounded by its simple brilliance. Scientific data beyond light saturation was not used to form each figure. Each person was not constructed by the letters forming their genetic code. The letters were randomized and were only enough to form a figure. Obviously there are millions upon billions of genes coded by these letters, and writing all those letters on the figure would be too much visually for the audience member to comprehend. Although the figures are aesthetic, they force people to see themselves in a scientific sense for this genetics show. Maybe the next step is to use actual genetic code to form these figures, but in a way that could be meaningful to the user, a bit like Blind Genes by Andreas Müller-Pohle.

Sources

1. http://camilleutterback.com/projects/drawing-from-life/

2. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/multitiered

3. Yugo Minomo, Yasuaki Kakehi, and Makoto Iida. 2005. Transforming your shadow into colorful visual media: multi-projection of complementary colors. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology (ACE ’05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 61-68. DOI=10.1145/1178477.1178485 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1178477.1178485

4. Lee, H.. The screen as boundary object in the realm of imagination. Ph.D. dissertation, Georgia Institute of Technology, United States — Georgia. Retrieved January 24, 2012, from Dissertations & Theses: A&I.(Publication No. AAT 3364237).

Imagine entering a dark gallery space at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, in Mexico City, Mexico and experiencing a multi-dimensional sound scape. The lights behind you cast a shadow of your body against a brightly lit wall. Your shadow joins dozens of others in a space where your every movement is monitored by scanners. Behind the scenes, a vast array of radios, transmitters, antennas, amplifiers, mixers, and an assortment of electronic devices input your data and output it as a “mash up” broadcast. The effect is similar to what happens when you push the scan button on your car stereo. A steady stream of snippets consisting of traffic reports, pop music, video, advertisements, and news tickles your ears.

This is the work of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer who describes himself as an “electronic artist that develops interactive installations at the intersection of architecture and performance art.” The piece is titled, “Frequency and Volume,” for it’s auditory nature. Lozano-Hemmer created it, in 2003 around the time that the Mexican Government was wielding their power over indigenous people in the states of Chiapas and Guerrero by shutting down their short-wave radio stations.

While his installation demonstrates what it feels like to be tracked and targeted using monitoring equipment, I feel that it doesn’t directly confront the issue of free speech by posing the question, “Who really controls the airwaves? Instead, Lozano-Hemmer installation keeps visitors entertained, enthralled by its playful interface. Victor I. Stoichita, author of A Short History of the Shadow, describes a similar scene in Plato’s story about the origin of knowledge where “prisoners were incapable of gazing directly into the light of knowledge. They had their backs to this bright light and saw only the shadows cast on the cave walls. Plato’s point was that they saw only the shadow of reality, not reality itself.”

“Please be warned that your voice, your fingerprints, your biometrics are being scanned. You are now part of the artwork. If you don’t want that don’t come see the show!” —Excerpt from gallery notice

The use of a shadow metaphor appears in many of Lozano-Hemmer’s installations. But in “Frequency and Volume” it is the primary visual focus. According to Jungian theory, “The shadow contains the unconscious aspects of our personality that have been lost, rejected or never integrated.” Perhaps, Lozano-Hemmer’s shadow component through its simplicity, allows us to tap into our subconscious. We can focus on the auditory or “voice within” that speaks to us rather than ignoring it. In addition, “Jung viewed shadow integration as a moral as well as a psychological process which, he believed, holds the most hope for us as individuals and for society as a whole.”

Lozano-Hemmer’s “Frequency and Volume” has an evergreen quality that stays fresh. His work premiered in 2003 but has since been shown in a number of group and solo exhibitions. Its bears a universal message that crosses borders and cultures. The same message that gets us to think about free speech when it comes to the plight of Mexico’s indigenous can be felt here in the U.S. where the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) since 1981 under the Ronald Reagan administration has been cracking down on non-profit organizations such as the Radio Pacifica. “Frequency and Volume” reminds us that we are in control of our airwaves because we own them as citizens. We can touch them, manipulate them in real-time and as a group shape them into a picture that reflects back on us. Perhaps the challenge that visitors have when they leave the exhibit is applying what they’ve leaned to the so-called “real-world”.

Works Cited

“Biography.” Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Web. 24 Jan. 2012. <http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/bio.php>.

“CABINET // A Short History of the Shadow: An Interview with Victor I. Stoichita.” CABINET // Homepage. 2006. Web. 24 Jan. 2012. <http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/24/stoichita.php>.

“Jungian Psychoanalysis – Jungian Analysis, Therapy | New York Association for Analytical Psychology.” Jungian Therapy by New York Jungian Analyst, Therapist. Web. 24 Jan. 2012. <http://www.nyaap.org/about-jungian-analysis>.

“Rafael Lozano-Hemmer | Bitforms.com.” Home | Bitforms.com. Web. 24 Jan. 2012. <http://www.bitforms.com/rafael-lozano-hemmer-gallery.html>.

Von Chamisso, Adelbert. “PETER SCHLEMIHL:.” Gutenberg.org. ROBERT HARDWICKE, 192, PICCADILLY. 1861. Web. <www.gutenberg.org>.

However, works created in such a manner merely utilize computers as a tool. Ultimately, analog mediums can produce visually identical results. To truly use computers as a medium, we must marry two seemingly contrary traits: the creativity associated with art, and the strict logic associated with mathematics and programming. In school we are taught that these are complete opposites: some people are “left-brained” and logical or “right-brained” and intuitive. But computer art demands we abandon such overgeneralized schemas.

