From leoalmanac at gmail.com Mon Apr 3 19:23:36 2006 From: leoalmanac at gmail.com (Leonardo Electronic Almanac) Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2006 01:23:36 +0200 Subject: [LEAuthors] Leonardo Electronic Almanac - Global Crossings Special Message-ID: <5d60ab0c0604031623t5ff51712s1053daeaed47ab1a@mail.gmail.com> [image: The MIT Press] *Leonardo Electronic Almanac* http://lea.mit.edu ISSN #1071-4391 INTRODUCTION THE LEONARDO GLOBAL CROSSINGS AWARD: Artist Statements GLOBAL CROSSINGS BYTES ________________________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION Be prepared for a double dose of gastronomic global offerings in this issue, which features the Leonardo Global Crossings Special Project. We first celebrate the inaugural winners of the 2005 Leonardo Global Crossings Award ? the brother-sister team of Abdel Ghany Kenawy and Amal Kenawy from Cairo, Egypt, who have been collaborating on large-scale installations since 1997. Accolades also go to the three runners-up - Regina C?lia Pinto (Brazil - web-based and CD-ROM art), Kim Machan (Australia - curator, arts producer and consultant) and Shilpa Gupta (India - Internet, video and installation works) and all other nominees: Andres Burbano (Colombia), Kibook (collaborative team of Visieu Lac [Vietnamese Australian], Mark Wu [British-born Chinese] and Stefan Woelwer [Germany], Nalini Malani (India) and Hellen Sky (Australia). This award recognizes the contribution of artists and scholars from culturally diverse communities worldwide who work within the emerging art-science-technology field, and was juried by an international panel of experts. The award is part of the Leonardo Global Crossings Special Project, supported by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Visit the gallery: http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gxawards Following that, the Global Crossings Gallery, as curated by Dennis Summers and Choy Kok Kee, showcases a veritable feast of concepts that explores what it means to be a global citizen. Indulge in this "quality cross-section of the technical and aesthetic range of globally-related artwork" ? with themes that touch on the socio-political to technological/(pseudo)scientific to multi-cultural communications. The range of ideas bounced around is astounding: From creating a global community dedicated to raising issues of the sweatshop treatment of women throughout the world, particularly in relation to Nike (Cat Mazza's *Nike Blanket Petition*) to the darker side of global control (Alison Chung-Yan's *Surveillance*) to Mike Mike's more positive approach to *The Face of Tomorrow*. Then there is Samina Mishra's take on the children of immigrants from India and other East Asian countries and Tiffany Holmes's serious and scientific approach to global water pollution, *Floating Point*. Add to that Michael Hohl and Stephan Huber's *Radiomap*, which places participants on a physical representation of the globe projected onto the floor, and allow them to hear different radio stations based on their "global location", Helene Doyon and Jean-Pierre Demers' *Capture Site*, which sees two artists suspended above ground surrounded with sensors that communicate local environmental information throughout the world, Vanessa Gocksch's *Intermundos*, a representation of Colombian youth culture and its connection to other youth cultures worldwide and the physically uplifting *World Hug Day* project by the Gao Brothers for a sizzling stew of wondrous global delights. Visit the gallery: http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gx ________________________________________________________________ Leonardo Global Crossings Award http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gxawards Leonardo/ISAST is pleased to announce that the first Leonardo Global Crossings Award has been awarded to Abdel Ghany Kenawy and Amal Kenawy, of Cairo, Egypt, a brother-sister team who have been collaborating on large-scale installations since 1997. These works, whether tower-like structures containing glass balls rising up towards the ceiling or tunnels leading to a block of frozen ice in a room surrounded by chiffon, demonstrate that there is no "natural" barrier between the worlds of art and science. The Kenawys' unique collaboration is built partially upon Abdel Ghany's background in the physical sciences and Amal's background in filmmaking, yet their individual efforts cannot be so neatly defined as singularly "scientific" or "artistic". Committed to their creative processes, they work very closely together on every aspect of their projects from conceptualization and structural design to production and execution in their workshop. Characteristic of all their projects is the power of texture and image, and sensorial play with surfaces between spaces (loosening up the inside/outside polarity)- whether it is a "textured" video, the texture of light projected on a triple screen of chiffon, the texture of human hair bows on a pair of wax legs in a display case, or the textures (acoustic and visual) of a beating heart on which a pair of lace gloved hands is sewing a white rose appliqu?. For examples of their work see http://www.thetownhousegallery.com/html/artists/amal_abdelghany_kenawy.htm. The three runners-up for the 2005 Leonardo Global Crossings Award are Regina C?lia Pinto (Brazil - web-based and CD-ROM art), Kim Machan (Australia - curator, arts producer and consultant) and Shilpa Gupta (India - Internet, video and installation works). Other nominees for the 2005 award included: Andres Burbano (Colombia), Kibook (collaborative team of Visieu Lac [Vietnamese Australian], Mark Wu [British-born Chinese] and Stefan Woelwer [Germany], Nalini Malani (India) and Hellen Sky (Australia). The 2005 Leonardo Global Crossings Award, funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, was juried by an international panel of experts co-chaired by Nisar Keshvani and Rejane Spitz. The 2005 jury consisted of Samirah Al-Kasim (filmmaker, Egypt), Julio Bermudez (educator, U.S.A.-Argentina), Choy Kok Kee (artist, Singapore), Maria Fernandez (researcher, U.S.A.-Nicaragua), Pamela Grant-Ryan (editor, U.S.A.), Nisar Keshvani (editor-consultant, Singapore), Jayachandran Palazhy (choreographer-artistic director, India), Sundar Sarukkai (researcher, India), Yacov Sharir (educator, U.S.A.) and Rejane Spitz (educator, Brazil). The award recognizes the contribution of artists and scholars from culturally diverse communities worldwide within the emerging art-science-technology field. The award is part of the Leonardo Global Crossings Special Project, supported by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. ________________________________________________________________ Abdel and Amal Kenawy - Global Crossings Award Winners http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/lea/gallery/gxawards/kenawy.htm Abdel and Amal Kenawy 4 Omer Ibn 'Abdel Aziz street, El Haram Street, Giza-Egypt Tel: +2 010 306 6755 amalkenawy at hotmail.com http://www.thetownhousegallery.com/html/artists/amal_abdelghany_kenawy.htm Artist Statement The Room, 2003 Video performance PAL system; 10 minutes Dimensions variable Amal Kenawy's work spans a breadth of mediums, creating a space in which she negotiates her own identities vis-?-vis the world around her. In a recent work she entitled *The Room*, her brother, partner, and mentor Abdel Ghany Kenawy helped her put together ribbons, ties, and straps. An identity is slowly diluted into oblivion as Kenawy explores the dream-world of illusion against the memory of reality. She brings the unseen into a visual space by sensing a metaphorical world that hides behind the physicality. It is a room that reflects the much bigger world where the social being is a product and reflection of its surroundings, customs and conditions. Alone on stage, the visual artist embroiders adornments directly onto her flesh. White cold tiles surround her, furnishing a grid, fixing the profile of the artist and the white wedding dress next to which she sits slowly, mechanically sewing her palpitating heart onto the white cloth of a sleeve. Her two hands remain encased in white lace gloves. The absence of the body from which the heart has been removed and to which the plastic legs of dolls have been attached, the presence of the artist on stage, de-atomizing herself, underlines the renunciation of physicality at large. Personal Statement While working on *The Room*, it had no artistic preference but it was rather a project that drove me towards a style of self-expression. I found myself thinking about the strange relationship between man and his society. This is when I found myself inside a room. The internal room surrounds my body, while the outside was represented by society. The internal self is a representation of the imagination, the controversial and the non-realistic. It is always an invisible and private sphere of thought, a true production of social truth. Thus *The Room* is not simply a location of space but a relationship between place and time. It is a realistic presence of time with an illusion of dreams and memories of the human self that do not cease to exist. I never imagined that I could do my work while absorbing every detail around me. I also knew I could not revert to an actor to play my role inside *The Room*. It would not have been real no matter how talented and experienced the actor could have been. Every detail imagined, every image edited was planned and I abided by my storyboard. The music appeared in my mind and was transferred as I imagined it flowing through the air as moving streaks of light. Citation For the GX award, I am nominating the brother-sister team of Abdel Ghany and Amal Kenawy from Cairo. They have been collaborating on large-scale installations since 1997, and these works demonstrate that there is no "natural" barrier between the worlds of art and science, whether they are tower-like structures containing glass balls rising up towards the ceiling, or tunnels leading to a block of frozen ice in a room surrounded by chiffon. Abdel Ghany brings to the works his skills and knowledge in the physical sciences and Amal brings to the works her background in visual art (performance, video). They work very closely together in the conceptualization and execution of each project but Abdel Ghany is largely responsible for the problem solving of structural and scientific concerns, and Amal co-articulates the vision and experimentation of form, time and space. Abdel Ghany's statement about his relationship to science and art perhaps best articulates the approach that appears in their works: "Scientific knowledge is a means of understanding reality, and its various guises and manifestations. In the realm of art, scientific knowledge can be used to examine the relationships, dynamics and structure of things and beings, culminating in a more thorough understanding of their nature. I use functionalist notions of causality to gain a better understanding of the potential meaning inherent in the materials that I use and their consequences. The relationship between form and concept, material and energy is the basis of my work, rendering the process of creation more organic and less contrived. I borrow from the laws of nature, biology and physics. This knowledge has been integral to my work, which integrates elements of nature, with the force of the human condition replete with emotions and memories to articulate an artistic discourse that transcends time and place." Amal is also a performance-artist in her own right, and Abdel Ghany contributes to most of her solo pieces, further enforcing their unique ability, as siblings, to collaborate artistically. When observing the materials, you will notice the CV title is only for Amal Kenawy but all their projects are listed. Biography Abdel Ghany Kenawy - 1969: Born in Cairo, Egypt - Lives and works in Cairo - 1989: Studied sculpture in Faculty of Fine Arts, Cairo, Egypt. Amal Kenawy - 1974: Born in Cairo, Egypt - Lives and works in Cairo - 1997/98: Studied in the Academy of Arts, Cinema institute - 1999: BA in Painting & graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt - 1997/1999: Studied Fashion Design, Cinema Institute. Born in Cairo in 1974, Amal Kenawy studied painting and sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Helwan University and film at the Cairo Film Academy. In 1996, Kenawy received the first prize in sculpture at Egypt's annual Salon of Youth exhibition. At the 1998 Cairo Biennale, Kenawy and her brother Abdel Ghany Kenawy's collaborative work secured them the UNESCO grand prize. Her mixed medium, installation, sculptural and video works have been shown in countless exhibitions in Cairo, Beirut, Paris, Dakar and Bethlehem among other locales. Kenawy most recently showed her work as part of the Afrika Remix exhibition touring from 2004 - 2006; the Kunst Palast Museum (D?sseldorf), the Hayward Gallery (London), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), and the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo). In December 2004 she completed a three-month residency in Aarau, Switzerland. "My brother Abdel Ghany Kenawy and I started doing collaborative projects in 1997. So far we have jointly produced 11 art projects covering the full range of