ARTBASE (1)
BIO
Mark Tribe is an artist whose work explores the intersection of media technology and politics. His photographs, installations, videos, and performances are exhibited widely, including recent solo projects at Momenta Art in New York, the San Diego Museum of Art, G-MK in Zagreb, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Tribe is the author of two books, The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (Charta, 2010) and New Media Art (Taschen, 2006), and numerous articles. He is Chair of the MFA Fine Arts Department at School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 1996, Tribe founded Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.
Copernica
A new interface by Martin Wattenberg (commissioned by NASA, produced by
Rhizome.org): http://www.hq.nasa.gov/copernica/index.html
+ + +
Martin Wattenberg's Stellar Cartography
Jon Ippolito
An unruly flock of stars swarms across the screen. As their orbit expands,
the nebulous clusters of sparks cohere into slowly spinning spirals: the
universe on a computer monitor.
The year is 1983, and the luminous microcosm is a computer program
developed by cutting-edge researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics. As I watch, the astronomers tweak the cosmological equations
encoded in the program, then cook up another universe and compare it to the
vision telescopes provide of our own. A uniform gas? Turn down the
expansion constant. Braided star-strands? Stir in more gravity. Globular
clusters? Another dash of angular momentum, and finally familiar-looking
galaxies wheel across the screen.
Historian of science Peter Galison has documented the revolution wreaked by
these cosmological chefs, who demonstrated to the chagrin of their
old-school colleagues that computer simulations could be a new form of
experimental science. Theorists, for their part, took this world-generating
experimental apparatus and turned it into a meta-theory: they imagined a
primal "quantum foam" at the beginning of time, teeming with embryonic
universes on the verge of expanding. Each of the bubbles in this foam is a
proto-world organized according to a different set of principles. A bubble
with the right principles gets a shot at expanding into a full-blown
universe; God sits back and waits for the pot to boil over.
It's an unsettling feeling, knowing that other universes may be jostling
ours in this primeval cappuccino, but we should be used to this feeling by
now. In a single stroke a Polish canon by the name of Nicholas Copernicus
kicked the center out of a geocentric cosmos, sending the ornate epicycles
Ptolemy's orrery had accumulated over the course of fourteen centuries
clattering to the ground. Over the succeeding centuries, astronomers have
discovered lots of other potential centers: the local star group, our Milky
Way galaxy, the Virgo galactic cluster. But the story was always the same:
anytime they fixed on a potential cosmic center, it was unseated by a
de-centered model that turned out more elegant than the centered one.
The Java interface that artist Martin Wattenberg has designed for NASA's
art collection is also de-centered--or, to put it more accurately,
multi-centered. Visitors to the Web site can sort documentation of the
artworks according to various organizing principles, from artist to subject
to the first word of the title. Choosing a new principle re-organizes the
universe in a transition that is as startling visually as the cosmological
conjuring acts I witnessed at Harvard twenty years ago. The contortions
Copernica undergoes in switching from one principle to another, like those
of its scientific precursors, offer a deeper structural understanding than
could any static map of its collection.
Of course, Wattenberg aims only to picture a collection, while the Harvard
programmers were hoping to simulate a cosmos; art has traditionally been
content to represent, while science has aimed to predict. This difference
in the scale of ambition is certainly reflected in the individual examples
of the art represented in NASA's collection, from Martin Berkon's
interpretation in oils of Jupiter's roiling atmosphere to Henk Pander's
matter-of-fact rendition of NASA's "Solar Thermal Vacuum Chamber."
But representation can go beyond the retinal, and artists outside of the
documentary tradition represented by Berkon and Pander have periodically
turned to the star-filled firmament to represent something that can't be
seen--something too vast to comprehend in a glance. Van Gogh's 1889 Starry
Night is no star chart, but a meditation on the hypnotic power of the
heavens, a revelation of the slippery slope between the natural and
supernatural. A century later, digital tools have enabled artists and their
viewers to go from gaping at sublime vistas to navigating them. Four
undergraduate years wasted on stellar dynamics and quantum field theory
weren't sufficient to quell my enchantment with the night sky; Electric
Sky, an interactive map of online culture I charted for the Guggenheim's
CyberAtlas project in 1996, figured the collaborative networks of the
adolescent Internet as constellations of artists, online spaces, and
service providers.