Yoko Ono, Painting for the Wind, 1961

Yoko Ono first demonstrates this combination in Instruction Paintings, wherein she paints by sending instructions to a third party who paints solely in accordance with the instructions. This foreshadows the emergence of coded art, which today ranges from Java-based Processing to the consumer front-end of the internet: websites presented using HTML and CSS. In coded art, the artist does not create using any tools in the way a painter or logo designer use theirs. Unlike these tools, they do not operate in a “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” (WYSIWYG) environment. In many ways, artists using code as a medium delve one level of specificity deeper than the digital illustrator.

For the artist using Photoshop, for example, they draw with a mouse or tablet, and the computer translates that interaction with the tool into an image. The artist might draw a horizontal line across the canvas, and the computer must interpret this command to produce the result our intuition predicts. Meanwhile, the coder must specify and quantify all of the details: the color, opacity, thickness, flow, etc. of the line, as well as the exact pixels at which the line begins and ends. While the pen tool might create smooth Bezier curves in Photoshop, the coder must calculate the precise angles and anchor points.

This bears the question: why bother? Don’t these digital tools just make life easier for the artist? For the artist seeking to use the computer as a tool, this is mostly true. Creating a painting with code is simply more tedious and difficult than painting through Photoshop. But discarding the tool also provides us with more power. The coder can introduce complexity and precision to visual art the human mind cannot feasibly manage.

This results in fractal art. Unlike traditional art or its simulations thereof in the digital medium, fractal art is impractical in analog mediums. This algorithmic art involves mathematical calculations that produce fractal objects, which are translated by the computer into visual images. In other words, the artist is not imagining a result and producing it. Instead, the artist devises a clever set of rules or definitions, inputs the parameters, and uses the computer to manifest the work the same way Yoko Ono used a third party to paint according to her instructions.

Mandelbrot Set

Two of the most famous types of fractals are the Julia Set and Mandelbrot Set. They epitomize the usage of computers for static visual art: without a computer to interpret the rule set created by the fractal artist, these beautiful works would not be possible. It just goes to demonstrate that “left-brained” logic and “right-brained” creativity are not mutually exclusive. If anything, they might be more interdependent than pop psychology would lead you to think.

Julia Set

Dear Mr. Montfort,

I do not want to cause offense, merely offer a suggestion: would you
consider removing the parts of your blog that clearly do not deal with
interactive fiction from “Planet IF” (http://www.planet-if.com)?

While I am not saying that your posts are not intersting or that the term
“interactive fiction” should only apply to text adventure games in the
narrow sense (and while I appreciate the articles on Game Design and other
forms of interactive fiction that appear on Planet IF), the sheer volume of
your blog posts, along with “Grand Text Auto”, sometimes tends to drown out
anything else.

…

Instead of thinking of technology as something that is trying to replace traditional forms and media, we should think of technology as a means of creating artwork that could not have been created before.  Now, our imagination has yet another outlet that has rarely been explored in comparison to art forms such as painting, sculpture, and drawing. George Whale argues in his Why Use Computers to Make Drawings that technology is a media that we can learn from and ultimately use as a full collaborator to our artistic endeavors.  This concept of learning about methods of art is one that I had never thought about before, yet I can understand how this might occur.  If I were to use technology to create a more traditional piece of art (with minimal interactivity and participation), I would need to fully comprehend various aspects about aesthetics that are also used when creating something by hand.  For example, if I wanted to code something in Processing that realistically resembled an aerial view of a tree in the foreground and a mountain in the background, I would need to apply the same principles that I apply to a painting.

1) The tree should be a lighter shade to create a sense of depth

2) Certain parts of the tree should be the lightest, indicating more dimension

3) The tree and mountain should be at certain angles to depict an aerial view

These are all concepts that I would consider when creating certain artwork by hand and thus, using technology to create other works could also be a learning process for different facets of aesthetics.   One artist by the name of Harold Cohen, created a robot named AARON in which he explored the drawing process and learned more about this process from creating the code for AARON.  Cohen explains his journey with AARON and the beauty of his creation in The Further Exploits of AARON.

Instead of thinking of technology as replacing traditional forms of media, we should think of technology as a means of creating artwork that could not have been created before.  Now, our imagination has yet another outlet that has rarely been explored in comparison to art forms such as painting, sculpture, and drawing. George Whale argues in his Why Use Computers to Make Drawings that technology is a media that we can learn from and ultimately use as a full collaborator to our artistic endeavors.  This concept of learning about methods of art is one that I had never thought about before, yet I can understand how this might occur.  If I were to use technology to create a more traditional piece of art (with minimal interactivity and participation), I would need to fully comprehend various aspects about aesthetics that are also used when creating something by hand.  For example, if I wanted to code something in Processing that realistically resembled an aerial view of a tree in the foreground and a mountain in the background, I would need to apply the same principles that I apply to a painting.

1. The tree in the foreground should be a lighter shade than the mountain to create a sense of depth
2. Certain parts of the tree should be the lightest to indicate even more dimension
3. The tree and mountain should be at certain angles to depict an aerial view

Harold Cohen and AARON

These are all concepts that I would consider when creating certain artwork by hand and thus, using technology to create other works could also be a learning process for different facets of aesthetics.   One artist by the name of Harold Cohen, created a robot named AARON in which he explored the drawing process and learned more about this process from creating the code for AARON.  Cohen explains his journey with AARON and the beauty of his creation in The Further Exploits of AARON.

