Above is a screenshot of the performance Surveiller Punir “Double Contraintes Foucault” (for documentation) which I posted about a few days ago and has just finished on the Panoplie website.

Two works pointed out to me in a comment which are similar to Blogbot and Blog Bot Platform are Twittgenerator (images above of the generator and resulting Twitter account) which is granted very recent and Net.art.box (images below) which is now an amazing eight years old.

Both works are by Yann Le Guennec (Net.art.box is in collaboration with Grégoire Cliquet) and seem to fit nicely into the artists collection of network programming art intended to automate art or the role of the artist (see also). Yann also is one of surprisingly few artists who are using the longer running open source tools/environments making much of his work with php, mysql and associated libraries such as gd.

Net.art.box was a temporary installation which consisted of an open IRC channel to:

receive definitions of net.art. The IRC log is printed in real time and a webcam film [sic] this printed log and shows it on the net. The device is a feedback loop between real and virtual spaces.

As it says the installation was a feedback loop to the internet where text comments passed from the ‘virtual’ to be printed in the ‘real’ and were then streamed back to the virtual as an image in effect rendering users thought as visual art. This is not just a technical loop but also an artistic one of perception, interpretation and reaction (see Interactivity and MultiMedia Interfaces for notes on interactive feedback loops).

Twittgenerator, when entered by a user recovers users text searches from search.live.com. These are then rendered as potential twits by an imagined user, most probably the artist, which can then be logged on twitter or not.

Whats interesting about both of these works (and Blogbot) is that while automated to an extent they all need to be triggered by a user who may or may not be conscious of what is happening when they simply go to the works webpage. Blogbot Platform is the exception of the four in that it’s user, most probably a plant or animal, is not your typical network user and most definitely not conscious of the result of their ‘actions’.

This Monday (20/10/08, 20:30 Paris time, GMT+1) Pascal Lièvre and Matthieu Delahausse will perform Surveiller Punir “Double Contraintes Foucault” as part of Panoplie.org’s Double Bind series of webcast performances. The performance will involve:

Pascal Lièvre and Matthieu Delahausse, at two different places in Paris, will read the same extract of “Discipline and Punish” by Michel Foucault, each of them being equipped with an SM accessory which will make the exercise of the reading difficult.

The concept for these curated performances, a Double Bind, is a fascinating one in relation to networked forms:

A dilemma in communication, in which a person receives two or more conflicting messages, and one message denies the other; a situation in which the person will be put in the wrong however they respond, and the person can’t comment on the conflict, or resolve it, or opt out of the situation.

To view the performance on Monday go to: http://2008.panoplie.org/DoubleBind.

I’m currently teaching an undergraduate year 2 module about web based non-linear narratives and collecting a list of links to inspire the students to investigate the potential of what sounds like it should be a massive topic but is in fact tricky to find good examples of. The majority of work uses flash in a banal almost slideshow manner. There isn’t a lot of work which uses html/css/javascript, what does is very dated and more often than not half broken and very little exists which takes advantage of server side scripting, databases or any of the advantages of Web 2.0 such as mashups, ajax etc.

The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming, one of six digital fictions sponsored by Penguin books reinterpreting or paying tribute to six classics, in this case a homage to The 39 Steps by John Buchan, is one exception I found which without a doubt is the most interesting use of Google Maps I’ve seen yet. It is an adventure within Google Maps which takes advantage of the more sophisticated aspects of the Google Maps API including markers, polylines and animated routes. You would think that the idea of using Google Maps to create non-linear narratives like this was obvious but it’s the only example I can find.

Some related texts, Google Maps and ‘real’ / ‘virtual’ intervention and
Google and Art: A commercial / cultural new media art economy?

Originally seen on Networked Performance.

Some work from Bluescreen, a long running French net.art collective (I think, information is scarce) who have held firm with continuing to develop a vocabulary of net.art, is transversalMemory a performance involving the internet and digital photography. Similar in initial concept to the buttons element of Between Blinks & Buttons by Sascha Pohflepp however dating further back to 2004 and manifesting itself in a very different form, the latest instance of this performance was in Hua Shan cultural park in Taiwan on the 21st of August. The description of the performance is as follows:

As one takes a photograph with a digital camera, a different name is given to each photograph by the camera. The form of this name is specific to the camera model. It usually comes as a an alphanumeric characters series which includes the camera model reference and a number identifying each image. Whether they are intended to be publicly displayed, exchanged in a private or restricted context, or to be stocked, a large amount of these photographs end up being accessible on the internet…For each photograph we take, it is then possible to find on the net its twin images, that is to say photographs taken somewhere on the planet with a similar camera and bearing the very same name. The “transverse memory” performance intends to connect a photograph taken at a given time and place with its twin images collected in real time on the internet…Potential situations thus take shape, open fragments of narration carried out by the ability this process possibly holds to reveal, through the photography, a poetic and impalpable story of the place we are watching. It is only after a certain time, as we begin to sense the image through which it all started again, that we realise we had been carried away from it. We then have the strange feeling we are returning to a certain reality…