If Electric Sky is a static snapshot of cyberspace, Wattenberg's own forays
into representing online culture have rendered the swift precession of the
electrosphere in a more dynamic fashion. A 1999 Java applet, Starry Nights,
lets the user add or rearrange stars to a cartoonish firmament, apparently
based on van Gogh's eponym hanging in New York's Museum of Modern Art
(although its electronic impasto owes a closer debt to Jackson Pollock's
1953 Ocean Greyness at the Guggenheim). Wattenberg revisited this metaphor
in a 1999 collaboration with Mark Tribe and Alex Galloway. This Starrynight
is a dynamic interface to an archive of electronic texts contributed by the
members of the Rhizome.org online community. Each star represents a
different text; the brightness of each star is a measure of how often it
has been requested by online visitors. (It's as though the dustcovers of
library books got shinier rather than duller when borrowers left their
fingerprints on them.) Like its precursor, this Starrynight reverses the
perspective of Electric Sky, gazing from the ground into the ether rather
than looking down from the heavens onto the earth.
Starrynight also features a dynamic method for "slicing the data": viewers
who select a theme such as gender or virtual reality see a constellation
linking all of the stars representing texts with that theme--a cartography
of cyberspace that literally connects the dots of online culture. Like
Copernica, StarryNight embodies Wattenberg's ideal of an interface "that
combines reading and seeing in equal measure."
Media theorist Lev Manovich has argued that databases are for the computer
age what narrative was for the modern age: the dominant form of cultural
expression. If so, Wattenberg's interfaces are the shape of things to come,
for instead of grafting pre-conceived taxonomies onto his databases he
often derives the interface from the database itself. Viewers who choose
Copernica's "Make Your Own" button can discover new galaxies simply by
trying an organizing principle no one has tried before--say, partitioning
the texts according to whether they contain the word "Earth" (40 matches)
versus "Mars" (15 matches). This is one case where too many cooks don't
spoil the broth--they make it more interesting.
For Manovich, one of the most important variabilities of new media is the
proliferation of interfaces to the same database. While some designers are
content to come up with a single usable interface, Wattenberg's versatile
tools offer viewers the chance to create multiple visions of a single
collection. In the final analysis, then, Copernica is its own sort of
quantum foam; the contents of Wattenberg's cup will please some tastes more
than others, but there's an undeniable thrill in stirring it up to make
some fresh bubbles.
http://www.moma.org/docs/collection/paintsculpt/c58.htm
Cyberatlas.guggenheim.org
Bewitched.com
Guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_1297.html
Rhizome.org/starrynight
Spot.colorado.edu/~vstenger/Cosmo/MonkeyGod.pdf
Jon Ippolito has created online artworks seen at the Walker Art Center and
ZKM, curated exhibitions of video art and virtual reality at the
Guggenheim, and published a regular column in ArtByte magazine. This essay
is the first time his undergraduate degree in Astrophysics has been of any
use in his professional life.
Rhizome.org): http://www.hq.nasa.gov/copernica/index.html
+ + +
Martin Wattenberg's Stellar Cartography
Jon Ippolito
An unruly flock of stars swarms across the screen. As their orbit expands,
the nebulous clusters of sparks cohere into slowly spinning spirals: the
universe on a computer monitor.
The year is 1983, and the luminous microcosm is a computer program
developed by cutting-edge researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics. As I watch, the astronomers tweak the cosmological equations
encoded in the program, then cook up another universe and compare it to the
vision telescopes provide of our own. A uniform gas? Turn down the
expansion constant. Braided star-strands? Stir in more gravity. Globular
clusters? Another dash of angular momentum, and finally familiar-looking
galaxies wheel across the screen.
