art

I’ll be in Rochester, New York on Saturday September 29, speaking about conservation issues in new media art. Often with these sorts of talks I’m presenting as a techie with a touch of conservation experience, but in this case I’ll be presenting on one of my own works and talking about conservation issues from the point of view as a new media artist. Even better, I’ll be sharing the session with the terrifically talented Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.

In the odd chance that I have any readers around Rochester who’d be interested in coming to this, please contact me, because I think I can wrangle some sort of discount.

This Wednesday, June 6, I’m going to be taking part in a panel discussion on media preservation presented by Independent Media Arts Preservation and Electronic Arts Intermix. My part on the panel will be to talk about new media arts preservation, in particular the work I did on Shu Lea Cheang’s work Brandon when I was at Rhizome. The other panelists are Ann Butler, Jeff Martin, and Glenn Wharton.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007
6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
535 West 22 Street
5th floor
New York, NY

For more info, check out the full announcement over on Rhizome.

Image by Takeshi Murata

Rhizome is having a benefit concert on Monday, April 16th. I left Rhizome just about a year ago, but I’m still involved with the organization, and I’m happy to see them put together such a cool evening.

It’s going to be a great event—beyond supporting a great organization, you get to hang out at the Hiro Ballroom and check out Gang Gang Dance, Professor Murder, YACHT, and M.C. Cory Arcangel. I have seen YACHT live, and can vouch for his spazzy awesomeness. Cory is also terribly charming. You should not bring any significant others who get easily crushed out on lopey artist boys. Consider yourself warned.

Tickets start at $35 and can be bought online at http://rhizome.org/events/benefit/.

Most of my friends have heard me rave about my brother Albert’s cool Wiremap project before, but it’s a difficult thing to fully grok without actually seeing it. Wiremap uses a single projector to project fully 3-dimensional images; instead of projecting on to a flat screen, it projects on to a series of wires strung vertically at varying depths to fill out a rectangular volume. By knowing which wire is at which depth, the single projector can project volumes 3-dimensionally; for example, one of the Wiremap demos involves a globe that floats towards and away from the projector itself.

Much of the impact is lost if you can’t see Wiremap in person. But if you live in New York City, next Wednesday you can do just that at Dorkbot NYC.

Dorkbot NYC
Wednesday, November 1, 7 p.m.
Location One
26 Greene Street (betw. Canal and Grand)

For a new media artist working solo, Wiremap represents a daunting technical achievement. The computer driving the projector has to have intimate knowledge of each wire and what depth it’s at; and just physically calibrating the volume to the projector is an exacting task.

If you want more info, Albert has a pretty extensive wiki page up, and a long, explanatory video on YouTube. But trust me, the online representations of this work pale in comparison to seeing the real thing.

Back in 2004, when I posted the Unauthorized iPod U2 vs. Negativland Special Edition on eBay, I wasn’t really surprised by the attention it attracted online, but I was surprised by how the facts got shaved down as the idea spread. It’s a fairly complex idea, I’ll admit—to explain it you’ve got to bring in U2 and Negativland and iPods and Island Records and Kasey Casem and Downhill Battle—and more than one entry said that the iPod was a project of Negativland or of Downhill Battle. I wasn’t personally upset by these misattributions, but it did serve as a personal reminder of the way that the accuracy of many blogs is probably a little closer to that of office gossip than of high-quality journalism.

Recently I noticed a different sort of mistake: One of the iPod images was being swiped for a Chinese blog, for an entry on a new edition of the U2 iPod that had nothing to do with Negativland:

It’s easy to imagine how this happened: This blogger wanted to pass on an Apple press release but also wanted to spruce it up with some pictures, so she entered “U2 iPod” into an image search engine and stumbled upon this photo. Not knowing anything about the Unauthorized iPod U2 vs. Negativland Special Edition—if there’s been anything written about it in the Chinese language, I’m not aware of it—she blithely included it in her blog post and never gave it a second thought.

I find it amusing to imagine some random reader of this blog seeing the unfamiliar band name in the iPod display and maybe doing a little Googling on the subject. And since discovering this, I’ve been trying to figure out if this dynamic can be exploited more generally, to dupe image-swiping bloggers into carrying subtle political messages on their own blogs … nothing comes to mind, alas. But maybe I’ll come up with something.

