http://turbulence.org/Works/oilstandard/

http://turbulence.org/Works/ten-sided/

Looking at a map, Central America appears as a link connecting the massive North and South American continents. Sandwiched between Honduras and Costa Rica, at the center of this connective tissue, is Nicaragua. Like many places situated between such large and often opposing forces, its history contains many narratives of conflict and migration. To investigate these contentious histories, New Jersey-based artist Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga has created Fallout, a project that uses the web to redirect the grand narratives of Nicaragua through the identities of historical figures and the site's visitors. Personal recollections augment, disrupt, and coexist with stories of socialist revolutions and US interventions. The internet-based work will also inform a new installation by the artist at Momenta Art, in Brooklyn, from 9 December through 23 January. The physical manifestation of the project, titled 'Fallout: What's Left,' will feature specially-commissioned propaganda posters, a new video game, a mini FM radio station, and free voice-over-internet phone calls for migrants separated from their families during the holidays. Viva la historias colectivas! - Ryan Griffis

http://turbulence.org/Works/fallout/

Last week, I used knitPro to knit an anarchy symbol on a cardigan for my neighbour's new baby! All creative knitters should be familiar with this very handy tool created by microRevolt, with which users can upload images and download a pattern. But knitPro isn't just about helping out crafty folk. microRevolt's mission is to "investigate the dawn of sweatshops in early industrial capitalism to inform the current crisis of global expansion and the feminization of labor." Founder Cat Mazza's efforts will be acknowledged by a well-deserved Honorary Mention in the Digital Communities category at this year's Ars Electronica Festival, opening tomorrow. The Logoknitting tactic promoted by microRevolt involves placing logos of well-known corporate sweatshop offenders, such as the Gap and Nike, into DIY fashion items. This ironic act of resistance counteracts corporate disregard for the work and skill that goes into mass-produced clothing. microRevolt provides basic knitting instructions, information about protest activities, such as the Nike Blanket Petition, and excellent links to anti-sweatshop organisations and knitting sites. Grab your needles and stitch together your own connections between advertising, labour, production, and consumption in the global economy. Then stage your own knit-in. - Helen Varley Jamieson.

http://turbulence.org/spotlight/microRevolt/index.html

7am: my alarm forces me out of bed on a dark winter's morning. Across the globe, the summer sun is setting on Paris and Barbara Campbell is about to deliver episode 31 of 1001 Nights Cast, a durational webcast performance inspired by Sheherezade's legendary survival strategy. Each day, Campbell selects words from Middle East news reports, renders them in water colour and posts the resulting image online as a writing prompt to visitors. She then selects and adapts one or several of these stories for that evening's performance script. Previous episodes are archived on the site and reflect diverse origins, themes and characters. The performance I witnessed stemmed from "focus of all lenses." The story interweaves a Western schoolboy's teenage dilemmas with a glimpse of homoeroticism amid the turmoil of another bombing: human tenderness against a backdrop of violence. These are real people we're talking about. The webcam shows a close-up of Campbell's mouth as she calmly reads the story. A human mouth from which issues forth a story. I am drawn into another life, other experiences. 970 to go, and then, still, all the stories will not have been told. - Helen Varley Jamieson.

http://turbulence.org/spotlight/1001nights/index.html

Imprimatur, a multi-user software for poster-making, is the latest online tool for collaboration from artist Andy Deck. The software brings the design process to life, allowing multiple designers to team to democratically tweak the layout and statements of a single canvas. Anyone with a smidgeon of graphics experience will find the interface easy to use, and the product is a PDF that can be disseminated widely via email and print. In his background to the work, Deck refers to the proliferation of homemade posters in the aftermath of 9/11 and at the invasion of Iraq. He envisages "a wave of colorful, independent, and low-budget posters in public places" and sees Imprimatur as a means to channel energy into thoughtful public dialogue. Like many of his previous works, Imprimatur is written in Java, but this time the source code is not quite open; as a challenge to funders to support software art, Deck will only release the source code once he has received his next commission (New Radio and Performing Arts funded this one). I hope he's made a poster about that. - Helen Varley Jamieson

