Christiane Paul talk: In digital environments, the continuous flow of information creates fluctuating contexts that become a "moving target" when it comes to establishing our frameworks for creating meaning. While this applies to digital environments in general, content and context can fluctuate to varying degrees, depending on the openness or closure of a system or artwork. It does not come as a surprise that "mapping" in various forms has become a prominent narrative in networked digital art. Networks constitute an environment with no fixed entry points, consisting of nodes and synapses that can be reconfigured. The ability to create context and meaning in this type of environment largely relies on possibilities of filtering information and creating some form of map--be it mental or visual--that can allow for orientation, even if the map is constantly reconfiguring itself in front of our eyes. The talk will give a survey of the artistic practice of networked data visualization and "dynamic mapping."
Christiane Paul is the Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the director of Intelligent Agent, a service organization and information resource dedicated to digital art. She has written extensively on new media, net art, information architecture, hypermedia, and hyperfiction, and her articles have been published in magazines such as Sculpture, Leonardo, and Intelligent Agent,. Her book “Digital Art” (part of the World of Art Series by Thames & Hudson, UK) was published in July 2003. She is working with co-editors Victoria Vesna and Margot Lovejoy on an essay collection focusing on context and meaning in digital art; and editing an anthology on Curating New Media. She teaches in the MFA computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York and has lectured internationally on art and technology. Her first show at the Whitney, “Data Dynamics” (March - June, 2001), dealt with the mapping of data and information flow on the Internet and in the museum space. She was one of the co-curators of the New York Digital Salon's 10th anniversary exhibition (2003) and curated the net art exhibitions “Mapping Transitions” at the University of Boulder, Colorado (September 2002); as well as "CODeDOC" for artport, the Whitney Museum’s online portal to Internet art for which she is responsible. "CODeDOC" was launched in September 2002, and continued with a second installment at the 2003 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. Christiane Paul also curated the net art selections for the 2002 Whitney Biennial (March, 2002); for Fotofest (Houston, Texas, March, 2002); and the exhibition “Evo1” (Gallery L, Moscow, October 2001). Forthcoming exhibitions include eVolution, which addresses issues surrounding artificial life and intelligent, behavior-driven systems (opening January 23, 2004, at Art Interactive, Boston); as well as a selection of installations for the Ciberarts Festival in Bilbao, Spain (April, 2004). Ms. Paul has participated in numerous panels on new media and presented at conferences worldwide. Her speaking engagements included the Tate Museum, London; the Museum of Contemporary Arts (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain); the Boston Cyberarts Festival; the Royal Academy of Arts, Sweden; the annual College Art Association conference (New York); the International Summit on Multimedia and the Internet (Abu Dhabi, UAE); invenção thinking the next millennium (São Paulo, Brazil); consciousness reframed 2 (CAiiA, Wales, Newport, UK); and the Governor’s Conference on the Arts (San Francisco). John Klima bio Ca. 1980, Brooklyn-based artist John Klima (b. 1965) attempted to code a 3D maze on a TRS-80 with 4k RAM and failed miserably, but has been obsessed with 3D graphics ever since. Contracting for companies such as Microsoft, Turner Broadcasting, and Dun & Bradstreet from 1993 to 1998, Klima honed his programming skills while continuing to make art within the flexible schedule that free-lance programming provided. In 1998, Klima discontinued activities as a commercial programmer to focus solely on the creation of art software. Klima mounted his first solo exhibition in February 2001 at Postmasters Gallery and has opened his second solo show at Postmasters in November 2003. His work has been shown at European festivals, such as VIPER (Switzerland) and EMAF (Germany). His work glasbead was included in the "New Media New Face" exhibit at the ICC in Tokyo, Japan (1999) and received the Golden Lasso Award for Art in the Web3DRoundup at SIGGRAPH 2000 in New Orleans. His work ecosystm, commissioned by Zurich Capital Markets, was shown at the Whitney Museum as part of the exhibition BitStreams (2001). Klima's recent work, EARTH - previewed at the National Library of Medicine on May 21, 2001, and at SIGGRAPH 2001 in Los Angeles - was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. In 2002, he received a grant from the Langlois Foundation for his project Terrain Machine. By drawing upon gaming and the various possibilities of manipulating and transliterating data, John Klima's work occupies new territory in media art. Although there is an obvious connection between gaming and interactive digital art, and the gaming industry has played an important role in the development of multi-user environments, the parameters of this connection are rarely subjected to serious aesthetic investigation. Employing a variety of technologies to produce both hardware and software, Klima's work consistantly connects the virtual to the real, addressing issues of remote responsibility, and bluring the distinctions between the simulated and the concrete. A complete list of works is available at www.cityarts.com/lmno/ |
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