Historian of science Peter Galison has documented the revolution wreaked by
these cosmological chefs, who demonstrated to the chagrin of their
old-school colleagues that computer simulations could be a new form of
experimental science. Theorists, for their part, took this world-generating
experimental apparatus and turned it into a meta-theory: they imagined a
primal "quantum foam" at the beginning of time, teeming with embryonic
universes on the verge of expanding. Each of the bubbles in this foam is a
proto-world organized according to a different set of principles. A bubble
with the right principles gets a shot at expanding into a full-blown
universe; God sits back and waits for the pot to boil over.
It's an unsettling feeling, knowing that other universes may be jostling
ours in this primeval cappuccino, but we should be used to this feeling by
now. In a single stroke a Polish canon by the name of Nicholas Copernicus
kicked the center out of a geocentric cosmos, sending the ornate epicycles
Ptolemy's orrery had accumulated over the course of fourteen centuries
clattering to the ground. Over the succeeding centuries, astronomers have
discovered lots of other potential centers: the local star group, our Milky
Way galaxy, the Virgo galactic cluster. But the story was always the same:
anytime they fixed on a potential cosmic center, it was unseated by a
de-centered model that turned out more elegant than the centered one.
The Java interface that artist Martin Wattenberg has designed for NASA's
art collection is also de-centered--or, to put it more accurately,
multi-centered. Visitors to the Web site can sort documentation of the
artworks according to various organizing principles, from artist to subject
to the first word of the title. Choosing a new principle re-organizes the
universe in a transition that is as startling visually as the cosmological
conjuring acts I witnessed at Harvard twenty years ago. The contortions
Copernica undergoes in switching from one principle to another, like those
of its scientific precursors, offer a deeper structural understanding than
could any static map of its collection.
Of course, Wattenberg aims only to picture a collection, while the Harvard
programmers were hoping to simulate a cosmos; art has traditionally been
content to represent, while science has aimed to predict. This difference
in the scale of ambition is certainly reflected in the individual examples
of the art represented in NASA's collection, from Martin Berkon's
interpretation in oils of Jupiter's roiling atmosphere to Henk Pander's
matter-of-fact rendition of NASA's "Solar Thermal Vacuum Chamber."
But representation can go beyond the retinal, and artists outside of the
documentary tradition represented by Berkon and Pander have periodically
turned to the star-filled firmament to represent something that can't be
seen--something too vast to comprehend in a glance. Van Gogh's 1889 Starry
Night is no star chart, but a meditation on the hypnotic power of the
heavens, a revelation of the slippery slope between the natural and
supernatural. A century later, digital tools have enabled artists and their
viewers to go from gaping at sublime vistas to navigating them. Four
undergraduate years wasted on stellar dynamics and quantum field theory
weren't sufficient to quell my enchantment with the night sky; Electric
Sky, an interactive map of online culture I charted for the Guggenheim's
CyberAtlas project in 1996, figured the collaborative networks of the
adolescent Internet as constellations of artists, online spaces, and
service providers.
If Electric Sky is a static snapshot of cyberspace, Wattenberg's own forays
into representing online culture have rendered the swift precession of the
electrosphere in a more dynamic fashion. A 1999 Java applet, Starry Nights,
lets the user add or rearrange stars to a cartoonish firmament, apparently
based on van Gogh's eponym hanging in New York's Museum of Modern Art
(although its electronic impasto owes a closer debt to Jackson Pollock's
1953 Ocean Greyness at the Guggenheim). Wattenberg revisited this metaphor
in a 1999 collaboration with Mark Tribe and Alex Galloway. This Starrynight
is a dynamic interface to an archive of electronic texts contributed by the
members of the Rhizome.org online community. Each star represents a
different text; the brightness of each star is a measure of how often it
has been requested by online visitors. (It's as though the dustcovers of
library books got shinier rather than duller when borrowers left their
fingerprints on them.) Like its precursor, this Starrynight reverses the
perspective of Electric Sky, gazing from the ground into the ether rather
than looking down from the heavens onto the earth.
