Each year, Terminal awards four artists an award to help in the completion of internet based art works. Below are links to completed projects.

Works by Joel Swanson, and the WRMC Collaborative will launch in the next few months.

http://www.ariellefalk.com/

http://www.mcleanfahnestock.com/

O Captain, My Captain 

O BROWSER, MY BROWSER is a browser translation of Walt Whitman’s 1900 poem, “O Captain, My Captain” from Leaves of Grass. In the original poem, the death of a ship’s captain is an allegorical reference to the death of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln. In this reinterpretation, the allegory shifts to the impending death of the web. Here, short clips of YouTube videos (all 24 found by a search on the site using keywords from each line of the poem) provide a background noise, or a context, to interfere with or aid the reading of the poem.

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On The Road

In 2007 burrough created hand-made bags for City Lights Bookstore as a public art intervention to celebrate the 50th anniversary year of the publication of On The Road. The original manuscript was notoriously produced on a single scroll of paper (or, many papers taped to each another) before Viking Press published the manuscript in 1957. The complete text is rendered as a continuous page in the browser. However all instances of the word “road” have been replaced with the word “browser.”

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Waiting For You at the Mystery Spot

Adrienne Rich’s “Waiting For You at the Mystery Spot” (2000) is part of her 1998-2000 collection, Fox, which earned Rich the 2003 Yale Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. The judges acknowledged her “continuous poetic exploration and awareness of multiple selves.” In this language-image-browser redesign, the “Mystery Spot” (a California alternative tourist destination for gravitational anomaly lovers of all ages) takes on new meaning, or multiple selves, as the location of virtual Easter eggs relating to Rich’s text.

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curated by
Barry Jones

Work by:

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
JODI
Sylvain Barra, Benoit Blein & Laurent Padiou
Heather & Ivan Morison
New Paradise Laboratories

The web, it seems, is an ideal place for collaboration. Web 2.0 has encouraged us all to comment, consume, and collaborate with our culture. It only make sense that in the last 15 years artist who have moved to internet to make their work should embrace collaboration and in some cases, identify themselves as a group rather than individuals.

The exhibition showcases a wide variety of works thematically. It includes work by net.art / internet art luminaries like Jodi.org and Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and a theater / web piece by a large production company, New Paradise Laboratories, among others. The common ground that all of these works share is that they were created by groups and that they debunk the long held myth of the solitary “tortured” artist. After all, the web is now a “social” place.

some of the work contains adult language.

Jodi - http://you-talking-to-me.com/ - 2009

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Jodi, or jodi.org, is a collective of two internet artists: Joan Heemskerk (born 1968 in Kaatsheuvel, the Netherlands) and Dirk Paesmans (born 1965 in Brussels, Belgium). Their background is in photography and video art; since the mid-1990s they started to create original artworks for the World Wide Web.

source = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodi

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries - Artist’s Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site

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“We combine text with jazz to create Flash pieces. It’s a simple technique that shuns interactivity, graphics, photos, illustrations, banners, colors, and all but the Monaco font, and at the same time cuts across the lines separating digital animation, motion graphics, experimental video, i-movies, and e-poetry. To us, though, it’s Web art.”

source =http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/younghae/interview.html

Sylvain Barra, Benoit Blein & Laurent Padiou - Sharing the Uncertainty, 2007

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Experience an interactive film.
No need to click. Bring together the images on the screen.
The relationships and the separations of the four characters from three different generations depend on you.
Get involved and share the uncertainty.

source = http://rhizome.org/object.php?46747

Heather & Ivan Morison - Global Survey Radio Station

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Global Survey Radio Station broadcasts conversations, stories and borrowed material from around the world, collected by the artists Heather & Ivan Morison. During 2003 Heather & Ivan were commissioned by an organisation called Vivid to undertake a modern day expedition, the aim of which was to survey previously uncharted lives and to record and broadcast its findings. As well as archiving those findings from the original commission, Global Survey Radio Station continues to broadcast new sound works collected by Heather & Ivan from their continued research around the world.

source = http://www.globalsurvey.org/

New Paradise Laboratories - Fatebook

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A performance theatre work presented by the 2009 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. The performance is live, both in cyberspace and in real-space. The audience attends in both places.

Follow thirteen 20-somethings through the trials and tribulations of modern life—with a difference. First, the characters live in cyberspace. Their lives intersect with each other and with audience members through a variety of social media networks. Then in September, in a real space performance, it all careens toward a momentous night—the FATEBOOK party—where time stops, computers crash, and it’s now or never. And the ghost and the body part ways. And all bets are off. And nobody can say what’s real. And relief is in sight. And all matter collapses in on itself in a punishing gravitational catastrophe. And the lights go out for good. And it all gets really, really real…

source = http://www.fatebooktheshow.com/about.php

curated by Jillian McDonald

An exhibiton of web-based works by:

Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan!
Kristin Lucas!
Stephanie Rothenberg!
Brooke Singer!
Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga!

