EXHIBITION

Andrew Bucksbarg (USA), Consumertopia (2001), Web project
Andrew Bucksbarg is another dummy-robot involved in "media play," integrating animation, audio, user-influence, text, video, and vocalization. As an independent culture producer, Bucksbarg composes hybrid textures and plays of sensation that investigate ideas of futurism, technology, utopia, and play. He received an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts and teaches digital art at Orange Coast College in California. He is also the executive director of the media-arts organization adhocArts.org.

Links:
http://adhocsound.org
http://adhocsound.org/consumertopia.html

What happens when we become corporate agents and all forms of culture become commodities, manufactured by one massive government corporation? Consumertopia juxtaposes the detritus from a consumer-capitalist culture with a simple mouse rollover toy that triggers short samples of audio and spoken/written text.

Leon Grodski (USA), Based in Brooklyn, New York, he is a multimedia artist and producer. His internationally acclaimed video installation Great Balls of Fire continues to be exhibited worldwide (at the Impakt Festival, the Walker Art Center, Harvard University, etc.).
Links: www.the-sushi-bar.com

Great Balls of Fire, A Multimedia Installation by Leon Grodski
Video co-edited and co-produced with Pearl Gluck
Featuring James E. Jones
European Video Distributor The Netherlands Media Art Institute
Copyright 2002 The Sushi Bar LLC
Great Balls of Fire explores acts of seeing. The installation environment is an everyday living room, one from which anyone might have witnessed the limiting loop of information on September 11, 2001, and the days that followed. The video intercuts homeless visionary James E. Jones's sidewalk commentary with the visual task of an observer trying to grasp those 48 hours during and after the attacks. Horror and humor run on a loop - at once whetting stone and inoculation. In this constructed context of the quintessential living room, one is asked to reexperience the act of seeing, making sense, and remembering those days, the time that has since passed, and by extension, any day in history.

Aleksandar Ještrović-Jamesdin (Serbia and Montenegro), Stealth (2003), Instalation
Aleksandar Ještrović was born in Zagreb (1972). Since 1989 he lives in Belgrade. Jestrovic received a degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where he is currently a postgraduate student.

During the NATO bombardment of Belgrade (1999), the Yugoslav army shot down a Lockheed Martin F-117 Nighthawk fighter jet. Because of its predicted ability to escape detection on radar screens, this type of aircraft is also known as the "stealth" bomber. This was the first time a plane of this type was ever shot down. The installation Stealth presents a section of the downed plane along with documentary material about the event.

Oliver Kunkel (Germany), Mosquitobox (2003), Installation
A student at the Media Art School in Cologne, Germany, Oliver Kunkel creates work that doesn't focus on any particular material or means of expression. For him, it's more interesting to find and choose material in accordance with an idea. Through this process, objects evolve in the fields of photography, performance art, video art, sculpture and computer-generated art.
Links: http://www.raumanzug.org

Kunkel's project challenges our fears about being infected with HIV
Mosquitobox is a glass box filled with mosquitoes that have sucked
HIV-positive blood from a donor. Audience members have an opportunity to expose themselves to the potential danger of infection. They are given a choice.

Jennifer & Kevin McCoy (USA), Horror Chase (2002), Video installation
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are Brooklyn-based artists whose projects examine the way human thinking is structured by genre and repetition. As a way of focusing attention on these structures, they often reexamine classic works of science fiction or television narrative, creating sculptural objects, net art, or live events from what they find. Their work has been exhibited in various museums, galleries and festivals in New York (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, P.S.1, Postmasters Gallery, The New Museum in Smack Mellon) and across Europe (ZKM, The Cornerhouse Gallery, Manchester, Van Laere Gallery, Antwerpen and F.A.C.T., Liverpool). In 2002 they were the recipients of a Creative Capital Grant for Emerging Fields and in 2001 they received an award for New Media from the Colbert Foundation. Articles about their work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Wire, dArt International, Spin Magazine, Feed, The Independent ...
Links: http://www.mccoyspace.com/

Horror Chase is based on one of the most popular horror films of all time, Evil Dead 2 (1987) by Sam Raimi. For the project, the McCoys reconstructed the set of Evil Dead 2 and reshot the chase scene. Although relatively short in the original film, the chase scene is one of the movie's most arresting visual moments, as the main character is pursued by an unseen evil force that eventually possesses him. Horror Chase was shot on Super16 film and transferred to a digital medium, then looped so the chase appears as one long continuous shot, creating an endless uncanny scene that can be manipulated to run fast, slow, or backwards, according to a randomizing computer program developed by Kevin McCoy.

Haruki Nishijima (Japan), Remain in Light (1999), Interactive installation
Haruki Nishijima was born in Hamamatsu, Japan (1971). In 1998 he completed the master's course at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. In 2000, he began studying at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, or IAMAS, in Japan.
His project Remain in Light was in 2001 nominated for Prix Ars Electronica Interactive Art.
Links: http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/vida/paginas/v4/eharuki.html

Remain in Light is the visual representation of ambient analog sound waves, which have been captured using an "electronic insect-collecting kit." The net functions as an antenna for catching and accumulating radio wave data. After "electronic insects" are discovered and "collected" in their "natural environment," the analog data is converted and presented visually in an interactive environment. Each "electronic insect" is represented by a different color; each color represents a single frequency. This way visitor creates a color map of analogue sounds which s/he "collected" in an environment.