sculptures, installations, video installations, and performances. We use various mediums to accommodate the concepts inherent in each project. The bulk of our work is dedicated to the understanding and use of scientific laws, to link between the scientific and the human, and to establishing the unity within the absolute and general laws of nature." ________________________________________________________________ Andres Burbano http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gxawards/burbano.htm Andr?s Burbano Assistant Professor Los Andes University Bogot?, Colombia South America Tel: +57-1- 3394949 ext 3056 burbano at alleati.com / burbano at gmail.com Keywords Net art Latin America, technology and society, art science, art technology, experimental documentary, digital narratives Artist Statement *Ways of Neuron*, an online scientific and experimental documentary an open project initiated by Andr?s Burbano http://atari.uniandes.edu.co/burbano/neurona Hermeneutics + basic sciences = interface. This is the main element of the project in terms of interface conceptualization. For Hans Diebner, physicist, the interface is a concrete space of relation between two spheres of scientific knowledge: on one hand are hermeneutics or sciences of language and on the other are physics within the context of exact sciences. This space of relation is the interface, "interface" meaning the cultural, technological and artistic "place" where interpretation systems and phenomena themselves are connected. This powerful and complex concept of "interface" is the most important reason to develop a scientific documentary with interactive profile that aims to understand and give structure to the notion of interface according to the nature of its content, being always aware of the role of this project in the cultural, artistic, scientific and technological scenes. *Ways of Neuron* is an online scientific and experimental documentary about the impact of neuroscience research and its relationship with the nature of the mind. A critical aspect of the documentary is, from an aesthetic point of view, the coherent relationship between data processing and content access. The documentary has a navigational interface whose design is guided by conceptual principles rather than traditional principles of visual or interactive design. So, the notions of neural networks and semantic networks are fundamental elements to the design and programming process of the interface and to the development of the way of communication between two web servers, one for databases and another for streaming media. It is important to understand that scientists have represented the neuron, neural networks and the brain in different visual ways since the birth of neuroscience. Throughout his investigative process, S. Ramon y Cajal made hundreds of drawings. The visual results exceeded at a certain moment the purely graphical aspect passing to more complex techniques of representation very unusual in his time, like photography, color photography, microphotography, etc. The *Ways of Neuron* project is constructed based on the idea of creating non-conventional forms to explore databases, crossing different spaces of knowledge and creation to contribute to a contemporary way to represent neuroscience concepts. Neuroscience has been developed in such a way that it is important for the community to understand its repercussions, complexities and possibilities. Research neuroscience opens a new set of questions regarding the human condition. The documentary is informative while using professional and respectful sources of research and information in order to provide the necessary depth of content bound to these scientific fields; it is based on three types of materials: interviews with specialists, interactive experiences and audiovisual material. The project will cover 12 general conceptual axes: Brain, Cognition, Consciousness, Emotion, Evolution, Imaging, Language, Memory, Mind, Neural Networks, Neuron, Perception. Maintaining coherence with its nature, the project tries to involve people in different places and from different disciplines in order to contribute concepts, ideas, technical information, interviews, etc. The project has the special collaborative support of the Basic Research Laboratory of the ZKM. Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Institut f?r Grundlagenforschung http://basic-research.zkm.de:8080/basic_research/ http://www.zkm.de Citation Burbano explores the interactions of science, art and technology in various capacities: as a researcher, as an individual artist and in collaborations with other artists and designers. Burbano's work ranges from documentary video (in both science and art), sound and telecommunication art to the exploration of algorithmic cinematic narratives. The broad spectrum of his work illustrates the importance - indeed, the prevalence - of interdisciplinary collaborative work in the field of digital art. *Hipercububo/ok*, an anthology on digital art of Latin America that Burbano edited in collaboration with Hernando Barragan, was published in 2002. A website for this project is now under construction *Typovideo*, also in collaboration with Hernando Barragan, is a system of video streaming ASCII text that explores the interaction of new and old technologies, the relation of image and text, server technologies, compression processes and tactical media. The project can be viewed at http://atari.uniandes.edu.co/~aburbano/_html/content/typovid.html Hernando Barragan is a Colombian architect and designer, who participated in the 2004 Milan Triennial. His project for that event can be seen at http://people.interaction-ivrea.it/h.barragan/ *The Quiasma Project* created by Burbano in collaboration with media artists Clemencia Echeverry and Barbara Santos, re-imagines geography from the condition of isolation that Colombians increasingly experience on account of the War on Drugs. That the war is linked to broader international political and economic issues needs little elaboration. Burbano's independent videos, *Medios*, II and III address specific political events in Colombia, which are nonetheless linked to global conditions. Economic and political stability become more urgent in the countries south of the US border as struggles for the control of the world intensify. This work can be viewed at: http://www.freewaves.org/festival_2002/events/latin/colombia_faguet.html Burbano's commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration, to working with new and old technologies and to exploring relations among aesthetics, technology, society and the sciences is rare in the field of Latin American digital art. I recommend that he be considered for this award. Biography Andres Burbano explores the interactions of science, art and technology in various capacities: as a researcher, as an individual artist and in collaborations with other artists and designers. Burbano's work ranges from documentary video (in both science and art), sound and telecommunication art to the exploration of algorithmic cinematic narratives. The broad spectrum of his work illustrates the importance and prevalence of interdisciplinary collaborative work in the field of digital art. His works include *Typovideo*, created in collaboration with Hernando Barragan, a system of video streaming ASCII text that explores the interaction of new and old technologies, the relation of image and text, server technologies, compression processes and tactical media (the project can be viewed at http://atari.uniandes.edu.co/~aburbano/_html/content/typovid.html); and *The Quiasma Project*, created in collaboration with media artists Clemencia Echeverry, Santiago Ortiz and Barbara Santos, which re-imagines geography from the condition of isolation that Colombians increasingly experience as a result of the conflict. Andres Burbano ? Pasto, Colombia, 1973 - is a film and TV maker from Universidad Nacional de Colombia; Masters in interactive media from Mecad, Barcelona, Spain; researcher of Basic Research Institute at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany. Burbano is assistant professor in the art department at Los Andes University, Bogot? Colombia. ________________________________________________________________ Hellen Sky http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gxawards/sky.htm Hellen Sky Co Artistic Director Company in space P O Box 1495 St Kilda VIC Australia 3182 Tel: +613 9534 6676 hellen at companyinspace.com http://www.companyinspace.com Artist Statement Liquid paper 1. - Making Light of Gravity ? embodiment in intelligent camera-based technology systems. I start with myself, the universe of my body, and all that reaches between the cells of my brain and the cells of my skin, the neural networks synapsing chemical transmissions proprioceptor to receiver, triggering connections between memory banks, tastes of sensations, perceptions, consciousness, a knowing and being. An embodied experience of the space I fill and the spaces through which I move. Technology is often described as utilitarian, like an object, which has a particular function. However I think it's more like DNA, its already part of our subcellular structure. We are processing each other in constant exchanges; we are in effect of each other in a fluid osmotic architecture navigating new pathways. Images, and thoughts, sounds and movement co-exist and become dispersed over smaller and larger grids. Our perceptions begin to reconfigure and we begin to consider these as larger choreographies, as evolutions of corporeal interconnectivity that move beyond the fixity of stages of the 20th century. Located within multiple architecturally projected environments - liquid walls, the speaking, moving, and the images, shifts between perspectives on past, present and future work. In a non-linear poetic, the voice traverses a range of mindsets and localities, making metaphoric connections between journals of daily life, complex philosophical and scientific thinking, from astronomy, neuroscience, intelligence, consciousness, and concepts of home, land, gravity, security systems, and the spectrum of networked states of perception. This Liquid paper presents an artist's ideas interwoven with complex philosophical and scientific thinking in a manner which allows the art, and the qualities of the performance itself, to speak with as strong a voice as the words that are spoken. It integrates a multiplicity of systems of communications, including live and recorded sound/real-time video feeds/pre-recorded and archival video footage to consider new concepts of bodies, technology and choreographic form. It is a fluid form, allowing new writing, movement and media systems to enter the work in response to the environment and context of presentation. There are 100 trillion stars in our universe There are 100 trillion IP address on the Internet 100 trillion neurons in my brain There are a hundred trillion cells in the universe of my body, But only 10 trillion of these cells are human, Each living cell is an intelligent system. Each cell is a sub molecular machine A transcribers of genes Codes of intelligence Their antenna listens for signals In each one of my 10 trillion cells there is 1.8 metres of DNA If you could find my source code Get behind my firewall. You might be able to crack me open. Unwind me. My body would be 108 trillion metres long I'll give you a clue. The key to my code is in my Skin, is in my Blood, and is in my Brain. I can seek you out. I can draw you in. My body is a bridge? it spans time. New Work in Development: *The Darker Edge of Night* - 2005 ? 