"We crash your browser with content."
Screenfull.net… I’ve never heard of a more appropriate description for anything… in my life. The creators of this site claim that they’ve created a webpage with so much media on it that it will literally overload your computer. Upon navigating this site, I found this statement a tad bit exaggerated, although they’re not far off. Instead, it successfully overloads the viewer’s senses until they feel they’re about to experience their first epileptic seizure.

Co-created by jimpunk and Abe Linkoln, hailing from France and the United States, respectively, this collaboration is a multimedia project that attempts to break the conventional forms of art, of net art even, and display as much stimulation to the viewer as possible, maybe in hopes of actually overwhelming the audience.

The site covers many different topics, and while the pictures and sounds may sound abstract, they actually all have reason to be there. Some of the issues that are brought to attention here include war (specifically the war in Iraq), politics, religion, and even net art and the future of that idea.

One of the ways that the authors of this site tackle these topics is through the use of rendered pictures and remixed sounds and songs. They are integrated together through varying technologies to blend the site into one big mess of social unrest. By using flash animations, looping video clips, hypertext, wav files, and even pdf’s, the user is shown through multiple ways exactly what the authors’ viewpoints are on certain subjects.

This different ways of displaying their media also allows for interactivity between the viewer and the creators, as well as between the viewer and the page itself. At Screenfull.net, the viewer can manipulate the page a variety of ways. They can turn the sounds and songs permitting from the page on and off with a simple click (although you do have to scroll through the mayhem to find the right button, which is lost in the jumble of images and videos), click up above and listen to radio clips used on the page in a popup, leave comments for the artists, click on hyperlinks to other articles and media projects, and even view the contents of the whole page in a pdf format in hopes of understanding the site without the screaming sounds and intense flashing colors bombarding you at warp speed.

This example of multimedia is way outside the box, even by net art standards. It blurs the line between reality and fiction by using recognizable images and sounds and editing, cropping, and remixing them into barely recognizable thoughts and ideas. It is a global experience as well, on more than one level. First of all, the creators themselves are from opposite sides of the pond. Many of the comments are in varying languages too, which leads me to believe that people of different backgrounds and geographies are visiting the site. By allowing these viewers to leave comments, the site also becomes a collective experience in this way.

I believe this site successfully captures Ted Nelson’s idea of creating a virtual space where memories and ideas can be stored and organized for the masses to view. Nothing captures this idea better than a blog, which is essentially what Screenfull.net is. It is their thoughts and ideas shown through the use of videos, songs, and images. The knowledge displayed on their site is truly a “vastly cross-tangle of ideas,” which branch off into thousands of directions.

David Ross explained it best by saying what every blogger and net artist loves to hear: “It’s fun to be able to change things on a whim.” That is exactly what these two artists do every day on this site.

Overall, this site is extremely multimedia packed. Although it lacks order or any real design, it is this very fact that makes the site interesting. It is so over the top that it drew my attention and kept me wondering what all is contained within the site's pages. It seems as if the old saying is true. Only those artists that truly understand the rules of design and art are allowed to break them. In this case, the artists must really have known their stuff, because they quite possibly broke every design rule ever invented.

Note: Please also visit these sites to further encompass the ideas and backgrounds of these artists and their projects.

Rhizome.org
Netflix
Realtime

posted by Magz @ 4:42 PM

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To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: [-empyre-] SCREENFULLy missing
From: //jonCates <joncates@criticalartware.net>
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 16:48:56 -0500
Delivered-to: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
In-reply-to: <001f01c57a7f$cc2ddc40$0a02a8c0@roblaptop>
References: <001f01c57a7f$cc2ddc40$0a02a8c0@roblaptop>
Reply-to: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>

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i want to login + register a few [comments/thoughts/emotions] on this month's discussion, the collaborative work of abe linkoln + jimpunk aka SCREENFULL, the performances of identity that have occurred here [in/on] empyre + elseware [in/on] facets of the hyperthreaded listservosphere.

in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition the "footage" is a mysterious viral new media meme creeping across the internet in lil bits n chunks of video, forming uneasy metanarratives. these video downloads are obsessionally interwoven into the lives of the main characters as they attempt to unravel the secrets of the footage: origin, meaning, maker(s), etc... those that follow the footage are known as footage heads + often inhabit 2 opposing + polarizing ideological camps. these camps are the Completists (i.e. Mama Anarchia) who believe that the footage is being [sliced/spliced] from an already existing + finished work w/the chunks being released slowly + the Progressives (i.e. heros Cayce Pollard + Parkaboy) who believe that the work is being created progressively or incrementally rather than representing moments in an already completed project, arc or narrative. the Completists + Progressives meet, discuss, flamewar + share footage on a fictional forum www site called "Fetish: Footage: Forum" aka "F:F:F" that hosts their conversations + exists as their communal cultural platform, their nonlocal networked home.

i just read Pattern Recognition in early May, picking up a paperback ed in LaGuardia while rtn'ing to CHI IL .US from NYC NY .US. the novel engrossed me + i read it w/a sustained hunger. <---// WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD //---> when i came to the concl of the book i was wonderfully disappointed in that perfect way that you want narratives to continue endlessly. perhaps this feeling is intentional on Gibson's part, a way of self-replicating feverish obsessions the characters feel for the footage. @ the concl of the book, Gibson reveals most (if not all) of the secrets of the footage. in doing so he slightly shifts the positioning of the Completists as villains + the Progressives as heros. the Progressive heros Cayce + Parkaboy were correct about their Progressivist theories on the footage. their immediate online enemy Mama Anarchia, in the overtly + overly theoretically motivated camp of the Completists, was fabricating a fantastically ornate tapestry of lies in various postmodern theoretical + critical dialects, modes + references incl'ing Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Jameson + Habermas. these fantastic lies were smoke-n-mirrors, a distraction to complicate their search for the truth.

