720 http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/articles Last 10 articles added to the Aotearoa Digital Arts website Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:55:59 PST en-us ADA Webmaster http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/images/articles.gif http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/articles Aotearoa Digital Arts Article Library http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/articles/Equipment Pool/139 Specifications and loan conditions Su Ballard/ Vanessa Coxhead Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:46:23 PST http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/articles/Trust Documents/137 October 11, 2009 Stella Brennan Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:56:15 PST http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/articles/Essays/135 Lisa Samuels Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:23:21 PST http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/articles/Essays/134 Lisa Samuels Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:23:11 PST http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/articles/Symposium Material/133 ADA Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:57:48 PST http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/articles/Symposium Material/128 Call for Proposals: __Séance for Nam June Paik__ _â€�"I use technology in order to hate it more properly”_ Nam June Paik Nam June Paik is widely regarded as the father of video art. Innovative digital artworks are sought for a new project: to channel (and negotiate with) the spirit of the late Korean artist’s practice. Séance for Nam June Paik is a screening/performance event curated by Daniel Agnihotri-Clark, to be presented as part of Tending Networks: the fifth Aotearoa Digital Arts (ADA) symposium (see below for background information). Séance for Nam June Paik provides the opportunity for Aotearoa/New Zealand (affiliated) digital media artists to examine and respond to the legacy and currency of Paik’s influential career. In your submission you may wish to consider (but are not restricted to) aspects of Paik’s practice such as: • his pioneering role in the emergence of video art as a genre • his firm dedication to interdisciplinarity, and his transition from classical music to electronic art • his affiliation with the Fluxus movement, and the movement’s emphasis on fun and accessibility • his 1974 concept of the â€�"electronic superhighway” • the influence of John Cage (and the concept of indeterminacy) in Paik’s work __Time and Place:__ Séance for Nam June Paik will take place on the evening of Sat 23 Feb 2008 in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand. The project is supported by the Physics Room Contemporary Art Space, and the event will take place at an offsite venue. (Exact time and place to be advised.) __Submissions:__ Proposed artworks must be no longer than 15 minutes in duration, and they must be suitable for the format of a seated event (for image please follow the first link at the end of this email). (Note: for performance proposals, please bear in mind that the performer her/himself will not necessarily be visible to all audience members, since the audience will be seated in a circle facing the television screens.) The medium for your séance could be: • video (single channel: to be duplicated across four screens) • audio (either quadraphonic or stereo amplification) • internet • performance At a technical level, the only core requirement is that the work must have a digital dimension. Submissions could be either new artworks (that have been developed for this event) or existing works (that are thematically relevant for presentation in this context). In your proposal, please include: • a brief description of the proposed artwork and the concept behind it • relevant documentation (hard copies in digital format: CD or DVD only please) • brief biographical information • contact details The curator’s selection will be independently peer reviewed. The closing date for submissions is Friday 11 Jan 2008, and applicants will be notified via email by Mon 28 Jan 2008. Please post your proposal to: Daniel Agnihotri-Clark (curator) c/- Massey University School of Fine Arts, Private Box 756, Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. __Background:__ Séance for Nam June Paik (curated by Daniel Agnihotri-Clark) is presented as part of Tending Networks (the fifth ADA symposium), and in conjunction with an international exhibition of network art (The Physics Room, curated by Adam Hyde and Julian Priest). __About ADA:__ www.aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz Aotearoa Digital Arts is New Zealand/Aotearoa’s only digital artists’ network. The list was launched in 2003 by Stella Brennan and Sean Cubitt during Brennan’s stint as inaugural Digital Artist in Residence at Waikato University’s Screen and Media Department. ADA was born of the observation that although new media artists were often highly networked in terms of both their own practice and their professional relationships, there was no national organisation drawing together those with a common interest in digital art. This recognition suggested the irreversible importance of place against the frictionless communication enabled, in theory, by network technologies. ADA is a network by the simplest of means: it is open, un-moderated and self-defining. Members of ADA are artists, curators, writers, and teachers with some kind of affiliation to New Zealand. In material terms ADA is an email-discussion list, a website, and four face-to-face symposia have been held to date: the first at Waikato University, Hamilton (2003), the second at Auckland University of Technology (2004), the third at Otago University in Dunedin (2005), and the fourth hosted by the Western Institute of Technology, in New Plymouth (2006). In the absence of a dedicated physical space for development of new media projects, ADA enables the sharing of