07 Technology and Time within a blinking of the eye, begins from an imagined point of view beyond the horizon of mid 21st century integrating many media, including a poetic synthesis of cosmological data visualizations, and interpretation of audio visual media engaged with via a real time haptic motion capture network system outcomes of the research between CIS's collaboration with The Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing & Sensory Neuroscience Laboratory, Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia, supported through Arts Innovation Program - *The Darker Edge of Night* begins where *The Light Room* diminishes. *Making Light of Gravity* - Liquid paper 1 - was first presented in Utah Art and Technology Symposium ? Arts of the Virtual: Poetic Enquiries in Time, Space, Motion Oct 2004, and will be published in Extensions: The online journal for embodied technologies. Volume 2: Mediated Bodies: Locating corporeality in a Pixelated World ? UCLA Department of World Art and Cultures. Liquid paper 1 was further developed during a three-week residency at Waag society for old and new media, Amsterdam in Jan 05 - Connected Program, supported through ANAT (Australian network for art and technology) working in collaboration with media artist Michelle Teran, exploring keyworx software to facilitate a real time interface between voice and image. Most recently presented in Melbourne at Malthouse Theatre in April 2005. Thoughts, memory, past, present, our spatial perspectives and our perceptions begin to reconfigure and we begin to consider these as larger choreographies, as evolutions of corporeality interconnectivity that move beyond the fixity of stages of the 20th century 'theatre' the physical site, no longer the only infrastructures that will connect theatres of artists evolving work because and through the technology which is transforming how we as social beings inhabit this world. These ephemeral networks. These global tides, become part of our sensing, needing processing, modulated surges of power, cascading effects across electronic grids, distributed over networks ? blackouts - to frame a single point of view in this global arena. These Virtual Colosseums who is the gladiator who are the slaves, A big brother command SMS your message Evict that neighbour. Citation Hellen Sky is the creative director of Company in Space (CIS). Her practice has evolved through performance and image making extended through new technologies. In CIS projects she collaborates with others to develop scores, and systems for integrating multiple media and technologies into a total choreography for performative events, linking virtual physical terrains to the general public. Previous work such as *Escape Velocity*(live and telematic movement driven performance), *Data Dancing* (London), *Downloading Downunder* (Amsterdam), *SIGGRAPH*(Florida), *MDDF2* (Monaco), *Digital Now* (Hong Kong), posed the question: Where do flesh, fragile bone, senses and perceptions fit into the new geographies of the late 20th century? More recent work such as *CO 3*, performed in Interact Asia Pacific Multi Media Festival (Melbourne), *Future Physical*ICA (London), and *Arnolfini* (Bristol), explored concepts of presence, and identity within virtual reality. *The Light Room* new media movement opera, premiered at MIFA 01 & 02 (Melbourne Museum), engaged with physical and virtual architectural worlds as metaphor for life bridging the cusp of 20th/21st centuries. New work in development for 2004/5 *The Darker Edge of Night* again asks questions of time and origin, perceived from the emergent new horizons of the mid-21st century. The work integrates many media, including a poetic synthesis of astrological data sets and outcomes of research from CIS' collaboration with The Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University. I should add that Hellen Sky is Australian. She is very active worldwide and has a visible global influence (in Oceania, Europe and Asia more than in the U.S.A.). Her work combines the latest tele-media technologies, strong theoretical and choreographic craftsmanship, and stunningly beautiful performances. Biography Hellen Sky is co-director of Company in Space. She is both a Fellow of the Australia Council Dance Fund, 2004 ? 2006, and nominee of the inaugural 2005 Leonardo Global Crossings Award. Hellen was a Visiting Fellow at SIAL for the Skins of Intimate Distance: Liveness and Affect week held in August 2003 and a guest artist at Waag Society for Old and New Media (connected program Amsterdam 05). Her choreography performance and image-making has been extended through new technologies. She collaborates with composers, performers, scientists, academics, designers, writers, architects, interface programmers to develop scores and systems, which consider movement to effect and alter the relationship between multiple media into total choreographies for performative events linking virtual and physical terrains to the general public. ________________________________________________________________ Kibook - Visieu Lac, Mark Wu and Stefan Woelwer http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gxawards/kibook.htm Kibook Ltd 38 Kingsland Road 4 Perseverance Works London E2 8DD Tel: +44 (0) 20 7739 9233 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7739 5266 info at kibook.com http://www.kibook.com Kibook is an interactive design company formed by Visieu Lac, a Vietnamese-Australian with a degree in nuclear physics; Mark Wu, a Briton of Chinese descent; and Stefan Woelwer, a German. Kibook pursues interdisciplinary projects that draw on science and lend themselves to artistic applications. Citation I am nominating a group of three, one Vietnamese Australian - Visieu Lac, a British born Chinese - Mark Wu and a German - Stefan Woelwer, because of their constant efforts in creating innovative and revolutionalized works. The group being a mixture of different nationalities, cultural backgrounds and diversity represent the global crossing initiative. They are called Kibook and have created revolutionary experimental and borderless interactive works, which can be applied to many disciplines. The nominated team has different backgrounds and work in different circumstances. What these diverse combinations of creative individuals have in common is that they all work within the relatively new field of interactive design or art, and their work is in some way experimental, that they have each, to a greater or lesser degree found a new way of using interactive media, and thereby extended the language of interactivity across boundaries. Interaction art and design is an emerging practice, and the language of interactivity is still forming. In this context, adopting an experimental approach to the design process is not so much an indulgence as a necessity. There is an enormous space out there and much of it has not been explored yet. At a very basic level, dealing with this new medium, practitioners - artists, designers, specialists still have to work it out themselves, and that means experimenting with the medium and the audience. This process was a combination of inventing and discovering - inventing in the sense of coming up with new way of communicating with the medium, discovering in the sense that there are still much to explore. In this process ? one of real discovery and real invention, it is still the conditions in which much interaction art and design take place today. Biography Kibook is a firm of specialist digital design consultants, evolving, developing and delivering the best creative interactive media solutions to our clients. The directors of Kibook, Stefan Woelwer and Mark Wu, share extensive experience in the digital media and education industry with a portfolio of varied work and a range of clients. International clients result in projects developed for world class brands such as BAR Honda F1, SAP, Canon, Sun, Hitachi and L'Oreal. Kibook have also created work for personalities such as the talented Japanese singer/artist/performer Kazuko Hohki, Yellow Earth Theatre and the Designer of the Year 2004 nominee Sam Buxton, for whom they have developed the brand and online experience for his successful MIKRO series of products. As well as providing design and technical solutions for an international client base, Kibook has also developed educational material and have been commissioned to organize and deliver seminars and workshops for various universities and colleges. Kibook was chosen by the ICA to go to Berlin to showcase its work alongside other high profile companies from the UK. ________________________________________________________________ Kim Machan - Global Crossings Award Runner-UP http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gxawards/kim.htm Kim Machan GPO Box 2505 Brisbane QLD 4001 Australia Tel: +61 7 33487403 Fax: +61 7 33484109 kim at maap.org.au http://www.maap.org.au Keywords Asia Pacific New Media Art, MAAP ? Multimedia Art Asia Pacific, New Media Art Festival Artist Statement "Global Crossings" as a concept is one that I feel a very close affinity to. When I was eight years old I have a hyper vivid memory of feeling very cold from swimming and then crawling and rolling in the warm sand where I grew up in Booker Bay. I crawled, and I pondered, why do white people live in Australia? I did know the history of white settlement in Australia, and as a side thought, that my mother was born in Indonesia, but it was a deeper question. I thought about all the people in the world being born somewhere, not by choice, just that we are all born somewhere. My concept at that very moment was one of billions of people everywhere, thinking and doing something. Quite an innocent revelation but perhaps this is a moment that is always with me, one that I still reflect on and has consequentially been a conscious and sub conscious motivating force. Australia as a land is so far from the European traditions and culture that permeates our life. Asia is our closest region and essentially I feel that we need more understanding and exchange culturally to make sense of 'where we all are'. Serial contemporary art projects as curator and cultural producer with gallery and television projects placed me in the 'eye of the storm' when the digital technological revolution was seeking content for new delivery systems. In the mid nineties, all sectors (government, corporate and education) had a great interest in Asia and were eager to engage with the Asian Tiger Economy that enabled support for the birth of MAAP - Multimedia Art Asia Pacific. MAAP is an organization and festival that explores New Media Art across a range of art forms and practices emphasizing interactive multimedia, broadband content, Internet, digital media, animation and varied projects integrating new media. MAAP was established to bring focus to the 'unmapped' cultural new media content emerging from the Asia Pacific/ Australia regions and is now an Asia Pacific touring New Media Arts Festival and website resource. MAAP partners with key organizations in our region creating new networks, creating exhibition opportunities, introducing the artists and their work to audiences, and increasing cultural contact and understanding through the experience of New Media Arts to a broader community. MAAP's inaugural annual festival in 1998 was based in Brisbane and online and continued annually till 2001 when commitment to regional partnerships had significantly matured to progress further engagement. MAAP stepped offshore to the China Millennium Monument Art Museum, Beijing in 2002, partnering to achieve major milestones for all involved. After the success of 'MAAP in Beijing' our next major festival followed. 'MAAP in Singapore' 2004, involving seven galleries (including the Singapore Art Museum) with curators invited from our region, public artworks, live broadband events linked to Brisbane and a refereed conference hosted by Nanyang Technological University. As a founding board member and Asia enthusiast, I stayed committed to the project - through the Asia financial crisis, SARS, the Iraq war, terrorism and Asian bird flu. My work as a facilitator to bring together the enormous creative talents of our region is one that is constantly challenging and always a most satisfying honor to work with such diverse and gifted people. Citation Instead of nominating an artist - an individual who work has overcome trans-cultural boundaries. I would like to nominate an individual whose work has facilitated numerous artists overcoming trans-cultural boundaries. My nominee is Kim Machan, Festival Director of the Multimedia Art Asia Pacific Festival (MAAP). Though an artist, Kim of late, has performed more of a curatorial/festival director role in the Asia Pacific region. She has played a tremendous role in moving the art and technology scene forward in this region. Based in Brisbane, Australia, the annual MAAP festival humbly began in 1997. From its earliest days, the festival strived to identify and showcase young, emerging artists from the Asia Pacific. The festival featured a range of work from students to stalwarts like Stelarc, providing a diverse range of work - which would not normally be seen. In 2000-2002, the festival was adopted by the Brisbane Powerhouse - Centre for Live Arts, where the festival demonstrated its coming of age - with a single dedicated venue with the equipment and facilities it needed. About then, the festival (Kim) realised that it had reached its peak and decided to turn into a touring festival to: - Reach out and expand to new audiences - Overcome regional boundaries, reach out and identify new artists who do not always have access to technology - Provide countries with an opportunity to showcase local artists in the same platform as international artists (a common problem in the Asia Pacific) Since then, the MAAP Festival has been housed in Beijing, China and then in Singapore this year. There are plans to tour to Seoul and other venues. I strongly recommend Kim as a candidate for the Global Crossings award as her work fits the Global Crossings initiative perfectly. Through the festival, young new artists were seen, some of whom have gone on to international fame - Shilpa Gupta, Candy Factory (Japan), Gong Xi (China). It has overcome natural geographical barriers that prevent trans-cultural collaboration to give artists an opportunity to work together and see new works. On a personal note, Kim has boundless energy and almost always single-handedly manoeuvres often trying situations - developing and working with high level corporate and government bodies. In sum, she is an individual who has devoted the last 18 years and contributed to the progress of the Asia Pacific new media ethos and significantly assisted in helping artists have their work recognized and introduced to new audiences by successfully overcoming traditional geographical boundaries. Biography Kim Machan has been Director of MAAP-Multimedia Art Asia Pacific since 1998 and involved in contemporary art for some 