ARTBASE (2)
BIO
Jim Andrews does http://vispo.com . He is a poet-programmer and audio guy. His work explores the new media possibilities of poetry, and seeks to synthesize the poetical with other arts and media.
jakalope.net, yugop.com
http://jakalope.net : an intriguing Flash project by Dave Ogilvie, music
producer (Vancouver). Sort of Myst-like in its riddles.
http://yugop.com : Flash work by Yugo Nakamura from Japan.
ja
http://vispo.com
producer (Vancouver). Sort of Myst-like in its riddles.
http://yugop.com : Flash work by Yugo Nakamura from Japan.
ja
http://vispo.com
Peace Research Institute in the Middle East
The Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME) is coordinated by
Sami Adwan, a Palestinian academic, and Dan Bar-On, an Israeli academic.
Here we have an instance of Palestinians and Israelis working together. What
they concentrate on are "peace building" projects. You can read descriptions
of these projects at http://vispo.com/PRIME and in the just-published PRIME
2001-4 newsletter at http://vispo.com/PRIME/news2004.htm . These tend to be
quite interesting, such as the creation of books for Israeli and Palestinian
school-children that tells each tribe something of the other's story, gives
an indication of the pain of the other, the humanity of the other.
Of course, Sami Adwan and Dan Bar-On have been working in pretty difficult
circumstances the last few years and they have asked me and Sid Tafler to
publish very little in the last couple of years on the site. So it's great
to get something from them, to see that they are still carrying out their
important work of peace-building projects. Here is an excerpt from their
newsletter describing two of their projects:
Shared History Project: Since January 2001 we held thirteen (13) meetings of
a group of 6-7 Palestinians teachers, and a similar group of Israeli
(Jewish) teachers led by Prof. Adnan Massalam and Prof. Eyal Naveh (as
history experts). We met first at the New Imperial Hotel in East Jerusalem,
but lately, as the Palestinian teachers do not get permits anymore to stay
overnight, we started to hold our meetings at PRIME. We held two summer
meetings abroad: in 2003 in Turkey and in 2004 at the Eckert Institute in
Braunschweig, Germany. We developed till now one booklet of three historical
events that the teachers chose (1917/Balfour declaration, 1948 war,
1987-93/first Palestinian Intifada) in which there are two parallel
narratives (an Israeli and a Palestinian) accounting for the same event. The
second booklet will soon go to print (three additional events: the 1920th,
the 1930th and 1967 war) and the teachers work now on the third booklet (the
1950th, the1970-1980, and 1993-2000). The teachers tried the first booklet
with some of their students. We will also develop a teacher guide and try to
conduct an evaluation of this method, in comparison to a single narrative
approach. The first booklet has been translated into Hebrew and Arabic,
English, Italian and French, and will soon be translated also into German,
Spanish (Catalan, etc.) and Portuguese. Of course all the texts are yet
experimental and will need additional revisions before published in the
final book. Shoshana Steinberg and Summer Jaber-Massarwa are observing and
documenting the process. This project was funded by the Wye River and the
Ford Foundation.
The "localized" refugees-immigrants project: We chose a region in the South
of Israel (Beit Jubreen area). Sami's team (headed by Shibli) interviews
Palestinian refugees who originally come from that area and live in refugee
camps near Bethlehem. Dan's team (headed by Julia and Nitai) interviewed the
Jewish immigrants who settled in this region prior or after 1948. The
interviews are videotaped and we would like to create a database and perhaps
a museum based on these two sets of interviews. In December 2003 we held a
workshop in which two families of each side, three generations in each
family, shared their stories for two days, in Talitha Kumi. A Palestinian
team filmed this meeting and we hope to have soon a film of that encounter.
Also this project is funded by the Wye River. As part of this project Dan
conducted interviews in Haifa with Jews and Arabs who remember Haifa from
before 1948 and Sami conducted interviews with Palestinians who live in the
West Bank and come originally from Haifa. There are two short films, which
describe some of these interviews.
ja
Sami Adwan, a Palestinian academic, and Dan Bar-On, an Israeli academic.
Here we have an instance of Palestinians and Israelis working together. What
they concentrate on are "peace building" projects. You can read descriptions
of these projects at http://vispo.com/PRIME and in the just-published PRIME
2001-4 newsletter at http://vispo.com/PRIME/news2004.htm . These tend to be
quite interesting, such as the creation of books for Israeli and Palestinian
school-children that tells each tribe something of the other's story, gives
an indication of the pain of the other, the humanity of the other.
