A friend of mine told me about a work entitled Parasite (shown above) almost a year ago and I remember looking at the site at the time but since had completely forgotten about it. Being awarded an honoury mention for Ars Electronica this year reminded me of the piece by Frédéric Eyl, Gunnar Green and Richard The and its connections with a previous Ars Electronics Honorary Mention in 2001,

Prototype Schmarotzer (Parasite) (shown above) by Frank Fietzek (which I previously wrote a short write up on netartreview in 2003).

Both works share similarities with a performance by Stelarc again entitled Parasite, Event for Invaded and Involuntary Body (shown above) first performed in 1997 and discussed at length in the Ars Electronica of that year which fell under the heading Flesh Factor.

While Prototype Schmarotzer and Parasite Event for Invaded and Involuntary Body (and indeed much of Stelarc’s other works) both focus on man machine relationships, Parasite focuses on relationships between existing systems and technologies, that is, underground networks and the opportunity they provide of a captive audience in a darken space with little or nothing to look at and the ease of creating mobile projection systems. This is opportunism at its best to avlow new media art to move beyond gallery spaces and integrate itself in public urban spaces.

One other work which should be noted here which has a similar means of projection (although thematically no connection) as Parasite is Daniel Sauter’s Light Attack (above left) from 2004. These opportunist projection works seem to be the logical progression from the work of Imi Knoebel in the early seventies entitled Projection X (above right) which was recently shown as part of the 40 Years of Video Art exhibition at the ZKM in Karlschruhe.

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