Internet art challenges traditional notions of the artist and artwork: Who is the artist when the medium is dynamic and participatory? What about the integrity of the artwork itself, when the audience can customize the artist's original conception and recreate it in infinite new configurations?
The University of Colorado, with the support of the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS), has invited Web artists, noted curators and leading scholars to consider the issues and questions posed by the Internet in the realm of the visual at a conference titled "Rethinking the Visual: New Technologies in the Context of Culture and Society" to be held on the Boulder campus Sept. 13-14.
The cornerstone of the conference is an online art exhibition, "Mapping Transitions"(), featuring new works by three internationally recognized digital artists commissioned especially for the symposium. The works provoke debate about the cultural impact of art and technology, but co-curators Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of New Media for the Whitney Museum of American Art and Mark Amerika, digital artist and CU professor of new media, point out that they are also meant to engage the audience in the process of artmaking.
The Internet changes the way artists compose, distribute and exhibit their work in public. Once on the Internet, the exhibition is open round-the-clock. Audiences and artists are often able to participate in the ongoing creation of the work; and the works themselves often evolve with input from multiple participants.
Paul and Amerika chose Mary Flanagan, Lisa Jevbratt and John Klima, all of whom were included in this year's Whitney Biennial of American Art, because of the experimental nature of their work in visualizing various forms of computer data.
Flanagan, an associate professor of multimedia design in the art department at the University of Oregon, investigates the intersection of art, technology and gender. Before joining the faculty, Flanagan produced CD-ROM games for the Discovery Channel and ABC/Creative Wonders.
Her piece for "Mapping Transitions," titled [search], explores the human desire for information and knowledge by monitoring actual Internet search engine queries from around the world. The work conceptually explores everyday life and how ordinary people use technology, while simultaneously considering the commonality of desire and how the immediacy of the Internet affects people's yearnings.
Jevbratt, an artist and assistant professor of digital media at the University of California, Santa Barbara, created software for "Mapping Transitions" that generates visualizations of the movement of crawlers over the Web and the data they collect in the process. The software allows each viewer to manipulate the crawler's behavior, for example, by deciding where it should begin crawling, or the order in which links are followed. The result is a kind of topology, a visualization of where the crawler has been, which is then emailed to the user.
Klima's piece for "Mapping Transitions," is titled "Political Landscape, Emotional Terrain," and features a series of global terrains that relate to the metaphors used to describe the human condition. One terrain consists of a 3-D relief map of the Earth. Another charts "emotional" terrain, employing statistics from a World Health Organization online global database related specifically to mental health, which translates the incidence of mental illness into an elevation, replacing the existing topography of the Earth with a landscape created from the mental condition of its inhabitants.
A third uses statistics relating to human rights abuses around the world to map the "political" terrain.
The artists will participate in a panel discussion with Amerika and Paul on Friday, Sept. 13, in Room N141, Sibell Wolle Fine Arts Building on the CU-Boulder campus following a reception in the CU Art Galleries. The reception begins at 5:30 p.m., the panel at 6:30 p.m.
On Saturday, Sept. 14, five leading scholars and video artists will reconsider the aesthetic, social and cultural significance of visual art in the realm of hypermedia during the "Rethinking the Visual: New Technologies in the Context of Society and Culture" Conference, in Room N141, Sibell Wolle Fine Arts Building, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The artist scholars are: Roderick Coover, University of Chicago; Johanna Drucker, University of Virginia; Faye Ginsburg, New York University; Steve Jones, University of Illinois-Chicago; and W.J.T. Mitchell, University of Chicago. The agenda, including each speaker's topic follows.
Editors Note: The exhibition goes "live" on Sept. 4 at ; artists and curators are available for interviews prior to that date and email addresses are enclosed. Complete resumes of the artists, curators and speakers are available at the "Mapping Transitions" Web site.
Mark Amerika, (303) 492-4489
University of Colorado at Boulder
Sibell-Wolle Fine Arts
318 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309
Mary Flanagan
198 Lawrence Hall
Department of Art
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97402
John Klima
130 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Lisa Jevbratt
345 N.3rd St #4
San Jose CA 95112
Christiane Paul
79 Thompson St., #12
NY, NY 10012
MAPPING TRANSITIONS
Friday, September 13, 2002
5:30 p.m-8:00 p.m.
CU Art Galleries, Sibell-Wolle Fine Arts Building
5:30-6:30 Reception and exhibition viewing
6:30 Welcoming remarks, Introduction of Panel: Dr. Erika Doss, CU Fine Arts Dept.
6:45-8:00 Panel Discussion Mapping Transitions with artists: Mary Flanagan, John Klima and Lisa Jevbratt, and co-curators, Christiane Paul and Mark Amerika
RETHINKING THE VISUAL: NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONTEXT OF SOCIETY AND CULTURE
Saturday, September 14, 2002
8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.
Room N141, Sibell-Wolle Fine Arts Building
8:30-9:00 Coffee
9:00 Welcoming remarks: Dr. Todd Gleason, Dean College of Arts & Sciences
9:15-10:00 W.J.T. Mitchell:Ìý "The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction"
10:00-10:45 Johanna Drucker: "Is There an Aesthetics of Digital Media?"
10:45-11:00 Coffee
11:00-11:45 Faye Ginsburg: "Digital Dreamtime and Inuit Internet"
12:00-2:00 Lunch
2:00-2:45 Rod Coover: "Words, Webs, and Worldmaking: Representing Places Through Hypertext and the Time-Image"
3:00-3:45 Steve Jones: "Immersion, Culture and Communication in CAVE-based Virtual Reality"
3:45-4:00 Coffee
4:00-5:00 Group seminar