Helene von Oldenburg & Ellen Nonnenmacher (Germany), Little Virus (2003), Interactive installation
Helene von Oldenburg lives in Rastede and Hamburg, Germany. She holds a doctor's degree in agricultural science and a diploma in visual arts. Her work (presented in lectures, performances, and installations) centers on her research into the appearances and effects that digital media impose on perception, society and the future.

Ellen Nonnenmacher was born in Tübingen, Germany (1964). She received diploma degree in fine art from the University of Hamburg. She is a founding member of several artistic initiatives, including Women and Technology (1992), Old Boys Network (the first cyberfeminist network, 1997), and mikro e.V. (an organization in support of media culture, 1998).
Links:
http://www.thealit.de
Frauen.Kultur.Labor
http://www.mars-patent.org
a project by Helene von Oldenburg and Claudia Reiche (Art on Mars).
http://www.thing.de/Capital
a project by Ellen Nonnenmacher
http://www.oldenburg.de/edith-russ-haus/english/cyberfem_.html
Cyberfem Spirit - Spirit Of Data
http://www.oldenburg.de/edith-russ-haus/english/ufo.html
UFO - Strategies

Little Virus is a strategic game for 2-6 players. It is based on the nature and life of viruses in general. The game functions as a simulation of reality. During the course of the game, the hidden mechanisms and agendas of economics, the military, politics, medicine and science are disclosed. The game reflects the reality of today's work with viruses; it describes the progress of a new virus from its computer-design, through its development and testing stage in the laboratory, to its life at large in the outside world. The target of the game is to increase the viral population in order to reach the target field "Epidemic".

Sergey Provorov & Galina Myznikova (Russia), Interactive audio installation for cable, hand and flash
Galina Myznikova and Sergey Provorov, artists from Nizhny Novgorod (formerly Gorky), Russia, work in various spheres of contemporary art, including those that use the most up-to-date technologies. In 1993-96, Galina and Sergey were the authors and directors of an experimental program on Nizhny Novgorod television that explored "the conception of non-verbal information." Since then, they have created over 18 experimental videos, including some international co-production projects. Their films have been shown in various international film and video festivals, including Viper (Switzerland), Transmedialle (Germany) and FCCM (Canada). Many of these artists' works have been preserved in the video banks of Chicago (USA), Basis Wien (Vienna, Austria) and the Media Collection (Moscow, Russia). Their work "Four Compositions for Cable and Hand" is included on an international CD-anthology of sound poetry.

Provorov's and Myznikova's installation makes use of light (a camera flash) and sound (an electronic click) at their maximum peak expression, which originates in the direct contact of a low-frequency cable against a hand. Unlike a real-world situation, where it is not always possible to control a process, an installation is an artificially created situation and therefore easily controllable. When touching the cable, people feel a weak electric charge, a kind of alternative to light and sound, as it is not fully sensed by us. This working model reveals the essence of the "hidden threat" mechanism. People get involved in a "dangerous" interactive game. They create their own electronic music, luminous effects, and get an electric charge. Only time will show the consequences of this game.

Kathrin Pohlmann (Germany), The Voyeur (2002), Video installation (11:30 / loop)
Born in Leipzig, Germany (1978), Kathrin Pohlmann has been studying photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig since 1999.

The Voyeur deals with taboos and fears about sexuality, pornography, and intimacy. Kathrin Pohlmann filmed her family as they watched a porno film. She told her family in advance that they would be filmed, but they didn't know what they would be watching on the TV screen …

Rene Rusjan (Slovenia), Invisible Threat: Home (2003), Interactive installation
18. 6.-23. 6., 18.00-21.00, Dvořakova 8, apartment: Kukovec

Born in Ljubljana (1962) and a graduate in sculpture from the Academy of Visual Arts at the University of Ljubljana, Rene Rusjan lives and works in Ljubljana as a free-lance artist and a lecturer at the Famul Stuart School of Applied Arts, which she also co-founded.

Links:
http://www.ljudmila.org/scca/ip/rene/rp.htm
http://www.ljudmila.org/scca/ip/rene/3r-threat.html

In most people's perception, home is the safest possible place on earth. But in reality, it can be a hotbed of all kinds of invisible threats. The scene appears to be a small apartment with all those nice, user-friendly things we can't do without in such a place. Home, sweet home. But a closer look discloses information about a wide rang of invisible threats, which (possibly) are also present in our own homes.

Nataša & Katja Skušek (Slovenia), You will see ... (2003), Video installation (4:23 / loop)
Nataša Skušek (1967) received a degree in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. In 2001, she continued her studies with several months at the art academy in Trondheim, Norway. She is currently a postgraduate student in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana.
Katja Skušek (1977) studies graphics at the School of Natural Science Technology in Ljubljana.

Tina Smrekar (Slovenia), Under Surveillance? (2003), Video installation
Tina Smrekar received a degree in industrial design from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. She continued her studies with a year at the University of Arts and Design in Helsinki. She is currently a graduate student in photography at the art academy (HGB) in Leipzig.

The video presents the politics of "surveillance in the name of security" in two cities, Leipzig and London. The artist interweaves statistical data with interviews in which people talk about their feelings and fears linked to the fact that they are exposed to continual surveillance, which not even the one observing them can escape.