practices, and contributes towards a very real sense of a digital media community in New Zealand. Daniel Agnihotri-Clark Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:19:33 PST http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/articles/Symposium Material/125 __OPEN Call for Workshop Proposals and Presentations__ Tending Networks: the ADA Symposium 2008 ------------- __________ The next national Aotearoa Digital Arts symposium, __Tending Networks__, will be held in Christchurch over the weekend of February 22-24, 2008. The Symposium is a space for New Zealand art practitioners, researchers, curators, and audiences to share projects, skills and ideas relating to digital and media art practices. Non-members, new members and current members of ADA, and members of the broader Christchurch arts community are invited to participate. This is a call for proposals for short presentations and for workshops. Presentations (5 minutes) ------------- The brief presentations will be an opportunity to share any bite-sized idea: a particular work, an aspect of your practice, a project idea, a concept, a research proposal, or anything in five minutes or less. Presentations can be illustrated with slides, video, audio or other media. The brief presentation format aims to allow work in progress can be presented informally, in an open context, without the requirement of writing an entire paper. Proposal format: please send a 200 word outline of your proposed presentation and a 50 word biography to symposium@aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz by December 12th 2007. Please include ‘Presentation Proposal’ in the subject line of your email. Workshops (1.5 – 3 hours) ------------- We are currently seeking leaders for Symposium workshops. Workshops are a chance to share knowledge and develop skills, to make something, to open up new fields of inquiry or just learn some fun new tools. Workshops can take many forms: they can be based around technologies or ideas, as geeky or ungeeky as you like. Possible themes might include: circuit bending, social networks, planning & tactics, hacks & workarounds. The length of the workshops may vary, but tasks will need to be able to be realised in under three hours. Proposal format: please send a 4-500 word outline of your workshop, a list of technical and material requirements, and the ideal number of participants to symposium@aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz by December 12th 2007. Please include ‘Workshop Proposal’ in the subject line of your email. About the ADA Symposium and Trust ------------- ADA is a network of people who are interested in digital and media art as practitioners, writers, curators, researchers and audiences. ADA is a charitable trust that facilitates discussion around themes related to digital and media art in New Zealand through an email list, a website, and regular events. The ADA symposium provides an important opportunity for the distributed network to spend time together in real space, and to share and develop projects, ideas, skills, and plans. This is the first ADA Symposium to be held in Christchurch – previous events have been held in Hamilton, Auckland, Dunedin, and New Plymouth. __Tending Networks__ will feature keynote presentations from significant international digital art practitioners and panel discussions around ‘growing’ social networks, curating, and producing digital media art. The symposium also features ‘Séance for Nam June Paik’, a screening event curated by Dan Agnihotri-Clark, and an international exhibition of network art curated by Adam Hyde and Julian Priest to be held at the Physics Room. A call for proposals for ‘Séance for Nam June Paik’ will be circulated on the 30th November 2007. __Tending Networks__ is supported by The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space, and the ADA Trust. Symposium details will be updated here: http://symposium08.aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/ Deadline for proposals for brief presentations and workshops: December 12th 2007. Proposals should be sent to symposium@aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz Notification of successful proposals: December 17th 2007. ADA Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:35:59 PST http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/articles/Documentation/121 Version 2 of UpStage, a web=based venue for live online performance, was launched on June 28th with an exhibition at the New Zealand Film Archive in Wellington, and on 7th July, 070707 UpStage Festival: a festival of 13 live performances in UpStage, by artists around the world. Audiences watched the performances at the Film Archive and online. http://upstage.org.nz/blog/?page_id=48 helen varley jamieson Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:45:17 PST http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/articles/Essays/120 _First published in New Zealand Art Monthly http://www.nzartmonthly.co.nz/ July 2004_ Hye Rim Lee is an Auckland based Korean artist whose work across mediums considers the way fictional identities create and are created by, cultural desires. Through her digital personification, _Toki_, Lee presents a discussion of the desire and desirability of cuteness evident in Asian visual culture and fashion. _Toki_ is a computer generated hybrid bunny-girl; she is cute and sexy like her anime (animated film) and manga (cartoon) counterparts, with doe-eyed western facial features, and a curvaceous and slender idealised body. Thorough this digital personification Lee explores what it means to be a Korean born woman living in New Zealand. The bunny reference though, has a multiplicity of significations, from the cute, playful childhood pet, to the sexual innuendos of playboy bunny. _Toki_’s name is Korean for bunny, which holds a personal reference for Lee as she was born in the year of the rabbit. Lee suggests that _Toki_ is a supernatural life form who embodies the experience of migration as an ’alien Asian’. _Toki_’s youth and adolescence, is symbolic too of the experience of migration, of the ensuing uncertainty and discovery of self. Lee evokes this process of individuation in her _Birth of Toki_ series, a process similar to the way an adolescent explores and develops their own identity. Like Japanese artist Mariko Mori’s _Birth of a Star_ (1995) Lee uses a digital personification to explore the position of Asian women in society, commenting on the conflation of stereotypes from Japanese pop culture, western consumerism and Korean tradition, that impact on these women’s lives. Both their works are a type of what Thyrza Nichols Goodeve calls “cyborg surrealism.