http://turbulence.org/Works/imprimatur/

The chipper, poignant and irksome imperatives launched from all corners of daily routine by competing companies permeate our commutes, grocery lists, and vernaculars. Current mantras like 'Laugh More. Cry More. Experience More.' (Blockbuster), 'Try Being More Of A Woman!' (Coty Perfume) and 'Get the Most Incredible Memory Ever.' (Dell) make big demands or promises to their targets! The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, based in and out of Boston, endeavors to compile authoritative research on this topic, comprising a project called The International Database of Corporate Commands. In the opinion that these commands function within society and public consciousness on a nano level that is virtual and powerful, the white-lab-coated Institute invites researchers from all over the world to upload documentation of corporate commands to their online database. By gathering them all in one place and enacting certain slogans in real spaces--a recent flash-mob-meets-teach-in 'microperformance' at a Cingular store produced 10 minutes of literal 'Roll(ing)over'--the institute hopes to produce a better understanding of the ramifications of constant commercial programming. If you'll be in Boston, come visit the Institute on Saturday and Sunday afternoons (2PM) at Space 200 (200 State Street). - Kevin McGarry

http://turbulence.org/studios/kanarinka/index.html

Life, for Jean-Luc Godard's 'children of Marx and coca-cola,' was an extended meditation on politics, pop culture and the vicissitudes of dating. Peter Horvath adapts the concerns of this generation and the filmic style in which they were rendered in his new work of net cinema Tenderly Yours. Here, the story of Josephine--a contemporary French woman who 'detests money/ thinks herself a marxist/ and thinks she is too old for her age'--unfolds in two simultaneous Quicktime videos. The central window illustrates her brief encounter with a like-minded young man while the smaller, peripheral frame provides ambient and intimate asides in the form of colorful abstractions and pixilated close-ups. Nodding both to the early writings found in the journal Cahiers du Cinema and Lev Manovich's more recent Soft Cinema, Tenderly Yours exploits net conventions to emulate the spontaneous, fragmented and naturalistic mode of new wave filmmaking. The question is whether the quandaries of the children of Marx and coca-cola are relevant to the kids these days, or if perhaps the generation to which Josephine belongs should claim new lineage. - Lauren Cornell

http://turbulence.org/studios/horvath/tenderly/

From the busy, lonely halls of post-Valentine's Day winter comes a project about 'two people in two places living together while apart.' IN Network is a collaboration between bi-coastal conceptual sweethearts Michael Mandiberg (New York) and Julia Steinmetz (Los Angeles). Presently unable to live in the same city, they opt to occupy the same routines, which they synchronize and electronically relay to each other through sets of camera phones and microphones. Powered by a phone promotion that allows for unlimited airtime between clients who are 'in network,' Mandiberg and Steinmetz are in touch 24/7. During the month of March, Turbulence.org will host webcasts, podcasts (audio broadcasts distributed to hardware via software subscription), and a moblog (blog of mobile phone photography) to transmit to an online audience the constant correspondence that describes their fused existence: 'driving to/from work, eating dinner, giving lectures to students, going for walks, having cocktails, reading books in silence, falling asleep and waking up.' This sharing of lives, though consisting of the mediatized and mundane, is less entrenched in data and detritus than it is in the lives of, and new possibilities for being, people. - Kevin McGarry

http://turbulence.org/Works/innetwork/

Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett are exploring where and how narratives might emerge from a collaborative environment whose participants are thrown together in a dynamic mix. In Grafik Dynamo, these artists are packaging a LiveJournal feed--news and images from the real-time blogosphere--into Lichtensteinian frames. In short: a random re-blog comic strip. The initial idea was to pull from RSS feeds being created on servers all over the world; so as an ever-increasing number of blogs are parading pop culture, news, art, politics, science, personal rants, etc., Grafik Dynamo would make an exquisite corpse of this collective conscious. Comics have become an experimental form that routinely reaches into surreal, photorealistic, and impressionistic realms. The juxtaposition of these varying styles, speaking back to broad trends across blogging culture in this format, is uncanny in the Freudian sense: strange but familiar... I think I've read this comic before... And the layout? Armstrong and Tippet ironically display the new religion of information as a continually regenerating triptych, begging questions of author-ity, narrativity and 'public' information in general. - Nathaniel Stern