20 years. Working as an independent curator and producer, she initiated projects such as ABC broadcasts *Art Rage: Art Works for Television* involving 70 contemporary artists over four series (1996-2000) and other arts media productions. She has made several New Media Art research tours through Asia and developed collaborative partnerships with arts organizations and governments through the region. In 2002 she was contributing curator for Media City Seoul, Co-Chief Curator for 'MAAP in Beijing' and Chief Curator for many MAAP programs including annual Net Art and screening programs since 1998. She has served on several panels and advisory boards including Sound Mill Arts Qld, on the World Wide Web Consortium Program Committee and as paper reviewer (2000-2004), Griffith Artworks Acquisitions Board and currently, The Institute of Modern Art Board. Presently Kim is researching the next major project for MAAP 2006 that will focus on artists in Asia using the internet. Kim is a Ph.D. candidate at Queensland University of Technology in Creative Industries in the area of New Media Art in Asia. ________________________________________________________________ Nalini Malani http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gxawards/malani.htm Nalini Malani 3\42 Nanik Nivas, 91 Bhulabhai Desai Road, Bombay 400026, India Phone: + 91 20 26140832 nalinim at bom5.vsnl.net.in http://www.naliniMalani.com Artist Statement The Indian artist Nalini Malani who was born in 1946 in Karachi, saw the gradual erosion of the earlier nationalistic, Nehruvian socialist ideologies giving way to the subtle economic strangulation of the Indian economy by the West. While Indian art for decades was mostly focused on new interpretations of its traditions, Malani's framework has always reached farther than the boundaries of India. The Greek tragedies, politically engaged theatre from the 20th century such as Heiner Mueller and Bertolt Brecht, film noir, and existentialism became source material for many of her large projects. Malani's works have had an engaged social commitment throughout. Her innovative productions in theatre and video from the nineties onwards have dealt with the axis of globalism and parochialism and the ensuing aggression in the form of sectarian violence, manipulation of history and threat of nuclear war. Just after the riots of Bombay in 1992-1993 that put Indian secular society out of joint, she was one of the first artists to pick up the video camera as an alternative medium for making art. In the nineties she traversed a labyrinth of different media practices with video, theatre, neon, painting, drawing, installations, combined and montaged them, let them collide. She is an artist 'pur sang' and although her latest major works are video installations, she does not call herself a video artist but a painter. Her artworks do not become just a didactic, audiovisual pedagogy, but rather a challenging aesthetic conception of her subjects. The video installation form that she uses for this takes on an aesthetic that seduces the spectator in the first register. In Hamletmachine, 1999/2000, she portrays fascist leaders bleeding over a body creating a throbbing visual cadence that reaches a cathartic high point from which emerges a large deformed face of a woman howling for her lost world as the Muslim slum of Behrampada burns to ashes. In *Transgressions, 2001*, she combines the video element with reverse paintings and shadows. On the video projections of white European skin appears the Western clich?d experience of the Orient, combined with shadows of her Kalighat paintings. The narrative proceeds to give critical interpretations on genetic engineering and global marketing strategies, followed by a moronic child's voice pleading to learn English while languages from India pour down like monsoon rain lost into the earth forever. Like tattoos, these images adorn the fair skin for eternity, in a process of cultural destruction (rather than of cultural creation) that has never come to an end. In works like these, Malani has found a hybrid form combining her painting style with video and performance to construct unique ways of contemporary storytelling. For Nalini Malani, art is a search for the working of the mind, convincingly crystallizing questions regarding human behavior. As she says, "I do believe in a more progressive society, and I do not refer here to technological progress. It has to do with human beings and tolerance and understanding." Citation Malani is one of the pioneers of contemporary Indian art. Although primarily a visual artist, she has over the last decade or two moved into installation and media art. Her influence on other younger artists to experiment with different media is often acknowledged by the art community in India. As far as work with technology goes, mention must be made of *Remembering Toba Tek Singh*, a 20-minute video installation. Among other props, this piece used 17 VCDs, four data projections and 12 television monitors (for more on this piece, see (http://www.qag.qld.gov.au/content/apt2002_standard.asp?name=APT_Artists_Nalini_Malani). Her *Sacred and the Profane* uses a 'primitive' technology of the cinema in conjunction with popular art. An experiment of this kind brings forth the fascination with technology not only to the artist but also to the viewer and the larger public. It does so not by presenting technology per se but by re-presenting common art forms and images. This re-presentation captures the similarities as well as the differences with the original, popular images. In so doing, technology establishes a common space with artistic expression and thereby gets assimilated within the universe of art. So, although Malani's work does not deal with 'high' technology, her works sublimely capture the spirit of technology ? that is, technology that is used does not intrude on the artwork, allows the artwork to retain its autonomy as a piece of art and yet makes it clear that this work has been radically altered by the use of something other than art, in this case some technological intervention. Her work also satisfies the criterion of global connectedness. *Remembering Toba Tek Singh* is based on a short story by the well known writer Manto dealing with the events during the partition of the Indian sub-continent into India and Pakistan, reflecting artistically on inhuman and irrational violence. As many commentators have noted, her art often reflects on marginalized voices and is committed to protest, whether it is a response to sexual exploitation (as in her *Medeaprojekt*) or religious/national fanaticism (as in *Hamletmachine*). Biography Malani has worked with video since 1991. She started by recording her ephemeral, continuous drawing *City of Desires *, on the walls of Gallery Chemould, Bombay, made in protest against the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. Her video works have been an expansion of her practices in drawing and painting. In her multimedia installations she often makes single cell animated drawings that bleed and stain. Foregrounding the dispossessed of the earth, she has worked in theatre collaborations using texts by the German playwrights Heiner Mueller, Bertolt Brecht and the Pakistani writer Sa'adat Hussain Manto which reflect on violence, pain and suffering in the name of nationalism and religion. She has shown her large scale works in solo exhibitions at Prince of Wales Museum Bombay, 1999, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York 2002, Apeejay Media Gallery, New Delhi, 2002; and Bose Pacia Modern, New York 2004. A selection of the venues where her presentations have been shown are: The World Wide Video Festivals, Amsterdam 1998, 2000, 2002; Century City at the Tate Modern in London, 2001; Unpacking Europe, Museum Boymans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2002; the Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, 2002; Kalaghoda Festival, Bombay, 2003; Multi-Media Art Asia Pacific, Millennium Monument Beijing, 2003; Poetic Justice, Istanbul Biennale, 2003; House of World Culture, Berlin 2003,Zoom, Museo Temporario Lisbon, 2004; Minority Report, Aarhus Art Festival, Aarhus, 2004; La Nuit Blanche, Paris, 2004; "Homo Ludens" Media_City Seoul, 2004; Crossing Currents, New Delhi, 2004; Edge of Desire, Queens Museum, 2005; Sharjah Biennale 2005; and Venice Biennale 2005. ________________________________________________________________ Regina C?lia Pinto - Global Crossings Award Runner-Up http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gxawards/pinto.htm Regina C?lia Pinto Rua Conde de Bernadotte, 26, bloco: 02, apto: 502, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil reginapinto at arteonline.arq.br http://arteonline.arq.br http://arteonline.arq.br/library.htm Keywords Net.Art, globalization, Milky Way, giant pixel painting, genre. Artist Statement Be Alive Today by Regina C?lia Pinto After starting out in the world of the arts, I have been working with art and computers since 1993. In 1997, I became a Net.Artist. I have never regretted that move. The "Net Art" category is being simultaneously conceived and built by many artists from several terrestrial coordinates. Although globalization and exclusion are completely interlinked terms, I still believe that one of the good qualities of the former is the fact that it permits the exchange of artistic experiences in the national and international spheres. That delights me! All of my work is focused in that direction. My interest is clearly expressed in *The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That* (http://arteonline.arq.br), my best-known work. The museum has no institutional links and receives no financial aid or sponsorship of any kind. It is developed on a home computer in the city of Rio de Janeiro, but it has a dynamic digital model, in a permanent state of "coming into being" and, for that very reason, receives contributions from different latitudes and longitudes of this geography without borders created by information technology. In addition to being its curator, I am also an artist ? the museum encompasses all of my own work, including the *Library of Marvels*, my collection of "artist books" on the Web. These books are electronic narratives that use several kinds of media and processes: image, sound, words, movement, games, simulation, programming, and interactivity or the simulation thereof ( http://arteonline.arq.br/library.htm). In addition to examining the cultural impact and possibilities created by computers as machines that can produce books and libraries, the *Library of Marvels*, in a way, is also part of the same positive quality of globalization because it seeks to disseminate the writings of important authors from all continents. Today, this may be because: "The image-world is the surface of globalization?. The task is not to get behind the image surface but to stretch it, enrich it, give it definition, give it time. A new culture opens here upon the line." (Susan Buck-Morss, "Visual Studies and Global Imagination"). Perhaps because I have returned to my roots somewhat, I have been devoting myself to "giant paintings" (pixels on screen) such as the Milky Way (http://arteonline.arq.br/via_lactea ), which began as reflections on pain, beauty and a photograph that personified the Beslan tragedy (2004). In this "painting" I touch on another focus of my early studies: the female gender. The Milky Way is like a mosaic. Different images with a strong impact, screen sirens, ordinary women, women who have been victims of violence and women from the third world, side by side, all have a right to their 15 seconds of fame ? "Star Time." The aim is not to compare them; what matters is the "Whole." The role of women, ensuring the survival of the species with their milk in this Milky Way. I am fascinated by the thought that with my work as a (Brazilian!) woman I am doing something to light up this Milky Way. It's good to be alive TODAY! And to participate actively and creatively in this great web of information. Citation It is my pleasure to recommend Regina C?lia Pinto for the Leonardo Global Crossings Prize. Pinto is a Brazilian artist whose work focuses on web-based and CD-ROM art. Pinto's utilization of technology is permeated with a poetic and playful sensibility, which has the effects of both challenging and delighting the user. Global awareness and desire to make connections characterize most of her work. Pinto's most extensive project is *The Museum of the Essential*, and *Beyond That*, previously the on-line publication *Arte on Line* which she initiated and ran from a home computer. The ability to cross borders has always been important to Pinto both practically and metaphorically. This virtual museum exhibits the work of international artists, with special emphasis on South American digital art. The plan of the building attests to the global ambitions of the project. It includes areas dedicated to topics such as Cartographies of Globalization, Cloning and the Web, Esthetic of Tragedy, Borders of net.art and Web Art Today, The Concept of Borders Today, Electronic Poetry, Electronic Artist's Books, Anthropological and Sociological [issues], a video room and a game room. Pinto's own artwork, consisting of multiple interactive books and game books is featured in