Starrynight also features a dynamic method for "slicing the data": viewers
who select a theme such as gender or virtual reality see a constellation
linking all of the stars representing texts with that theme--a cartography
of cyberspace that literally connects the dots of online culture. Like
Copernica, StarryNight embodies Wattenberg's ideal of an interface "that
combines reading and seeing in equal measure."
Media theorist Lev Manovich has argued that databases are for the computer
age what narrative was for the modern age: the dominant form of cultural
expression. If so, Wattenberg's interfaces are the shape of things to come,
for instead of grafting pre-conceived taxonomies onto his databases he
often derives the interface from the database itself. Viewers who choose
Copernica's "Make Your Own" button can discover new galaxies simply by
trying an organizing principle no one has tried before--say, partitioning
the texts according to whether they contain the word "Earth" (40 matches)
versus "Mars" (15 matches). This is one case where too many cooks don't
spoil the broth--they make it more interesting.
For Manovich, one of the most important variabilities of new media is the
proliferation of interfaces to the same database. While some designers are
content to come up with a single usable interface, Wattenberg's versatile
tools offer viewers the chance to create multiple visions of a single
collection. In the final analysis, then, Copernica is its own sort of
quantum foam; the contents of Wattenberg's cup will please some tastes more
than others, but there's an undeniable thrill in stirring it up to make
some fresh bubbles.
http://www.moma.org/docs/collection/paintsculpt/c58.htm
Cyberatlas.guggenheim.org
Bewitched.com
Guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_1297.html
Rhizome.org/starrynight
Spot.colorado.edu/~vstenger/Cosmo/MonkeyGod.pdf
Jon Ippolito has created online artworks seen at the Walker Art Center and
ZKM, curated exhibitions of video art and virtual reality at the
Guggenheim, and published a regular column in ArtByte magazine. This essay
is the first time his undergraduate degree in Astrophysics has been of any
use in his professional life.
Re: Re: Day Job?
At 09:49 PM 9/19/2002 -0400, Christopher Fahey [askrom] wrote:
> I've
>always wondered why it is that artists always make a concerted effort to
>*hide* the fact that they have day jobs? Have you ever seen an artist's
>CV that talks about their skills or experience as a picture framer or as
>a corporate HTML coder? Almost never. Most seem to sugges that the
>artist is and always has been a full-time successful artist. It's as if
>we're afraid to admit that we have day jobs out of fear of looking like
>we are underacheiving -- or worse, having the appearance that art-making
>is a hobby.
leaving your day jobs off your artist cv doesn't necessarily indicate an
effort to hide--it just makes sense if the day jobs aren't relevant to you
art practice. in my case, i include the things (like my rhizome job,
teaching jobs, curatorial jobs and my one commercial web design job way
back when) that i think are relevant and leave out the things (like my job
in a group home for teenage kids, or my jobs in restaurant kitchens) that
don't really relate to what i do as an artist. if i were tim rollins (an
artist who works with kids as his art work), i would probably include the
group home job on my resume.
i wanted to participate in the day jobs show because i'm particularly
interested in the ways in which artists are now taking alan kaprow's idea
of the "blurring of art and life" out of the relatively rarefied and
controlled world of happenings and into the messy, complicated and often
compromised "real" world of their employment. doing things that function
simultaneously as art and as something else raises the stakes of this kind
of interdisciplinary activity. i'm interested in the blurring of art and
science, art and activism, art and architecture, art and design, art and
business, art and commerce, etc. just to give an example: it's one thing to
make political art (hans haake) and another thing (to me a more interesting
thing) to engage in political activism as art (electronic disturbance theater).
