Net_condition
Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM)
Karlsruhe, Germany
http://on1.zkm.de/static/index.html

Recently RHIZOME visited Germany to participate in "net_condition," an
exhibition at the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in
Karlsruhe. Net_condition (http://on1.zkm.de/static/index.html) is the
first major museum show to attempt a comprehensive exhibition of net
art. The show is the combined product of several curators including
Peter Weibel, Walter van der Cruijsen, Jeffrey Shaw and Benjamin Weil.
It serves as the symbolic inauguration of Peter Weibel's new
Directorship of the museum, as well as the inauguration of net art's new
entry into the art world.

Net_condition addresses the problems and possibilities that exist in
today's networked world. At the heart of the exhibition is a
cybercafe-like cluster of computer terminals. Each terminal is devoted
to a particular website or computer project. The roster is filled with
highlights from the last four years of computer art: Victoria Vesna's
"ZKM Bodies" (a special segment of her ongoing project "Bodies
INCorporated"), Jodi's "CTRL-SPACE," the I/O/D Webstalker, Mark Napier's
"Digital Landfill," and dozens of others. All projects are available to
the average net surfer. Nothing new here.

Yet while the majority of net_condition exists on these rows of computer
terminals, many installations provide much needed sensory environments.
Wolfgang Staehle's net art ready-made, "Empire 24/7," brings new life to
Warhol's cinematic painting "Empire." Here, Staehle projects a web cam
image of the Empire State Building streamed live from New York directly
onto the ZKM gallery wall. The passage of time is slowly visible,
offsetting Karlsruhe's daily cycle by 6 hours. In another corner of the
room, the ASCII Art Ensemble continues to dominate the American Standard
character set with a close-circuit video-to-ASCII converter. Jordan
Crandall's "Drive, Track #3" is a multichannel, visual installation
incorporating film, internet and video images. External surveillance
footage of the ZKM building is contrasted with internal snapshots of
intimate human moments.

Video games are also important to the exhibition. A group project called
"esc to begin" has created "Font Asteroids," a fun textual version of
the arcade classic. You pick a website. The text from the website then
provides the interplanetary debris that you must destroy. Like the
original Asteroids, the words in Font Asteroids break apart into
prefixes, suffixes, and roots. Great fun is had with etymology. A series
of terminals for playing Quake III Arena (not yet rated for German
audiences, but sure to be declared illegal due to violent content) are
also presented under the "esc to begin" context as well as other
in-house creations.

Some artists comment ironically on the high-tech nature of net art.
Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin team up with Blank & Jeron to create
"Introduction to net.art." In this piece, six granite slabs hang on the
wall, each engraved with a passage from Shulgin and Bookin's net.art
manifesto. The Redundant Technology Initiative also rejects networking
by creating a large floor installation of discarded harddrives, mother
boards, and other computer innards. Laid out edge to edge, the raw
hardware looks like the skyscrapers and streets of a miniature
futuristic landscape.

The Tokyo segment of Knowbotic Research's "IO_dencies" project
(http://www.khm.de/people/krcf/IO_tok/) is a highlight of the ZKM
exhibition. IO_dencies is a project about urbanism. The title plays on
the meaning of both "tendencies" and "input/output." It takes
information about the Shimbashi neighborhood in Tokyo–information about
the traffic movements, the economic activity, the flows of
information–and interprets it in a visual way. As Andreas Broeckmann
describes it, "visible and invisible strata of the urban environment are
transduced into electronic fields." The user sees an aerial plan of
Tokyo on which hundreds of tinny flows are visible (visit
http://www.khm.de/people/krcf/IO_tok/io_exhibition/exhibition.html for
sample screen shots). The flows represent actual data collected from
real urban space. Using "attractors" the user can interrupt the flows in
various ways. There are attractors for merging the flows, diverting
them, organizing them, confusing them, and so on. For example, an
"organizing" attractor will tend to organize the paths of flows in its
immediate area. The user can change the relative strength of each
attractor. Finally, Knowbotic Research has networked the project so that
multiple users may place their own attractors on the same map. The
result is an interesting space where the interaction of user input and
urban statistical data create visual "tendencies."

Also in the exhibition is Knowbotic Research's "IO_lavoro_immateriale"
(http://io.khm.de/lavoro/). This project is about labor, but not in a
traditional sense. "Immaterial labor" includes all types of creative,
intellectual or affective labor, including everything from biological
"work" (childbirth) to social labor (political action). As project
participant Michael Hardt writes, "affective labor is the constitution
of communities and collective subjectivities." IO_lavoro_immateriale is
a collaborative database of information from 6 participants. The
information is collected and integrated into visual maps. Like Knowbotic
Research's previous project, IO_lavoro_immateriale examines what happens
at the *intersection* of these various maps. "Magnetic fields" are
created by overlapping different spaces between the 6 participants'
maps.

At the ZKM, IO_lavoro_immateriale exists as a large interactive computer
screen. The collaborative map is visualized on the monitor as a series
of flowing shapes. Gliding over the large screen is a smaller screen
that acts as a type of computerized magnifying lens through which the
flows may be examined and inflected. Although the large interactive
screen is not immediately intuitive as an interface, with a little
practice the project becomes interesting.

At 30 feet wide, the "Net.art Browser" dominates one wall of the
exhibition. A collaboration between curators Jeffrey Shaw and Benjamin
Weil, the Net.art Browser is a large flat-screen monitor that glides
from side to side over the URLs of web art projects written on the wall
behind. Like a digital lens, the browser illuminates the written text
into active links. The user may then launch various web sites ranging
from Heath Bunting, Vuk Cosic, Mark Napier, and Olia Lialina, plus a
bevy of Weil's old ada'web favorites. The cordless keyboard used to
control the browser is great fun. Unfortunately the rest of the project
is not as well crafted, with no curatorial vision evident.

A few other art projects fall short. Ken Feingold's "Seance Box No.1"
suffers from technical failures. Masaki Fujihata's haptic telepresence
machine, "Impressing Velocity," suffers from its bloated budget ("We
must use the motion platform!"). Lynn Hershman, an artist whose
reputation has long surpassed her creativity, also disappoints with
"Difference Engine #3."

Parallel to the net_condition show, the ZKM presented a day-long
symposium on the recent film "The Matrix." Slavoj Zizek stole the show
with his incisive Lacanian reading of the film. All were rewarded by a
private midnight screening in the museum that same evening. Just as the
Matrix has proven to attract large audiences to the spectacle of digital
technology, one is struck by net_condition's ability to motivate
audiences to the spectacle of electronic art. The museum's visitors are
encouraged to touch, feel, and experience the art in a way unprecedented
at other art museums. Some visitors surf the web. Others sit on couches
and read. Kids have fun playing video games. Artists work in the
medialab. Curators come and go. And the museum thrives as a vital public
space.

Net_condition runs at the ZKM in Karlsruhe through January 9th. Much of
the art is visible through the museum web site
(http://on1.zkm.de/static/index.html). In addition, a series of
web-accessible RealVideo files document the museum's ongoing lecture
series
(http://on1.zkm.de/netCondition.root/netcondition/thelounge/default_e).