“ Goodeve suggests, with reference to Mori’s work, that this carries “the sense of an uncanny psychic projection fashioned not merely from her own individual subjectivity but one created from her fusion with technology, science fiction myths and the euphoria of late capitalist culture.“ (1) Lee and Mori’s work embraces technology in its production and content, fusing it with popular culture formations in a hyper-surreal way. Their work is a conscious display of an enchantment with alternative realities and ultra cute fiction, whilst also critiquing stereotypical representations of Asian women. _Toki_ takes pleasure in popular stereotypes of beauty, most importantly the desire to be cute, whilst questioning and teasing such willingness to accept the sexy, youthful and cute stereotypes that are fed through popular culture. Through this Lee exercises her own agency in creating and reclaiming this ideal for her own enjoyment. Her criticism takes the outwardly ironic and cheerful tone of critique that is the mark of pop art. Mori and Lee are both attracted to the clean and stylish aesthetics of digital imaging. Toki’s development has been charted through a series of pristine digital prints and animated films. Throughout the _Birth of Toki_ series Lee examines Toki’s position as a product of a hyper-real culture that promotes simulation and superficiality over substance and depth. (2) As writers Botler and Gromala argue “digital artists suggest not that we look through the experience to a world beyond, but rather that we look right at the surface.“ (3) Digital animation, when used as form of artistic production, inherits the goal of illusionism as its major premise. Animation with a computer has only, therefore, tools that aim to simulate the conventions of cinematic perception that most computer imaging programs build upon. Lee’s work delights in exposing and demonstrating the hyperrealist and illusionistic computer graphics tools she uses in the production of her _Birth of Toki_ series. The goal of photo-realistic computer graphics to make the medium disappear (4) is subverted by Lee’s showcasing of the process and tools of construction in _BOOM BOOM_ (2004). The automated tools and mathematical principles that become the surrogate for artistic equipment are exposed, highlighting the artificiality and constructed nature of all graphical images. Honing in on areas of ’interest’ face, breasts, bottom and high heels, Toki is minutely crafted and perfected, under the point of the mouse, which acts like a virtual cosmetic surgeon’s knife. Lee argues that she “questions the myth of technological perfection and by association, our modern obsession with transformation.“ (5) Toki goes under the knife in the same manner as the performance artist Orlan,(6) to expose the strenuous processes undertaken by women in order to achieve ideal beauty. Like a performance piece _BOOM BOOM_, is procedural showing Toki’s construction from series of effects and processes that progressively move towards a more complete simulation of perfected reality. The digital prints _Mesh, Patch and Smooth_ (2003) explore beyond her skin, deeper into the layers of her composition, presenting her as a digital object and thus infinitely malleable and impressionable, as well as objectified for public inspection and the male gaze. Lee’s work demonstrates that even in a disembodied virtual realm the body still operates as an ultimate social signifier, despite the cliche that cyberspace offers freedom from bodily determinants like gender. In their virtual worlds machines achieve what nature cannot, albeit in a way that is too perfect too real, totally hyper-real, providing an ultimate dreamscape. Toki’s digital creation story, references the readymade goddess in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485). Toki is the child of assembly line mechanical reproduction and the Venus of post-industrialisation, embodying contemporary notions of extreme ideal beauty. She is graphically designed and mass-produced with her own inflatable marketing figurine _MiniTOKI_ (2002- Present). From her initial inception Toki has been destined to star in her own video game. As such Toki is an avatar, the recipient of desires projected onto a graphical personification. As fictional vessels for the imagination of their proprietors, avatars like Toki become vehicles for fantasy exploration. Lee argues that although Toki is controlled by her creator, or master, Toki can actually think, she can create her own desires. Lee believes that with her own game Toki will take on a life of her own. In Tokiland (2003) digital video work that was presented as a part of Interdigitate 2003, an ongoing multimedia performance event held in Auckland, Lee goes further in inverting the dominance of stereotypes constructed under the male gaze. In Tokiland Toki is mechanically cloned into an army, the lack of emotional facial expressiveness of the replicants, once read as passivity, when multiplied into the hundreds, like the ’Smiths’ out of the Matrix, becomes stern and threatening. As we shoot past a multitude of assembly-line TOKI spawn we cut through them with our gaze but cannot harm them, as each figure has the capacity to recompose. Their interchangeablity is a comment on the way in which the power of ideal represses diversity in favour of homogeneity. “In her multiplication TOKI becomes menacing, revealing an inherent binarism between innocence and threat sublimated within the evolving poetics of beauty.