TIMELINE (CONTD.)

In 1970 Jack Burnham organized the Software exhibition visitors were invited to operate computers: something extremely strange. It helped introduce artist to an important dimension of computing that could be utilized. The exhibition displayed a catalog by Ted Nelson called Layrinth, which Nelson named as the first publicly-accessible hypertext. Another participant was Nicholas Negroponte, who contributed Seek, an environment that housed gerbils and light metal blocks that responded and could be rearranged by the gerbils movements. Burnham commented that, "the goal of Software is to focus our sensibilities on the fastest growing area in this culture: information processing systems and their devices."

Also in 1970, the New Left Reader published Hans Magnus Enzensberger's, Constituents of a Theory of the Media. Enzensberger takes aim at the media business--the consciousness industry and proposes distributed production of media as well as a new fundamental organization of media in this commonly cited essay.

Two years later Jean Baudrillard wrote an essay titled, Requiem for the Media, in which the ideas of Enzensberger and McLuhan are challenged.

Raymond Williams's Television: Technbology and Cultural Form provided a critical approach to television and the important concept of flow--the fluid combination of program segments, commercials and other materials that complete the experience of watching television.

Computer Lib/Dream Machine(1974), is considered by some to be the most important book in the history of new media. Written by Ted Nelson, the Janus-like codex joins two books back to back; in the middle, the texts of the two bound-togther books meet. Not only did the book predict that personal computers were on their way, but it challenged the popular notion of what computers were for.

Cory Arcangel graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music with a degree in Technology in Music and the Related Arts. He came to the art world through a number of internet based activities. These, in turn, lead to invitations from institutions for lectures and demonstrations, a performative aspect which naturally called for the creation of digital environments. These latter pieces evolved into stand-alone artworks.

For his second solo show at Team Gallery , Cory Arcangel continues his practice of tweaking old data. Instead of the Nintendo and Atari Game systems, Cory instead uses Richard Linklater's stoner classic Dazed and Confused, Guns and Roses' tune Sweet Child O' Mine, the Beatles' vaunted appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, Bruce Springsteen's legendary Born to Run LP and Dennis Hopper's 80s cop drama Colors.

The exhibit is a fascinating and entertaining combination of art, music and technology, made better by Cory Arcangels' personal commentary. It was inspiring to see someone able to combine multiple passions into a cohesive project.

A professor of music technology at Georgia Tech, Gil Weinberg enlisted the support of graduate student Scott Driscoll to create Haile--the first truly robotic musician. Not only does it identify and imitate music, but Haile (pronounced Hi-lee) can maintain rhythm and distinguish between similar rhythms. Here is a video of Haile in action.

Adam Pasick is heading up Reuters technology's first virtual news bureau inside the online role-playing game Second Life. While many independent journalists and bloggers have published inside such virtual worlds, Reuters is the first established news agency to dispatch a full-time reporter to do so.

A new software developed by Image Metrics allows a computer to map an actor's performance onto any character virtual or human, living or dead. The computer mirror image posses something more subtle than just mimicking ones facial expressions. It is as if it adopts the actors personality.

Some die-hards at Sony still believe that, properly designed, the e-book has a future. Their solution is the Sony Reader, a small, sleek, portable screen that will be introduced this month in some malls, at Borders bookstores and at sonystyle.com for $350.

The 10th annual D.U.M.B.O. Art Festival this weekend was a great chance to enjoy the fall weather, the New York City waterfront, and some great contemporary art. Walking through DUMBO on Saturday was like being involved in a parade that spread throughout the various art studios, galleries, parks, shops, dining establishments (I had the best pizza in recent memory at Front Street Pizza), and streets of the neighborhood.

A few of the galleries and artists' spaces that I visited on Saturday are worth mentioning. powerHouse Books' new powerHouse Arena gallery had an exhibit up that reminded me of a hip-hop version of the Morrison Hotel gallery in SoHo. Unfortunately, the music in there was too loud, so, a couple blocks of wandering later, I found a stage in an open-to-the-street indoor space with a guy dressed in a white jacket and white glasses, wailing away on stage with a guitarist and drummer. Outside that space was an art project that consisted of a stretch limousine that anyone could go inside of to have a drink, chat, or watch one of those 10 inch television sets that they have in limousines.

The work that stuck with me the best from my day in DUMBO was Mary Temple's The Forest for the Sea at the Smack Mellon gallery. The piece is a large installation that consists of a painting of a fake shadow on a 24 by 60 foot wall. Mary's work feels like it should have been in the Whitney Museum's 2006 Biennial because of the way in which she plays with light and darkness, and with creating moments of false reality, which were issues heavily implied by the Biennial's Day for Night theme.

