ruthc's blog

Reblog of 'mini-review of Andy Deck at HTTP gallery' from NodeLondon Digest

Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 10:13:56 +0000
From: Saul Albert To: digest@nodel.org
Subject: mini-review of Andy Deck at HTTP gallery

The opening of the Open Vice/Virtue: The Online Art Context at HTTP gallery (Haringey, N4) last Thursday was quite a mob scene: everyone crammed into the little gallery space in the front of HTTP, drinking, chatting, hanging out of the door to smoke... the convivial boozy atmosphere of an opening.

Danny Boyd of the Many2Many multiblog recently scraped Jimmy Wales's response, to the recent uproar over Segenthaler's complaints, from a secluded email list and spread ithere . It's helpful to be reminded of academically approved uses of Wikipedia... that it may be used very well in the place of an encyclopedia but not as a replacement for a bibliography of books, journals etc.

Station House Opera are performing 'Live from Paradise' in an empty shop in Birmingham, a disused church in Colchester, and a former courtroom in London. Dizzied by the fluidity of their networked SFX which folded space and time, mixing the ancient media of theatre and new media space, I couldn't say if there was a story. There are relationships and scenes between 4 characters, played by 9 actors and 3 cameras at each venue, all connected and broadcast via a 2mb broadband connection.

Piano duets, an attempted seduction, some good jokes and a psychological observation, all take place between players, across physical space and, in the company's own words, "merge to become a fourth imaginary space."

It's is not an easy thing to write about.
The dialogue and performance style reminded me of some Hal Hartley shorts I saw a while back. But the scenario kept bringing me back to Jean Paul Satre's 'In Camera".

A conversation with Dave Green of NTK at the EVNT workshop earlier this week at SPACE Media Lab started like this....

Me : So you have this conference coming up in July. Would it be appropriate for artists to come along to talk to programmers?

Dave: [---giggles-->
[---giggles more-->

The giggling kept going throughout our conversation. Perhaps it was because I kept making statements and asking questions that generalised programmers into a herd- comments about how they think, behave, communicate. It may also be that I falsely assumed that everyone has the same question as me perpetually ringing in their heads.

- Why don't artists in London work more closely with the programming community?-

Thank you is an HIV awareness project which took place in Khayelitsha, South Africa, New York City and on the web. In early December 2004 the works were displayed on 2 computer monitors in 2 remote project spaces.