The individual stages of this project reminds me a great deal of A Visitor's Guide to London by Heath Bunting, 1995. Like the London guide, the work is in black and white and takes the various cityscapes and filters them down to a more cartoon-like appearance. This methodology works well with the cartoonish characters of the piece which could look out of place in a more photorealistic space. I'm not sure if the London guide was used as a template for the project or not but it seems to me it must have been.

the final group portion reminds me of Maja Balevic's "I Wish I Was Born In a Hollywood Movie" (2006) because of the way the windows (or in this case thought bubbles) overlap, stack on top of each other, but can be closed as desired. The theme is not the same, there is no disparity between real and perceived worlds, but the style is very similar.

A few net.art pieces use avatars to tell a narrative, as we were supposed to for this project. Zombie and Mummy from Olia Liliana and Dragan Espenschied (2002) for instance uses avatars in a comic format. This project is a bit more abstract than that, but as with the other two works, the stylistic similarity remains even if the purpose doesn't.

Dollspace

Dollspace

1997 Francesca Da Rimini, Ricardo Dominguez, Michael Grimm

Francesca Da Rabini hails from Australia and is part of the cyberfeminist art group known as the VNS Matrix. The project "Dollspace" or "Hauntings" is an exploration of the artistic and erotic potential of negotiated email relationships, online virtual communities and web-based narrative architectures that have been reverse engineered into multiple immaterialities. The work takes often innocent images and couples them with sometimes obscene remarks to present a dichotomous relationship similar to that of online interactions between people which can often devolve into the deviant or pornographic despite the fact there is never actually any true contact between the participants. On the internet, all things are possible and every flavor of interest can be found now, making sites like this seem tame by comparison, but at the time such experiments were more shocking and extreme than they are today.

It's interesting going back to some of these old sites that have become passe as society evolves (or devolves, as the case may be) sexually and technologically and we find that the things that were offensive just ten or fifteen years ago are now considered old hat. Sex in particular is always an interesting topic, even if some of the areas it moves into become difficult to look at as the purveyors attempt to push the envelope of what is socially acceptable.

I Wish I Was Born In a Hollywood Movie

3-30-06 Maja Bajevic

Maja Bajevic was born in 1967 in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (now Bosnia/Herzegovina) but studied art in Paris, France. She was in Paris when the Bosnian War erupted in 1992. Her earlier artwork explored war and the effect it has on the people who live through it. She had originally planned to stay in Paris for 8 months, but ended up staying for 8 years as the war and its aftermath continued in her home country. in 2000 she returned to Sarajevo.

With "I Wish I Was Born in a Hollywood Movie" she moves away from politics and war to contrast the shiny face that Hollywood puts on locations with the reality that the people who live there actually have to deal with. she does this using a flash animation that gives the appearance of windows, both metaphorical as with a computer operating system, and literal, as we look through the windows from hollywood imagery into reality.

In a way this piece reminds me of my first trip to New Orleans in 1995. All you really saw of New Orleans on TV before that was either the Superdome for football games or a romanticized look at the garden district with its plantation homes or Bourbon street during Mardi Gras. When I got there I was shocked to see the reality was much grimier and run down than what media had led me to believe. Ah, the innocence of youth!

filmtext

filmtext

2002, Mark Amerika

source: http://www.altx.com/who.is.Mark.Amerika.html

Mark Amerika was named one of the top 100 innovators by Time magazine as part of their series on artists, scientists, entertainers, and philosophers. He got a Master's degree from Brown University and works as both a writer and artist.

Filmtext, part three of a series, was originally commissioned by Playstation 2 and was conceived as a highly ambitious multimedia event. I say event because in order to get the full effect, not only did one need to visit the website, but there is also an mp3 soundtrack, there were museum installations, an ebook, and live performances. The first two parts of the series were Grammatron and PHON:E:ME

source: http://www.altx.com/mp3/filmtext.html

The live performances of Filmtext consisted of the artist himself acting as narrator while the sound artist he collaborated, Twine, would remix his voice and add the distorted version back into the performance.Amerika says "I'm just wondering how to take some of these ideas (techniques) and use them to amplify these writerly effects in live performance. I found that using the net, the WWW, was very helpful. So that in Lucerne, while we were doing the live, improvisational sound-writing remix, I was also projecting my laptop's wireless connection to the WWW and grabbing data off the network in real-time and sampling what I needed from it right into the new story, remixing as I wrote it, and then using the sounds to further distort the narrative's generative meaning (or meaning-potential)."

Filmtext attracted me because the site is designed along a very science fiction inspired template complete with futuristic text, alien landscapes in the background, an unusual and alien sounding soundtrack, and interactive displays all of which create an ambience of mystery.