Of course, Sami Adwan and Dan Bar-On have been working in pretty difficult
circumstances the last few years and they have asked me and Sid Tafler to
publish very little in the last couple of years on the site. So it's great
to get something from them, to see that they are still carrying out their
important work of peace-building projects. Here is an excerpt from their
newsletter describing two of their projects:
Shared History Project: Since January 2001 we held thirteen (13) meetings of
a group of 6-7 Palestinians teachers, and a similar group of Israeli
(Jewish) teachers led by Prof. Adnan Massalam and Prof. Eyal Naveh (as
history experts). We met first at the New Imperial Hotel in East Jerusalem,
but lately, as the Palestinian teachers do not get permits anymore to stay
overnight, we started to hold our meetings at PRIME. We held two summer
meetings abroad: in 2003 in Turkey and in 2004 at the Eckert Institute in
Braunschweig, Germany. We developed till now one booklet of three historical
events that the teachers chose (1917/Balfour declaration, 1948 war,
1987-93/first Palestinian Intifada) in which there are two parallel
narratives (an Israeli and a Palestinian) accounting for the same event. The
second booklet will soon go to print (three additional events: the 1920th,
the 1930th and 1967 war) and the teachers work now on the third booklet (the
1950th, the1970-1980, and 1993-2000). The teachers tried the first booklet
with some of their students. We will also develop a teacher guide and try to
conduct an evaluation of this method, in comparison to a single narrative
approach. The first booklet has been translated into Hebrew and Arabic,
English, Italian and French, and will soon be translated also into German,
Spanish (Catalan, etc.) and Portuguese. Of course all the texts are yet
experimental and will need additional revisions before published in the
final book. Shoshana Steinberg and Summer Jaber-Massarwa are observing and
documenting the process. This project was funded by the Wye River and the
Ford Foundation.
The "localized" refugees-immigrants project: We chose a region in the South
of Israel (Beit Jubreen area). Sami's team (headed by Shibli) interviews
Palestinian refugees who originally come from that area and live in refugee
camps near Bethlehem. Dan's team (headed by Julia and Nitai) interviewed the
Jewish immigrants who settled in this region prior or after 1948. The
interviews are videotaped and we would like to create a database and perhaps
a museum based on these two sets of interviews. In December 2003 we held a
workshop in which two families of each side, three generations in each
family, shared their stories for two days, in Talitha Kumi. A Palestinian
team filmed this meeting and we hope to have soon a film of that encounter.
Also this project is funded by the Wye River. As part of this project Dan
conducted interviews in Haifa with Jews and Arabs who remember Haifa from
before 1948 and Sami conducted interviews with Palestinians who live in the
West Bank and come originally from Haifa. There are two short films, which
describe some of these interviews.
ja
famous curves
if you move things around in your net.art via programming, you may find
these useful:
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Curves/Curves.html
These are from the University of St Andrews (I am not aware of any saints in
the family), Scotland's collection of famous curves.
ja
http://vispo.com
these useful:
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Curves/Curves.html
These are from the University of St Andrews (I am not aware of any saints in
the family), Scotland's collection of famous curves.
ja
http://vispo.com
four observations and a question
her problem is she's too smart to be a poet; she doesn't have an equally
intelligent audience.
we elect bad leaders because, when the program is exploitation and
destruction, nothing less will do.
or does the program only become exploitation and destruction when we elect
bad leaders?
some of the wives were interviewed. it seemed they really believed they did
not know their husbands were gangsters.
the painting has a painting on each side of the canvas, which is partly why
it will fetch such a price; but when she was alive, she painted on both
sides because she didn't have enough money for another canvas. Emily Emily
the fuckers, the fuckers.
ja
intelligent audience.
we elect bad leaders because, when the program is exploitation and
destruction, nothing less will do.
or does the program only become exploitation and destruction when we elect
bad leaders?
some of the wives were interviewed. it seemed they really believed they did
not know their husbands were gangsters.
the painting has a painting on each side of the canvas, which is partly why
it will fetch such a price; but when she was alive, she painted on both
sides because she didn't have enough money for another canvas. Emily Emily
the fuckers, the fuckers.
ja
Uribe & Andrews -> Loomoja in Turku
Loomoja is a literary magazine from Turku/Helsinki Finland that usually is
print-only. The current issue also involves a Web component (
http://www.unikankare.net/lumooja/liike/ ) with work by Marko Niemi, Miia
Toivio, Henna Lasorla, Anne Varis, Teemu Ikonen, Jussi Lahti, Timo Harju &
Saija Sofia, Ana Maria Uribe, and myself. They have gone to considerable
work to translate some of Ana Maria Uribe's work (she's from Argentina) and
some of my work into Finnish.
