Interactive Futures 07: The New Screen

Nov 15-18, 2007, Victoria
Held at Open Space Gallery and The Bedford Hotel, Victoria
Co-curators:
Steve Gibson, Julie Andreyev, Randy Adams
INTERACTIVE FUTURES is a forum for showing recent tendencies in new media as well as a conference for exploring issues related to technology. The theme of this year’s event is The New Screen. IF07 will explore new forms of screen-based media from a diverse body of artists, theorists, writers, filmmakers, developers, and educators. Interactive visual environments, screen-based performances, new forms of narrative experiences, web-based environments, and innovative educational models will be shown at IF07.
information poster: ifposterrgb.pdf
For information, or if you would like to attend contact Julie: jandreye@eciad.ca

Listening Post

Listening Post by Mark Hansen and Ben Ruben is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens. 

This work won a Golden Nica from Ars Electronica in 2004, and has been widely exhibited since then.   In Ruben’s artist statement, he says

“My starting place was simple curiosity: What do 100,000 people chatting on the Internet sound like? Once Mark and I started listening, at first to statistical representations of web sites, and then to actual language from chat rooms, a kind of music began to emerge. The messages started to form a giant cut-up poem, fragments of discourse juxtaposed to form a strange quilt of communication. It reminds me of the nights I spent as a kid listening to the CB radio, fascinated to hear these anonymous voices crackling up out of the static. Now the static is gone, and the words arrive as voiceless packets of data, and the scale is immense. And so my curiosity gave way to my desire to respond to this condition.

Anyone who types a message in a chat room and hits “send” is calling out for a response. Listening Post is our response — a series of soundtracks and visual arrangements of text that respond to the scale, the immediacy, and the meaning of this torrent of communication.”

This installation has inspired other forms of text harvesting – see Debbie’s review of We Feel Fine, or The Dumpster, a Tate Net Art comission that mines the romantic lives of teenagers.

Top tips for writing

Mark Bernstein offers ten thoughtful and inspired tips for writing blogs, although each tip could just as easily offer guidance for living a meaningful life as writing well. My three favorite points he makes are:

• Write passionately about things that matter

• Don’t tell us what happened: tell us why it matters

• Show us the details, teach us why they matter

George Orwell, in his 1946 lament Politics and the English Language, suggests the following:

1. “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”