as others have noted in reviews of Pattern Recognition, Gibson directly addresses postmodernity by discussing Tommy Hilfiger fashions in rltn to Cayce's allergy to branding + in Cayce's experience of the "mirror-world" reflections + refractions of NYC NY .US in LND .UK, Tokyo .JP + Moscow .RU. but in the current context of this post, i am more interested in the inclusion of the character of Mama Anarchia who speaks fluently in postmodern discursive modes. toward the concl of Pattern Recognition Gibson reveals that Mama Anarchia is a puppenkopf (German for "Puppet head") controlled by the villainous character Dorotea Benedetti + articulated by her theory-soaked translation pawn, an unnamed "graduate student, in America" (00). Gibson incl's lil of Mama Anarchia's actual posts but refers to a large + intricate volume of posts, mini that are weaponized in flamewars w/Parkaboy, a Progressive hero of Pattern Recognition.

in the unwritten discursive space of F:F:F, Mama Anarchia's postmodernist language + referents are in the service of the Completist view of the footage. Gibson positions the collaborative of Dorotea + the unnamed American graduate student aka Mama Anarchia's hollow, postmodern academicized theory as a ventriloquist act. this performance of identity is socially constructed in, on + thro the online forum F:F:F. the explanation of this performance of identity on page 325, is a brief but incisive view into a critique that Gibson fwds while shaping + dfn'n his characters. the character of the unnamed anonymous American graduate student is itself a {template|[puppenkopf/puppet]} for the wooden recital of academic languages that line reality tunnels (01) like reinforcing girders that support mine shafts. i am choosing this mine shaft imagery carefully to dirty up, invert + multiple the ivory tower metaphor that so often is used in this kind of comment or conversation. i am also using imagery that digs in order to address digging as dissing, i.e. in the form of personal attacks vs. digging as grokking, i.e. in the sense of developing a deep understanding.

the language lining reality tunnels is often exclusionary as the tunnels brach off further + further from main arteries that are heavily travelled. the use of such exclusive language can be critiqued as elitist. the academic elitism that the usage of the term "ivory tower" refers to connects to discursive modes, dialects + references thro limiting or @ least judging the validity of "voice" on the grounds of scholarship, i.e. academicized {grokking|geeking out}. to grok (02) is to become part of or 01 w/, to be included in a knowledge [domain/body] completely + intuitively. perhaps the intuitive aspect of grokking can take place instantaneously + immediately. scholarship is in itself an academic {concept|construct} or theorypractice. as a [domain/area of activity] scholarship takes time + is often characterized by slow knowledge building processes of reflection, examination, analysis, development, etc... also, scholarship (like a taxonomical subclass or subgenre of art making, i.e. artware) appeals to specialists or ppl w/particularized [tastes/interests]. thin [lines of demarcation/fissures/layers of ice] separate specialists, obsessives + fetishists. w/o pathologizing, i suppose these lines are best measured in degrees of functionality.

as a functional fetishist of specialized knowledge [domains/bodies], i can personally relate to the obsessive compulsive Cayce Pollard in her search for the footage as well as her sense of belonging [in/on] F:F:F.

@ the concl of Pattern Recognition as Gibson reconciles or @ least complicates the Completist + the Progressive views on the footage, he reveals the footage to be the work of a singular artist (read genius -> read hi-modernist myth) who uses appropriates found + original material to create the footage. this artist, a character named Nora Volkova, samples, retouches, remixes + reconfigures elements into the footage. Nora makes a lil @ a time (validating the Progressive view) + her sister Stella releases those bits as videos, tracking their movements across networks as viral meme-like media files. Nora is constructing a larger shape w/a perceptible pattern that the videos form @ a mysterious metalevel of their structure. the making of meaningfulness
culminates in a pattern that is recognizable to Cayce Pollard, made visible thro a literal + figurative network of metanarratives, fragments, codes, clues, hacks, bits + bytes of new media. this plot element reveals invalidates the Completist view of an existing finished work but does support a kind of completism that shares a [kindred spirit/connection] to {concepts|constructs} such as the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk or total art work that originates from + articulates a {purified|heroic} singularity of unity in the artist + in the conception + realization of the work (i.e. the artist's vision). Nora also exists as a profoundly contemporary version of the Romantic artist as lone visionary working in complete solitude to create an expressive reality that is perceptible + inhabitable to her audience, namely Cayce, thro the project of the work itself. in this art myth, Nora is herself also a mystery, her inner world is inaccessible to everyOne + anyOne w/o the entryways opened by the footage. when Cayce asks Stella if the footage amounts to a linear narrative Stella remarks on the mystery of the Nora's future development of the footage saying "Who knows? Nora? She does not say." (03)

i have bin subscribed to abe linkoln + jimpunk's SCREENFULL RSS feed since 2005.02.10 + have bin [aware of/following] their individual + collaborative work for way prior to dat. i have struggled w/SCREENFULL + my own responses to the RSS feed or blog art version + the HTML'd web art version. my responses have bin similar to Gibson's description of the Completists vs Progressives arguments in Pattern Recognition. i assume the process of SCREENFULL matches the Progressive position on the footage, meaning that SCREENFULL seems to be a collaborative stream of consciousness being generated just before release rather than far in advance. SCREENFULL also seems responsive, the stream of consciousness forking in relation to ongoing conversations, external stimuli + environmental new media [art-worlds/listservosphere/blogosphere] conditions. like a realtime [performance/system] these fluctuations enhance the experience of the work + create entry points.