Yet, with these technological advances, are people losing their appreciation for more traditional artwork?  In my mind, it appears that people see paintings that depict real life (with so much precision and detail that they look like photographs!) and they breeze by them without a second look.  To me, something like Jan Davidsz. De Heem’s Still Life with Grapes is absolutely breath-taking, not only because of the beauty of the objects themselves, but because of the time and care it must have taken to produce a work of this kind.

Still Life with Grapes by Jan De Heem

When you look very closely, you notice the little insects swarming around in the entire painting.  It’s absolutely stunning! Although a work like this is centuries old, if one were to be made in today’s society, I fear no one would really care, suggesting a “been there, done that” attitude.   While I do agree that new media art is exciting and innovative, I hope that people can still appreciate works like De Heem’s because it takes just as much talent, patience, and skill to create a work like Still Life with Grapes as it does to create a work like AARON.

Next Tuesday, January 31st, new media curator and digital art scholar Christiane Paul will be speaking in Loew Theater at 4:30pm. She will be presenting a talk titled “Feedback: Histories of New Media Art,” sponsored by the Digital Humanities Initiative and the Department of Studio Art.

Christiane Paul is the Director of the Media Studies Graduate Programs and Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School as well as the Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has written extensively on new media art and technology with publications like Digital Art and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond. At the Whitney Museum, she has curated shows like ”Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools” (May 2011), “Profiling” (2007), and “Data Dynamics” (2001), and the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

We’re so excited- hope to see you there!

As demonstrated by Wafaa Bilal’s 2007 piece Domestic Tension, the internet and anonymity evinces a more visceral response from its audience than a live performance, independent of the social norms and pressures that typically hinder our most primal desires. In this piece, Bilal accomplishes this by inviting the internet audience into his home. Bilal’s website explains that Domestic Tension allows viewers to “log onto the internet [and] contact or ‘shoot’ Bilal with paintball guns” while he is confined to the gallery space, subsisting on whatever food or drinks were donated. Bilal intended Domestic Tension to protest the suffering borne by Iraqis throughout their daily lives, subject to constant monitoring and at perpetual risk from violence. However, the piece also serves as a chilling social experiment. By providing the web with 24-hour access to his life and the power to make him suffer, Bilal makes evident the cruelty that anonymity can bring out in otherwise normal individuals. In fact, within twenty days over 40,000 paintballs had been fired at Bilal, and over 60,000 individuals had fired at him in total by the end. This was countered by a kinder movement of individuals who would wrest control of the gun from the cruel, even taking watches to protect a complete stranger.

This evidences the true power of the interaction between new media art and the internet. Since the internet vastly increases the potential audience of any performance at a negligible cost, messages such as Bilal’s can be easily spread. Not only were these 60,000 participants / audience members made aware of Bilal’s message, but they were also witnesses to the conditions Bilal protested. In other words, the integration of the web has created a new medium for artistic expression that reaches an exponentially larger audience than a mere play. Furthermore, Bilal’s piece itself communicates with us on a far more primal level: it is real, and it is the epitome of the age-old adage of “showing not telling.”

Domestic Tension also serves as a powerful social experiment reminiscent of Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments as well as the murder of Kitty Genovese. Milgram’s experiments demonstrate our capacity to do despicable things under the right circumstances. Meanwhile, Kitty Genovese’s story illustrates the Bystander Effect, whereby the crowd diffuses responsibility since each individual feels more anonymous. These two factors combine in Bilal’s piece: afforded freedom from liability due to anonymity, thousands of people did not hesitate to shoot at Bilal. Some even wrote scripts to subject him, a total stranger, to a hail of paintballs. Given the right circumstances—the opportunity and freedom from liability—they could not control themselves.

This poses a number of troubling questions. Are we truly the civilized people we fancy ourselves, governed by higher humanistic ideals, or are baser motivations such as self-preservation and social conditioning the only things keeping us in check? If we find ourselves outraged by this cruelty, as Bilal’s internet protectors clearly felt, why are we not equally outraged about larger-scale cruelties across the world, in war zones such as Iraq or third world countries?

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung is a new media artist who specializes in creating digital collages that combines historical and popular culture references with images relating to current events in order to depict contemporary societal problems. In fact, Mary Flanagan, my professor for New Media Theories and Practices at Dartmouth College, explained that “recreating and remixing an old master artist’s artwork is a common theme in art history and contemporary art.” According to Hung, his main purpose in creating digital collages is to “explore the nature of digital communication while touching on issues such as identity, politics, sexuality and power,” as stated on his personal website. One example of Hung’s work, titled “The Fast Supper” is shown here:

In this piece, Hung satirizes the famous “Last Supper” painting by Leonardo da Vinci, which depicts Jesus Christ and his twelve disciples having their last supper before his crucifixion. Hung’s digital collage depicts Jesus consuming large amounts of fast food and unhealthy snacks, growing more and more obese until he overinflates and explodes. In the background, the epic orchestra song of Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi plays as Jesus wolfs down his food.

