whoa internet

new addresses for the internet, who would have thought. it’s called IP version 6. “The net’s current addressing scheme is expected to exhaust the pool of unallocated addresses by 2011.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7221758.stm

check it out

In Exile

I spent a lot of time combing the internet, looking for a net art piece that I actually wanted to review. There is a lot of interesting work out there, but it took some time to filter through it all to find something that actually had some emotional and intellectual resonance for me. Finally, I stumbled apon Carlo Zanni’s My Temporary Visiting Position From The Sunset Terrace Bar. The concept seems pretty simple: a daily video stream of the sunset in Naples. Upon poking around the website, I learned that the foreground of the video is actually pre-recorded, and is not in Naples at all, but rather Ahlen, Germany, so we have a city in Germany superimposed over the sky in Naples.

It didn’t happen to be sunset in Naples when I found the website, but there is an archive of previous days, and the archive videos have been “time accelerated,” so you can watch the sun set on fast-forward. I watched several sunsets – each video begins with the reading of a poem (“A Tormented Owl at Home and in Exile” by Ghada Samman, a Syrian poet) by a man with an American accent, and features music from the Gotan Project, an Argentinian band. The artist himself is Italian, and according to his bio lives in Milan and New York, and the website was created by a company in Argentina.

The piece therefore reaches from South America to North America to Italy to Germany to Syria, just in its creation. It deals with issues of space and time, home and exile, distance and community. It provides the viewer with choices in how they wish to experience the work: live and in real time, or archived and time-accelerated, subtitled in English or German or not at all, and with or without the additional information provided by the website.

3D OBJECTS

Hello everyone!  This is the first time I that i use this Blog and I still don’t know if I am doing things correctly but here it is my comment on rihzome….  While browsing the Rihzome site I found pictures of 3d objects made out of cardboard that I had seen recently at the Max Protetch Gallery in Chelsea.  These pieces really interested me for the fact that the artist used such a common material and he opted to use laser technology to mold sculptural and biomorphic shaped objects made out of cardboard.  The interesting shape, large scale and transparency are appealing to me.   The object is hollow giving it transparency and making it interactive.  Viewers can see people walking by behind the object without adding that light plays an important role.  It looks like artists are looking for future possibilities of art making.  Now days, the new media technology play a big role in the process making of art.   These laser cut objects remove the artist’s hand from making the art.

I wanted to See All of the News From Today

I saw a panel discussion with the guy who did this project before.  It is pretty ambitious.  Essentially, this is a huge network of people who scan the front page of their local newspaper and submit it to this collection of covers.  daily.  It is a constantly refreshing overview of the state of the global consciousness.  It is not every newspaper yet, but, as I understand, that is the goal.  Of course, this project is dependent upon physical print- upon the concept of a newspaper front page.  It would not be as effective to make a similar conglomeration of the daily headlines using, say, internet home pages, as most news sites are not as regionalized as a printed paper is.  So, this project acts upon physical reality, compiling it in a way that would be physically impossible without digitalization and the globalized communal work ethics enabled by networking.One other thing that is nice about this, is that it doesn’t attempt to say anything.  There is not editorial voice, or artistic presence providing access to the information for you.  No translations, no links.  The site is completely 2-dimensional.  The information is left to speak for itself, to be interpreted as it is.  As such it is a pretty radical visualization of the international current moment.If only the images were higher resolution and a pdf style zoom in zoom out function was supported so that the smaller text would be visible.http://allnews.greyisgood.eu/ 

copy culture

(i think i’m doing this right. if not, sorry…)

Copy culture. Someone records a song, or makes a movie, or types a post. Then the internet gets a hold of it, and before long, the music, movie, or words are reimagined in some new context. As The Art Gallery of Knoxville writes, “Information is particularly suited to gift economics, as information can be copied and transmitted at practically no cost. It can be treated as a nonrival good: when you share information, you do not deprive yourself of the information.”

Abe and Mo Sing the Blogs features Marisa Olsen and Abe Linkoln singing posts from their favorite blogs. Though Marisa’s voice is lovely, the songs are often unlistenable, owing to some curious choices of material. But that’s irrelevant. What’s interesting is how it encapsulates ideas about property and culture on the internet. For their header, they seem to have taken an old photograph of a couple holding bulldogs and pasted their own faces over it, which is consistent with the “borrowing” nature of the entire project. The songs are free, whereas ten years ago, the material costs of cassettes or CDs would’ve made free distribution impossible. Also, Olsen and Linkoln use the authors’ language in a way the authors never intended, though the idea of “getting permission” seems unnecessary and antiquated. Nobody is claiming “intellectual property”, or demanding a commission for using words they thought of first. Finally, the immediacy of the posts is also uniquely modern. Some of the songs were uploaded on the same day as the posts themselves.

This seems to be a radical shift from the culture I remember growing up. When “Ice Ice Baby” came out, it sparked a big controversy over sampling. Was it art, or just a David Bowie ripoff? Today, nobody questions Vanilla Ice’s validity as an artist, and sampling has opened up whole genres that were previously impossible. The right to own property, to build fences around “your stuff”, has always been a part of the American definition of freedom, but the internet is challenging the mentality that ideas can or should be owned.

They say if you can’t profit from your ideas, there’s no incentive to innovate. Yet Abe and Mo… well actually, they were commissioned by the Whitney for this project… but in thousands of other cases (including the blogs the work is derived from), people are sharing their works and ideas without the possibility of material compensation. It’s as though all culture is becoming open-source. Perhaps that prevents some from earning a living as artists. But it also invites everyone, everywhere to make cultural contributions, and I think that is ultimately more interesting.