Scott Paterson, Marina Zurkow, Julian Bleecker, Adam Chapman: PDPal
October 2003
Scott Paterson, Marina Zurkow, Julian Bleecker, Adam Chapman: PDPal
The PDPal Gate Page features an animated video that serves as a prelude to the larger project PDPal, a PDA-based mapping tool by Scott Paterson, Marina Zurkow, Julian Bleecker, and Adam Chapman. PDPal allowed users to log their urban experiences in Times Square: as a digital diary for writing, recording, and sharing one’s daily observations and memories, the tool provided an online forum that allowed to build a "communicity,” a made-up city of individuals who share a subjective and poetic language. The work drew the user’s attention to social systems and physical environment in their surroundings, from landmark buildings to sidewalk encounters. Anti-geographic and anti-cartesian, PDPal challenged existing mapping projects that utilized GPS and cartography, instead experimenting with emotionally based systems that shape personal and public spaces.
The original PDPal was meant to be run on PDA's using an application beamed from a physical location, and the original website pdpal.com is no longer online. More descriptions of the project are available from Marina Zurkow, Creative Time, MoMA, and Rhizome among others.
Trained as an architect, Scott Paterson became a member of the emerging media and digital art community in New York, which led to his work as a principal designer and associate creative director at Frog Design in New York and design-lead at the global design firm IDEO. He has twenty years of experience in strategic creative leadership, creating award-winning designs and mentoring across multiple disciplines. He has received grants from the Walker Art Center, Parsons School of Design, and The Design Institute at the University of Minnesota.
Marina Zurkow (b. 1962) is a media artist focused on nature and culture intersections, and fostering intimate connections between humans, other species, and planetary agents. Her work spans gallery installations and unconventional public participatory projects. Her work has been shown internationally, and recent exhibitions include Parting Worlds, including the Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow, at the Whitney Museum of American Art and WHAT IF? at MoMA’s Creativity Lab, New York City; Antroposcenes, Lo Pati Centre d’Art, Amposta, Spain; The Breath Eaters, Wolfsonian Museum, Miami; Underfoot/Overhead, Wasserman Projects, Detroit; and Can the Substrate Speak? Festival Art Souterrain, Montreal, Canada. Zurkow was a 2022 fellow at the Environmental Media Lab, Princeton University; and received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rice University, NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She resides in the Hudson Valley, New York, and teaches at New York University.
Julian Bleecker is an artist, engineer, software developer, hardware product designer, author, researcher, and entrepreneur. In 2005 he founded the platform Near Future Laboratory, which has since become the company through which he does creative and commercial work. Julian has exhibited art and technology work through many venues, platforms, festivals, and galleries including Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Bitforms Gallery, Creative Time’s 59th Minute (Times Square, MoMA, and Rhizome, NYC; the Walker Art Center's Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis; and the Design Museum, London, UK. Along with Scott Paterson and Marina Zurkow, he was a Creative Capital grant recipient and has been an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam Atelier and Banff Center for the Arts.
Adam Chapman’s work merges contemporary technology with traditional media such as drawing to explore the dynamic formation of imagery through generative patterns. He has shown internationally at museums and galleries including Pilar and Joan Miro Foundation, Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; Triennale der Photographie Hamburg, Germany; American Museum of the Moving Image, Long Island City, New York; SKL Gallery, Illes Balears, Spain; and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, California. Chapman has been a visiting artist at the American Academy, Rome, Italy; MacDowell Colony, Petersborough, New Hampshire; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO; California State Fullerton’s Grand Central Arts Center, Santa Ana; Banff Center for the Arts, Banff, Alberta, Canada; and 911 Media Arts, Seattle. He has taught at Yale, NYU, and Parsons School of Design, The New School.
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.