in terms of performance, experiences + entryways, abe linkoln + jimpunk position SCREENFULL as "STADIUM ROCK NET.ART" (04).
the inclusion of net.art in their description is an odd choice to sample from the bin of new media art taxonomies. the much [announced/decried/denounced/hystoricized] birth + death of net.art aside, SCREENFULL is clearly not about the constraints or intentions that have bin defined by the self-definitions fwd' by those who [claimed/created] the net.art category. Stadium Rock is a similarly mismatched term. large venues, inflated egos, massive sound systems + light shows characterize Stadium Rock. the 1970's Stadium Rock scene involved rising ticket sales + ticket prices that fueled this bloated, fantastical + narcissistic genre. oppositionally, punk has bin hystoricized as a response to the pretentiousness of Stadium Rock. punk (@ least in part) incl's a return to Garage Rock sensibilities mixed w/Situationalist [artforms/politics] of disruption + the DIY ethos of unschooled improvisation (in the sense of make-do-with-whatever-you-got-ness). punk is small + immediate. Stadium Rock is huge + distant. abe linkoln has a mohawk on his appropriated head + jimpunk has got punk in "his" name as well as in "his" approaches + projects. all of the above, make SCREENFULL as "STADIUM ROCK NET.ART" hard to swallow unless you take this "STADIUM ROCK NET.ART" status as a form of sarcasm. bitter? biting? perhaps.

bitter sarcasm is sumTimes in itself difficult to swallow, so i will be perfectly sincere about SCREENFULL. like a Gibsonian Completist or a tattered hi-modernist, i wonder self-consciously what SCREENFULL adds up to [+/or] if it is supposed to add up to anyThin @ all. is culmination a viable standard for understanding if not judging SCREENFULL as a [work/project/piece] of new media art? is the {concept|construct} of culmination or even a gradual accumulation of meaningfulness too romantic a framework for interpreting the fragmented irony, embedded sarcasm + postmodern theorypractice of SCREENFULL? is meaningfulness as an artistic value important to jimpunk + abe linkoln? is SCREENFULL nihilistic? anarchistic? apocalyptic? discordian? does it have the politics of punk or the vanity of stadium rock? both? neither? none of the above? who knows? abe linkoln? jimpunk? SCREENFULL? they do not stay + they do not say.

this month on empyre will end in a few days during which i will finish packing up my apt + mv to a new neighborhood. when i get to the new apt a new convo will have started on empyre. perhaps a summer project will have taken shape on the .microsound listserv. the _arch.ive_ list will continue probably hum + buzz w/the snd of {de|re}-compiled codeworks. artists will go into residency [in/on] NetBehaviour + make work work which will be [distributed/discussed] onList. the listservosphere will continue to bubble up in my inbox like the hyperfolded + foamy bubbleverse it is. the blogosphere will continue to grow, spin + fill my feedreader. i will continue to engage in both, QWERTYing + coding entries. the month of June 2005 will pass out of existence (in sense of active discussion) on empyre + into the archives + w/this [passage/transition] we will have lost a few moments or opportunities for exchange that could have lasted lifetimes between those who left, i.e. jimpunk + abe linkoln. maybe i am being romantic in my academically induced summertime, but i will miss June 2005 [in/on] empyre + miss the opportunities for digging into discussions i was looking fwd to.

as jon.satrom wrote on empyre a year ago (05) quoting the late Phil Morton, early video artist + innovator (to connect w/ terms of privileged criteria + the recent thread on hystorical determinations of value) in his last post to empyre during May of 2004: "PEACE/ASCESIS"
// jonCates
CHI IL .US

00: "Puppet-head. A graduate student, in America". That is how i am able to be the Mama." - Dorotea Benedetti (p. 325)

data.src:

title: Pattern Recognition
dvr: William Gibson
format: book
edition: paperback
page count: 384 pages
publisher: Berkley
date: 2005.02.01
lang: ENG
ISBN: 0425198685

01: "Reality Tunnel is a term coined by Timothy Leary and popularised by Robert Anton Wilson. It refers to the concept that with a subconscious set of filters formed from their beliefs and experiences, everyone interprets this same world differently, hence "Truth is in the eye of the beholder". The individual world each person occupies is said to be their reality tunnel."

data.src:

title: Wikipedia
dvr: various
format: wiki
uri: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel

02: the term "grok" was coined by author Robert A. Heinlein in the sci-fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land.

data.src:

title: Stranger in a Strange Land
dvr: Robert A. Heinlein
format: book
edition: Hardcover
publisher: Putnam Adult
date: 1963.04.01
lang: ENG
ISBN: 039910772X

03: page 312 of data.src 00

04: data.src:

title: SCREENFULL.NET > STADIUM ROCK NET.ART
dvr: abe linkoln
date: 2004.08.27
time: 06:23:27 PM
format: [invite/ann/email msg/Rhizome.org post]
uri: http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=14343&text=27409

05: data.src:

title: [copy/hack/bend] it right
dvr: jon.satrom
date: 2004.05.31
time: 13:26:45 -0500
format: [-empyre-] post
uri: https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2004-June/msg00000.html

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This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and MHonArc 2.6.8.

Building an Australian networked future

Melinda Rackham

Abe Linkoln and jimpunk, screenfull.net: the book (www.screenfull.net) (2005)

We all know what slippery commodities innovation and creativity are. Despite the establishment of comfortable centres of excellence and well-resourced educational institutions, the ‘it’ factor often elusively springs, like a pop up window, from left field. After all, networked art itself first emerged in the gaps and margins of the military and educational internet and our first generation of Australian net artists like Francesca da Rimini, Ian Haig, Garry Zebbington, Mez, Graham Crawford, John Tonkin and myself, were all self-taught. In the mid 1990s it was a necessity to be innovative with online practices, and artists had the excitement and advantage of working in the uncharted territory of a fresh media.