various parts of the web site, especially in the room labeled "Library of Marvels". I specially recommend *The Book of Sand*, a game book designed to encourage the participant to reflect on the relation of aesthetics, ethics, and global events. The game consists of a virtual set of dominos that allows the user to reconstruct the Twin Towers. Each piece of the game is linked to images and texts. The visitor is instructed to think of ethics and aesthetics while playing the game. While several internationally renowned Latin American artists use sophisticated technologies, much of the digital artwork (specially web art) emulates earlier static, two-dimensional media, such as painting, drawing, and photography. Pinto models her works on books, yet she allows the viewer to create individual pathways and to experience the works in unique, non-linear ways. The inclusion of games within the books greatly contributes to this effect. Pinto's work invokes the joint powers of art and technology to seduce, to entertain, to connect, to challenge, to inspire and to destroy. Hardly more could be expected of an artist. She deserves your consideration for this award. Biography Born in Rio de Janeiro, Regina C?lia Pinto is a researcher, visual artist and teacher. She earned a teaching certificate in Drawing and Art at the Escola de Belas Artes of the Universidade Federal in Rio de Janeiro, 1974 - 1977. She has a Master's degree in Art History, specializing in the Anthropology of Art / EBA, UFRJ, 1994. Her Master's thesis is titled: "Four views in search of a reader, important women, art and identity," 1994, EBA, UFRJ. She has written a variety of academic works, including published scientific essays. As a visual artist, she has participated in several exhibitions and curated several. ________________________________________________________________ Shilpa Gupta - Global Crossings Award Runner-Up http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gxawards/gupta.htm Shilpa Gupta 2nd Floor, Premesh 6 B Turner Road Bandra West Mumbai 400 050 India Tel: 91 22 26427721 shilpagupta at hotmail.com Keywords Interactive, public, accessible, mass reproduced, democratic, politics in everyday life, installation, video, Internet, Bombay/Mumbai. Artist Statement Untitled, 2004 Interactive Projection, Projector and Computer 8 meters wide In this wall projection are seven figures, all dressed up in camouflage ? which has become increasingly fashionable after the War on Terror Campaign. First in the West, and more recently, spilling East onto the streets outside my home. Now I can walk into shops two blocks from where I live and buy camouflage gear. Camouflage makes you feel Cool and masquerades Terror. Terror is quite Cool. Click on the figures and they move, they copy, they imitate. Click one, click two, choose a leader, become a leader and the rest follow. If they stop, click them up and they join. Exercise 1 ? 2 ? 3 ? 4. One Bend, Two Bend, Three Bend, Stay. Look Straight ? Don't See ? STAY I have a bag, I have a phone, my neighbour has a phone, my phone, I don't have a phone, I don't have a shopping bag, but I need to JOG for it. Jog Jog Jog Stay on the Spot. Jog Jog Stay Stay March Free Speech Free Press Free Market March Market Market March Free Speech No Speech No Press Market Market Market march March Shut and Be. Shut and Eat. Don't Interrupt. PRAY. Fun Merry Merry Merry Fun Fun. DO or OUT. Aim 1234 Right Kill 1234 Left Aim 1234 Shoot Shoot Aim Shoot 1234 1234 1234 4,4 Dumbed in a capitalist society, we enjoy being programmed. We find instant satiation and loss of memory in turning ourselves into puppets. We allow media, electronic extensions of ourselves now in the hands of a corporate often with state support nexus to think for us and amputate individual reasoning (McLuhan). Mental and physical activity slips from the mechanical to the mindless, deteriorating into fear, chaos and violence against an enemy that does not exist in a world where global consent is hijacked to fight a war in search of weapons which were never there. Everybody Bend; Don't Talk, Don't See, Don't Hear. Gandhi said so. The project recalls a psychology where a combination of healthy physical exercises can help in slow and intense indoctrination of the mind by intense state military drills, local Hindu right wing RSS cadre exercises or new age courses to make you fighting fit. The interactive loop keeps slipping into mindless violence. Violence ? which is no longer just a fashion but is being internalized, morphing the emptied vulnerable self to become a source to project it towards the state, which is no longer the sole entity that has monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. Citation Gupta has shown a remarkable flexibility in her approach to creating works of art moving away from conventional notion of what constitutes art and art practice. Her work is often about interactivity and it exists mostly in that moment, an aspect which distinguishes her from conventional visual artists. She has managed to bring to life practices, experiences, beliefs, memory and imagination of people, particularly from India, into the realm of new types of art practices. In doing so she has reached out to a wider section of society and has changed the idea of how we experience or even imagine art. She has also managed to move away from a Eurocentric art history based art practice. Her work stands outside the definitions created by such institutions and offer a fresh approach to creating art in Indian context. Among her well-known works are *Blessed-bandwidth.net *, *Sentiment-Express.com* and *Diamonds and You.com *. Describing *Blessed-bandwidth.net *, a piece commissioned by Tate Online, Jemima Rellie says, "Shilpa Gupta's new work *Blessed-bandwidth.net *invites visitors to log on, choose a religion and get blessed. Set against a world divided by faith, the work explores religion, globalization and the complex cultural and political dynamics of the Internet ? it juxtaposes the real and virtual worlds and encourages visitors to consider how these spaces overlap and merge." In writing about her work, Johan Pijnappel has this to say: "She creates fake worlds that simulate the culture of her environment, while simultaneously standing this culture on its head. In a conversation we once had, she suggested to me her reasons for bringing net art into her practice: 'It is about default properties, default politics. Net.art is non-consumable. It is familiar, interactive, friendly and time based. It can't match your curtains, and comes built in with a challenge to the lopsided hierarchical relationship between the artist and the patron'." While Shilpa Gupta's works are visibly technological, the use of technology is not to throw light on technology but on ordinary experiences. In the process, technology becomes an essential part of her work, again not because she is using the net as a medium but because she is saying something essential about the net - that the net impregnates our experiences so seamlessly that we are always in danger of forgetting that it is technology that is mediating between us and the world. It seems to be the case that the most important insights into technology which her work develops are the ways by which technology becomes 'natural', something which we take for granted in the same way as the natural world around us. Biography Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976) lives and works in Mumbai where she has participated in shows at Saakshi Gallery, Gallery Chemould, National Gallery of Modern Art and at Lakeeren Art Gallery. Recent works include *Your Kidney Supermarket*, an interactive installation and video on illegal human organ trade which was shown in a bookshop window in Mumbai and later at the Transmediale, Berlin where it received the Interaction award 2004. She also works in Internet art, for example, *Blessed-Bandwidth.net* which was commissioned by the Tate, London (2003) and *Sentiment - Expess.com *, which was shown at Century Cities (2001) curated by Geeta Kapur at the Tate Modern. In 2006, she will show at Biennial of Sydney, Solo Show - The Blackbox @ ARCO, Madrid, 9th Havana Biennial and Liverpool Biennale. She has participated in Media City Seoul Biennale and Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial and over the past 10 years she has participated in shows in Berlin, Brisbane, New York, Beijing, Hoorn, Amsterdam, Auckland, Singapore, Jakarta, Manchester, Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Melbourne, Toronto, Glasgow, Seoul, Tallinn and Ljubljana. She has initiated the Aar Paar - a public art exchange project between India and Pakistan and the Video Art Road Show, screenings of video art on streets in Mumbai and Delhi. In 2005 she co-facilitated a visual art exhibition on borders for the World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil. ________________________________________________________________ GLOBAL CROSSINGS http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gx/ by Dennis Summers 3927 Parkview Drive Royal Oak, MI 48073 U.S.A. Tel: +248-549-2322 Dennis [@] quantumdanceworks [dot] com http://www.quantumdanceworks.com and Choy Kok Kee School of Film and Media Studies Ngee Ann Polytechnic 535 Clementi Road Blk 53 #07-01 Singapore 599489. Tel: +65 6460 8251 kokkee [@] np [dot] edu [dot] sg / kokkee [@] artlover [dot] com "We are looking for work that considers the global earth in some fashion or another. It can be work that addresses global social, political economic, spiritual, etc. issues. It can be work that physically or metaphorically lies in multiple locations on the planet, it can be work that may have personal relationships to multiple locations on the planet. Or anything else that loosely falls along the concept of being "global" in nature." ? LEA call for entries. Introduction The idea for this show came out of an email exchange between myself and Nisar Keshvani, LEA's editor-in-chief. The *Leonardo* journal had recently published an article on my ongoing global memorial artwork called *The Crying Post Project*. In the time between writing it and publication I had put up some more posts and had thought that *LEA* would be a good venue to update the article. Nisar suggested putting together an Internet exhibit of other artworks that were somehow global in design or content. Nisar also brought in Kok Kee Choy as a co-curator to participate with the review process. I have to say that this exhibit turned out to be much trickier, and to take much longer than I initially expected. First of all, our original call for entries brought in almost no appropriate work at all. And although our second call was much more productive, I have the feeling that there are many more artists doing exciting, challenging global artwork. I know that at least a couple of artists that we personally approached had not seen the call for entries at all. As powerful a communications medium as the Internet is, the reality is that even well networked people are buried under too many information resources, and it can be quite easy to miss opportunities. Furthermore, our goal was to try to increase the representation of artists around the globe who tend to be under-represented in the Euro-American art axis. This too was difficult, in that many of them may not even have Internet access. Additionally, there were some artists with interesting work, who unfortunately were unable to resolve technical details in getting the work presentable for the Internet. In spite of all these concerns, I believe that the artists we have collected here represent a quality cross-section of the technical and aesthetic range of globally related artwork. However, if you are reading this and believe your work to be appropriate, please do not hesitate to contact *LEA* at lea at mitpress.mit.edu. Before considering the artists that have been included in this exhibit, I'd like to consider a number of artists we were unable to include, and the implications of their artwork to a new networked global art and economy. One artist wrote: "Hello there, My name is Scott Wesly am a local artist from austria i will like you to do me a favour. the favour is that my agent is to pay me some money for the art award which i won from mr erick benjamin in usa for the jobs i model for him, Now he is owing me some money and he has decided to pay me with USPS Money Order and i cannot cash the money over here because it is USPS Money Order or CANADA money order. so now am looking for any US or Canada CITIZEN that i can trust in helping me to cash the Money Order and i don't mind in paying the person 10% of the money because this has been a problem for me so i want you to help me out of the problem. I will be very greatfull if you can help me out in cashing this money order. I will be waiting for your urgent response ASAP today. Here is the full name and address of the agent owing me if you will like to contact him for confirmation MR ERICK BENJAMIN 206-338-5690" The global component here should be apparent: Austria, the USA, and perhaps Canada. Additionally there is a provocative subtext ? global monetary practices; perhaps the abuse suffered by people on the wrong end of the new global economy. Unfortunately the artist failed to supply us with the necessary website or attached information. Mr