Natalie Bookchin talk:

Natalie: My lecture will be about collaboration as a persistent aesthetic strategy in network art. I will address the ways the Internet figured in the initiation and realization of collaborative work, and discuss the shift of what counts as artistic practice, as a result of the form and context of the networking environment. I will detail the trajectory of my own work in network art to describe a history that runs parallel to a larger trend, focuing on my online game Metapet (2003) and on a project initiated and coordinated by Jackie Stevens and me called AgoraXchange, a project that borrows elements from models of large scale peer-to-peer collaborations that have emerged on the Internet. These include the paradigm of open source software development (as in the development of the Linux operating system), large scale self-regulating peer-to-peer discussion groups (such as slashdot.org), and communities where individuals sustain and maintain a user reputation system (such as ebay.com). In all of this work I will discuss how the network figured in the development, content and realization of the art and how my practice is located, not in the studio, but in networks.

Natalie Bookchin bio:

Natalie Bookchin's projects include Metapet, an online game commissioned by Creative Time. The beta version of the project was launched at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Version 1 was linked from the Whitney Museum’s online gallery. Bookchin is currently working on a large scale network project called AgoraXChange, which has been commissioned by the Tate Museum, and is scheduled to launch in 2004 at agoraXchange.net. In 1999-2000 Bookchin organized <net.net.net>, an eight month series of lectures and workshops on art, activism and the Internet at Cal Arts, MOCA in LA, and Laboratorio Cinematek in Tijuana. From 1998 to 2000 she was a member of the collective ®TMark. She was a 2001-2002 Guggenheim Fellow. Her work is exhibited at institutions including PS1, Mass MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, KunstWerke, Berlin, the Generali Foundation, Vienna, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Shedhale in Zurich. She is based in Los Angeles and is a faculty member at CalArts.

Cathy Davies

Cathy Davies will screen "Holding Pattern", the first in a series of screensavers designed to bring complex, atmospheric cinema to the personal computer workstation. (Download free at www.idle-time.org for Mac and Windows.)

"In the workplace, the computer tends to fracture our attention into tiny, task-oriented units," said Davies. "But even in our most productive, atomized mental states, and against the policies of our employers (or even our own productive intentions), we instinctively steal moments to be idle at work. I want to create little films for
computers which interrupt the granular processing of tasks, and remind us users what it is like to truly be idle -- owning your own time, and mind." She will discuss the history of long, slow films, and the unique potential for cinema in screensavers.

bio

In 1997, Cathy Davies casually put some fonts she designed on a website as a free download. Within two years, these fonts had been used in graphic designs from TV commercials to mainstream rap albums to riot girl zines. Since that time, her work has centered on the net as a distribution medium, art as a "gift economy", the humble ubiquity of graphic design, and shoplifting from corporate and marketing culture.

She performed with Heather Cassils as a cloned Bill Gates in "Microsoft Me" (2001) at Edith Russ site for Media Art in Oldenberg, Germany. Her web site "NeedCom: Market Research for Panhandlers" (1999) received funding from PBS Online and Web Lab, and will be featured in the upcoming book _Graphic Agitation 2_ from Taaschen Press.