A decade later things have changed. The net has been through a period of exponential growth, conformity, and inevitable bust. Now the network is firmly established as a way of life, disillusionment has been dusted off and more sustainable practices are emerging. But is innovative networked art still emerging locally and globally today?

Innovations

The answer is yes, and screenfull.net (www.screenfull.net), a collaborative blog which starts by promising the viewer "we crash your browser with content", is one example. It doesn’t actually crash your browser, but it does confront the viewer with raucous and chaotic content, forcing a re-consideration of the multiple narratives with which we engage each day. This is not safe, clean, bland web design–it breaches good taste and sensible research practice, looking beyond the familiar to create its own rules of engagement.

The artists responsible–jimpunk (France) and Abe Linkoln (USA)–know their stuff, rigorously mashing theory, humour, hybrid-media immersion and larrikin impudence. Linkoln’s previous curatorial projects display an intelligent understanding of, and inquiry into, the unique qualities and decade long history of networked art. Likewise jimpunk smartly exploits the Rococo potentialities of HTML, JavaScript and Flash to create sites that give you a scary and exciting media-rich roller coaster ride unlike anything you’ve experienced online before.

This generation of artists grew up with the network and are often being educated by experienced online practitioners. One of screenfull.net’s authors is a graduate student at Colorado University’s TECHNE practice-based initiative. The program was instigated by veteran net.artist Mark Amerika and encourages investigation into the complex and intuitive processes that revolve around emerging forms of knowledge in networked digital culture. The students built the course website, curate shows and conduct interviews with global practitioners, creating works for real world consumption rather than classroom assessment. In fact screenfull.net was recently recognised as the Graduate School’s top research project over the usual winners from physics and engineering. When network art is positioned as a discrete discipline, retaining its unique language and strengths, rather than being squeezed into a scientific model, then an environment is created where innovation can be recognised and fostered.

Locally we are implementing similar strategies, such as Integrated Media Practice taught by Adrian Miles, himself the creator of the video blog or Vog, and Jeremy Yuille at RMIT. This course ensures students are multi-literate in network and software, utilising blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, and conducting collaborative research in an ongoing wiki (server software allowing users to freely create and edit web page content using any web browser). The crucial innovative factor is that students learn to operate within a network rather than learning to design work for networked display.

These focused but flexible environments encourage experimentation, and most importantly acknowledge failure as a crucial part of the innovation process. If we continually operate from a position where funded projects must have successful outcomes for the recipient to be re-funded, then spectacular failures from which innovative work often arises will be swept under the carpet. When research projects jealously guard their Intellectual Property, others waste time and money examining similar issues. We need visionary direction to nurture openness in our educational and research cultures. Mature policy makers understand that the creative process is playful, involving the sharing and breaking of things to create newness.

Lo schermo è ipertrofico, sovraffollato, traboccante. Zeppo di scritte, immagini, video e link colorati. La finestra del browser è talmente bersagliata di codice che crasha inesorabilmente. Sconfitta. Abbattuta sotto i colpi di centinaia di istruzioni confuse e sovrapposte.
D’altra parte, il crollo era non solo previsto, ma minuziosamente predisposto, promesso (o forse dovremmo dire minacciato) da Jimpunk e Abe Linkoln, autori del progetto Screenfull. Net artista francese tra i più longevi e fantasiosi, da sempre interessato all’indagine sulle dinamiche e sulle estetiche dell’errore tecnologico, Jimpunk annuncia da subito la propria mission in cima all’home page: “We crash your browser with content”, facciamo collassare il vostro browser per eccesso di contenuti. E alle sue finestre moltiplicate e lampeggianti, agli scroll infiniti, ai link impazziti e agli script schizofrenici si aggiunge per l’occasione l’ironia tutta postmoderna di Abe Linkoln, misterioso artista che marchia le sue operazioni con un logo inconfondibile: un ritratto di Abramo Lincoln in perfetto look punk, con tanto di cresta.

Links
Screenfull.net
Leggi l'articolo intero su Exibart.com

Per una volta i contenuti non scarseggiano. Anzi, sono decisamente troppi. Così tanti che il browser non li contiene e crolla. Sconfitto da troppe immagini, troppi video, troppi link. Due net artisti esplorano l’estetica del collasso. E sfidano il vostro computer…

link correlati
www.screenfull.net
www.linkoln.net
www.jimpunk.com
www.eyebeam.org/reblog

valentina tanni

[exibart]

Date: 4.22.05
From: Melinda Rackham <melt2()pacific.net.au>
Subject: Screenfull.net: THE BOOK

Tempted by Screenfull.net's promise: "we crash your browser with content"

I clicked. I waited. I hoped. I prayed . My screen stuttered and
jerked--but disappointingly the browser didn't crash.

What it does do though is get slower, allowing gaps and rips to appear in
the usual illusory fabric of the seamless internet as the space fills with
raucous and chaotic content. Appearing before me is an art work that breaks
the daily tedium of grazing over cloned and sanitised blog interface
design--those sorts of creepily nice blogs that make me shudder on the
inside with their readable, balanced, cutesy, clean, neat, artless, self
conscious, logical, and organised versions of blandness.

So, okay, I may be a bit cynical after a decade online, but is there
anything wrong with wanting to be thrilled? With craving entertainment? With
desiring to be jolted from my often near comatose screen behaviours of
browse, click, copy, delete, send. And thankfully Screenfull.net does all
that. When the net is looking more and more like a corporately fortified
instantaneous push media, Screenfull is a timely reminder that the internet
is a public space, a theatre of disparate dialogue in multiple and
asynchronous formats, dumbed down only by lack of imagination and the
unchallenged conventions of HTML.