The unedited Last Supper painting

Obviously, this parody may be very offensive to those who feel great reverence for the Christian religion, but that controversial nature is one of the most effective aspects of the work. By choosing to satirize such a revered and sacred event, Hung is attempting to emphasize the equality in magnitude of the dire situation American society faces regarding obesity—one third of Americans are categorized as “obese”. Christianity is the most popular religion in America, practiced by over 78% of the theist population. In this piece, Hung parallels the pervasiveness of Christianity in our everyday lives with the ubiquitous nature of fast food in contemporary American society. Jesus Christ in this digital artwork can be interpreted as the representative of the United States itself, since the logos of famous fast food chains have been replaced by Christian symbols: KFC is replaced with JFC, presumably meaning “Jesus Fried Chicken”; Coca-Cola is replaced with “Jesus Christ”; and the McDonald’s French fries container has a cross on it. These examples of modern-day fast food reflect the “proliferation of imagery in a media society,” as proposed by Christiane Paul, the author of Digital Art. The reason these examples of fast food are so intuitive to us is that with the massive advertising campaigns large food corporations such as McDonald’s, KFC, and Coca-Cola run, the images of their products have made the “transition from mere representation to branding, in which [the images] are inscribed with a concept or value” (Paul). Hung is suggesting that our present culture is so dependent upon industrialized and artificially created fast food that we almost treat our penchant for consuming these products as an official way of life, a religion. Using the explosion of Jesus Christ at the end of the animated clip, Hung is attempting to warn Americans that unless we change our eating habits and stop our dependency on fat, greasy foods, we will generate health problems of enormous proportions as a population and cause America’s demise.

The way in which Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung combines the use of a collage, animation, and music to create “The Fast Supper” epitomizes the flexibility of digital media in allowing artists to aggregate different sources of technology to create works of art. The animated collage by itself would only be effective to a certain extent; however, with the combination of music, which creates a sense of urgency and impending doom, the audience is able to better appreciate the gravity of the obesity situation in America. One of the major merits of this piece of work is that it is available to anyone around the world with Internet access. “The Fast Supper” can be found on YouTube, via a link from Hung’s personal site. This ease of access makes “The Fast Supper” a superior means of conveying messages about society compared to any other methods. Also, in regards to audience exposure and costs, digital media is far more effective than traditional approaches of spreading social awareness through making speeches or running advertising campaigns—once the work is posted online, potentially hundreds of millions of viewers have access to it, and it costs nothing to post the work via video hosting sites such as YouTube. Hence, in this day and age, the fusion of digital media and art proves to be a highly effective tool to convey messages raising social awareness. Art is an increasingly popular tool to promote social or political causes, serving more than just as an aesthetic pleasure.

References:

http://fitmodelunion.com/malemodels/kenneth/

http://www.mos.org/leonardo/bio.html

http://www.tinkin.com/about/

http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html

http://religions.pewforum.org/reports

http://www.paintinghere.com/painting/original_picture_of_the_last_supper_3291.html

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collage

http://www.ucpress.edu/content/chapters/10362.ch01.pdf

http://www.thamesandhudson.com/9780500203989.html

Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003.

Flanagan, Mary

Big Questions, Anders Nilsen, Drawn & Quarterly, 9781770460478

Anders Nilsen has done exquisite sequential art, a.k.a. comix. I’m particularly fond of the trembling outlines and barely-representational figures in The End. The trade book of Big Questions is more conventional in style, but it binds 658 pages and 15 volumes of Nilsen’s work together in an extended, amazing story. In it, birds speak, but aren’t very smart. They devise their own ideas about a piece of unexploded ordnance, for instance, imagining it as an egg. An elderly woman dies in a plane crash; the idiot man-boy she has been caring for survives, as does the pilot. He also doesn’t seem too smart. The drawing style, which passes for simple at times but is nicely composed and filled with rich details, keys into the story, an animal tale that passes beyond childish simplicity. There are none of the mainstream superheros and no hint of the indie comics memoir in these ten years of work by a master of this art. Comic readers should love it; radical readers who wish to try out comics should try it.

But my favorite piece is Canogar hide 2 by Daniel Canogar. The portrait was created by inscribing many different fingerprints digitally; the prints blurred and overlapped creating only partial prints. Today fingering printing is one of the top methods in identifying someone. The fingerprint is so unique that you don’t share it with anyone else. However in Canogar’s piece he seems to have created a grand collage consisting of many different people;  all the prints are blurred together, however, becoming an inseparable and unidentifiable piece of work. The work is the extreme contrast of what the fingerprint represents in our society today. Our fingerprint is our own individual identifier, but by making it unidentifiable, Canogar has made it anonymous. Scheer does the same thing in his pieces of work. The scientist or the collector usually took the moth itself or pictures of the moth and labeled it so that they could identify it; here Scheer reproduced the pictures but not the names, we are left with little other information but what we see on the page or in the picture. These artists have taken processes of identification and made them anonymous in their artwork.

I began to think of examples from my own life in which scientific processes could be made into art. One of the more prominent examples that comes to mind, is one of my biology labs. In this particular lab, we were looking at different types of cells.The cell had been stained with different florescent dyes. Each part of the cell could absorb a different dye because it’s density. We then used a confocal microscope connected to a computer to view the cell. The microscope would shine a light of different wave lengths, and which ever dye reacted to that wave length would reflect back a color and then we would photograph it with a computer program. This would be  one repeatedly at different wavelengths to capture the different densities of the cell. After we were finished with this process, we would recreate the cell by overlapping the different photographs we had taken. The finished product created a beautiful 3D picture of  the cell, with many colors over lapping, that looked it been created digitally on computer.  Many scientists display their work at competitions like the  Small World Microtography Competition. Scientist submit the pictures of  their as forms of art1. It lead me to think that there may be many more scientific process that we are not exposed to that have the capacity to produce beautiful artwork.

Sources

Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003.