Since the Art Festival does happen every year, you still have a chance to experience it if you didn't this year. More than just a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon, the DUMBO Art Festival does a wonderful job of drawing positive energy and attention to a growing creative center in New York City.

Although Eric Rosenthal, presented fascinating ideas, he offered no thoughts on a possible solution for the problems he presented. Rosenthal spoke for nearly three hours in which he used numerous technical diagrams to demonstrate how the technology continues to fail us. There is no doubt that technology has not reached its full potential, and the constant upgrading proves difficult for archiving materials. However, the process of seamlessly integrating media and technology in our lives is not going to happen overnight. The equipment (digital cameras, televisions, cds) that Rosenthal degraded in his lecture is relatively new, and still without question a vast improvement from its predecessors. Eric Rosenthal was unclear in his argument. It was hard to decipher whether or not he was advocating new technology. No doubt a very intelligent man, Eric Rosenthal did nothing but attempt to illuminate issues that are obvious and/or irrelevant to most individuals.

TIMELINE (CONTD.)

Marshall McLuhan, regarded as one of the founders of media ecology, published several highly influential works in and around the 1960s. Two such works, The Galaxy Reconfigured and The Medium Is The Message, discuss McLuhans theoretical frameworks of new media, such as The Gutenberg Galaxy theory.

In 1966, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) was established. Founded by Billy Kluver, Fred Waldhauer, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. The non-profit organization developed from the experience of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. This event, which was held in October 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, brought together 40 engineers and 10 contemporary artists who worked together on performances that incorporated new technology.

Nam June Paik, who created Cybernated Art, is considered the first video artist. He altered televisions and used portable video cameras. He integrated video with live performances in unusual and provocative ways--such as his TV Bra for Living Sculpture. Paik coined the Term "information superhighway" and wrote an important cybernetic/Buddhist manifesto for the context of his work in 1966.

In a 1968 essay documenting "the mother of all demos" Douglas Engelbart and William English discuss their Augmentation Research Center's (ARC) work to date. The piece was titled A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect, and the ideas presented in it were defined by Xerox and refined by Apple.

GALLERY VISITS (TUESDAY, OCTOBER 3RD)

At Postmasters gallery, Natalie Jeremijenko exhibited work that combines art, sociology and environmentalism by converting the gallery space into a collective enterprise of material pertaining to New York City birds. Components include feeding and house complexes, information gathering perches and live video feed of birds.

Bitforms gallery presented a new show by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer titled, Standards and Double Standards. Lozano-Hemmer is a renowned new media artist who specializes in public art involving technology and surveillance to engage participants.

Eyebeam displayed Bill Dolson's Studies for Synthetic Meteors. The show presents massage video studies for a proposed public artwork in the New York City skies. It consists of artificial meteor showers, captured from multiple angles. The technologies used in this artwork were established with the assistance of scientists at NASA and Los Alamos National Laboratories.

At PaceWildenstein, the new show by Lucas Samaras, titled iMovie, is diplayed. It consists of several five minute voyeuristic films of Samaras himself, that he edited on imovie. In the films, Samaras travels through different shapes, sexes and identities.

All four of these galleries exhibit varying work by new media artists. They demonstrate the vast potential of art and technology and how that can be used in numerous ways--public, private, large scale and in tandem with the environment.

T I M E L I N E ( C O N T D . )

Also in the early 1960s, Ivan Sutherland developed what is known as the Sketchpad system. This program enabled "a user and a computer to converse rapidly through the medium of line drawings," Susan Brennan explained. The system not only allowed people to draw on a computer display, but it also made people realize that a computer screen was more that just a replacement for a piece of paper. The Sketchpad system was the skeleton of all todays human-computer interaction and graphics software.

In 1961, Roy Ascott published an article titled The Construction of Change, in which he discusses the connection between cybernetics and art (and art education). The article was the first publication on education in the area of new media art. In 1964, Ascott presented the idea of telematic art (which he later became a pioneer and primary articulator of), in which an artist creates a system for communication and collaboration between physically dispersed individuals.

This weekend (September 29th to October 1st) is the 2006 WIRED NextFest. Check it out

T I M E L I N E (C O N T D .)

In 1962, Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, or "Lick," assumed leadership of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an arm of the military-industrial complex that Bush helped establish to help the military use computers effectively. Licklider was praised by his contemporaries for directing DARPA projects that had broad benefits.

Although Licklider left DARPA in 1964, the network he invisioned (ARPAnet), which would eventually become the internet, took shape under the guidance of Lawrence Roberts.

In 1968, Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, published the highly influential article, The Computer as a Communication Device, which began with the bold statement: "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face." In this article Licklider puts forth the ideas of both a personal and global computer network. As well as speech and handwriting recognition.