Listen and Repeat by Rachel Knoll is a modified megaphone installed on a mountain in Washington state.

Social media is used to connect but concurrently serves as a disconnect from social life outside of the virtual world. In Listen and Repeat, a modified megaphone uses text to speech capabilities to recite tweets composed with the tag ‘nobody listens’ from the social media website Twitter. The megaphone…dictates tweets to an audience of trees.

For similar work see Untitled (Singing Tree) by Peter Coffin.

Webcam Venus by Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia is a performative work as comparative study of the nude in classical fine art and internet webcams. The artists describe the process as follows:

Sexcams use webcams and chat interfaces to connect amateur adult performers with an audience. Users log on to see men, women, transsexuals, couples and groups broadcast their bodies and sexuality live for the public, often performing for money. To create this experiment in high and low brow media, we assumed anonymous handles and spent a few hours each day for a month asking performers: “Would you like to pose for me?”…We—like all guests in the cam rooms—only type in limited but sequential lines of text in a chat scroll. The performer can either interact via typing text lines which appear in the chat scroll along with our comments, or speak directly to guests in audible voice. The majority of performers do not speak, even though many have a microphone broadcasting ambient sound like background music. If they respond at all—a lot of hours spent being ignored—we start discussing the pose. We show them an image, either through asking them to do a Google search, or a URL we paste in the chat line. Sometimes we make our avatar profile pic the pose we want so they can click on it directly. They pose, holding for 30-60 seconds. They take direction from us to “correct” their pose. The webcam became the image frame. The performer’s bedrooms or kitchens or bathrooms became the backdrop to these new works and mash-up of histories.

GIRLS vs. _root by Addie Wagenknecht is a browser add-on (in development I think), which highlights p2p (peer-to-peer) male dominated culture.

Why? There is a death of women contributing to open source software. This plugin is presented as a “filter” to challenge assumptions about gender roles in software, and to “rewire” your brain. The actual goal is to present such a ridiculous “plugin” that people get frustrated and start a deeper discussion and argument about gender and open source…Currently the add-on works by replacing every username on sites such as github.com with a female username (example: Sarah212) and female avatar. Additionally, Pirate Bay becomes ‘Princess Bay” and the typical breast laden-porn ads while searching are replaced ads for ‘David Beckham for H&M’.

To contribute code to the project visit the GitHub repository.

Tempo by Marie-Julie Bourgeois, Luiza Jacobsen, Rémi Bréval and Julien Brévalis:

a mosaic of sky in real time. Webcams from around the world set the sky and broadcast live images. By reversing the usual vision of the Earth seen from above, this installation offers an instant map of the sky. The work takes to beat the rate of rotation of the Earth and the sun becomes the reference point and the center position at the height of the installation. Tempo appears as an environmental monitoring, in which the viewer becomes the guardian
of heaven.

Purge by Brian Lobel, is a durational performance which took place in London, England (July 7 – 10, 2011) for 22 hours and Kuopio, Finland (September 27 – October 1, 2011) for 20 hours. The artist spends one minute describing and defending his 1400 Facebook friendships to strangers in a public space. At the end of each minute, three people from the audience voted on who would be kept as a friend and who would be deleted.

Purge addresses where online friendship stops and real friendship begins (and if this is a distinction that is possible or important). In 2010, Brian discovered that his deceased ex-boyfriend and best friend, Grant, had deleted him from Friendster (a pre-Facebook networking site), which neither had checked since they stopped dating in 2006. Although they had since re-‘friended‘ in life (both virtually and non-virtually), it was the discovery of this past de-friending (and impossibility to ‘reconnect‘ since Grant’s death), which inspired Brian to create Purge in 2011.

Below is a recording of a lecture on the performance.

Originally seen in the International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, Volume 8, Number 2.