Wesly was by no means the only artist dealing with global monetary practices, and their aesthetic implications. Several artists including Mr Aroh Edy (Nigeria), Mr Serge Mitev (Russia), Dr Debbie jerry [sic] (also Nigeria), Mr Wong Du (China), Mr John Savimbi (Angola), and Mrs Luisa Loi Ejercito Estrada (Philippines), all submitted interesting collaborative project ideas. In general, each project consisted of a request to a collaborator to supply banking information and/or money in order to transfer larger sums out of their respective countries. There was some variation in the socio-political subtexts. In some cases they dealt with different funereal practices, i.e. the relationship between money and the dead (Edy, Du, and Savimbi); in others they dealt with power relationships and the significance of protected resources (Mitev, jerry, and Estrada). I was intrigued to see that this common aesthetic was shared by artists from what we would generally consider to be wildly differing cultural traditions. It may be true, as some have suggested, that the global economy is leading to a shared global culture. Nonetheless, this seems to me to be an important new aesthetic development, which goes under-reported by the traditional art press. Perhaps owing to the nature of the *Leonardo Electronic Almanac*, artists that would normally go unrecognized felt comfortable enough to respond to our call for entries. Unfortunately, it was difficult to get the full details of these projects from either the artists or their global collaborators. The Works - Capture Site by Helene Doyon and Jean-Pierre Demers - Floating Point by Tiffany Holmes - Home and Away by Samina Mishra - Intermundos by Vanessa Gocksch - Nike Blanket Petition by Cat Mazza - Radiomap by Michael Hohl and Stephan Huber - Surveillance by Alison Chung-Yan - The Face Of Tomorrow by Mike Mike - World Hug Day by Gao Brothers The artists in this show have addressed the global concept with variety. It should come as no surprise that several took a socio-political approach (Mike, Chung-Yan, Mishra, Mazza). Three might be considered more of a technological/(pseudo)scientific approach (Holmes, Hohl/Huber, and Doyon/Demers), and two a multicultural communications approach (Gocksch and the Gao Brothers). Mike, Chung-Yan, Mishra, and Mazza all consider what it means to be a global citizen. Mazza and *microRevolt* have created a global community dedicated to raising issues of the sweatshop treatment of women throughout the world, particularly as it relates to Nike. Much like the AIDS quilt and certainly just as serious, small squares are knitted by people all over the world and are being collected for use as a blanket to present to Phil Knight, the Chairman of Nike. In this project the Internet is the format for publicity, but not the actual artwork. Chung-Yan also looks at the darker side of global control with her * Surveillance* project, in a piece that could only be created and displayed via the Internet. In her case, she points out how much of the world is now both public and easily accessible, raising the usual questions of just how far the information revolution will go, and how little control we have over it. I personally would like to see this raised to a higher level of engagement than a "things as they are" presentation. Perhaps into an artwork that allows for some form of public engagement as does the Nike Blanket Petition. Mike takes a more positive - some might even say utopian - approach with *The Face Of Tomorrow*. Here Mike creates composite images of men and women created by combining multiple pictures of the populations of cosmopolitan cities throughout the world. What is interesting is how similar these composites appear even from wildly differing locales. There are however, some structural issues that ought to be considered. For example, Mike does point out the difficulty in getting photos of women in Muslim countries, but this leaves a noticeable and questionable gap in his presentation. Additional issues include the fact that the photos are overwhelmingly of young people, which certainly skews the composites. I also would have been intrigued to see this carried even further into gender-neutral composites. Finally, the Google ads for smiley faces and other products and services may have been an economic necessity, but it distracts from the presentation. Mishra looks at the children of immigrants from India and other Asian countries, and displays their often poignant and wise comments on living in Great Britain. Although I appreciate the range, depth and subtlety of her photos and quotes, I think that the piece overall would benefit from a more technically savvy and aesthetically sophisticated presentation. Such an interface design could enhance the content, and be an even richer experience for the participant. Holmes takes a serious and scientific approach to global water pollution in *Floating Point*. In this piece she creates multiple methods of visually representing data pertinent to specific water components at specific locations. Although it might be dismissed as "simply" information design, there are both aesthetic and interactive components to many of the locations, which are quite interesting independently of its informational value. Hohl and Huber have crafted a project, which in addition to its informational value, seems to be just plain fun. In *Radiomap* participants (and ultimately collaborators) walk on a physical representation of the globe projected onto the floor, and based on their "global location" different radio stations can be heard. Each station is taken from the "real" location. This is a complex piece, which in addition to bringing people into "contact" with other parts of the world, also can allow for a variety of collaborative and other experiences. *Capture Site* by Doyon and Demers is a piece which in some ways is the inverse of *Radiomap*. Here, the two artists are suspended above ground in a large net, with all sorts of sensors in place that communicate local environmental information throughout the world. Additionally, the two performers engage in a performance/conversation that is also streamed throughout the internet. *Intermundos*, created in Colombia by Vanessa Gocksch (Pata de Perro), has as its goal the representation of local youth culture, and its connection to youth cultures worldwide. It has a range of funky elements and does a good job of capturing both visual and conceptual aspects of their cultural environment. At this point it is still mainly focused on Colombia, but there are enough segments that look elsewhere, that I have hope for the growth of what is described as an ongoing project. Some may discount the *World Hug Day* project by the Gao Brothers as both simple, na?ve and aesthetically uninteresting. And to tell you the truth, I would have a hard time discounting that critique. However, perhaps because of my "flower power sixties" imprinting, I see it as both a powerful statement and a social sculpture not dissimilar to that of Christo and Jean Claude, or Fluxus artists such as Yoko Ono. The image of thousands of people throughout the world in a simultaneous hug is quite striking. So if you're not out there hugging, please stop reading this and start exploring the world. BIOGRAPHIES The multimedia installations, bookworks, digital animations, performance and conceptual works of Dennis Summers have been inspired by his readings in quantum physics, philosophy of science, anthropology, linguistics and information theory. He has worked and exhibited artwork internationally for the past 20 years. More recently his interest in environmental issues, current theories on mapping, and language extinction has led to a variety of artworks including his ongoing global conceptual artwork *The Crying Post Project*, begun in 2001. In addition to the physical posts placed around the world as part of *The Crying Post Project*, other components include a series of digital prints and an interactive 3D website. In contrast to this sort of work, a recent series of abstract digital "color field" videos have been described as mesmerizing, beautiful and complex. His artist's books and videos are in the collections of several major museums. Choy Kok Kee holds a Master of Art degree in Design for Interactive Media from the Centre of Electronic Arts, Middlesex University, London, UK. Prior to that, he was trained in advertising art/applied art and fine art. He has worked in the creative industry for more than two decades as an art director and creative consultant. Kok Kee is also an academic and advisor to tertiary institutions and art colleges. As an artist, Kok Kee first exhibited his works at a tender age of 11 in the late 1970s after being spotted as an art prodigy. Since then, Kok Kee has exhibited and won numerous art awards both abroad and locally. His works are acquired and collected by both foreign and local commercial institutions, government bodies and educational establishments. He is also a member and chairperson of governmental, educational, art and design advisory committee and professional bodies in areas concerning political matters, media, education, creative design and arts development. Kok Kee is also a noted pioneer digital media artist in Singapore and an ex-Mensa international member. He is also the founder and mastermind behind the brand Cult Of Creatives. ________________________________________________________________ Capture Site http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gx/capture/index.htm by Helene Doyon and Jean-Pierre Demers Doyon/Demers 746, rue Saint-Olivier Qu?bec (Qu?bec) G1R 1H5 Canada Tel: +(418) 524-6337 Petitsrectis [at] doyondemers [dot] org http://www.doyondemers.org/situation/index_sc.html In the context of the Festival Art Action Actuel (FA3), Doyon/Demers presented the third version of *Capture Site*, located 5.25 meters above a rooftop visible from the windows of Artexte. The installation, composed of sensors fixed to a suspended gridwork, gathered data corresponding to changes in the environment, detecting variations in luminosity, temperature and wind velocity, as well as the movements and pressure exerted by the performers. The conversation d'amour, d'anecdotes et de th?ories between Doyon and Demers, as they stood on the aerial grid each day between 12:00 and 5:00 PM, were transmitted in real-time audio and video to the interior of Artexte's space. St Raymond - The Capture Site For the duration of this performative event, the environmental data were translated into information taken from Artexte's bibliographical database. Five streams of data were produced from the random pairing of the environmental elements with different categories from the database. For example, measures of light intensity were matched with documents from the "Subject" category of Artexte's database, temperature changes found their equivalence from the "Geographic Code" category, wind speed was matched with "Artists", etc. These constantly changing data streams, produced by applying environmental variables to information concerned primarily with Canada's visual arts community, were accessible on-line, in real time. Finally, an email message containing selected information from the climatic reading and the movements of Doyon/Demers at that precise moment, was automatically sent, every 20 seconds, to one of the five continents. Biography Helene Doyon and Jean-Pierre Demers have been working together since 1987. Active in performance art, but keeping free of all labels, Doyon/Demers identify themselves as "undisciplinarians". These "Socioaestheticians" have produced many events incorporating rural and urban environments, in which often voluntary citizens become both the material for the work and its dispersed authors. Their works have been presented in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, France, Spain, Hungary, the Netherlands and Japan. Doyon/Demers are currently completing their Doctorat en Etudes et pratiques des arts at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal (UQAM), Canada. In 2003, Helene Doyon was appointed professor in New Media Arts at the Ecole des arts visuels of Laval University in Quebec City. Jean-Pierre Demers also teaches at UQAM. ________________________________________________________________ Floating Point http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gx/floatingpt/index.htm by Tiffany Holmes Assistant Professor Department of Art and Technology The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 112 S. Michigan Avenue Chicago IL 60603 U.S.A. Tel: +312-345-3760 Fax: +312-345-3565 tholme [at] artic [dot] edu http://www.enviroart.org/HolmesColab/docs/ In her project *Floating Point*, the artist proposes to study trans-disciplinary methods of information analysis in the context of making pollution data accessible and informative to the general public ? through art and performance. The broader goal of the proposed research is to creatively design art that promotes sustainable and ecologically responsible modes of living and a general awareness of both local and global water quality issues. In Zurich, the artist creates a two channel video installation that displays a comparison of the dissolved oxygen levels in both Lake Zurich and the Limnat River. To begin this project, she will develop a