Manifestos! Revolutions!

“Revolutions are always verbose”, said Leon Trotsky.

The revolutions and manifestos found here are rife with language, overflowing with meaning whether social, personal, technological, environmental, or political. These calls for action and declarations of change aren’t necessarily forceful or loud but public and inclusive; life-changing and performative. Though existing as online artworks they all include live offline events, documented herein.

Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan are known for their humour-infused performances probing ordinary life and extraordinary history through language and humour; characters such as The Lesbian Rangers and Superfeminist smash stereotypes and incite poetic revolution where “stupidity is no longer an option”. Kristin Lucas interrogates technologies from the ATM to computer viruses as they encroach on her identity, playing the role of a self caught awed by the transmutation expected in an unstoppable digital revolution. Stephanie Rothenberg as cultural anthropologist fuses old and new media in a pseudo-scientific investigation of human relations to specific digital technologies, for example attempting to protect tourists from digital radiation through “divine data-mining”. Brooke Singer’s recent projects take broad social issues like environmental clean-up to the web as public art, inciting further engagement. Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga’s web and performance works point out the heavy economic and social barriers that immigrants face, urging pedestrians and online visitors to demand (at least theoretical) change by voice or ballot.
Jillian Mcdonald jillianmcdonald.net is a Canadian artist transplanted in Brooklyn. Her current work in media and performance art deals with a sort of Undead Manifesto sparked by the rise of vampire and zombie archetypes in popular culture. Mcdonald teaches at Pace University where she curates and co-directs the Pace Digital Gallery.

Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan 
Consideration Liberation Army

Curated by Alan Bigelow

launched on January 15, 2009
A physical exhibition in Gallery 108 on the campus of Austin Peay State Univeristy ran from January 15 until January 30, 2009

Given its ongoing (and often surprising) metamorphoses on the web, it is dangerous to lay claim to a universal identity for digital literature, where exceptions to the rule often signal the coming of new forms, new iterations. But as a result of recent technologies, and digital literature’s explosive re-invention of itself on the web, some aesthetic patterns may be emerging on the contemporary scene that offer hope for a form still struggling for its public identity.

Of course, not all digital literature is found on the web—interactive multimedia installations, CD/DVD-based works, and live performances with multimedia components, to name a few, are important and fascinating parts of the digital literature scene. The offline component to this exhibition,for example, shows that web-based art can have a life outside the virtual world, something many galleries and museums are finallyrecognizing as digital literature makes its way into art centers and exhibition venues worldwide.

But for the most part, the works in this exhibition, and many like them, find their life, and major readership, on the web. The web is not just a quick and expedient way to find an audience for digital literature, a way to self-publish at minimal cost, and a path to self-promotion; it also offers worldwide access to a multimedia platform for which these works can be created, and provides a place for them to thrive. As the public has growing access to cable and DSL, and browsers become more adept at handling different media, the web becomes an increasingly friendly place for digital literature, and for an audience weaned—through their daily cyber-lives—on multimedia, connectivity, and interactivity.

Even a cursory scan of digital literature websites presents a vast diversity of viewpoints and strategies. Some belong to professional artists who, for their love of the avant-garde, and with no expectation of monetary reward, follow their dream of a new art form; some belong to online journals, festivals, and exhibition spaces that offer venues where digital writers can show their work; and some belong to organizations that archive digital works, offer opportunities for artists in the field, and publish events and news to help raise public awareness…. And then there are your next-door neighbors’ children who, using text, audio, and photos, are blogging about their fantasies and daydreams to whoever will listen. They may deny it, but they are telling digital stories, and they grew up reading them, too.

The web not only provides a convenient portal for digital literature, but it also serves as a source of inspiration and material for writers. Digital stories, dramas, and poems—as multimedia events—present logistical challenges for their creators. For example, to shoot all the photography for a Flash clip that contains a total of fifty or more images, and for those images to be photographs of celestial bodies or exotic species of animals; or to need a music clip without having access to an orchestra or a band… In these, and other instances, the web is an indispensable source. It offers royalty-free images, music clips, or even shareware (software available online, often for free) to help writers complete a task that, if they had to create all the components from scratch, might take them months, or even years. This is a democratization of not only information, but of artistic opportunity. Virtually anyone, with a bit of ingenuity, can create digital literature and share it on the web. It might not all be great literature, and it might not be seen by many people, but the web has empowered it.