> I've
>always wondered why it is that artists always make a concerted effort to
>*hide* the fact that they have day jobs? Have you ever seen an artist's
>CV that talks about their skills or experience as a picture framer or as
>a corporate HTML coder? Almost never. Most seem to sugges that the
>artist is and always has been a full-time successful artist. It's as if
>we're afraid to admit that we have day jobs out of fear of looking like
>we are underacheiving -- or worse, having the appearance that art-making
>is a hobby.
leaving your day jobs off your artist cv doesn't necessarily indicate an
effort to hide--it just makes sense if the day jobs aren't relevant to you
art practice. in my case, i include the things (like my rhizome job,
teaching jobs, curatorial jobs and my one commercial web design job way
back when) that i think are relevant and leave out the things (like my job
in a group home for teenage kids, or my jobs in restaurant kitchens) that
don't really relate to what i do as an artist. if i were tim rollins (an
artist who works with kids as his art work), i would probably include the
group home job on my resume.
i wanted to participate in the day jobs show because i'm particularly
interested in the ways in which artists are now taking alan kaprow's idea
of the "blurring of art and life" out of the relatively rarefied and
controlled world of happenings and into the messy, complicated and often
compromised "real" world of their employment. doing things that function
simultaneously as art and as something else raises the stakes of this kind
of interdisciplinary activity. i'm interested in the blurring of art and
science, art and activism, art and architecture, art and design, art and
business, art and commerce, etc. just to give an example: it's one thing to
make political art (hans haake) and another thing (to me a more interesting
thing) to engage in political activism as art (electronic disturbance theater).
Re: Re: Day Job?
At 05:08 PM 9/19/2002 -0400, joy garnett wrote:
>gee whiz, mark, are we all but pawns in your ruthless climb to stah-dom?
>
>;)
i thought it was the other way around...
;-)
>"I have come increasingly to see Rhizome.org as a social sculpture and the
>work I do there as art work."
>--Mark Tribe
>
>
>
>Day Jobs
>Online Exhibition:
>
>http://www.newlangtonarts.org/view_event.php?category=Network&archive=&&eventId5
>
>[...]
>Mark Tribe
>Projects
>
>Day: Rhizome.org http://www.rhizome.org
>Night: Rhizome.org http://www.rhizome.org
>Mark Tribe's art work featured in this exhibition can be seen as
>performance as much as media art. Rhizome.org is an online community that
>Mark describes as "social sculpture" in the tradition of Bueys. [sic!]
>Here, product is not as important as process, though it would be a
>disservice to abstract Rhizome.org to the level of a conceptual art prank
>when, in fact, it has had a very real effect on the social lives of many
>new media artists and offers many practical services. This close-knit
>integration of a conceptual social work combined, inextricably, with
>practical real-world services is exemplary of how new media artists are
>sometimes able to play and work in the same media. Since media is the
>built environment that we now live in full-time (as opposed to a weekend
>leisure destination), artists find it possible to move into the "main
>house" -- sometimes without anyone noticing them sneak in.
>
>-- Richard Rinehart
>
>[...] etc.
>
>
>+ une dans la gueule, and two for tea !
>-> post: list@rhizome.org
>-> questions: info@rhizome.org
>-> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
>-> give: http://rhizome.org/support
>+
>Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
>Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>gee whiz, mark, are we all but pawns in your ruthless climb to stah-dom?
>
>;)
i thought it was the other way around...
;-)
>"I have come increasingly to see Rhizome.org as a social sculpture and the
>work I do there as art work."
>--Mark Tribe
>
>
>
>Day Jobs
>Online Exhibition:
>
>http://www.newlangtonarts.org/view_event.php?category=Network&archive=&&eventId5
>
>[...]
>Mark Tribe
>Projects
>
>Day: Rhizome.org http://www.rhizome.org
>Night: Rhizome.org http://www.rhizome.org
>Mark Tribe's art work featured in this exhibition can be seen as
>performance as much as media art. Rhizome.org is an online community that
>Mark describes as "social sculpture" in the tradition of Bueys. [sic!]