It's great to see that this usually-print-only magazine is making this sort
of foray into digital poetry.
Marko Niemi, one of the Loomoja editors and also the translator of Ana
Maria's work and mine, has not only translated four of my fairly difficult
DHTML pieces into Finnish, but he has also updated the code. He is also a
programmer. The English versions of these pieces mostly run on only IE for
the PC (Seattle Drift runs on the Mac). Marko has upgraded the code so that
they also run on Netscape 6+ and Firefox for the PC.
These pieces of mine were written between 1997 and 1999. If you were online
at that time, you might recall that was the time of the 'browser wars'
between Microsoft and Netscape. Quite a few people who were doing web.art in
DHTML found that, at a certain point in the browser wars, they could no
longer really commit to making work in a medium where the code probably
wasn't going to work on future machines for very long. The browser wars
seemed to indicate that stuff for the Web was not meant to have any
longevity. Netscape discontinued some of their code (such as the <layer>
tag) that was important to some web.art works (I never used it), and it
became hopelessly complex to try to make DHTML (Dynamic HTML) pieces that
worked on more than one browser on more than one platform (Mac/PC/Linux etc)
if you also wanted to push the programmerly aspect and not settle for simple
mouseovers.
We're a few years past that point now, and what is the state of things? I
find it encouraging that Marko was able to upgrade this code so that it runs
on more browsers than it did before. Perhaps W3C standards are starting to
have an effect. He tells me that the amount of browser sniffing he needed to
do in order to get the code running on different browsers, while using only
one file, was minimal. So it looks like cross-browser DHTML is at least a
bit less of a headache than it used to be.
I will study Marko's work to update the code of the English versions so that
they too will run on the other browsers. And of course will refresh my DHTML
in the meantime.
Marko has also published his translations of my work and Ana Maria's work on
his own site at
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/marniemi/etnodada/vierashuone.html
ja
print-only. The current issue also involves a Web component (
http://www.unikankare.net/lumooja/liike/ ) with work by Marko Niemi, Miia
Toivio, Henna Lasorla, Anne Varis, Teemu Ikonen, Jussi Lahti, Timo Harju &
Saija Sofia, Ana Maria Uribe, and myself. They have gone to considerable
work to translate some of Ana Maria Uribe's work (she's from Argentina) and
some of my work into Finnish.
It's great to see that this usually-print-only magazine is making this sort
of foray into digital poetry.
Marko Niemi, one of the Loomoja editors and also the translator of Ana
Maria's work and mine, has not only translated four of my fairly difficult
DHTML pieces into Finnish, but he has also updated the code. He is also a
programmer. The English versions of these pieces mostly run on only IE for
the PC (Seattle Drift runs on the Mac). Marko has upgraded the code so that
they also run on Netscape 6+ and Firefox for the PC.
These pieces of mine were written between 1997 and 1999. If you were online
at that time, you might recall that was the time of the 'browser wars'
between Microsoft and Netscape. Quite a few people who were doing web.art in
DHTML found that, at a certain point in the browser wars, they could no
longer really commit to making work in a medium where the code probably
wasn't going to work on future machines for very long. The browser wars
seemed to indicate that stuff for the Web was not meant to have any
longevity. Netscape discontinued some of their code (such as the <layer>
tag) that was important to some web.art works (I never used it), and it
became hopelessly complex to try to make DHTML (Dynamic HTML) pieces that
worked on more than one browser on more than one platform (Mac/PC/Linux etc)
if you also wanted to push the programmerly aspect and not settle for simple
mouseovers.
We're a few years past that point now, and what is the state of things? I
find it encouraging that Marko was able to upgrade this code so that it runs
on more browsers than it did before. Perhaps W3C standards are starting to
have an effect. He tells me that the amount of browser sniffing he needed to
do in order to get the code running on different browsers, while using only
one file, was minimal. So it looks like cross-browser DHTML is at least a
bit less of a headache than it used to be.
I will study Marko's work to update the code of the English versions so that
they too will run on the other browsers. And of course will refresh my DHTML
in the meantime.
Marko has also published his translations of my work and Ana Maria's work on
his own site at
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/marniemi/etnodada/vierashuone.html
ja