piece of hardware from a dissolved oxygen sensor. This hardware will be fashioned to float off a lifejacket or body buoyancy aid. The device will be connected to a laptop that can read the data transmitted in real time and provide an instant visualization of the amount of oxygen available. Currently, the artist is testing content ideas for use in the real-time visualization. The link above connects to the animation studies for the project, which document the process of how the artist conceptualized different ways to image water quality. Biography Tiffany Holmes is a multimedia artist whose practice blends traditional materials and new media in large-scale interactive installations. Her work explores the relationship between digital technology and culture with an emphasis on technologies of seeing. Her recent work explores the movement of both human and animal bodies and the visual languages from different disciplines used to capture that movement. She exhibits widely in international and national venues, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Interaction '01 biennial in Japan, ISEA, SIGGRAPH 2000, World at rt in Denmark, Digital Salon '99 in New York and Madrid, and the Viper media festival in Switzerland. She writes about her work and research and lectures in venues as diverse as the International Symposium on the History of Neuroscience in Zurich, SIGGRAPH '99, Next 1.0 in Sweden, and the Computer Games, Digital Culture conference in Finland. With a diverse academic background in painting, animation, and biology, Holmes situates her work at the intersection between artistic, biomedical, and linguistic modes of bodily representation. With a Bachelor's degree in art history from Williams College, Holmes received a Masters in fine arts in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Masters in fine arts in digital arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. To promote her interdisciplinary artistic practice, the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan awarded Holmes a prestigious three-year fellowship. Holmes recently earned an Illinois Arts Council individual grant and an Artists In Labs residency in Switzerland. She is currently an assistant professor of art and technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she teaches courses in interactivity and the history and theory of electronic media. ________________________________________________________________ Home and Away - Growing up as British Asians in London http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gx/floatingpt/index.htm by Samina Mishra 264/1 Gulmohar Avenue Jamia Nagar New Delhi 110025 India Tel: +00 91 98116251888 samina [at] vsnl [dot] com http://www.sarai.net/compositions/multimedia/samina/samina/index.htm *Home and Away* is a multi-layered, multimedia work that explores the dynamics of defining one's identity. The children in *Home and Away* are second and third generation British Asian and belong to families that traveled to Britain from across the Indian Subcontinent India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. An unfamiliar land was filled slowly with the familiar objects, sounds and smells. And so, for the first generation, it may have been easy to identify themselves as the Indian Diaspora, with a comfortable division between a home left behind and a new home, between a nostalgic past and a pragmatic present. But for these children, this is the only home they have ever known - a unique combination of London's physical space and the Subcontinent's "culture". They grow up in predominantly Asian neighborhoods, speak English with an accent that is far from Asian, eat roti sabzi at home and learn hardly any Asian history at school. So, if London is Home, then it is still, in some senses, distant and away. And if the Subcontinent is Away, it is still home to many things that make up their identity. The *Home and Away* exhibition is made up of digitally produced panels. The panels integrate large single images as well as selected strips from the contact sheets with text that excerpts interviews and an author's narrative. The photographs consist of portraits of the children and their families as well as street images and signage. These speak of a very strong Asian presence, both in everyday spaces as well as the exceptional, for example, the annual Baisakhi celebration in Southall, which coincided in 2003 with the opening of a new Gurdwara, the largest anywhere outside of India. The exhibit is bound together by an edited soundtrack using voice, music and effect sounds. In one corner, there is a computer displaying an html presentation which combines all the elements of the exhibition but is a stand alone work that allows the viewer interactive freedom. Biography Samina Mishra is a documentary filmmaker and media practitioner based in New Delhi. She has recently finished *The House on Gulmohar Avenue*, a documentary film about home and belonging, tracing the filmmaker's personal journey to understand what it can mean to be a Muslim in India today. *Home and Away*, a multimedia exhibition on British Asian children in London, appeared in ISEA 2004. Her work includes *Stories of Girlhood*, a series of three films on the Girl Child in India, produced for Unicef, India and *Adha Asman*, a video about differential access to healthcare, produced for the British Council as part of the Gender Planning Training Project. She has also written *Hina in the Old City*, a non-fiction book with photographs on the Walled City of Delhi for children. She was the location sound recordist for the documentary film *Words on Water*. She has translated six children's stories from Urdu into English for The Magic Key, published by Young Zubaan, New Delhi. ________________________________________________________________ Intermundos Site http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gx/intermundos/index.htm by Vanessa Gocksch (Pata de Perro) Hotel Bellavista 4650 Avenida Santander Marbella, Cartagena de Indias Colombia Tel: +57 5 664 6411 patadeperro [at] intermundos [dot] org http://www.intermundos.org *Intermundos* is an independent organization based in Colombia. Through events, exchange and the media arts we work to network marginalized Colombian communities together with different cultural youth movements from the "north". The project started by working with the Colombian hiphop movement, and it is in this area that it has grown the most. We have an office in Bogot? that serves as an information center where youths can find videos, books, magazines and music related to artistic movements from the north, as well as information related to their cultural heritage. Local events and workshops are organized relating to the hiphop movement; we host a weekly hiphop radio program, have published documentaries and have collaborated with other independent entities by participating in events and exchanges on a local and global scale. We have recently initiated a collaborative initiative with the PixelACHE festival group from Finland whereby exchanges are being generated between the "electronic subcultures" of our two countries and beyond. In all of our projects we work to strengthen the sense of local identity by highlighting the immense intellectual and cultural wealth of the different regions of Colombia. We, like many others in Colombia, feel that it is only through this heightened sense of identity (and greater access to information) that we can construct movements (or a society) that can move beyond following cultural trends towards proposing them. Today, what is perhaps the most important intellectual legacy existent in Colombia - indigenous knowledge - is fast disappearing. The western world has not yet validated "pre"?literate forms of knowledge acquisition as a valuable asset towards the "development" of human culture. This disdain on the part of the dominant, technology-based culture causes as consequence the continuous extermination of aborigine cultures and disappearance of their intellectual legacy. *Intermundos* is developing ways of reaffirming the values of these cultures through different projects and exchanges. Most of these are still in their initial phase. The website Intermundos.org is to serve firstly as our window to the world, and secondly as a multimedia experiment that serves to find new ways to communicate ideas through an organic format that does not follow a specific logic (that arises from linear thought) but rather invites the user to lose themselves in a chaotic framework much more true to life itself (multidimensional). We still consider the website to be a pilot, we are currently seeking funding in order to make it into the cultural portal we wish it to become. Biography Vanessa Gocksch is an artist who was born in the north but opted for the south. Travelling from Brussels to Miami, then Mexico, she is now based in Cartagena de Indias on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. She studied visual arts with an emphasis in sculpture in Florida International University, La Cambre and Universidad Autonoma de Mexico. She has worked with many different media, including sculpture, etching, photography, installation, performance, video and documentary. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals in Mexico, Colombia, Brooklyn, Miami, Helsinki and London. As of the year 2000 she started venturing into the digital realm, teaching herself the tools necessary to communicate and create in what she calls an indispensable medium when located in a "remote" region of the planet. She is presently performing as a video jockey under the name of Pata de Perro, as well as producing a documentary and developing the communication project * Intermundos* and its website. ________________________________________________________________ The Nike Blanket Petition http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gx/nike/index.htm by Cat Mazza microRevolt P.O. Box 1659 Troy, NY 12180 U.S.A. Tel: +518 253 5830 inquiry [at] microrevolt [dot] org http://www.microrevolt.org/petition_overview.htm The Nike Blanket Petition is an initiative of *microRevolt*, a collective of fiber hobbyists and cyber-activists founded by artist Cat Mazza. The mission of *microRevolt*is to organize new media projects that promote sweatshop awareness and investigate the current crisis of global expansion and the feminization of labor. The *Nike Blanket Petition* is a 14-foot wide blanket made up of knitted together squares. Each square becomes a pixel that makes up a bitmap of the Nike swoosh logo, and each square acts as a hand made petition for fair labor policies for Nike apparel workers. Participants from the United States and abroad have come together to knit or crochet a petition or virtually sign a square through the microRevolt.org website. The project combines Internet technology with traditional craft as a way of engaging social networks, whether in face-to-face knitting circles or an on-line community in dialog about the labor process of garment production. The Nike Blanket Petition has toured various knitting circles including ones held in New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and has received on-line signatures from over 20 countries. Once the blanket is complete with a border, it will be presented to the Chairman of the Board of Nike Corporation, Phil Knight, as a gesture of hope for abolition of the sweatshop conditions for Nike apparel workers. Biography Cat Mazza founded *microRevolt* in 2003 to combine her interests in media activism, women's labor issues, and art. From 1999-2003 she worked at Eyebeam, a non-profit new media art center in New York City where she developed education, curatorial and technology programs. She is currently teaching electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she received her Masters in fine arts. 2005 exhibitions include: Prix Ars Electronica, where she won a Digital Communities award; SESI gallery, Sao Paulo, Brazil; *Fuzzy Logic* at Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, UK, and the *Upgrade International* at Eyebeam in New York City. ________________________________________________________________ Radio Map http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gx/radiomap/index.htm by Michael Hohl and Stephan Huber Sheffield Hallam University School of Cultural Studies Art & Design Research Centre Psalter Lane Campus Sheffield, S11 8UZ United Kingdom info [at] hohlwelt [dot] com stephan [at] digitalmind [dot] de http://www.hohlwelt.com/en/interact/practice/radiomap.html *Radiomap* is an unencumbered interactive environment that enables one or more participants to walk about a large photorealistic map of the world and listen to live radio programs from those locations they are walking about. The location in focus is indicated by a "point of interest", a visual ring element. If more then one participant is present on the map this single "point of interest" is shared among them. Now they have to negotiate their movements to accurately tune into stations as they have an equal amount of control over it. The overall interaction is simple and intuitive and encourages collaboration. The radio programs in the database have been selected for their strong local color and program format. Where possible, stations that solely broadcast music of a certain