Our protagonists are artists jimpunk and Abe Linkoln--personas who both draw
on iconic associations with disparate and powerful US cultural historic and
animated figures. Together their strength is in working across the history
of networked art, design, aesthetics and theory in this remix of the
phenomenal blogging paradigm. The latest manifestation of Screenfull.net is
grounded in psychedelia and code work, with the seedy cycling and stuttering
of a background colour change JavaScript, producing an atmosphere akin to
flashing broken neon of a 1970's night club. It completely refreshes with
mashed media formats -- TV grabs, print posters, Paris Hilton, Flash
animation, in-process Photoshop files of art historical imagery, and
QuickTimes.

Screenfull is completed with a radio blog--Radio Sounds--which in true
Dadaesque manner, squishes more random cut-up bytes down the internet pipe
to our desktops. But what is really fascinating here is Screenfull.net: THE
BOOK--Guns, Duchamp and Magnetic Lassos. This delightfully illogical
extension of the blog online diary format (heralded as the liberator of
journaling from the page) loops their fulsome screen content back into the
usually serene and sedate corporate .pdf-- paper page based print format.

At last, with THE BOOK, Abe and jimpunk's promise eventuated and the
multimedia content crashed my .pdf viewer. Woohoo!! But it was only alerting
me I needed a long overdue upgrade. Downloaded and upgraded I start to
explore the work.

This formatting tempts me to decode the work into a fixed liner narrative as
screen content is hermetically sealed into discrete page packets with page
numbers. No hypertextual linking here, just numerical jumps and rapid
scrolls. I now very badly need to impose meaning. Will the magnetic lasso
draw threads between this work and the Duchampian forfeiture of the Dadaist
game of art for the equally fascinating strategy of chess?

The thematic of THE BOOK revolves around the almost blasphemous possibility
of shooting our screens, killing our art and our audience, canceling our
connection. I recommend viewing with Auto Scroll . . . however page numbers
are very helpful locators. You can catch the artists with guns blazing on
pages 20 and 21. The money shot can be viewed on pages 46 and 47. Here the
lasso traces an outline of a bullet hole in glass, the glass we have seen in
the previous few images of guns represented both on computer screens and in
front of computer keyboards. But the magnetic trace renders this image as
the memory of an event past, or the faint and unspoken desire of the present
which can never be fully realised.

This lasso aesthetic, and it continual use thought out the site and book
remind me of the lacy translucent outlines present in many paintings of the
French Symbolist Gustave Moreau. Moreau's strange fusing of human and
inanimate objects, his disregard for the conventions of size and
perspective, and his opium dream landscapes of inward sensation and
contemplation place him as a forerunner of surrealism. His use of the
spidery overlay rendered in the paint technology of the mid to late 19th
century, and Screenfull's image processing lasso overlay, give both bodies
of work a quality of simultaneous surface and depth, of being at once in
creative process and post-operative autopsy.

As well there is a lot of smirky-smart doubling and splitting in these
portrait/landscape papers/screens. The use of images from a landscape
oriented screen, split in half and placed on consecutive portrait oriented
.pdf pages, which most likely will never be printed out and read together is
intriguing.

Print it and you miss Screenfull's competitive soundtracks and QuickTime
content; don't print it and the images are cut in half, forcing you to
recombine the split images in your head. It's almost like an anaglyph--a 3d
red/blue overlapping split image. Different right eye image + left eye image
+ glasses = let the brain do the interpretation work. Except they are not
like that at all, they are consecutive rather than overlapping. However the
associations are flowing freely, and isn't that what successful art is all
about? It gives you an immediate hit, as well as leaving you to ponder
afterwards.

Linkoln's previous art curatorial works certainly do that with their
rigorous mix of simplicity and humour. A Thousand Plateaus re-examines the
mountainous graphical stats for net art sites; Net.art: Those that Can't
Teach Do is a cheeky listing of well know artist/educators' course outlines.
His linear blog remix of Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back From the War
turns Manovich's prime example of a new media logic of addition and
co-existence replacing the cinematic logic of replacement (p 324), back into
a logic of temporal replacement plus (rather than instead of) co-existence.
Recently Linkoln's curation of Pop Up at Turbulence.org, complete with a Pop
Up Manifesto exuding self-evident gems like: "4. Pop up windows neither pop,
nor up.", displays an intelligent and maturing engagement with the unique
qualities of net worked art.

Our co-author, jimpunk, is a talented and elegant artist who capitalises on
the Rococo potentialities of HTML, JavaScript and Flash to create sites of
infinite variability, detail and unending surprise. His works have been
perfectly described by Tricia Fragnito as "a web version of a roller coaster
ride: scary and fun and at the end you want to go again." In true networked
style, jimpunk often works collaboratively across geographical space, and
produces sites which exploit the unique experience of net browsing. He
embraces the pixel and what some would call "bad web design" using web safe
colour, pop up and flashing graphics in works like
www.-reverse.-flash-.-.back-; and in one of my favourites the now offline
www.nowar.nogame.org. Although his breed of network art may have had an
early Jodi-esque influence, we can see from the intimate and poetic musing
of 1n-0ut [meditation], it has grown up to be distinctively "jimpunk."

Scrolling around the Screenfull site, with Radio Sounds open in another
window, I am reminded that even though THE BOOK is a tightly thematic
curatorial collection, the bastard space of the network from which it is
comes is a chaotic, asynchronous, competitive, market place. It babbles with
recombinant, disjunctive, atmospheric content - designed not to be seen not
from a single authoritative cinematic perspective, but to be engaged with at
many levels.

It is for this reason web will emerge as the dominant media of the 21st
century, and as cinema did in the 20th century, it both builds upon and
differs from all that has come before. Networked space's most immediate
lineage is in what Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark call "Distance Art."
The activities of telecommunication art--from mail art, sound and radio art,
telematic art, assemblings and Fluxus as well as distributed textual
authorship. Artists and authors working in these distance fields challenged
the stability of the art production and distribution models of the 1960's
and 1970s, so that when the net emerged, new aesthetics were already in
process.