http://turbulence.org/Works/dynamo/index.html

October 7, 2004
Hacktivist Intertexts

Julia Kristeva's notion of intertextuality looks at the complex ways in which a given text is related to other texts. She claimed that every document is, in some way, a mosaic of other texts; every text is an absorption and transformation of others. Regime Change, the first of two, turbulence commissioned, textual instruments by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Brion Moss, David Durand, and Elaine Froehlich, literalizes and plays on Kristeva's connections. Beginning with a news article excerpt on Iraq, from April 2003, participants hyperlink between short passages from the Warren Commission, and back again. Viewers-turned-performers then jump between layers, and can add text back into the pieces preceding them. Eventually, the generated, mosaic texts become familiar committee-speak, requiring only contemporary names for us to read them as any contemporary subject: the 9-11 commission, Osama = Saddam, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth... And one bonus for dedicated players: with enough interaction, Regime Change's behavior shifts slightly, allowing your intertext re-mix to include a bit of the unexpected in uncanny ways. - Nathaniel Stern

http://turbulence.org/Works/twotxt/index.htm

You've heard of 'sex haze' this is 'media haze', a kind of fog created by the constant barrage of sound, image, and text that surrounds and defines current events. For his new project, <event>, American artist Michael Takeo Magruder has parsed recent BBC broadcasts and layered the audio, video and text related to each news item. Multiple perspectives should provide clarity- instead they obscure, producing a cloud of media static. We pick up only the most basic buzz words, the outlines of shadowy forms. Magruder's project is not fun to look at; he excels at creating just that feeling of helplessness in the face of too much information. This feels more like a primitive IQ test than a new media project - if so, we are all failing miserably. - Elizabeth Bard

http://turbulence.org/works/magruder

The collection of personal data has certainly become a more visible process in post-Patriot Act U.S.A, both for American residents and visitors. And it's no consolation to know that for every visible act of fingerprinting, there are even more instances of invisible archiving going on. 'Swipe,' an ongoing project by new media artists/engineers Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte, and Brooke Singer documents the process of personal data collection in the U.S., shedding some light on these hidden databases. The collaborative has released a new element of the project, an online 'toolkit,' featured on New Radio and Performing Art's Turbulence web portal. Swipe's toolkit includes such handy items as a calculator for determining the value of your personal data, forms for requesting a copy of the data that private companies have collected on you, and a bar-code reader that can decipher those printed codes on the back of many U.S. driver's licenses. The project also takes the form of live performances that include a cocktail bar... because you may need a drink when you find out what 'they' know about you. - Ryan Griffis

http://turbulence.org/Works/swipe/index.html

Turbulence.org is currently showcasing recent work by French artist Nicolas Clauss, the creator of the bilingual art site flyingpuppet.com. In eight interactive web pieces made over the last 18 months, Clauss has further developed his signature whimsical style. Subtle interactive components enhance a collage of audio fragments and dream-like images, resulting in mesmerising performative etudes. Influenced by contemporary dance as well as his original medium, painting, Clauss aims to express a depth of feeling beyond genres, words and concepts. The works cover a range of themes, from the esoteric to the humorous (run your mouse over the portraits beside the artist's bio for a smile). In fact, run your mouse over all of Clauss' work and you'll find gifts to rival what the other Claus might have left under the Christmas tree. - Helen Varley Jamieson

http://turbulence.org/studios/clauss/

The genealogy connecting Net.Artists to Duchamp, as claimed by Vuc Cosic, may be inflated to some, but the originator of the readymade makes a versatile springboard for many art discussions. Duchamp's Ideal Children's Children: Net Art's Brat Pack is a curatorial project of artist Eryk Salvaggio that re-presents the works of four other artists all under the age of 25. Interviews conducted with the artists - Cory Arcangel, Geoff Lillemon, Kalx and Michael Mandiberg - provide opportunities to read about the various influences and histories that inform their work. And as one would expect from descendants of Duchamp, they neither refute nor confirm any family ties. - Ryan Griffis

http://turbulence.org/curators/salvaggio/

Turbulence Artist Studios recently launched some works by Peter Horvath as part of its program to showcase fresh faces in the net.art scene. Featuring 3 full-length and 6 ten-second web pieces, Horvath's works are non-interactive, net.based videos engaging us in the possibility of technological intimacy. They are multilayered and created with a logic and aesthetic endemic of the web, while referencing surrealist and collage film vocabularies. These works employ the lyrical language of the cinema to compose an autobiographical portrait wherein the viewer hovers over a series of multi-layered videos. Finally, they exist as a composition of emerging frames which overlap, collapse and fill the computer?s own bordered space. - Valerie Lamontagne