1.http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/11/confocal_image_of_cochlea_wins.php

Pale Fire: A Poem in four Cantos by John Shade, Vladimir Nabokov, Ginkgo Press, 9781584234319

Extracting the poem (which only exists as a sort of in-joke in the radical novel Pale Fire) from what is perhaps (according, e.g., to Larry McCaffrey) the major English-language novel of the 20th Century? It’s at least a very extreme move. This edition drops the prose like a bad habit, makes like a banana and splits it off, makes like a tree and abandons House of Leaves prose for Leaves of Grass verse. Does it work in the sense of presenting a beautiful poem freed from its chrysalis? No. Much of it is still most notable for building up, and then comically deflating, the explicitly implied author, John Shade. It’s better as part of a narrative than as language trembling between sound and sense. But John Shade’s “Pale Fire” is not too bad of a poem qua poem, and reading it alone can certainly enhance one’s appreciation of the truly incredible novel that has been shucked off here. I haven’t read the included commentary, but must note that including commentary is an absolutely hilarious idea.

As demonstrated by Wafaa Bilal’s 2007 piece Domestic Tension, the internet and anonymity evinces a more visceral response from its audience than a live performance, independent of the social norms and pressures that typically hinder our most primal desires. In this piece, Bilal accomplishes this by inviting the internet audience into his home. Bilal’s website explains that Domestic Tension allows viewers to “log onto the internet [and] contact or ‘shoot’ Bilal with paintball guns” while he is confined to the gallery space, subsisting on whatever food or drinks were donated. Bilal intended Domestic Tension to protest the suffering borne by Iraqis throughout their daily lives, subject to constant monitoring and at perpetual risk from violence. However, the piece also serves as a chilling social experiment. By providing the web with 24-hour access to his life and the power to make him suffer, Bilal makes evident the cruelty that anonymity can bring out in otherwise normal individuals. In fact, within twenty days over 40,000 paintballs had been fired at Bilal, and over 60,000 individuals had fired at him in total by the end. This was countered by a kinder movement of individuals who would wrest control of the gun from the cruel, even taking watches to protect a complete stranger.

The gallery space was preserved after the demonstration ended. Over 60,000 paintballs were fired in this gallery over the duration.

This evidences the true power of the interaction between new media art and the internet. Since the internet vastly increases the potential audience of any performance at a negligible cost, messages such as Bilal’s can be easily spread. Not only were these 60,000 participants / audience members made aware of Bilal’s message, but they were also witnesses to the conditions Bilal protested. In other words, the integration of the web has created a new medium for artistic expression that reaches an exponentially larger audience than a mere play. Furthermore, Bilal’s piece itself communicates with us on a far more primal level: it is real, and it is the epitome of the age-old adage of “showing not telling.”

Domestic Tension also serves as a powerful social experiment reminiscent of Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments as well as the murder of Kitty Genovese. Milgram’s experiments demonstrate our capacity to do despicable things under the right circumstances. Meanwhile, Kitty Genovese’s story illustrates the Bystander Effect, whereby the crowd diffuses responsibility since each individual feels more anonymous. These two factors combine in Bilal’s piece: afforded freedom from liability due to anonymity, thousands of people did not hesitate to shoot at Bilal. Some even wrote scripts to subject him, a total stranger, to a hail of paintballs. Given the right circumstances—the opportunity and freedom from liability—they could not control themselves.

This poses a number of troubling questions. Are we truly the civilized people we fancy ourselves, governed by higher humanistic ideals, or are baser motivations such as self-preservation and social conditioning the only things keeping us in check? If we find ourselves outraged by this cruelty, as Bilal’s internet protectors clearly felt, why are we not equally outraged about larger-scale cruelties across the world, in war zones such as Iraq or third world countries?

You Can’t Have Everything… Where Would You Put It!, Bruce Andrews, Veer Books

There is no way this book will get past your spam filter:

facework cootie itsier-off
we are the dream sequences in your conventional cultural life -

Indeed we are. Here’s verbal salad (French dressing? Russian dressing?) shot through at times with lines of split and reassembled words:

zy^rit
sect^in
sing^franchi
cres^offi

It’s a delight to apprehend such text, passing words beneath one’s eyes, thinking about what it all might mean and sound like. Looking back now, I wonder if I should have flipped this open and read at random when I encountered it originally. Instead of plodding through, I might have thought for days about a line such as “tractor the Real.” But, as it happens, I can still do that. Although I have everything, I had nowhere to put it. I have to delve in again for specific examples of juxtapositions that Bruce Andrews fashions. The book is no doubt worth reading, scanning, or hashing into – however you want to have it all.

Scott Snibbe

Although there are various contemporary artists involved in interactive art, Scott Snibbe  is one of the most influential. Snibbe’s reasoning for his pursuit in creating interactive art is that “by using interactivity, [he] hope[s] to promote an understanding of the world as interdependent; destroying the illusion that each of us, or any phenomenon, exists in isolation from the rest of reality,” as stated on his personal site. A video of one of his works, titled Visceral Cinema: Chien, can be found here:

This piece was shown at Telic Gallery in Los Angeles, California, and Art Interactive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2005, as well as the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2006. For this work, Snibbe is able to recreate a traditional film in a way that allows the audience to be more than just passive viewers. What I find to be the most interesting aspect of this type of work is that the traditional paradigm of how people interact with art has evolved. In this case, Snibbe takes a surrealist film named Un Chien Andalou, made by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, and recreates it so that the audience can influence what happens in the film. Instead of just watching a stream of scenes being displayed on a screen, the audience can actually affect what happens within the projected visuals. Particularly, for this piece, Snibbe uses a projector to project silhouettes of a man pulling on a piano with a rope. If the audience stands between the man and the piano, the shadow of the participant is registered by some sensor and causes the piano to move farther away from the projected man, forcing him to strain against the rope to pull the piano with him. Additionally, by “touching” the shadow of the man with the participants’ own shadows, the man will slowly dissolve into tiny fragments, coming back only when participants removed their shadows from touching his.