genre have been avoided, as they would not support the concept behind the work. Part of this concept is the effect of disorientation as this large-scale map is not experienced from a (safe) distance but participants are placed upon it. Continents appear from a different perspective, and geography and the relationships among continents seem distorted. Another part lies beyond the mundane quality of the radio broadcasts as attentive participants realize different time zones and seasons in the different hemispheres besides the multitude of languages and dialects. These broadcasts together with the unusual, disorientating viewpoint create Gestalt effects that enable people to perceive the earth and other cultures from a different perspective. It is a collective and holistic experience of exploration, surprise, longing and belonging, mediating between the individuals (in the installation) and the cultures of the broadcasting places, creating an intense, presence that is expected to last beyond the active participation itself. *Radiomap* is the practice-based part of a research project Hohl is undertaking at the Art & Design Research Centre of Sheffield Hallam University. This exploration is about the Experiential Qualities of Interactive Environments. Biographies Michael Hohl graduated in 2000 with a Masters in Digital Media Design from the University of the Arts, Berlin and also spent some time at the K?ln international School of Design (KISD) in Cologne. He worked as a conceptionist in digital media from 1994 in different digital media companies in Berlin (PIxelpark, ArtCom, cityscope, imstall). In 2002, after the bubble burst he relocated to the UK (after having lived for almost 10 years in Berlin). He is currently researching "Experiential Qualities of Interactive Environments" at the Art & Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University. Stephan Huber is a freelance designer, artist and programmer based in Hamburg, Germany. He started with an apprenticeship in typesetting and graduated in 2003 with a Masters in Digital Media Design from the University of the Arts, Berlin. Stephan is interested in wicked technical challenges such as the visualization of databases. He also tries to explore the sources of right-wing extremism in his Masters in his installation *A world of truths*. ________________________________________________________________ Surveillance http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gx/surveillance/index.htm by Alison Chung-Yan Lecturer Faculty of Music (Sonic Design) Carleton University School for Studies in Art & Culture 20 Haslemere Avenue Ottawa, ON Canada K2W 1E3 Tel: +(613) 599-8731 alison [at] sonicscape [dot] biz http://artengine.ca/chungyan/surv/index.htm *Surveillance* (2004) is a net art installation which explores the phenomenon of webcam surveillance on the Internet and its capacity to conjoin spaces near and far ? physical and virtual ? public and private. Housed within a single webpage, 15 smaller windows are gradually assembled security-camera style into a 5x3 matrix offering a near real-time glimpse of webcams situated around the world. As a woman in the Netherlands searches her fridge, an elephant drinks from a watering hole in Africa. Students mill about a campus in southern California while traffic hums along in Toronto. The night sky is lit up in Shanghai as an office worker in Houston toils away in a cubicle. In Japan, a Zen garden is a picture of complete stillness while the Internet Traffic monitor registers a spike in activity. Satellite cloud patterns over Costa Rica allude to the possibility of a storm, as people wait in line at a cafeteria in Alaska and a guinea pig somewhere in Pennsylvania stirs in its cage. As a solar flare is picked up by satellite, someone crosses a bridge in Bali and a BBC radio broadcaster reaches for his cup of coffee. Unlike the fast-paced abbreviated snapshot of the world as often depicted and superimposed by television news media, *Surveillance* attempts to show the world unfolding and moving to its own rhythm. It offers the chance to observe with the attendant possibility for things to happen ? or simply be. The exhibit uses Flash and Javascript and is optimized for 800 x 600 screen size resolution, Internet Explorer 5+ browser on PC, and dial-up Internet access speeds. Biography Alison Chung-Yan (b. 1971, Trinidad) is a media artist and composer based in Ottawa, Canada. Her works have been exhibited at the Images Festival (Toronto), National Arts Centre (Ottawa), Oscar Peterson Hall (Montreal), Java Museum for Internet Technologies in Contemporary Art (Germany), La Casa Encendida (Spain), Island Art Film and Video Festival (UK), and the 2004 Biennale of Electronic Art (Australia). Alison is currently focused on the creation of interactive sound and video installations with funding support awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and the Corel Endowment Fund for the Arts in Ottawa. Classically trained in piano performance under the Western Ontario Conservatory of Music, Alison also holds a B.A.Sc.(Honours) Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, a Diploma in Sonic Design from Carleton University, and is an alumnus of the Canadian Screen Training Centre's Summer Institute for Film, Television & New Media. She is currently a lecturer on the Faculty of Music at Carleton University where she instructs courses in computer music. ________________________________________________________________ The Face Of Tomorrow http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gx/face/index.htm by Mike Mike Kadirler 9 - D4 Firuzaga, Beyoglu Istanbul Turkey Tel: +90 537 938 1876 mike [at] faceoftomorrow [dot] com http://www.faceoftomorrow.com *The Face of Tomorrow* is an open-source web-based exploration of human identity as affected by the forces of globalization. It makes full use of all the tools of the modern economy - distributed work across several time zones, outsourcing to take advantages of cost disparities, an open source model that allows input from contributors, and of course the Internet itself as a medium of display and exchange. On one level the project answers questions such as "What does a New Yorker, a Londoner look like?" On a deeper level the work deals with issues arising out of the mechanics of globalization such as inclusion, access and democracy. The source code, which documents the photo shoot, selection and morphing process is open for inspection and change by all involved. As a result the project has now taken on a life of its own, like a computer code or virus, and at present there are people in Colombia, Japan, Israel and Mexico working on the project independently of Mike. Biography Mike Mike, born in 1964 in Cape Town, South Africa, studied at Goldsmiths College, London and lives and works Istanbul ________________________________________________________________ World Hug Day http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/GALLERY/gx/hug/index.htm by Gao Brothers Beijing New Art Projects 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, The Factory 798 Art District, Beijing P.O. Box 8503 Beijing 100015 China Tel: +86 10 84566660 Fax: +86 10 84566660 gaobrothers [at] gmail [dot] com http://www.world-hug-day.net Here, we propose the *World Hug Day* project. We started it in Shangdong Province, China, together with a worldwide Internet project, an interactive international campaign via the Internet, and have got enormous feedback and support. We carried out the first such performance, *The Utopia Of Hugging For Twenty Minutes*, on 10 September 2000. We invited some 150 volunteers, who were previously strangers to each other, to participate. We asked the participants to choose a person at random for a hug at the same time, and then cluster into group hugs. Since then, we have hugged hundreds of strangers, and organized group hugs for strangers in different public locations in different ways many times. In order to develop the *World Hug Day* project worldwide, we are planning to go global to hug hundreds of strangers, with permission, of course, and organize group hugs for strangers, and hold a travel exhibition of these photos of the hug-performance worldwide. Biography Gao Zhen (b. 1956) and Gao Qiang (b. 1962) were both born in Jinan, China. The Gao brothers are a pair of artists based in Beijing. They are authors of several published works, including *How Far Can You Walk in One Day in Beijing*, *The Current State Of Chinese Avant-Garde Art* and *The Report Of Art Environment*, who have been collaborating on installation, performance, photography works and writing since the mid-1980s. Some of their works were published in *A History Of China Modern Art*, *China Avant-garde Photography *, *The Best Photography Of China*, etc. and collected by Chinese and foreign people and museums. LEONARDO NETWORK NEWS COORDINATOR: Kathleen Quillian kq [at] leonardo [dot] info ________________________________________________________________ BYTES INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE New Constellations: Art, Science and Society 17-19 March 2006 Museum of Contemporary Art Circular Quay West, Sydney Australia New Constellations: Art, Science and Society ? an international conference charting the ways in which art and science are gravitating towards one another within contemporary culture. The Conference will present the latest thinking about collaboration between artists and scientists and examine how the worldwide trend towards interdisciplinary engagement is changing the definitions, methodologies and practices they use and how they view the social implications of their work. Key Speakers: Ruzena Bajcsy, Immediate Past President, CITRIS (Centre for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society), University of California, Berkeley, California; Elizabeth Grosz, Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and Visiting Professor of Architecture, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey; Steve Kurtz, Founding Member, Critical Art Ensemble; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Roger Malina, Chairman, Board, Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology; Co-Chair, International Advisory Board, Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts. The Conference has grown out of a collaboration between artist Mari Velonaki and The University of Sydney's Australian Centre for Field Robotics, an Australian Research Council - Australia Council for the Arts Linkage Project. The Conference is supported by Artspace, Australian Network for Art and Technology and Patrick Systems and Technologies and The University of Sydney. Conference enquiries: 61 2 9245 2484 or email [at] education [dot] mca [dot] com [dot] au For further program details and information go to This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. ________________________________________________________________ FROMM PLAYERS AT HARVARD: e l e c t r o n I c s FREE CONCERTS Friday, Saturday, Sunday March 10-12 at 8:00 pm in John Knowles Paine Concert Hall. Curated by composer Hans Tutschku, the weekend will feature three different concerts of cutting edge work. Friday night: Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt, Earle Brown, ?rjan Sandred, Luigi Nono, Jacopo Baboni, and Alvin Lucier, who will give a pre-concert talk at 7:15pm. Saturday night: Ensemble f?r Intuitive Musik Weimar (Germany), performing pieces by Cage and Stockhausen. On Sunday, the four finalists of the 2006 live electronic competition will perform premieres of their work, joined by Boston's finest new music performers. This competition--the first of its kind at Harvard--aims to encourage the creation of new instrumental pieces with live electronics. A final prize winner will be announced after Sunday's concert. John Knowles Paine Hall is located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA, directly behind the Science Center, and is wheelchair accessible. The Hall is a short walk from the Harvard Square red line stop. Free parking for this event is available after 7pm at the Everett Street Garage. ________________________________________________________________ CREDITS Nisar Keshvani: LEA Editor-in-Chief Natra Haniff: LEA Editor Nicholas Cronbach: LEA Editor Kathleen Quillian: LEA e-digest Coordinator Michael Punt: LR Editor-in-Chief Andre Ho: Web Concept and Design Consultant Roger Malina: Leonardo Executive Editor Stephen Wilson: Chair, Leonardo/ISAST Web Committee Craig Harris: Founding Editor Editorial Advisory Board: Irina Aristarkhova, Roy Ascott, Craig Harris, Fatima Lasay, Michael Naimark, Julianne Pierce Gallery Advisory Board: Mark Amerika, Paul Brown, Choy Kok Kee, Steve Dietz, Kim Machan fAf-LEA Corresponding Editors: Lee Weng Choy, Ricardo Dal Farra, Elga Ferreira, Young Hae- Chang, Fatima Lasay, Jose-Carlos Mariategui, Marcus Neustetter, Elaine Ng, Marc Voge ________________________________________________________________ LEA PUBLISHING INFORMATION Editorial Address: Leonardo Electronic Almanac PO Box 850 Robinson Road Singapore 901650 lea [at] mitpress [dot] mit [dot] edu ________________________________________________________________ Copyright (2006), Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology All Rights Reserved. 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