http://www.turbulence.org/studios/horvath/index.html

From Moebius's art deco sets in 'Tron' to William Gibson's 3D datascapes in 'Neuromancer', many artists have imagined what it might look like inside the machine. Cory Arcangel bypasses such stylized, anthropomorphic visions and simply shows us his raw data, 11 hours worth, in all its glitchy 8-bit nakedness. Arcangel tricked Quicktime into reading the binary data daily passing through his computer's RAM. The result is Data Diaries, a collection of intriguing, abstract data 'movies' (complete with audible bleeps and squawks), available in color or black & white. Pass the pixelated popcorn! - Curt Cloninger

http://turbulence.org/works/arcangel/

Before there was Flash animation, there was the subway. Graffiti-covered trains are a distant prototype of digital motion graphics, animating colorful designs and text against a sliding urban backdrop. In his new Stop Motion Studies series, David Crawford returns to the subway car as vehicle of expression, manipulating its interior time and space rather than its exterior surfaces. The result is an urban character study befitting our age of digital compression. Passenger emotions -- exhaustion, boredom, happiness -- are pared down to their most essential keyframes and played back in infinite, asymmetrical loops. Though motion is limited to a few degrees in Crawford?s ticking snapshots, these subtle, personal moments are indeed moving. - Matthew Hutchinson

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/sms3/

Using the format of search engine results, Prema Murthy's Mythic Hybrid presents contextual information on a group of women in India, micro-electronics factory workers who reported having collective hallucinations. These women are the artist's focusing device as she remodels information on industrial conditions, spiritual phenomena and womens' status. The associations Murthy brings together are varied, but make conceptual sense not just in light of the fascinating story about the hallucinating workers, but also in tandem with some of the radical notions about women and the real in Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto -- a book that informed this project. - Rachel Greene

http://turbulence.org/Works/mythichybrid/index.html

Kanarinka is the only net artist I can think of who does color studies. Her work on yellow, 'Color Stories - Yellow' integrates samples featuring the color to build 'art modules.' Some of these have an informal quality, but still, perhaps because of the affective capabilities of the color, they seem to move beyond the screen. In other modules, the dominance of color gives way to a focus on narrative, or to an investigation of animating color. Some 'Stories' seem in line with Abstract Expressionist concerns with 'beauty;' others evoke color field studies. There is a lot here -- Kanarinka's work covers some dense (yellow) territory. - Rachel Greene

http://turbulence.org/studios/kanarinka/index.htm

What is the most popular number on the Net? Surely '69' is making the rounds, and we'd all like to see a little less of '404' (the number associated with 'File Not Found' errors)? Contributing to the growing pool of data-visualization oriented work are artists Golan Levin, Jonathan Feinberg, Martin Wattenberg, and Shelly Wynecoop. Their project, The Secret Lives of Numbers, is the beautiful result of an exhaustive study to determine the relative popularity of every integer between zero and one million, on the web. Log on to contemplate the various social patterns of numeric codification. Or just check out how your lucky number stacks up.

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/nums/

How often do you visit Turbulence.org? If not too often, now would be a good time. Recently, the New York new media organization launched "The Secret Life of Numbers" by Golan Levin with assistance from Martin Wattenberg, Jonathan Feinberg, David Becker, David Elashoff and Shelley Wynecoop. Fun for math geeks everywhere, The Secret Life of Numbers is about the popularity of numerals. Using custom software, popular search engines and statistical tools, the artists surveyed the public to understand what integers were the most favored, as if members of a boy band. Rather than just present cold statistics, though, the artists give site visitors an interactive visualization. Who said numbers weren't cool?

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/nums/

For some synesthesia in action, look no further than Martin Wattenberg's latest project, The Shape of Song -- which just made its debut online at turbulence.org. Wattenberg attempts to visualize various kinds of music via customized software that translates any composition available on the Web into elegant arch-like images and curvy forms.

http://turbulence.org/Works/song