Authoring art in symbiosis with an evolving electronic communications
systems, means working with an as yet largely unknown language. Right now
artists are connecting half visible dots to form a rapidly shifting template
of the future.

In less than a decade aesthetic sensibility has radically altered--7 years
ago, in 1998, when net.artist's were universally obsessed with making tiny
fast clean files and web pages with no more than 4 text lines of text on
screen, the now deceased Estonian web artist Tiia Johannson was making
massive web works of sometimes single images. Puzzled, I asked her why, and
her reply (made even more dramatic by her fabulous Marlene Dietrich accent)
was the foretelling "I like to make them wait."

If jimpunk & Linkoln want to make us wait while they stuff our browsers with
content, we will wait. It is in small shudders of expectation; those sudden
shocks; those intimate reminders of packet rhythms, that make Screenfull, in
all its format manifestations, succeed. It is both flexible and fixed;
distributable and located; doubled and traced; embracing full content and
empty potentiality. For me the characteristics of risk taking and shape
shifting, together with the rigours of knowing ones medium and a sense of
larrikin humour, define networked art. In the words of Johannson--on the
Network "you have to be plastic to survive."

______________________________

Abe Linkoln: http://www.linkoln.net

Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark (eds), At a Distance: Precursors to Art
and Activism on the Internet, MIT Press, 2005:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10451&ttype=2

1n-0ut [meditation]: http://www.jimpunk.com/1n-0ut/

jimpunk: http://www.jimpunk.com

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, 2001:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=8830&ttype=2

Pop up: http://turbulence.org/curators/popup

Radio Sounds:
http://www.screenfull.net/stadium/2005/03/screenfull-radiosounds.html

Screenfull.net: http://www.screenfull.net

Tiia Johannson: http://artun.ee/~tiia/netproject/

THE BOOK: http://www.screenfull.net/THE_BOOK_2.pdf

Tricia Fragnito, This is your Browser on ):mpun<, BlackFlash mag,
2004/02/27 :
http://www.blackflash.ca/

Wow. Screenfull. Net.Art. I need an advil...

...

The SCREENFULL dudes started off their reBlogging gig at Eyebeam politely enough, but total chaos now rules. My browser actually just crashed--you're advised to let everything load before attempting to scroll. I keep thinking of Jerry Lewis in Hardly Working ("essential late Lewis..." Cahiers du Cinema), a walking disaster who can't keep a job. He's rinsing glasses at a bar that's just hired him, staring at the exotic dancer's leg above him on the counter, trying to control himself, but you know by the end of the scene he's going to be grabbing the leg screaming "I LIKE IT! I LIKE IT!"

Recognition: Correction

On February 09, 2005 I wrote:

Look, See is not an artblog as that label is coming to be understood: a weblog about art; it is instead a place for an art practice. And that is what makes my weblog different than, as far as I can tell, any other weblog.
This not entirely true. At the time I wrote this I had already known, thanks to Tom Moody, for several months about abe linkoln's and jimpunk's Screenfull, another weblog which is an artwork, a web space in the weblog format-- regular posts in reverse chronological order-- totally devoted to being an artwork, not a place about art:

Screenfull is a media mashup, a collision of borrowed (stolen) images, video, and audio that have been cut and torn and jammed back together, maybe in the mode of Brion Gysin's and William Burroughs' cutups, not to mention Schwitters and Rauschenberg, Negativland, Bruce Conner and Jess, and Superbad. But Screenfull had slipped my mind, or I had blocked it out, perhaps because even though Screenfull is a work(s) that takes a form I know well and understand, it is not exactly my cup of tea any more.

Not to take anything away from abe, jimpunk, and Screenfull, to be sure, but the pop quotation, the smirking ironic comment, the technique of ripping five things into several pieces and reassembling them into something raw and casual, just isn't something that interests me a lot as an artist; I see that in my past as juvenile, puerile, mean-spirited, and obvious.

This assessment does not mean, however, that I don't check in with Screefull a couple of times a week. And you, dear reader, might consider doing the same. Turn up the volume!

I have added this text as an update to the February 9, 2005 post.

Posted by chrisashley at 12:27 AM

http://www.nettime.org/pipermail/nettime-ann/2005-February/001707.html

<nettime-ann> [ann] RE:view the base case (?) of Re: RHIZOME_RAW: rh:zome Subject (# of texts)
jonCates jcates at artic.edu
Wed Feb 23 21:04:51 CET 2005

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 @ 21:55:44 -0600, jimpunk wrote:
>Subject: <nettime-ann> [link] SCREENFULL ( D:gest) <title>todos
somos screenfull</title>

this SCREENFULL ( D:gest) formatted nettime-ann includes an ann of the
"rh:zome Subject (# of texts)" project. a few hours before this ann
went thru nettime-ann i sent the following [msg/txt] [thru/to] the
platforms + listservs that the "rh:zome Subject (# of texts)" project
addresses, i.e. Rhizome.org + o-o as well as related systems, i.e. the
rhizome-list Yahoo! Group:

"On Feb 19, 2005, at 1:20 PM, jimpunk wrote:
>http://www.screenfull.net/stadium/2005/02/rhzome-subject-of-texts.html

announcing the "rh:zome Subject (# of texts)" project. as of the
writing of this [msg/txt] "rh:zome Subject (# of texts)" includes the
the following features:

"rh:zome Subject (# of texts)" includes a txt msg: "PLEASE DO NOT
CL!CK" as an alt tag to a code snippet that self-referentially links
to the "screenfull stadium rock net.art" show @:
http://www.screenfull.net/stadium/

++ includes links to:

http://del.icio.us/screenfull

++

http://del.icio.us/LaBoiteEnValise

that utilize del.icio.us profiles to [promote/distribute] projects +
pieces. LaBoiteEnValise in particular relates to earlier threads on
Rhizome.org about the remixological, newMedia, digitalArt, Duchamp +
chess.

