Steve Dietz, Carl DiSalvo, Nathan Hactivist


Telematics Timeline

Interaktive Open-Source Timeline für Medienkunst und -technologie


Telematics Timeline_screenshot_entry: N Schöffer 1978 [link 01]

Telematics Timeline_screenshot_entry: N Schöffer 1978

Kurzdarstellung

Kurzbeschreibung

Die Telematics Timeline ist ein von Kuratoren gestaltetes Online-Projekt und Teil der Ausstellung „Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace“ (San Francisco Art Institute, 2001, Kurator: Steve Dietz). Es zeichnet die Geschichte des Technologieeinflusses auf die Kunst und die Populäre Kultur auf und ist als Open-Source-Kontext für die Ausstellungsobjekte gedacht. Dietz: “The Internet - specifically the World Wide Web - has become such a successful "meme" in our society, that there is almost a cultural amnesia about telecommunications-based art that pre-dates the Web.” [dt.: Das Internet – speziell das World Wide Web – ist ein erfolgreiches "Mem" in unserer Gesellschaft geworden, und zwar dahingehend, dass es fast eine Kultur-Amnesie gibt in bezug auf Kunst, die auf Telekommunikation basiert und zeitlich vor dem Web lag.] Die Telematics Timeline versucht, einige der frühen Highlights der Medienkunst sowie eine längere Geschichte der Enabling Technological Innovation zu erfassen. „Most importantly, it is open source. Anyone can upload new information or interpretations into the timeline via the Internet.“ [dt.: Am wichtigsten ist jedoch, dass es sich um Open Source handelt. Jeder kann neue Informationen oder Interpretationen in die Timeline über das Internet heraufladen.]

KünstlerInnen / AutorInnen

  • Steve Dietz, curator › Biografie [link 02]
  • Carl DiSalvo, designer
  • Nathan Hactivist, programmer

Entstehung

Vereinigte Staaten, 2001

Partner / Sponsoren

Die Ausstellung wurde von Independent Curators International erstellt. Das Walker Art Center war ein Partner. Die Wanderausstellung war auch im San Francisco Art Institute, Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Austin Museum of Art, The Atlanta College of Art Gallery und in dem Oklahoma City Museum of Art zu sehen.

Eingabe des Beitrags

, 18.05.2004

Kategorie

  • Forschungsprojekt

Schlagworte

  • Themen:
    • Kulturvermittlung |
    • Medienkunst |
    • Internet
  • Formate:
    • interaktiv |
    • Internet
  • Technik:
    • Shockwave

Inhalt

Inhaltliche Beschreibung

The Internet - specifically the World Wide Web - has become such a successful "meme" in our society, that there is almost a cultural amnesia about telecommunications-based art that pre-dates the Web. As powerful as early projects such as Muntadas's "File Room" (1994) or Ken Goldberg's "Telegarden" (1995) were (and are), many artists were working in the embrace of telecommunications for almost twenty years prior. Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz's 1977 "Satellite Arts Project" first introduced the notion of a virtual space - a video space in-between physical spaces - and their 1980 "Hole-in-Space" was a kind of magic of open-systems, bi-coastal communications that may have since become commonplace but which directly inspired several of the artists in the exhibition. Many others, from Bob Adrian to Roy Ascott to Carl Loeffler to Heidi Grundmann, proseletyzed the aesthetics and politics of a global connectivity over the ensuing years, using the available means, from fax to Slowscan TV to early computing networks. Their work and thoughtfulness about it is inspirational.
The telematics timeline attempts to capture some of these highlights as well as a longer history of enabling technological innovation. Most importantly, it is open source. Anyone can upload new information or interpretations into the timeline via the Internet.
(Steve Dietz, http://telematic.walkerart.org/timeline/)

The Telematic Timeline was presented as part of the exhibition Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace, curated by Steve Dietz.



Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace
Steve Dietz

Telematic Connections, like many of the works in it, is a hybrid affair. Part history, part speculation, partly onsite, partly online, it crosses boundaries between art, communications, and popular culture. Its four sections include installation works, past and recent film clips, online projects, and a "telematics timeline." Through these various media, the exhibition presents the ways in which artists use technology—and the Internet—to explore both the utopian desire for an expanded, global consciousness and the dystopian consequences of our collective embrace, willing or not, of computer-mediated human communications. At the same time Telematic Connections places this emergent work within a historical framework.

The eight installations that comprise the "Telereal" component of this exhibition use the Internet and computing to explore this mediated embrace between parties, whether human to human, human to machine, machine to machine, or even human to nature. Here, as well as in the ten online projects in the "Datasphere" component of the exhibition, what the visitor-participant does in the galleries affects (and is affected by) someone or something somewhere else in physical space. "The Virtual Embrace" signals this shift from the viewer as an observer to embracing us as a participant, integral to the work-process of art.

While Telematic Connections presents the possibilities for connections and affiliations, it still acknowledges a persistent question about connective new media. Artist, theorist, and teacher Roy Ascott stated it poignantly already in 1990, "Is there love in the telematic embrace?" Is there content besides technology? Engagement beyond entertainment? A message that is not only the medium?

Telematic Connections is not fundamentally about technology. Nor is it an attempt to define a new genre of art practice. It is about what MIT computer scientist Michael Dertouzos calls "the forces of the cave"—some of the eternal human traits that have never left us, including the desire to connect, even to merge with another—but in today’s world of ubiquitous computing and global networking.

(Steve Dietz, February 2001, http://telematic.walkerart.org/overview/index.html)

Kontext

Statement

Dietz:
„One of the things I found out in researching the Telematics Timeline, which is intended as an open source context for the works in the Telematic Connections exhibition—anyone can add their own examples to it— is that there is a well-articulated, if not well-known history of such works and events. Whether it is Myron Krueger´s “ responsive environments” from the 70s in relation to Victoria Vesna’s Community of People with No Time or Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza (1966) in relation to Maciej
Wisniewski’s Netomatheque or Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s Satellite Arts Project (1979) in relation to Paul Sermon’s Telematic Vision, there are important precedents for almost every work in the exhibition.“

„ (...) I don’t see the website, which I collaborated with Carl DiSalvo, as “just” a reflection of the physical exhibition. It’s like Englebart ’s idea of human intelligence augmentation. The symbiosis of physical and virtual installations is a complex system, which feeds on itself to allow possibilities that cannot be achieved in either dimension alone .“

(Both statements are quoted from: http://www.sanfranciscoart.edu/database/pdf/teletalk.pdf)

  • › Medienkunst und Forschung [link 03]

» http://telematic.wal…g/timeline/index.html [link 04]

  • › Telematics timeline_screenshot_entry: Captain Crunch 1968 [JPEG | 43 KB ] [link 05]
  • › Telematics Timeline_launch & exhibition_SFAI 2001 [JPEG | 21 KB ] [link 06]