Opening February 11 and running through April 30, the Walker Art Center
presents in the galleries in Minneapolis and online a complex of events
that examine–and just plain play with–the intersections between art,
entertainment, the network, commerce, and life. During these three
months, the work of over 125 artists will be presented as part of:

+ Let's Entertain: the exhibition in the galleries
+ Art Entertainment Network: the exhibition online
+ EAT: Entertainment, Art, Technology an online forum
+ Sins of Change: Media Arts in Transition, Again: an international
symposium at the Walker
+ mediatheque: your source for 24 x 7 digital arts programming on the
Web
+ artwarez: cool art downloads

+ + +

Art Entertainment Network (AEN) is an online exhibition of more than 40-
Web-based artist projects that exploit the convergence of media on the
Internet in order to explode the boundaries between art and
entertainment–and daily (online) life. All these projects are designed
to be viewed, experienced, participated in, and played with online–from
Natalie Bookchin's video gamelike "The Intruder" to participatory
projects such as Mark Napier's "©bots" to new forms of narrative such
as Auriea Harvey's "An Anatomy" to Ken Goldberg and Bob Farzin's
mysterious "webcam," "Dislocation of Intimacy."

AEN is a concept portal by Steve Dietz, designed by Vivian Selbo, which
is a gateway to the projects in the exhibition as well as other artist-
created video, audio, and text works from around the Internet, featured
"24 x 7" in the online mediatheque. Like any portal, there are the
expected features from a search engine to a link of the day, except that
in AEN each of these features links to a specific artist project, for
instance, one that plays with the notion of a search engine such as
Mongrel's "Natural Selection" or a daily link, as in Maciej Wisniewski's
"Jackpot."

For the gallery installation, Antenna Design New York, Inc. has extended
the idea of a network portal into the gallery to create a physical one–
a revolving door that is a kind of portal between the physical
installations of Let's Entertain, and the online projects of Art
Entertainment Network. As the door turns, different projects "open up,"
yet the viewer/ambulator always circles back, never actually crossing
the threshold into the virtual.