++ screenfull Splash scrs 3, 2 + 1. -> do these Splashes reference
Rhizome.org's alt.interfaces "a series of alternative interfaces to
Rhizome's archives of text and art." (0) ?

++ links to + appropriations of blogger.com + feedburner.com imgs +
functionality, the most participatory of which allow comments to be
added to the work.

all of these elements combine to create a highly self-referential loop
through process or loop back test that {branches|bounces} off of
Rhizome.org threads, discursively hyperthreading to multiply, connect,
decenter + circulate the subject of "rhzome-subject-of-texts". as such,
"rh:zome Subject (# of texts)" functions rhizomatically as rhizomeness
is described by Gilles Deleuze + Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia as quoted by Rhizome.org in Rhizome.org's
About Us. (1)

this remix of the "PLEASE DO NOT" threads traces back to the ongoing
"PLEASE DO NOT SPAM ART" project by trashconnection as sent to
RHIZOME_RAW from www AT trashconnection.com. trashconnection's "PLEASE
DO NOT SPAM ART" positions spamware as artware + allows usrs of the
"PLEASE DO NOT SPAM ART" system to construct + send spam msgs as an
ongoing + open process. the "PLEASE DO NOT SPAM ART" posts handmade
spam msgs to addressees selected by the usr of the system + also CC's
those msgs to the o-o Mailing List. the o-o Mailing List is described
as:

" o-o is an experimental mailing list for net art and it's theory. Also
for providing information about electronic art, technology and events."

data.src:

title: >>>> info o-o
dvr: o-o
uri: http://www.o-o.l

Date: 2.20.05
From: //jonCates <joncates@criticalartware.net>
Subject: the base case (?) of Re: RHIZOME_RAW: rh:zome Subject (# of texts)

On Feb 19, 2005, at 1:20 PM, jimpunk wrote:
>http://www.screenfull.net/stadium/2005/02/rhzome-subject-of-texts.html

announcing the "rh:zome Subject (# of texts)" project. as of the
writing of this [msg/txt] "rh:zome Subject (# of texts)" includes the
the following features:

"rh:zome Subject (# of texts)" includes a txt msg: "PLEASE DO NOT
CL!CK" as an alt tag to a code snippet that self-referentially links
to the "screenfull stadium rock net.art" show @:
http://www.screenfull.net/stadium/

++ includes links to:

http://del.icio.us/screenfull

++

http://del.icio.us/LaBoiteEnValise

that utilize del.icio.us profiles to [promote/distribute] projects +
pieces. LaBoiteEnValise in particular relates to earlier threads on
Rhizome.org about the remixological, newMedia, digitalArt, Duchamp +
chess.

++ screenfull Splash scrs 3, 2 + 1. -> do these Splashes reference
Rhizome.org's alt.interfaces "a series of alternative interfaces to
Rhizome's archives of text and art." (0) ?

++ links to + appropriations of blogger.com + feedburner.com imgs +
functionality, the most participatory of which allow comments to be
added to the work.

all of these elements combine to create a highly self-referential loop
through process or loop back test that {branches|bounces} off of
Rhizome.org threads, discursively hyperthreading to multiply, connect,
decenter + circulate the subject of "rhzome-subject-of-texts". as such,
"rh:zome Subject (# of texts)" functions rhizomatically as rhizomeness
is described by Gilles Deleuze + Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia as quoted by Rhizome.org in Rhizome.org's
About Us. (1)

this remix of the "PLEASE DO NOT" threads traces back to the ongoing
"PLEASE DO NOT SPAM ART" project by trashconnection as sent to
RHIZOME_RAW from www AT trashconnection.com. trashconnection's "PLEASE
DO NOT SPAM ART" positions spamware as artware + allows usrs of the
"PLEASE DO NOT SPAM ART" system to construct + send spam msgs as an
ongoing + open process. the "PLEASE DO NOT SPAM ART" posts handmade
spam msgs to addressees selected by the usr of the system + also CC's
those msgs to the o-o Mailing List. the o-o Mailing List is described
as:

" o-o is an experimental mailing list for net art and it's theory. Also
for providing information about electronic art, technology and events."

data.src:

title: >>>> info o-o
dvr: o-o
uri: http://www.o-o.lt/post/

o-o, which "PLEASE DO NOT SPAM ART" connects to via
[CC'ing/porting/piping] data to, also features a
"spam.it option" that can be used (anonymously or w/any available
identity including 01's own) to fwd msgs to various related other
platforms + listservs that address newMedia art theorypraxis, such as
list@rhizome.org.

while i love the horizontal spread of the "rh:zome Subject (# of
texts)" project + the ethic of appropriating [+/or] remixing while
porting [+/or] piping a conversational data set from 01 src to another,
i wonder if the flatness of "rh:zome Subject (# of texts)", in terms of
the engagement it presents as options, doesn't close the feedback loop
to closely to the surface. "PLEASE DO NOT SPAM ART" remains open to the
abyss of spamware as a system that can be utilized artistically. the
o-o Mailing List multiples those options while also targeting specific
discursive platforms such as Rhizome.org. the Rhizome.org "PLEASE DO
NOT" threads function as a playfull insider's games for those [in/on]
the Rhizome.org platform who are familiar w/trashconnection's "PLEASE
DO NOT SPAM ART" project + announcements. will "rh:zome Subject (# of
texts)" open this system? will "rh:zome Subject (# of texts)" further,
widen, deepen [+/or] flatten the conversation? + while these questions
circulate, looping through these networks, awaiting remailing,
expansion + comment, i also wonder if "rh:zome Subject (# of texts)"
offers or mobilizes critique of the systems that are @ play
with[in/out] of the project, or if such an intention exists in this
mutual recursion... (?)