Next Friday, I will be part of the Post post modern panel discussion hosted by NYC Artists Talk on Art . Here’s some info:

Friday, April 28th 2006, 7pm
School of Visual Arts. 209 East 23rd Street,
(between 2nd & 3rd Ave.)

Artists Talk on Art is pleased to present “Post Post Modern,” an examination of the newest trends in art. Artists, writers, dealers and alternative space directors will show and discuss cutting-edge art, considering how societal, political, and technological developments influence these trends.

How has globalization, the information explosion and cybernetics contributed? In what way does the distribution of art through art fairs, digital prints, and websites impact the work? Finally, what could the future hold?

...

Moderator: Chris Twomey, artist, writer

Participants:
Lea Rekow, artist, founding director of Gigantic Art Space
Francis Hwang, net artist, writer, software engineer, former director of technology for Rhizome.org
Joel Beck, co-partner of Roebling Hall Galleries
Ben Goldman, artist, director of City Without Walls, founder/president of United Visual Arts Inc.

Organizers: Chris Twomey, artist, writer and Tamara Wyndham, artist

$7.00 general admission, $3.00 students/seniors with ID, free to passholders/SVA students

Last night I was out celebrating a friend’s birthday at a bar in Brooklyn when I felt a funny sensation from the pocket of my hoodie, like it had caught on something. I reached in and pulled out a little rubber frog, wrapped in a note.

In case you can’t read the note, it reads:

Hi! My name is Astrid. Take me home & love me. I’ll love you too. (over) or you can just keep me in your pocket & carress me, oh so gently.

Yay strangers dropping random things into my clothes while I’m getting drunk! It’s like there’s a happening in my pocket and everybody’s invited.

Ten-sided continues: We’ve been writing for almost a month now, and in our more-than-50-entries we’ve been hinting at lost loves, past crimes, and strange inventions. Two more months to go …

why the lucky stiff, one of our ten illustrious writers, has just put together Fictohedron, an alternate to reading Ten-sided through the Turbulence site.

Cool features include: Bayesian analysis to see what novel words are showing up with higher frequency in Ten-sided blogs, and when you click on those words they’re highlighted in entry text … A healthy sign of an easily remixable work, I’d like to think.

Back in January, I sent out a call for nine fiction writers: Today, the nine selected writers and I are launching the resulting online artwork on Turbulence.org.

Turbulence Commission: Ten-sided by Francis Hwang, with Johannes Görannson, Jess Kilby, Tao Lin, Brendon Lloyd, Jessica Penrose, Glenis Stott, John Woods, Taren McCallan-Moore, and why the lucky stiff

Ten-sided is a textual performance in which ten authors collaboratively improvise on a single online narrative. For three months, each author will blog as a fictional character. All ten characters must somehow be connected, and all ten authors are responsible for ensuring that this connection is explored through the course of the story. However, authors are forbidden from coordinating the story beforehand. Instead, they can only take their cues from one another’s public entries. The resulting improvisation resembles a jazz performance or a session of exquisite corpse, but in a new form of creative practice that comments on and employs the multi-vocal nature of blogging communities.

One aspect I’m interested in here is having a piece that is inherently, not arbitrarly, time-based. That is, this is online art that you subscribe to over time, not just view through a browser once. I hope that you’ll all follow along—I have no idea where the story will go over the next few months, but I suspect the results will be quite remarkable.

I’m looking for nine fiction writers who want to collaborate with me on an artwork that has been commissioned by Turbulence.org. I don’t want to give too much away, but I can say that the work will involve writing collaborative, improvisational fiction online. I can’t honestly say how good the final product will be, but I think it’ll make a fascinating experiment—provided, of course, I’m lucky enough to have good writers to work with.

Each writer will receive a $200 stipend for participation. Participating in this artwork will require a light, but ongoing commitment: perhaps an hour a week, from March to June.

No particular experience, or publications, are necessary. However, you should be mildly comfortable with technology, enough to use a website like MySpace or a blog host like Blogspot. It would also be okay if you had a friend who could help you with the technical stuff. Basically, the project involves a little tech setup, and I don’t want to have to do a lot of tech support for other people.

If that doesn’t sound too maddeningly vague, please let me know if you’re interested by emailing me at sera@fhwang.net. I’d appreciate a few writing samples, and if you have any experience with improvisational anything (stand-up comedy, music, even live-action role-playing), it’d be useful to know about that, too. Also, please feel free to ask any other questions. Thanks!