“ (7) Encompassing both the desire to be desired and the will to be in control, Lee presents an awareness of the power of gender stereotypes whilst acknowledging that sexuality is a crucial dimension to life and identity. Lee does not separate sex from sexism, but a dialogue on both realities is present in the images she composes. Lee’s Toki series is fun, deriving entertainment from playfulness, fantasy, and popular culture. Lee claims technology and its processes for her own ends, using her Toki character as an avatar for exploring idealised fantasies and playfully cute dreams. At the same time there is an undercurrent of critique that is aligned to the social commentary of pop art. Lee indicates contemporary obsessions with superficiality and the role of bodily beauty as a cultural commodity. Highlighting the hyper-real fixation of computer graphics programs, she exposes the medium and its objectifying gaze. Lee uses Toki to critically inspect the cultural construction of beauty ideals through mediums such as Asian animation, western consumerism and Korean traditional values. Lee constructs a struggle against sexism, by reclaiming her right to representation, whilst acknowledging that sexuality is a crucial dimension to life and identity, not something that needs to be repressed in order to critique objectification. References: 1. Goodeve, Thyrza Nichols Mariko Mori’s Cyborg Surrealism Parkett 54 1998/9 p 102 2. Darley, Andrew Visual Digital Culture 2000 Routledge, London and New York p 81 3. Botler, Jay David and Diane Gromala Windows and Mirrors 2003 MIT Press, Massachusetts p59 4. Botler and Gromala 2003 p39 5. Lee, Hye Rim ’Artists Statement’ in Hannah Scott Arcadia: the Other Life of Video Games 2003 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth p 30 6. See http://www.digibodies.org/online/orlan.htm for information on Orlan’s work 7. Gardiner, Sue ’Auckland’ Art News v 23 n 4 p 35 Jaenine Parkinson Thu, 14 Dec 2006 22:54:47 PST http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/articles/Reviews/119 In Alex Monteith’s work there is an interest she shares with the writer Italo Calvino, in what can be seen in Calvino’s terms as a concern for deftness and lightness of touch; for what appears to impose restrictions on a work (forced restraints), instead open it out to infinite conceptual possibilities. In this way, AV Scenario is a distillation of all the possible trajectories of film analysis and observation into one, formulaic shot. In Monteith’s capturing of this moment, the restaging and mimicking of a minute scene wrenched from a larger ‘whole’ (the spinning spoke of the car crash), the viewer is forced to notice what she or he might usually, in the flow of the narrative and in an over-familiarity with stock shots, overlook. However, in the reversing of the spinning movement the viewer is forced to look differently about its referential foundation. Monteith’s image points only superficially to the original film referent — the reverse is not a re-inscription of the shot at all but an illusion (with hypnotic potential). It is at this moment, in our realisation that the shot has returned in a new way, that its former allusion (its singularity) is shattered into many planes of possibility. On one plane, the breaking up and dispersal of the visual surface through the circular movement of the lines on the screen, creates a captivating, abstract moving image, with meditative potential. This is just one possible reading of the image, one point within a range of multiplicities that opens the work out to infinite readings. In the same way, it would be foolhardy to think that there may be a route back to the founding reference through the model car placed in the installation space (a form of closure). The original, which we must keep re-remembering exists only as illusion, is represented not by a ‘double’, but by a toy car, a miniature. The upturned model is disarming in the way of all mimicry for it unleashes another space with rupturing potential — all doubles, we are reminded, are impossible doubles, they all carry their points of difference. Monteith’s installation, AV Scenario, playfully dismantles filmic illusion by picking away at the seamless coating stretched over the finished motion picture. Aside from reference to the apparent endless use of stock shots in motion pictures and the restaging and mimicking of minute scenarios that question film’s sense of ‘wholeness’, there is Monteith’s cheeky revealing of all the messiness of the production processes, the cables and pulleys, grips, cameras, and tripods. And, if as viewers we are happily complicit, if not demanding of our own manipulation in the illusion of filmmaking, then Monteith has replicated this manipulation by making the viewer initially see the image of spinning spokes as video projection, rather than as live-footage from a CCTV camera. Capturing as live action the wheel of an overturned model car is perhaps Monteith’s most puckish move for this reminds us of the trickery that produces the layers of simulation and illusion in all film production. Set against such playfulness is the prosaic and overly descriptive title — Imitating the ‘spoke-backwards’ illusion during motion picture car chase scenes — and the careful, almost officious listing of each element that makes up the installation piece, laying-bare in another way, Monteith’s own thinking about the work of illusion. AV Scenario is beguilingly playful and it is as much homage to Monteith’s love of all kinds of films, as it is an unpicking of its illusions. _Dr. Jan Bryant is Lecturer in Art History at University of Auckland. Her research focuses on the philosophical and political implications of modern and contemporary art, film and architectural practice, with particular interest in spatial theory and the city._ Jan Bryant Thu, 14 Dec 2006 22:44:27 PST