Audience interacting with Snibbe's "Chien" work.

To me, Visceral Cinema: Chien consistently exhibits Snibbe’s intention of making the audience aware of the relationships within this world. The fact that this piece of art requires physical participation allows the audience to realize that everything in our reality is interdependent. Even our smallest actions can change what happens around us, so we should never see ourselves as lone entities unaffected by the universe. This work challenges the audience to look at the world in new light, providing a new outlook on human life and what it means to exist. Interactive art pieces such as this provide a different approach to appreciating art compared to traditional forms. In my opinion, this type of “new” art is more effective in relating and connecting with the audience, since they have a chance to personally influence their experience of the art—because each person’s interaction with the piece is different, what they experience as a result will be unique to them as well.

Sources:

http://www.ucpress.edu/content/chapters/10362.ch01.pdf

http://www.snibbe.com/bio/ http://www.snibbe.com/files/6512/8735/8979/Scott_Snibbe_at_Media_Lab_2009.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgxkUH6PrIE

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.htm

http://www.snibbe.com/images/projects/chien/large/chien_5.JPG

Bullivant, Lucy. Shadow Play: The Participative Art of Scott Snibbe. Special Issue: 4dsocial: Interactive Design Environments 77, no. 4 (July/August 2007), 68–77.

This Thursday, January 26th, humanities scholar and Duke professor Cathy Davidson will be giving a talk here at Dartmouth, at Filene Auditorium in Moore Hall at 5pm. She’ll be discussing her latest book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.  

According to Davidson, “distraction is your friend.” Our brains aren’t linear, and disruptions can be welcomed. Within the midst of immense technological change, Davidson emphasizes the synergy of collaboration by difference. Collaborative digital learning and distributed multitasking become essential for 21st century learning. She advocates for re-envisioning our Industrial-age institutions, a crucial update necessary for a new world of constant connectedness, information overload, and global collaboration.

Davidson has served as the Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, where she created programs like Program in Information Science + Information Studies and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

Davidson is also the co-founder of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), a virtual network of individuals and institutions inspired by the collaborative potential of new technologies. HASTAC administers the $2 million annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition, which worked with the Mozilla Foundation to launch 2011′s “Badges for Lifelong Learning” Competition that aimed to innovate connected learning. 

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/157/cathy-davidson-duke-university-hastac

Visit her website: cathydavidson.com and follow her on Twitter

The interactive component of both installations, to me, is what makes them so interesting! Inspired by the installations’ dependence on human interaction, I decided to venture onto Google in hopes of finding more new media work that relied on interactivity.  I stumbled across a body of work by Daniel Rozin that blew my mind!  He has a series of works called “Mechanical Mirrors” in which each piece is a mirror made of a different media such as the shiny balls mirror and the peg mirror.  I didn’t actually believe the mirrors worked until I viewed the peg mirror video footage and was shocked at what I was seeing.

Click to see the wooden mirror in action

Opponents of SOPA and its Senate sister, PIPA, fear that such legislation would greatly inhibit the free flow of knowledge. Said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, “SOPA and PIPA endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad, and set a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world.” The bills claim to provide protection for the public from online piracy, copyright infringement, and even counterfeit drugs. When cast in that light the bills seem reasonable, even friendly, but the rub comes in bounding them: if the American government can order Google to disable hyperlinks to pages which contain copyright infringement or other exploitative material, can it also order the same for Websites simply suspected of such? Could Sites containing hate speech be cut out? What about dissident domains?

In a world ever-more dependent on the free-flow of information for work, play, revolution, and everything in between it is a frightening thought that all it might take to wipe a Site- or an entire genre of content- from the Internet is the opinion of a someone able to convince the Attorney General to push the paperwork required to force all legitimate service providers to cease providing their services. For new media artists and the public that loves their work this is a particularly frightening prospect.

The nature of the medium lends itself to sampling pre-existing works, and artists do so unabashedly- often without thought for copyright law. A 2001 example of how such appropriation can be received (for better and worse) lays with Dino Ignacio, a then-high-school-student who used Photoshop to create a photomontage of found images of Bert (from the globally syndicated Sesame Street) and Osama Bin Ladin. He posted this work on his homepage, a Bangladesh publisher picked up the image in a web crawl for images to use on anti-American shirts and posters, protestors in the Middle East snapped them up, and CNN filmed them in action. When representatives of the Children’s Television Workshop (responsible for Sesame Street) saw the footage they vowed to take legal action against… someone.

The Ignacio affair ended with the student taking his Website down of his own volition, given increased and unwanted global public scrutiny, but what of such artists whose work intentionally crosses the lines of what some may consider infallible copyright law? What would it mean for the government to forcibly remove an artist’s work from public view? In the interest of freedom and speech- both which, to date, are the laws of the Internet lands- it would mean something very, very bad.

