Whitney Museum of American Art: Recent pages: Exhibitions/Artport

Americas Got No Talent

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:06:43 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions/AmericasGotNoTalent

“America’s Got No Talent” is a web-based software project by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki that synthesizes and processes the steady stream of Twitter feeds for several American reality television shows such as “American Idol,” “America’s Got Talent,” “America’s Next Top Model,” and “X Factor US” among others in this genre. The project highlights when and how these shows gain popularity through social media and followers. When tweets are sent, they are dynamically displayed along with the bias for each program which is based on retweets from followers as well as fans. The visualization takes the form of a horizontal bar graph in the shape of an American flag that updates dynamically. Each show’s virtual presence grows in size based on the amount of attention it receives from social media users worldwide, creating a measurement meter that ranks popular media on their social exposure, rather than their credit as viable media sources.

Commissioned for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012 for Artport, with support provided by Jeremy Levine.

Voyeur Web

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:39:29 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions/VoyeurWeb

VOYEUR_WEB collapses the private and public spheres by connecting the blueprint of an apartment to images from webcams that open a view into the apartment’s rooms. During the month of July 2001, VOYEUR_WEB linked to live webcams. The links have been replaced with an archive version of the original work.

Tina LaPorta is a media artist who lives and works in New York City. Her most recent work has been created specifically for the Internet. She recently received the Web Residency Commission 2000 of The Alternative Museum, where she completed her World Wide Web work Re:mote_corp@REALities. In 1999, Ms. LaPorta received a commission for the creation of Distance, a web-specific work hosted on Turbulence.org. Her work has been included in the exhibitions Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace (2001); the Technically Engaged show at AIR Gallery, NYC (2000); the Dystopia and Identity in the Age of Global Communications exhibition at Tribes Gallery in NYC (2000); and in Body as Byte at Neues Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland. Ms. LaPorta has been invited to participate in several symposia and on-line projects, including “The Warhol Hijack,” at weliveinpublic.com; “Gender in New Media,” an on-line panel at the “INVENCAO: Thinking The Next Millennium” conference, Sao Paulo, Brazil; and “Alterities: Interdisciplinarity and Feminine Practices of Space” at the Ecole Suprieure Nationale des Beaux Arts, Paris, France.

Idea Line

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:37:37 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions/IdeaLine

IDEA LINE displays a timeline of net artworks, arranged in a fan of luminous threads, mapping lines of thought through time.

According to Martin Wattenberg: “From the beginning, net art has travelled multiple paths. More than a medium, the net is a environment uniquely hospitable to many diverse media: programming and animation, video and audio, gameplay and community. Each individual artist picks up these threads and weaves them in novel combinations. The IDEA LINE designed to let you follow these threads of thought yourself, and discover how each work is part of a larger tapestry.”

IDEA LINE displays a timeline of net artworks, arranged in a fan of luminous threads. Each thread corresponds to a particular kind of artwork or type of technology. The brightness of each thread varies with the number of artworks that it contains in each year, so you can watch the ebb and flow of different lines of thought over time. As you move your mouse over the lines, they will open up to reveal titles of artworks. Place the mouse on top of a title to learn more about the work. Click to launch the work itself. Right-click to highlight other pieces by the same artist. If you are looking for a particular title or artist, type into the text box at the upper left. You’ll be able to see your search results in the context of the overall idealine.

To create the list of artworks, Wattenberg sent out a public request for help to several net art forums. Almost one hundred artists responded. In addition, data was entered on many popular or influential artworks that were not covered in this response. A text-only list of the artworks is available.

Martin Wattenberg is a digital artist and computer scientist. His work focuses on visual investigations of data masses: communities, conversations, and other conceptual collections. His projects range from artistic explorations such as Fleshmap (with Fernanda Viegas, 2008) and Apartment (with Marek Walczak, 2001), to tools for democratizing data visualization (Many Eyes, 2007, with Fernanda Viegas et al.) Wattenberg holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley (1996).

Codedoc

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:34:53 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions/Codedoc

CODeDOC is an exhibition consisting of twelve, small commissioned works. The project takes a reverse look at ‘software art’ by focusing on and comparing the ‘back end’ of the code that drives the artwork’s ‘front end’—the result of the code.

Expand each section below to read a statement from the curator, and explore the twelve projects.

Software Structures

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:33:03 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions/SoftwareStructures

Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, {Software} Structures explores the relevance of conceptual art to the idea of software as art. Casey Reas created three unique structures—text descriptions outlining dynamic relations between elements—which were then implemented: twenty-six pieces of software derived from the textual structures were coded to isolate different components, including interpretation, material, and process. For each of them, you may view the software, source code, and comments.

“The catalyst for this project is the work of Sol LeWitt, specifically his wall drawings. I had a simple question: ‘Is the history of conceptual art relevant to the idea of software as art?’” explains Reas. “I began to answer the question by implementing three of Lewitt’s drawings in software and then making modifications. After working with the LeWitt plans, I created three structures unique to software. These software structures are text descriptions outlining dynamic relations between elements. They develop in the vague domain of image and then mature in the more defined structures of natural language before any thought is given to a specific machine implementation. Twenty-six pieces of software derived from these structures were written to isolate different components of software structures including interpretation, material, and process. For each, you may view the software, source code, and comments.”

Follow Through

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:29:39 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions/FollowThrough

Follow Through is a mobile, audio-visual artwork that has been created specifically for the Museum’s 5th Floor Permanent Collection galleries and is accessible to visitors on portable media players. The project is inspired by the discrepancy the artists found between the active and energetic art on view in the galleries and the rather passive and languid body language of museum visitors looking at that art. Referencing the structure of the existing audio tour, the artists invite visitors to engage in a set of exercises designed to bring well-established behavioral codes of museum attendance into relief. The project’s title has its roots in sports terminology where the term “follow-through” describes the act of carrying a motion — such as hitting a ball — to its natural completion. With Follow Through, the artists are inviting visitors to complete the dynamics of the artworks in an experience that goes beyond the mental act of contemplating or interpreting them.

Jennifer Crowe (b. 1974) is currently a new media producer in New York. Trained in the arts, her education includes an MA from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies and a BA in Visual Arts and Communication from the University of California, San Diego. Jennifer has broad experience in the arts with a special interest in digital archives and fine art preservation. Projects include curating exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery and The New Museum, initiating Rhizome.org’s Artbase, an online archive for Net-based artworks, and producing online companions for Peabody-Award winning art television shows at Thirteen/WNET New York Public Television. She has coordinated digital video archiving projects for Yale University, the Dance Heritage Coalition, and the EU’s international video preservation project PrestoSpace. She has lectured at various venues including the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, the American Museum of the Moving Image, and the Guggenheim Museum.

Scott Paterson (b.1969) is an architect, interaction designer, and artist based in New York. He teaches studio courses in the MFA in Design and Technology Program at the Parsons School of Design and has also taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture. Trained as an architect, his education includes a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Minnesota and a Masters degree from Columbia University. He has received grants from the Walker Art Center, Parsons School of Design, and The Design Institute at the University of Minnesota. Paterson lectures internationally and his work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Banff Centre for the Arts, as well as in venues in Amsterdam, Berlin, Florence, and Mexico City.

The Dumpster

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:26:03 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions/TheDumpster

The Dumpster is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has “dumped” another. The project’s graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain.

Golan Levin’s work combines equal measures of the whimsical, the provocative, and the sublime in a wide variety of online, installation and performance media. He teaches electronic art at Carnegie Mellon University and is represented by bitforms gallery, New York.

Kamal Nigam has expertise in data mining and machine learning, with an emphasis on analyzing text and internet data. Until recently Kamal was the Director of Applied Research at Intelliseek, and is now at the new Google engineering office in Pittsburgh.

Jonathan Feinberg takes pride in executing the invisible-yet-essential. He works at Google in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Dumpster is the first in a series of three works co-commissioned in collaboration with Tate Online. Critical texts and video interviews with the artists will accompany the works at Tate.

The Battle Of Algiers

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:22:07 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions/TheBattleOfAlgiers

The Battle of Algiers recomposes scenes from the 1965 film of the same name by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo. The original film is a reenactment of the Algerian nationalist struggle leading to independence from France in 1962. The success of the actual battle for independence has been attributed to the nationalists’ organization: a pyramidal structure of self-organized cells. Lafia and Lin recomposed the film along a cell-based structure, in which French Authority and the Algerian Nationalist cells are represented by stills from the film and move according to different rule sets. When cells of different camps intersect, they trigger video cells displaying each side’s tactics (as depicted in the film) according to the rules of the system.

Marc Lafia has shown work internationally in seminal exhibitions such as ZKM’s Net Condition and Future Cinema, The Walker Art Center’s Let’s Entertain, as well as venues including the Georges Pompidou, The ICC Tokyo and other museums and art centers. Throughout his work, including his films and photographs, the image is not understood as a representation or a record of an event but as an event in itself, an entire mode of “going.” For Lafia, computation and algorithmic procedures allow for the production of new structures of organizing image and information, as well as new ways of distributing affects and emotions. His recent “Computations|Permutations” project is an on-going exploration of the limits of the image, as it asks: what is an image? How can it “go”? Marc Lafia lives in Brooklyn, New York, and currently teaches at Columbia University.

Born in Taiwan, Fang-Yu Lin is a New York–based new media artist and technologist. Focusing on Internet art and interactive installation, Fang’s artwork reflects the interplay of human experience, culture, and technology. In addition to receiving an Honorary Mention from Prix Ars Electronica, his works have been featured in many venues, such as Tate Online, FILE São Paulo, Seoul New Media Festival, Les Rencontres Internationales, Bauhaus Dessau, and SIGGRAPH. Fang also co-authored Switch Craft: Battery-Powered Crafts to Make and Sew, a wearable technology DIY book. He holds a MFA in Design & Technology and a MS in Information.

The Battle of Algiers is the second in a series of three works co-commissioned in collaboration with Tate Online. Critical texts and video interviews with the artists will accompany the works at Tate.

Screening Circle

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:19:44 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions/ScreeningCircle

Screening Circle adapts the cultural tradition of the quilting circle into an online format. Visitors to the site can enter the drawing area to compose loops of graphics and affect and edit each other’s screens. The pieces can be made by one person or by several people and the arrangement of the segments can be haphazard or precise. In the screening area, the resulting motion graphics will be on view instantaneously. The “circle” invoked in the title refers to the circle of participants, and, indirectly, to the loop of images that are produced. “Screening” refers to the pre-viewing of film in the film making process. It is a form of viewing that allows people to have some influence over the final product.

Andy Deck specializes in Internet art and has been at the forefront of  aesthetic research into the creative possibilities of the Internet as a  medium. His work addresses the politics and aesthetics of collaboration,  interactivity, software, and independent media. At his website  ARTCONTEXT.NET, Deck combines code, text, and image to demonstrate new  patterns of participation and control that distinguish online presence and  representation from previous artistic practices. He is also a co-founder  of Transnational Temps, an arts collective concerned with making Earth Art  for the 21st Century. Included in the ground-breaking European EcoMedia  exhibitions, the group went on in 2010 to mount the exhibition  Spill»Forward in response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  

Deck’s works have been shown in numerous online exhibitions and at venues  such as the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Museum of Contemporary  Art, Barcelona; Machida City Museum, Tokyo; PS1-MoMA, NYC; Moving Image  Gallery, NYC; Media Noche, NYC; HTTP Gallery, London; Postmaster’s Gallery,  NYC; Location One, NYC; Mejan Labs, Stockholm; Plato Sanat, Istanbul; Wood  Street Gallery, Pittsburgh; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. His work  has been awarded prizes and honorary mentions in various contexts, including Prix Ars  Electronica, the Webby Awards, VIDA 4.0, the Biennial of Ibiza, the Web  Biennial of Istanbul, etc. In 2011 his work was awarded first prize in the  interactive division of the LÚMEN_EX Digital Art Awards. The artist  lives and works in New York City.

Screening Circle is the third in a series of three works co-commissioned in collaboration with Tate Online. Critical texts and video interviews with the artists will accompany the works at Tate.

Clickistan

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:17:43 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions/Clickistan

CLICKISTAN is an online art project from UBERMORGAN.COM that was commissioned to benefit the Whitney’s 2010 Annual Fund. Once you’ve completed the many levels, you’ll arrive in the golden chamber where you’ll be asked to make a gift to the Whitney’s Annual Fund.

The CLICKISTAN soundtrack is inspired by early computer games, and is supplied by the 8-bit music website micromusic.net.

Sunrise And Sunset

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:15:41 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions/SunriseSunset

Sunrise/Sunset is a series of Internet art projects commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org to mark sunset and sunrise in New York City every day. Unfolding over a timeframe of ten to thirty seconds, each project accompanies a transition of the website’s background color from white (day) to black (night) and vice versa. A new project will be posted every three to four months.

Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s adjunct curator of new media, notes: “What distinguishes these projects is that they use whitney.org as their habitat, disrupting, replacing, or engaging with the museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the Internet, the intervention in existing online spaces.”

To see sunset or sunrise, be anywhere on this website. Sunset today: 5:38 PM, New York time. Sunrise: 6:41 AM. Time in New York now: 8:04:15 PM.

Tripolar

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:11:15 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions/Tripolar

Originally commissioned by the Whitney for its 2002 CODeDOC exhibition, Scott Snibbe’s Tripolar is now available as an iPhone and iPad app. Tripolar animates the tangled, abstract, and ever-changing forms a pendulum makes as it swings over a magnetic base. The app is available in the iTunes store.

Artport

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:04:38 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport

Artport is the Whitney Museum’s portal to Internet art and an online gallery space for commissions of net art and new media art. Originally launched in 2002, Artport provides access to original art works commissioned specifically for artport by the Whitney; documentation of net art and new media art exhibitions at the Whitney; and new media art in the Museum’s collection.

Commissions

Whitney Museum of American Art — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:30:22 -0500

Exhibitions/Artport/Commissions

The Commissions section provides access to original works of art commissioned specifically for Artport by the Whitney.