FLOATING POINTS: NET ART NOW
Co-Presented by Turbulence.org and Emerson College

NATALIE BOOKCHIN + CATHY DAVIS
Wednesday 04.14.04, 7:00 p.m. (EST, USA)
Bill Bordy Theater, 216 Tremont Street, Boston
Live online at http://institute.emerson.edu/floatingpoints
All lectures are free and open to the public

NATALIE BOOKCHIN will talk about collaboration as a persistent aesthetic
strategy in network art. She will address the ways the Internet figured
in the initiation and realization of collaborative work, and discuss the
shift of what counts as artistic practice, as a result of the form and
context of the networking environment. Bookchin will detail the
trajectory of her own work in network art to describe a history that
runs parallel to a larger trend, focusing on her online game Metapet
(2003) and on a project initiated and coordinated by Jackie Stevens
herself called AgoraXchange, a project that borrows elements from models
of large scale peer-to-peer collaborations that have emerged on the
Internet.

CATHY DAVIES will screen "Holding Pattern," the first in a series of
screensavers designed to bring complex, atmospheric cinema to the
personal computer workstation. (Download free at www.idle-time.org for
Mac and Windows.) "In the workplace, the computer tends to fracture our
attention into tiny, task-oriented units," said Davies. "But even in our
most productive, atomized mental states, and against the policies of our
employers (or even our own productive intentions), we instinctively
steal moments to be idle at work. I want to create little films for
computers which interrupt the granular processing of tasks, and remind
us users what it is like to truly be idle – owning your own time, and
mind." She will discuss the history of long, slow films, and the unique
potential for cinema in screensavers.

BIOGRAPHIES

NATALIE BOOKCHIN'S projects include Metapet (www.metapet.net), an online
game commissioned by Creative Time. The beta version of the project was
launched at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Version 1 was
linked from the Whitney Museums online gallery. Bookchin is currently
working on a large-scale network project called AgoraXChange, which has
been commissioned by the Tate Museum, and is scheduled to launch in 2004
at agoraXchange.net. In 1999-2000 Bookchin organized <net.net.net>, an
eight month series of lectures and workshops on art, activism and the
Internet at Cal Arts, MOCA in LA, and Laboratorio Cinematek in Tijuana.
From 1998 to 2000 she was a member of the collective