>Here, product is not as important as process, though it would be a
>disservice to abstract Rhizome.org to the level of a conceptual art prank
>when, in fact, it has had a very real effect on the social lives of many
>new media artists and offers many practical services. This close-knit
>integration of a conceptual social work combined, inextricably, with
>practical real-world services is exemplary of how new media artists are
>sometimes able to play and work in the same media. Since media is the
>built environment that we now live in full-time (as opposed to a weekend
>leisure destination), artists find it possible to move into the "main
>house" -- sometimes without anyone noticing them sneak in.
>
>-- Richard Rinehart
>
>[...] etc.
>
>
>+ une dans la gueule, and two for tea !
>-> post: list@rhizome.org
>-> questions: info@rhizome.org
>-> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
>-> give: http://rhizome.org/support
>+
>Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
>Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
Re: CODeDOC -- launched today at artport
At 11:18 AM 9/16/2002 -0400, t.whid wrote:
<snip>
>perhaps this is the start of a new trend in software/net artists
>open-sourcing their code. in reference: MTAA are working on a networked
>sculpture and i felt compelled to make public the applescripts that help
>to run it, check 'em out there:
>http://www.endnode.net/careAndFeeding_applescript.html
we've been talking with mark napier and a few others about starting an open
source code archive for artists. so we'd have code objects in addition to
art objects and text objects.
maybe this will finally get off the ground soon... ;-)
<snip>
>perhaps this is the start of a new trend in software/net artists
>open-sourcing their code. in reference: MTAA are working on a networked
>sculpture and i felt compelled to make public the applescripts that help
>to run it, check 'em out there:
>http://www.endnode.net/careAndFeeding_applescript.html
we've been talking with mark napier and a few others about starting an open
source code archive for artists. so we'd have code objects in addition to
art objects and text objects.
maybe this will finally get off the ground soon... ;-)
njumedija 0_ in belgrade
Dates:
Sun Sep 29, 2002 00:00 - Thu Sep 12, 2002
njumedija 0_ is a new media event which will be organized on the 29th September, 2002, in rex, jevrejska 16, belgrade. njumedija 0_ is the first in series of events whose goal is to promote new media and redefine standards of local public and authors. The event is apealing to all who are interested in design, art, electronic music, digital video, video games and other aspects of new media. The event will be moderated by vuk cosic, and it will consist of presentations by:
vuk cosic_ net.artist, ljubljana & belgrade
tom roope_ new media designer, london
gordan paunovic_ DJ and B92.net editor, belgrade
daniel jenett_ new media designer, hamburg
corrosion_ multidisciplinary group of young authors, belgrade
gebhard sengmuller_ inventor of vinyl video, vienna
time
11:00 AM
29th September, 2002
program
10:55 introduction
11:00 presentations
17:30 discussion
21:30 party ( location yet to be chosen )
location
rex
jevrejska 16
belgrade
srbija
supported by
pro helvetia
B92
active design
stamparija west
contact
direct practical questions to nikola@njumedija.org
direct theory questions to svetlana@njumedija.org
organisers
ngo njumedija_
( dejan curcic, gordan paunovic, katarina zivanovic, marko simic, nikola tosic, nenad arsic, slobodan markovic, svetlana jovicic, zana poliakov, zoran pantelic )
mailing list: http://njumedija.org/0
vuk cosic_ net.artist, ljubljana & belgrade
tom roope_ new media designer, london
gordan paunovic_ DJ and B92.net editor, belgrade
daniel jenett_ new media designer, hamburg
corrosion_ multidisciplinary group of young authors, belgrade
gebhard sengmuller_ inventor of vinyl video, vienna
time
11:00 AM
29th September, 2002
program
10:55 introduction
11:00 presentations
17:30 discussion
21:30 party ( location yet to be chosen )
location
rex
jevrejska 16
belgrade
srbija
supported by
pro helvetia
B92
active design
stamparija west
contact
direct practical questions to nikola@njumedija.org
direct theory questions to svetlana@njumedija.org
organisers
ngo njumedija_
( dejan curcic, gordan paunovic, katarina zivanovic, marko simic, nikola tosic, nenad arsic, slobodan markovic, svetlana jovicic, zana poliakov, zoran pantelic )
mailing list: http://njumedija.org/0