1 Bill Summary & Status, 112th Congress (2011-2012), H. R. 3261. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.3261:
2 Text of S 968: Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s112-968&version=rs&nid=t0%3Ars%3A265
3 Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, p. 1-2. Henry Jenkins. http://tinyurl.com/convergence-culture-henry-jenk

Joseph Scheer’s work focuses on one miracle of nature—moths. Normally seen as the unattractive cousin of butterflies, moths are not considered beautiful by insect standards. However, Scheer brings to light their beauty with his photography by focusing on the elements of size and texture. Scheer uses a university colleagues access to a special scanner to develop his highly detailed photographs. According to National Geographic, “The scanner records so much information—67 million data points per square inch—that a single specimen may take 20 minutes to scan. The data files generated are huge: Two small moths fill an entire compact disc.”[i]

The large moth pictures are simply but very powerful. Looking at one of these prints, you can see the texture in the wings: its gossamer transparency and frail beauty. For example, look at Zeusera Pyrina:

You have a full view of the entire body and wings, and are even able to see the many tiny flecks of black on its thin wings. One can also see the detail segmentations and “furry” parts in the antennae and head.

Or take a look at Ctenucha Virginica:

This image would normally look like a normal uninteresting black moth in real time during the day. But with the incredibly zoom and digital detail in this photograph, we can see the shiny blue body, the orange head, and the slight brown-purple tint of the wings. To see more of Scheer’s work, click here.

The various pictures give a zoom-lens focus to one of life’s most overlooked creatures. And through painstaking work, Scheer recreates the moth’s image before our eyes with excruciatingly clear detail. Advances in digital technology birth Scheer’s work in recreating an element of natural science. Science here plays a double role. The question, of course, is, “Why moths?” Scheer says, “I have chosen moths to study and create work from because of their diversity (approximately 14,000 species found in the United States) and their rich mythology in history. They are also a family of insects that most people know so little about, both visually and environmentally. A goal of my artwork is to bring this information to a diverse audience who may not normally be aware of, or come in contact with, the beauty and diversity of moths.”[ii] With this singular goal, Scheer bring insect photography to a new level of appeal. Here is a site for an exhibit he held at Colorado University called Moth Matters.

However, science need not be natural for it to be considered artistic. It can also be found in the least artistic of mediums: data.

Andreas Müller-Pohle redefines what it means to present scientific art. Often, digital art is an image digitally encoded into pixels and into binary numbers, stored as data in a computer, and then through some output device, the image is recaptured. But Müller-Pohle in all of his works poses an interesting question: Who says data is not art? Müller-Pohle creates a series of works called Digital Scores, each which presents the numeric data representation of an image as the work itself. Transposing the pictures into millions of alphanumeric characters, Müller-Pohle creates a New Media Art that abstracts a picture into data, forcing us as views to find the beauty in the image.

Another work of Müller-Pohle that makes use of data is Blind Genes. Here the data is scientific. After numerous biological discoveries, we know now that all physical affectations are coded or expressed in our DNA, in sequences of nucleotides and amino acids. In blind genes, Müller-Pohle uses a database of genetic information and then picks out those that express blindness. He then visualizes those sequences in Braille, a language used by the blind to read written texts. Here, he merges the meaning of two coding systems, one linguistic and one genetic, to make a very powerful statement about the meaning of data while displaying it in a beautifully minimalist pointillism. Another one of Müller-Pohle’s works is called the River Project.

Both Scheer and Müller-Pohle take great pains to create their art. Each can boast a use of science and new technology to create their pieces. But from their collective work, we find science and art to be more interconnected than previously thought. In the days of still life paintings and portraits, data was not considered to be an appropriate medium for art. Now with digital artworks such as these, science is no longer the subject or the medium, but both.

Sources

Women workers in maquiladora factory

Tijuana is home to thousands of men and women who work in the maquiladora factories. They earn $8 a day assembling among other things, medical devices, automobile components, Smart phones in state of the art facilities. At the end of the day, these same people go home to feed their hungry children, in homes made of cinder blocks, recycled tires, and discarded garage doors from nearby San Diego, California. It is also the headquarters of the Tijuana Cartel, an organized crime syndicate specializing in drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, human smuggling, and gun running.

Because of it’s diverse immigrant population, Tijuana is well spring of new ideas, hybrids that spring our of the barrios where resourcefulness is essential to survival. One such creation is Torolab an artist collective comprised of architects, artists, musicians, graphic designers, and DJ’s. Raul Cardenas, its founder, named his group after the spirit of el toro (the bull) who “has nothing to lose and everything to win.” Cardenas is a modern day curandero (medicine man) who studies the anatomy of the city through its vascular system. In 2005 Torolab unleashed La región de los pantalones transfronterizos (The Region of the Transborder Trousers) project. Working as a collaborative Torolab designed a pair of pants equipped with a hidden pocket for a passport and Global Positioning System (GPS) transmitters. For five days wearing their especially equipped pantalones they traversed the zone with it’s many barriers and obstacles, between Tijuana and San Diego, recording all their movements including their car’s fuel consumption. All the data was fed into a computer and graphically visualized using Torolab’s programmed software. The results were projected in different colors onto a grid panel of a topographical relief map. Five days were compressed into an eight-minute loop as he or she traveled back and forth across the vast urban landscape. The pantalones are multi-functional and can be worn by American tourist’s visiting Tijuana. They offer plenty of pockets for cameras, souvenirs and medicine bottles.

A cartographic portrait of the Mexico-California borderland and the Torovestimenta Project by Raúl Cárdenas Osuna

Torolab’s Transborder Trousers project goes beyond exposing the migratory patterns of Tijaunenses (Tijuana citizens). It reveals the harsh reality that is common to some folks yet foreign and incomprehensible to others. If we care to move beyond the visually stunning imagery, Torolab gives us a lens for examining the world that we’ve created. It’s a world where walls and cameras provide security, where we decide who comes in and who goes out. In a sense, Transborder Trousers is a tool for studying and questioning our own behavior. It frees us to do a self-analysis, check all the data and ask honest questions like: “What is the real price of freedom?” or “Who’s homeland are we protecting?”