In addition to being on the web, some other distinguishing features of contemporary digital literature are represented by this exhibition. First of all, each of the works uses text in significant ways and in dynamic juxtaposition with visuals, whether those visuals be photos, animations, text as image, waveforms, drawings, or video. This is not new—virtually all of the works in this exhibition find their antecedents in early digital literature, where this juxtaposition often appears—but now the play between text and images is more complex, more synthesized, and more diverse in terms of media.

Also, most (but not all) of these pieces can be considered, by traditional literary definitions, as fiction or poetry, not simply by how the text is presented on the screen (in poetry or prose form), but also by the persistence of plot, character, figurative language, verbal imagery, textual rhythm, or other formal attributes. In this respect, these contemporary works share a common bond with earlier works in that there is a heritage in literary vision, a timeless art concerned with narrative (whether linear or non-linear, text or image-based) and poetic line. Writers seem to speak to their audiences in what are essentially archetypal, even conventional, ways, no matter what medium they are writing in.

Additionally, all the works in this exhibition use audio as part of a multimedia presentation, something often overlooked in earlier examples of digital literature. The audio is not merely there as an adornment: it reinforces action, setting, character, mood, and visual play. Without it, the works do not fully achieve their intended effect.

Next, all of these works are interactive: they require the user to navigate through the piece, triggering certain events like the introduction of new plot developments, related visuals, sounds, or text morphs. Again, we see this in earlier works, but restricted mostly to links within a hypertext environment. In the contemporary digital world, anything can be “hot.”

All of these components—text, visuals, sound, literary vision, interactivity, and (yes) accessibility—add value to the works. They are synthesized (with levels of sophistication enabled by newer technologies) so as to streamline the user experience and enhance the work’s aesthetic efficiency. The final work is a cohesive whole, and entirely dependent on all the forms used in its creation. As in all good creative work, in any medium, there are no useless parts.

A Note on Interactivity:

These works, like many works of digital literature, demand a certain level of user engagement. They WANT to be played with as cooperative literatures, and as a result, the user becomes not just the reader of these works but, in part, the author. The choices the user makes—which buttons they click, where their mouse strays, what links they follow—all result in different narrative geographies, and different ways of reading the same work. The flexibility in navigation that is a trademark of most digital literature requires our patience as we proceed through the works, but our patience is more often than not rewarded.

Because this exhibition is not only for online presentation, but also for offline display in a gallery, I have omitted those works that allow for user input into online databases. These types of works are an important part of the digital literary scene, and anyone interested in such works, or examples of other digital literatures, can search the sites listed below. I have also, contrary to the globalism which defines the web, used only works in English. My apologies to the many extremely talented artists and writers working in other languages.

With Thanks To…

Many thanks to Barry Jones, Associate Professor of Art at Austin Peay State University, who invited me to curate this exhibition, and also to Terminal, its online home. Also, many thanks to the Department of Art/Center for the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University.

December 16, 2008

Alan Bigelow www.webyarns.com

To curate this exhibition was to rely on many online sources. Here are a few, with some additions, for those who would like to learn more about digital literature:

Born Magazine
http://www.bornmagazine.com

Chico.art.net
http://www.csuchico.edu/art/net/

CONT3XT.NET
http://www.cont3xt.net/

Digital Technology and Culture
http://www.digitaltechnologyculture.motime.com/

Eastgate
http://www.eastgate.com

electronic book review
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2008
http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/programs/dtc/elo08/media.html

Electronic Literature Organization Library of Congress/Archive-It Project
http://eliterature.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Electronic Poetry Center
http://epc.buffalo.edu/e-poetry/

FILE 2007/2008 (Electronic Language International Festival)
http://www.file.org

furtherfield.org
http://www.furtherfield.org/

Grand Text Auto
http://grandtextauto.org/

Hermeneia: Literary Studies and Digital Technologies Group
http://www.uoc.edu/in3/hermeneia/cat/

Hypercompendia
http://smgct.typepad.com/hypercompendia

Hyperrhiz
http://www.hyperrhiz.net

The Iowa Review Web
http://research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu/tirw/vol9n2/

Java Museum
JavaMuseum.org

newmediaFIX
http://newmediafix.net/

New River Journal
http://www.TheNewRiver.us

nt2
http://www.labo-nt2.uqam.ca/

Rhizome.org
http://www.rhizome.org

trAce archive
http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/

Turbulence.org
http://www.turbulence.org

Vispo
http://www.vispo.com

Word Circuits
http://www.wordcircuits.com/index.html

WRT: Writer Response Theory
http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/

And the list goes on…

December 10, 2008

Micro was a collaborative on-line performance by [ fladry + jones ] and jason.sloan. Micro loosely addressed the theme of “human rights” since the day of the performance was human rights day.Micro incorporated the manipulation of live streaming video and a live twitter feed filtered for posts addressing human rights overlay the video, along with s live improvised sound track.

view documentation of the performance (on vimeo)