art

When Los Angeles shut down in March 2020 due to the pandemic, and most cities became ghost towns, I returned to making art for the screen, developing what has become a dynamic and multi- layered artwork that is readily disseminated. One of the things that thrilled me about making art for the internet (net art) was that it could exist beyond the traditional gallery space. I saw it as a new form of public art, easily accessible to all and a viable platform where unconventional narratives could be created by combining photographic images, drawings, short poetic texts, and animations through a succession of linked pages. The viewer actively “clicked” on images and words to engage with the work and move through the site. 

Since the beginning of the Pandemic, (March 2020) I have been creating a net art project that in many ways is a pandemic journal with reflections about what I see around me as I walk in my neighborhood (Santa Monica, CA) as well as react to events world-wide. I have created images, roll-overs, texts and animations. The site has about 200 pages (or more). It lives within an earlier net art project called Ghost City (www.ghostcity.com) and because it stems from the "S" square on the Ghost City website, I have called it Avenue S (www.ghostcity.com/avenue-s). To navigate one clicks on the red squares at the bottom of each page ( … ). Avenue S is a visual record of these disconcerting times as it includes imagery related to the pandemic and interpretations of this fraught national and global political moment. The project has become a document of this extraordinary moment in time that unveils regularly like a serialized novel. 

Returning to net art recently has been both a challenging and rewarding experience: challenging as I have had to relearn a lot of the HTML code used to create interactive webpages and rewarding because I love using this medium to create work. It is a pleasure every day to be inspired by what I see and to imagine an interactive scenario while I walk and then come home and create it. This immediacy engenders a feeling of freedom and is why I gravitated to net art originally. It is a dynamic and interactive form of art that can be experienced by anyone, anywhere, anytime. 

(Source: Author's description)

Digital materials protrude into the most intimate corners of our lives, are part of the architectures that shape our dreams and desires. Yet the modes of their production are comparably poorly understood. In the described talk, I provide a discussion of the status of concrete poetry as a tool for practice-based research into the characteristics of digital materiality. As long as we allow code to slip through the cracks of the collective imaginary, it remains easy for corporate actors to misrepresent the character and influence of coded infrastructures: It is imagined to exist elsewhere, in server farms, on the quantum physical plane of the infinitesimal, within the disembodied sphere of formal logic, but not among us, not as part of everyday reality.

While its effects, social media platforms, word processors, smartphone applications, are part of everyday reality, its digital substrates seem not to be. Resultingly, code is allowed to have unobserved social effects. Those who control the conditions of its production and operation are free to deploy this invisibility for any strategic goal they see fit.

At the same time, digital materiality in itself is not as abstract as it might seem:Its effects are felt in real life, in the ways people move through urban space, are hired and fired, in the cost of products and mortgages, in the manner news items are distributed through social media.

Electronic poetry constitutes an especially interesting medium for exploration of the characteristics of digital materiality: It allows expression of both everyday realities and the abstract formal structures of the digital. Its self-reflexive nature invites the recipient to reflect on the effects of its elements both on the level of language and technology.

Conceptual point of departure for this talk is the classical notion of the poetic "constellation", as introduced by Gomringer and others [1]. Building on this conceptual base, historic and current examples, together with some of the author's texts are discussed in order to elucidate possible avenues for researching digital materiality through poetry.

An experimental piece, drawing from the artist's Waveform project, this 10 minute film depicts a single, overhead shot of incoming ocean waves, which are scanned and analysed at various points by a machine vision system, which then parses the data gathered into short, poem-like texts. This film marks an attempt at using the dynamics of the moving image to better apprehend both the subject matter and the technical processes behind Waveform.

This piece was displayed at the Peripheries: Electronic Literature and New Media Art exhibition held at the Glucksman Gallery, Cork, as part of ELO2019, in July 2019.