References:

Amalfitano, Madelynn. “Bridging the Gap | Metropolis Magazine | October 2001.” Metropolis Magazine. Oct. 2001. Web. 17 Jan. 2012. <http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_1001/ob/ob07.html>.

Emerling, Susan. “Torolab | There’s Art for Art’s Sake, and There’s ToroLab – Los Angeles Times.” The Los Angeles Times. 19 July 2001. Web. 17 Jan. 2012. <http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jul/19/news/cl-23974>.

Leigh Brown, Patricia. “Young U.S. Citizens in Mexico Brave Risks for American Schools.” The New York Times. 16 Jan. 2012. Web. 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/us/young-us-citizens-in-mexico-up-early-to-learn-in-the-us.html>.

Takahashi, Corey. “Nortec Collective Crosses Musical, Real Borders : NPR.” NPR : National Public Radio : News & Analysis, World, US, Music & Arts : NPR. 21 Aug. 2009. Web. 17 Jan. 2012. <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112118237>.

“United States-Mexico Border.” Smithsonian Education – Welcome. Web. 17 Jan. 2012. <http://smithsonianeducation.org/migrations/bord/intro.html>.

It turns out you don’t have to camp outside in a tent in frigid climes to pitch a successful protest. The Electronic Disturbance Theatre has been doing them comfortably since 1997. Using simple technologies such as E-mail, HTML, and Java, the EDT has managed to launch a series of “denial of service attacks” on corrupt regimes from the Mexican Stock Exchange to the World Trade Organization. These attacks focus not on the places themselves, but on their websites.

The Medium Involved

The strategy? Simple. Disable the sites of corrupt politicians, corporations, and organizations in a form of hindrance similar to camping out in front of the actual buildings. In 1998, the founder of the EDT, Ricardo Dominguez, developed a Java applet called FloodNet. He and his compatriots solicited the aid of social and political activists around the globe to run the program. Using this tactical media, supporters went online to specified sites such as those of past Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the Mexican Stock Exchange, Chase Manhattan Bank, and the World Trade Organization, and asked for “bad URLs”—or, web pages that don’t actually exist on those sites. They requested a myriad of poignant and unapproachable things, such as “names of Zapatistas killed by the Mexican Army in military attacks on the autonomous village of Acteal,” and in return received an error message for each “bad” URL. As the error messages built up, the site would carry in its log a gross mountain of injustices, as if it were “returning the dead to those responsible for their murders.” This force of hactivism, if employed by enough people simultaneously, would even cause the server to crash.

The Future                                                          

This is not the EDT’s end goal, however. Dominguez asserts that the idea is not to “destroy or disrupt these Web sites,” but to “disturb.” He bases this internet activist movement on the standard of the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, a march of civil disobedience which strove to proceed honestly and openly. No fake names, counter-assassinations, or site destruction here. The participants save all data, so that their own actions may be called into account, not just those of the people and ideas they are protesting against. They want to annoy as “paper airplanes,” and not bombard with actual bombs. As Wray noted in his mapping of electronic civil disobedience, ” Despite the current levels of political, tactical, and technical questions that are being raised about hacktivism et al, it seems to be an area that is in a period of expansion, rather than contraction” (par 43).

The movement is, after all, rooted in the unifying principles of artists, not anarchists. It is an amalgamation of the aesthetic concepts of art and the ethical support of those struggling against the ongoing scourge of governmental oppression, such as the indigenous Zapatista people of Chiapas, Mexico (See Mark Tribe’s writing on the group). It is a practical system. It enables ordinary people, who cannot afford the “ear of the New York Times” or a spot on daily television, to speak their minds. It is an innovative system, progressing from the “Zapatista Disturbance Developer’s Kit” of 1999 to other realms of “online civil disobedience software,” and perhaps new media not yet invented. Interested to see where it goes?

See in particular, Wray, Stefan. Electronic Civil Disobedience and the World Wide Web of Hactivism: A Mapping of Extraparliamentarian Direct Action Net Politics. Switch 4(2).

Blas, Zach. On Electronic Civil Disobedience: Interview with Ricardo Dominguez. b.a.n.g. lab Blog. December 5, 2011.

Meet Zara, our design guru; Jasmine, doing a balancing act; and Andrea and Viviana, busy modding!

It is currently a “Tiltfactor Week”: Our own reality show! Teams have a week to research and prototype a concept to playable completeness. It might not be pretty–it is raining ice outside, we’re disregarding any sense of game aesthetics, and if you ask about the hours of hard work students will put into project games–you may hear groans. But– I think our players will be happy with the results!

We are very excited to announce that Prom Week has been nominated as a finalist in Technical Excellence for the 2012 Independent Games Festival!

We’ll be posting more info about Prom Week, how it works, and information about our release date soon.

Whooo hooooo!!!

Wednesday January 18, 2012 4-7pm
304 North Fairbanks

Come greet the new year with the folks behind Dartmouth’s Game Research Lab for an open house! Play video games and board games! Meet our student designers, staff, and founder Mary Flanagan– and play games! This time we will be playing Kinect games, and showing our own new games including POX for iPad and prototypes for our gender stereotyping and STEM field-related games, and we’ll discuss our new after school programs in Lebanon! And, we’ll play XBOX Kinect games and eat Thai food!

Huzzah!

Even more surprising is that Ian Bogost and I have managed to advance part of our diabolical plan to have people use five long, colored rectangles stacked on top of each other: