Barbara Lattanzi: C-SPAN x 4

January 2005

Two men at a desk on a C-SPAN feed wearing suits with a big text bubble over their heads that says "thrill me like you do".

Barbara Lattanzi created C-SPAN x 4 as a series of four online software tools that allowed visitors to the website of C-SPAN (the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network) to select video clips and manipulate and remix them. The Interrupting Annotator allowed users to annotate any selected clip and then stored and time-stamped the brief texts so that subsequent viewers could see them at the exact moment when they were originally made. In C-SPAN Alphaville, the video clips were subtitled with dialogue from the English version of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville, in which a dystopian society is controlled by a central computer. C-SPAN Karaoke overlaid prerecorded tracks from a karaoke machine onto selected videos, inviting people to sing along. In Lieu of Standing on Yer Head simply flipped the image 180 degrees to present it upside down, a countermeasure to political spin trying to convince people that “up is down.” Although humorous, the annotations nonetheless raised serious questions about authority and projections of state power within the online media environment.

This project partially relies on Shockwave .dcr files that are no longer readily playable.

Enter project View original Gate Page

Barbara Lattanzi (b. 1950; Evanston, Illinois) is a digital artist whose films, videos, internet art, and interactive software works have been screened and exhibited widely at venues such as the 2003 Ann Arbor Film Festival, the 2002 European Media Art Festival, and the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, New York. Her experimental software C-SPAN Karaoke received an honorary mention at Transmediale, Berlin (2005) and C-SPAN x 4 was featured in the Whitney Museum’s Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies 1965–2018 (2018–19). Her interactive media works have been exhibited at the 2003 Version>03 Digital Arts Convergence, Chicago; the Ninth New York Digital Salon (2001–2); Electronics Alive II Invitational (2004); the Fourth Seoul Net and Film Festival (2003); and Turbulence.org (2003). The production of her multimedia applets and software has been stimulated in part by the open structures of net-based venues such as the online software art archive runme.org and Rhizome’s Artbase, which also features her work. Lattanzi is an associate professor in the School of Art and Design, Alfred University, New York.

Gate Pages

Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.

Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.

artport

View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.