Ursula Endlicher: Untitled
October 2004
Ursula Endlicher: Untitled
Ursula Endlicher’s Gate Page is an animated entry portal to her projects Famous for One Spam (2004) and Website Portraits (2004), as well as three of Endlicher’s performances and the artist’s website ursenal.net. Users can click on the Gate Page’s floating shapes to access the individual project pages. In Endlicher’s often performative works, humans and “more-than-humans,” machines, and nature question each other’s behavior in playful ways. Famous for One Spam, for example, cycles through images and names of “spam characters,” based on junk mail and the names of the senders that ended up in the artist’s inbox. To create the virtual characters, the artist projected spam emails onto her face while reading and performing their content. As users navigate the work, they may encounter collages and performances of the spam mail content or web searches for the “real” person behind the sender’s name.
Ursula Endlicher (b. 1965; Vienna, Austria) is an interdisciplinary artist working with interactive media and the internet since the early 1990s. She investigates structural components and interfaces of digital and “natural” networks and creates works in contrasting formats, including net art, augmented reality, artificial intelligence/machine learning, installation, performance, environmental works, and dinners. In her works, humans, machines, and nature are inspired by each other’s behaviors and create new forms and “worlds” between them.
Her work has been shown at Chronus Art Center, Shanghai; / HeK (House of Electronic Arts), Basel, Switzerland; Transmediale, Berlin; [ACM] SIGGRAPH, Yokohama, Japan; ZERO1 Biennial (2012); in New York at Eyebeam and Harvestworks; on Turbulence.org (1996–2016); and in galleries in the United States and Europe. It has been reviewed in publications such as EIKON, the Brooklyn Rail, and Leonardo. She received the 2024 Austrian Art Award for Media Art by BMKOES, Vienna.
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.