Vocable Code is both a work of “software art” (software as artwork, not software to make an artwork) and a “codework” (where the source code and critical writing operate together) produced to embody “queer code”, examining the notion of queerness in computer coding through the interplay of different human and nonhuman voices. Collective statements and voices complete the phrase “Queer is…” and together make a computational and poetic composition. Through running Vocable Code on a browser, the texts and voices are repeated and disrupted by mathematical chaos, creating a dynamic audio-visual literature and exploring the performativity of code, subjectivity and language. Behind but next to the executed web interface of Vocable Code (13082018), the code itself is deliberately written as a codework, a mix of a computer programming language and human language, exploring the material and linguistic tensions of writing and reading within the context of (non)binary poetry and computer programming.

Vocable Code was first released in Nov, 2017 as part of the Feminist Coding Workshop organised by !=null. Conceptually, the artwork was, in part, inspired by Geoff Cox’s book titled Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression. In the early 2018, Winnie Soon has collaborated with Geoff Cox to produce a lecture-performance on Vocable Code as part of the International Conference on Artistic Research: Artistic Research Will Eat Itself, where both the source code and concepts were read aloud to exemplify the speech-like qualities of a computer program. Vocable Code (13082018) expands with the web version and the book in collaboration with Anders Visti from ‡ DobbeltDagger.

:: Voices’ contributor ::

Polly Poon, Søren Pold, Magda Tyzlik Carver, Sarah Schorr, Elyzabeth Holford, Gabriel Pereira, Annette Markham, Anna Brynskov, Geoff Cox, Lone Koefoed Hansen, Sabrina Recoules, Tobias Stenberg Christensen, Sall Lam Toro, Anders Visti, Google Algorithm, AhTong, Melissa Palermo, Joana Chicau, Erin Gee, Vasudevan Roopa, Winnie Soon

I am continuously looking for contributors, please see the instruction for voice donation and get in touch if you would like your voice to be part of this work.

ZeroDeath is a digital poetry created by Yohanna Joseph Waliya, He uses HTML as his platform to potrai his poetry. Floating animations of binary code and colours are to be seen in the background.  

The Institute for Southern Contemporary Art is a long-term project that aims todevelop an experimental platform for artists and cultural producers throughresults derived from machine learning and art market data. Drawing from climatechange disasters and the use of algorithmic analysis, the video portrays adystopian future where the creation of art is tied to its market consumption.Although ISCA’s mission seems disconcerting, it also strikes as strangelyfamiliar. Is ISCA simply looking to join the likes of existing programs such asArtRank and Art Advisor, or does it rather wish to shed light on the possiblepitfalls of these endeavours? Doubt is at the core of this proposition.

(source: Description from the schedule)

Inner Telescope is a poem created aboard the International Space Station (ISS) with the assistance of French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who realized it on Saturday, February 18th, 2017. Inner Telescope was specifically conceived for zero gravity and was not brought from Earth: it was made in space by Pesquet following my instructions. The poem was made from materials already available in the space station. It consists of a form that has neither top nor bottom, neither front nor back. Viewed from a certain angle, it reveals the French word “MOI“ [meaning “me”, or "myself"]; from another point of view one sees a human figure with its umbilical cord cut. This “MOI“ stands for the collective self, evoking humanity, and the umbilical cord cut represents our liberation from gravitational limits. Inner Telescope is an instrument of observation and poetic reflection, which leads us to rethink our relationship with the world and our position in the Universe. Since the 1980s, I have been theorizing and producing poetry that challenges the limits of gravity, especially with my holopoems—written with light. My Space Poetry manifesto was published in 2007. In 2017, I finally realized the dream I have pursued for more than 30 years: the creation, production and experience of a work directly in outer space. The astronaut's mission was entitled "Proxima" and was coordinated by the European Space Agency (ESA). My work was coordinated by the L'Observatoire de l'Espace, the Culture Lab of the French Space Agency.

(Source: artist's description from ELO 2018 Mind The Gap!)