<< preface

this blog is nina wenhart's collection of resources on the various histories of new media art. it consists mainly of non or very little edited material i found flaneuring on the net, sometimes with my own annotations and comments, sometimes it's also textparts i retyped from books that are out of print.

it is also meant to be an additional resource of information and recommended reading for my students of the prehystories of new media class that i teach at the school of the art institute of chicago in fall 2008.

the focus is on the time period from the beginning of the 20th century up to today.

>> search this blog

2008-12-14

>> Julien Maire, "Demi-Pas", 2002

"Half-Step" is a 20 min film consisting only of three dimensional projected objects : a collection of "Diapositives" or "projection modules" . They are constructed with laser cut ektachromes, motors, electrics and electronics devises, in order to animate the pictures directly inside the projectors, or to produce the movements by adjusting the depth of field (the focus is made on different layers of the slide).Demi-pas is a projection using only still pictures, animated in a ameliorated magic lantern process and synchronized with sound."

http://julienmaire.ideenshop.net/project4.shtml





video:
http://julienmaire.ideenshop.net/mov/dia_mov.html (the technique behind demi.-pas, not the actual performance)

http://sonix.sdv.fr:8080/ramgen/arte/transmediale04/demipas.rm (short extract of the performance)

Takehisa Mashimo, Satoshi Shibata, Akio Kamisatom "Moony", 2004

the artists were students from IAMAS, Japan

"Moony for Ogaki Binnale is an artwork using steam and interactive images. We tried to create an marginal space of the theme related to existence. In this installation, visitor can detect the images of butterfly inside the vapor steam. And if visitor touch them, they start to swarm around your hands and fly biside the visitor interactively. But it is impossible to touch them phisically. Visitor will experience the mystic phenomena between real and unreal in this space."

http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~mashim03/webconsole/artworks/index.html


video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR6i41sF4-Y

Moony was the first winner of the Prix Ars Electronica's "Next Idea" category and was realized in an artist in residence period at Ars Electronica Futurelab during the summer of 2004, presented first during the Ars Electronica Festival of the same year and continued to be shown at the Center after that.

>> Gruppe FOK, "Teleklettergarten", 2003

http://tkg.co.at.tt/

"A Kletterwand as a giant computer keyboard—this climbing wall (like the one alpinists use to train for a vertical ascent) has a computer keyboard integrated into it. Touching one of its 64 keys causes the corresponding program command to be executed on a local processor. The radio-equipped climbers obey the instructions of an operator. Experts from two fields—programming and mountain climbing—come together, and have to work together. The act of climbing introduces time delays and physical exertion into the otherwise instantaneous processes of programming and digital data processing."

video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0b0Z9qM5jI (starts at TC 1:15, ends at 2:35, language: german)


>> Heath Bunting, "Graffiti Street Internet Interface", 1996

from http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/graffiti-street-internet-interface/

"As part of an action, Bunting marked London housefronts with chalk and left behind the following graffiti: http://www.irational.org/x. Whoever types this URL into their browser receives a form in which the whereabouts of the graffiti can be entered. The replies to this ‹network› correspond with Bunting’s travel activities. Among other locations, the graffiti was sighted in London, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovenia, and on a ferry headed for Helsinki."

project website: http://www.irational.org/heath/x/

artist's homepage: http://irational.org/cgi-bin/cv2/temp.pl

>> Joseph Kyselak

From: http://www.stencilarchive.org/node/370

"Kyselak was born in Vienna on December 23rd, 1799. His perspectives weren't too bad for a man of his time. His Family was fairly rich and he was able to go to University. Anyway Kyselak obviously was far from too much career-orientated.

Sometime in the early 1820s, Kyselak made a bet with a couple of friends in Vienna. He bet that his name would be known all over the Austria-Hungarian Empire within 3 years (a vast piece of land at that time) without inventing a new kind of suicide (in fact, the people from Vienna were obviously well known for commiting suicide in very unorthodox ways).

What he invented instead was nothing less than modern-day "tagging". Kyselak travelled all over Central Europe in 1825 leaving his name in bright red and black at each and every exposed place he could find. The tag "Kyselak" could soon be found everywhere. He painted it on churches and castles, rocks and trees, bridges and obelisks. And in fact, within a year even his betting partners had to admit that Kyselak had indeed become very well known all over Austria and that he has won the bet.
But Kyselak could not stop. He started tagging buildings as soon as they were opened to the public. He was even asked by the police not to paint his name to a new Bridge over the Danube until the public opening ceremony was over. Kyselak agreed and waited one more week until his well known signature could be found painted on the bridge.

Kyselak can be seen as the father of modern-day tagging since he did not do anything but paint his name on a wall. He did not create pictures or symbols, his nickname was enough. As in modern-day graffiti viewers don't necessarily know what a tag means. It is just a name without an additional information. And that, indeed, makes Kyselak an ancestor to nowaday's street culture."


More detailed information can be found here: http://homepages.phonecoop.coop/mjmitchell/Kyselak/kyselak.html#death


There is a book publication from 2003, dealing with Kyselak's work: Michael Robin, "Kyselak was here", The Ascog Press, 2003

An excerpt from this book can be read here: http://www.talesofgrin.com/farawaypress/readers/pdfs/kyselak.pdf

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, "The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects", 1967

- audiofile on ubuweb:
---- side A: http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/mcluhan_marshall/Mcluhan-Marshall_The-Medium-Is-The-Massage_01.mp3
---- side B: http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/mcluhan_marshall/Mcluhan-Marshall_The-Medium-Is-The-Massage_02.mp3

- pdf of book:
(Eseuri) - McLuhan, Marshall - The Medium is the Massage

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... is a Media Art historian and researcher. She holds a PhD from the University of Art and Design Linz where she works as an associate professor. Her PhD-thesis is on "Speculative Archiving and Digital Art", focusing on facial recognition and algorithmic bias. Her Master Thesis "The Grammar of New Media" was on Descriptive Metadata for Media Arts. For many years, she has been working in the field of archiving/documenting Media Art, recently at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Media.Art.Research and before as the head of the Ars Electronica Futurelab's videostudio, where she created their archives and primarily worked with the archival material. She was teaching the Prehystories of New Media Class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and in the Media Art Histories program at the Danube University Krems.