Virtual Art@athica.org v.2: What I Did on My Summer Vacation

A Collection of New Media Artwork curated by Didi Dunphy

Launch Date: Thursday, August 7, 2003

Athens Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the second launch of its Virtual Art Gallery, which has been curated by Athens' artist Didi Dunphy. Ms Dunphy reviewed 40 submissions before deciding on the six sites included in Virtual Art@athica.org v.2. Please note that none of the artists will know -- until this announcement goes out -- that their sites made the final cut.

Unlike the first incarnation of ATHICA's Virtual Art Gallery, Dunphy's collection of online artwork created specifically for the Internet medium has a thematic focus: What I Did on My Summer Vacation, inspired by her recent "California Dreamin’ vacation." In the curator's own words: "The artist sites I have chosen explore travel, both actual and metaphorical. With the investigation of travel, these works consider the nature of physical site--albeit the town you're visiting or the Internet--the social and emotional study of site and sense of place. And, of course, with all travel (and net art viewing), the journey takes time, lyrical or critically self-referential. My bags are packed and I’m ready to go. Keeping in mind the theme of vacation, please visit the following sites."

1. Jorn Ebner (London, UK): Lee Marvin Toolbox (www.leemarvintoolbox.net)
The Lee Marvin Toolbox contains nine objects for orientation and navigation through existence. Its soundtrack kicks in upon opening the first window: it is a re-recorded cover version of Lee Marvin‘s song Wanderin‘ Star from the 1969 Western Comedy Paint your Wagon. The toolbox is in two parts. Its online version contains a descriptive handbook; clicking the titles or the words detail on each page opens an illustrative animation. Each animation is in itself a complex work that needs exploration as to its inner machinations of non-linear or linear narration. Each component of the online version is available for download in a slightly changed version as MP3, PDF and SWF-projector files. The work is composed of small Java Scripted windows, which form a graphic pattern on the screen in order to avoid the restrictive browser interface. (Technical Data: programming - Kenneth Kufluk & Richard Smallwood, musical production:- Alan Gregg)

2. Andrew Hieronymi (Los Angeles, US): Floating Sushi (www.andrew3000.net/floatingsushi/),
"The subject matter of the data I use in my projects is material collected or created from observation of everyday life. What interests me is to collect material from a local context that is seen through a universal visual vocabulary, such as street signs, logos, pictograms, or typography. The interfaces I have designed for my projects use for the most part basic point-and-click navigation, but I am also trying to find navigational solutions by looking at the vocabulary and construction of early videogames. When I borrow ideas from those games, I try to avoid bringing to my projects narrative elements or goal-oriented challenges. I don’t want my projects to be confused with games. In the end result, my projects offer a juxtaposition of signs, photos or texts that aim to create unpredictable visual associations, bringing forth semantic problems. These juxtapositions are displayed as a consequence of the combination of the three following factors: 1) the specificities of the interface's design, 2) the user’s own decision-making, 3) algorithms displaying data in a random manner."

3. Brooke Knight (Boston, US): An Hour of Your Time (www.altarts.org/hour)
An Hour of Your Time is an hour-long list of suggestions of activities that the viewer could be doing besides watching the piece. The suggestions flash by at a quick one-per-second rate, making it difficult to apprehend all that is written. Intended to frustrate and make the viewer anxious, there are a total of 3600 activities. The work was inspired by the inclusion of a wall clock in an installation at a Quebec museum; that clock forced one to realize how one "spends" time. Museums, like churches and casinos, are meant to suspend time, and to transport the viewer away from the constraints of ordinary space. Like those special spaces, the realm of the Internet also encourages a sense of "getting lost" in that, which is presented to you. An Hour of Your Time seeks to make that expenditure of time obvious.

4. Charles Linder (San Francisco, US): I’ll Fly Away (http://www.silentgallery.com/linder)
I’ll Fly Away, is a travel journal narrated by a series of bullet shot road signs.

3. Garrett Lynch (United Kingdom) The irreparable damage of self-realization communicated to another, (http://www.rhizome.org/artbase/9117/webpage/)
The work shows a timer counting up. A visualization of time shown coldly, and factually. The aging process/passage of time is that of my computers, the users facing the work and mine simultaneously. It is identity in virtual space by the assuming of self, realization of time and ones own age. It identifies the passage from the real to the virtual, the shared inescapable reality which exists in both of time as something nothing can escape.

5. Jon Winet and Margaret Crane (San Francisco, US): Monument (http://www.locusplus.org.uk/monument/)
In summer 2002, the collaboration launched Monument, an Internet-based project that takes a multi-faceted look at contemporary social and political life in Northern England. "Monument" investigates strategies for economic regeneration in the cities of Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead. Monument is a highly subjective portrait of a metropolitan area in transition. It obliquely comments on the ascendancy of service and knowledge-based economies since the demise of industry and mining.

The ATHICA board was very pleased when Ms Dunphy accepted their invitation to curate ATHICA's Virtual Art Gallery last spring. Ms Dunphy is a very well respected multi-media artist who has made a considerable reputation for herself in the four short years since her relocation to Athens from California. She is a part-time member of the Digital Media department at the University of Georgia where she teaches all genres of time-based art. Ms Dunphy's own work has been exhibited widely, most recently in the Art in Motion exhibition in California and the Georgia Triennial. Her upcoming show, Recess, will open at the end of August, 2003 in the UGA Broad Street Gallery. (You can view Dunphy’s web-based projects at www.dididunphy.com and www.nmi.uga.edu/art/mc.)

Virtual Art@athica.org v.2 is made technically possible by the volunteer efforts of programmer and website manager, Andy Hollingsworth. Artists interested in being notified of the next call for entries should email Didi@Athica.org. VA @ ATHICA will launch a new version twice-annually.