// jonCates
2005.02.20
CHI IL .US

(#) referents:

(0)

data.src:

title: alt.interface
dvr: Rhizome.org
format: various
uri: http://rhizome.org/interface/

(1)

data.src:

title: About Us
dvr: Rhizome.org
format: php, txt + img
uri: http://rhizome.org/info/index.php

<--! NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION EXCEPT ON RHIZOME.ORG WEBSITE AND EMAIL
LISTS. !--->

// jonCates
edu: http://www.artic.edu/~jcates
collab: http://www.criticalartware.net
projs: http://www.systemsapproach.net/
blog: http://newmedianowandthen.blogspot.com/

http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?31093

mbs asked about the rave video stills (here and here, and thanks to Maciej for reBlogging them). Studio !K7 marketed the X-MIX tapes as veejay tools, I'm guessing, as well as for home consumption. Not all of the ones I photographed are !K7--for a while I was collecting "home trip tapes" so there are others sprinkled in--but the X-MIX vids are indisputably the most creative. They started out fairly primitive (visually) in the early 90s and as the label got more established as a techno hub they grew more elaborate. The computer videos augment what are basically mixtapes by famous DJs. An audio track crossfades into another track and an accompanying visual also fades. Each vid goes with a particular song and they don't recur elsewhere in the mix.

As I mentioned, some of it's cheesy and some brilliant. The level of technology closely tracks the movement from flatness to realistic rendering in the gaming world--I suspect the (mostly European) video producers worked in both worlds. So one finds much wireframe modeling--bugs, babes, robots--mixed in with shimmery, vertiginous psychedelic effects. And cartoon characters with glowsticks and pacifiers. The best vids are the most layered: where you sense the artist trying to work like a drum and bass musician, really mixing stuff up. If only more computer art was this conscientiously mashed up and wild. SCREENFULL comes close to this sensibility--although jimpunk and Linkoln are more art aware and less about fast-lane club kid sensation.

From my neat, gallery oriented presentation it might look like I'm selling these appropriation photos. That's not really my objective. I'd want to get clearance from the artists and labels before I make a buck off them, so as a practical matter I'd say it's a private project published on the net that puts "art brackets" around works for popular consumption. The photos are pretty dry and "connoisseur-y" compared to the videos.

- tom moody 2-17-2005 2:41 pm [link] [add a comment]

THANKS, JUST LOOKING
by Chas Bowie

This is So Last Year: The Best of 2004

www.screenfull.net --Claiming to "crash your browser with content," screenfull.net is the only truly brilliant piece of internet art I've ever seen. Combining the aesthetics of early Nam June Paik videos, Lightning Bolt's dissonant sonic fury, and late '90s Y2K hysteria, screenfull is the new techno-psychedelic wasteland.

http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?30321


TOM MOODY WEBLOG TOP TEN 2004

1. Site Specific Art is Dead; Long Live.... According to this text from the year 2035, the dinosaur finally died when artists ran amok in the Saarinen airport terminal; meanwhile, the small mammals of wireless and GPS-based art stirred at Spectropolis 2004 and the psy.geo.CONFLUX.

2. Diana Kingsley at Leo Castelli. This artist's subtle humor has been evading the New York art world for years. The New Yorker is the latest not to get it.

3. Ross Knight at the Sculpture Center. More art too subtle for Saltz and the other pros.

4. The Infinite Fill Show at Foxy Production. Full disclosure: I was in this show (along with 92 other artists). Then I wrote about it online. And kept writing about it.

5. Four-way tie: Banks Violette at Team, John Parker at Front Room, Joe McKay at vertexList, Paper Rad at Foxy Production (and online).

6. Loretta Lux. Powerful images of ideal children combine painting, photography and digi-manipulation, made even more meme-worthy by resizing at a web-friendly 300 x 300 pixels.

7. Chris Ashley, Jan - December 2004. Abstract painter moves to web, uses your browser to make paintings, blows away competition.

8. SCREENFULL, July - December 2004. If Sigmar Polke were in his 20s today and/or Richard Prince surfed the net instead of painting, I'm convinced this is what he/they'd be doing. If only it could be commodified...

9. Michelle Handelman in Bryant Park. The performances were memorably quirky, the summer day was beautiful, Bryant Park was beautiful...

10. Duncan Hannah at JG Contemporary/James Graham & Sons. Weirdly affectless Hopperesque work by one of New York's best painters, whose work has long been too subtle for...oh never mind.

Honorable Mention: The art world's efforts to end the Iraq War and throw the current bums out of office, even though both have so far failed.

- tom moody 12-18-2004 1:25 pm [link] [1 comment]

http://www.fluctuat.net/blog/article.php3?id_article=893


Cette notice aurait pu s’appeler les Dieux du stade, les Rois de la pop ou les Kamikazes du plein écran. En attendant, c’est tous les jours dimanche et demain a étrangement lieu aujourd’hui... Samedi donc, (soit hier ?), le stadium est plein de pogos et de fureurs, bref jimpunk et linkoln, en trois posts, malaxent et remixent tout ce qui fait l’actualité médiatique de la journée pré-dominicale : slashdot, retagg et DJ Splash One ont de quoi donner du grain à mourdre à tous les Rebloggueurs du monde. Une non-réponse définitive à la question qui tue : "C’est quoi, un weblog ?", comme nous le rappelle l’avertissement de Bitchmagazine ? Allez savoir... Bonne journée !

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