TRANSMEDIA :29:59
media art in public urban space
http://www.year01.com/transmedia2959

November 1 - 31st, 2005
29th minute: Cheryl Sourkes - 'Live from the Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas'
59th minute: BlueScreen - 'streamScape'
Dundas Square, Toronto

Year Zero One is pleased to present TRANSMEDIA :29:59, a year long exhibition on the pedestrian level video billboard at Yonge-Dundas Square in downtown Toronto. Launched August 1st 2005, TRANSMEDIA :29:59 features one minute video works 24/7 every half hour on the 29th and 59th minutes.

Featured for the month of November is Cheryl Sourke's ''Live from the Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas' and BlueScreen's 'streamScapes'.

Cheryl Sourkes's 'Live from the Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas' is a series of videos made by animating stills captured from a remote webcam. Live from the Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas shows various Elvis impersonators marrying a variety of heterosexual couples.

Although webcams are often considered Big Brother’s surveillance tool, they actually provide ordinary people with potent mechanisms for self-representation. Unlike the performances normal cameras elicit, people act naturally in front of webcams. Sourkes has tracked literally hundreds of cameras on the Internet during the past five or six years. She sees the real world online as a hybrid place that partakes of both spheres but is really something other. That something inevitably excludes a remainder which resists translation.

BlueScreen's streamScape is made up of hybridised images from 13 webcams scattered all over the world. Every minute the streams from all of these cameras are captured on a server and then incorporated to the on-line landscape. Every hour an accelerated video of the last hour will be showed on Dundas Square video billboard.

BlueScreen give's birth to a landscape that lives from the inside, an inhabited landscape, which has a particular life form and is nourished from the flow that inhabits it. This landscape is timeless or at least not subjected to a specific timeframe, and shares some of its time with the viewer, the time that it lives. Like the environment that surrounds us, it will evolve indefinitely around permanent elements that allow us to appropriate it, make it our own.


TRANSMEDIA :29:59 is curated by Michael Alstad + Michelle Kasprzak.

Year Zero One gratefully acknowledges the Ontario Arts Council,Yonge-Dundas Square and Clearchannel for their support of TRANSMEDIA :29:59




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YEAR ZERO ONE is an on-line artist run centre which operates as a network for the dissemination of digital culture and new media through web based exhibitions, site-specific public art projects, an extensive media arts directory and the Year01 Forum.
http://www.year01.com
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