Leonardo Digital Reviews

INTERMEDIA: alteridem.exe

Sabau, G. et al (eds.)
Vol.17, No.2 2003 (English, Italian & French)
ISSN 1453-9942 Arad, Romania

Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia)

recluse@lis.net.au

{input=1,, 'Intermedia is the magazine of the 'kinema ikon' studio in Arad, Romania'. {comments} the studio is a base for around twenty digital, multimedia experimental artists. This edition [alteridem.exe], '...is a post festum catalogue, synthetically reflecting two multimedia events...held November 2002 at the arad cultural center' (p. 01)

{input=2,, 'From the surrealist 'cadavres exquis' to the 'oulipo' experiments...the theme of the collective work [alteridem.exe] raised inciting controversies regarding the artistic work's paternity' (p. 02). {comments} apart from the catalogue/zine here being reviewed, the work has three modes: installation version, cd-rom and a virtual version which will be, 'fully reconstructed on the internet'.

{output=1,, The work of the individual artists is varied and exciting, most of it challenges notions of what constitutes digital art. The group is explicit in their defining of 'digital' as the use of the computer as a creative new medium, not using it to transfer or reconfigure analogical work into a digital medium. One of the artists, Felix Dragan explores the nature of computer code as an art form in its own right. Going behind the 'user friendly' graphic interface most of us are now used to. {comments} The work by Caius Grozav, another artist exploring programming code and art, inspired the style of this review. I had to do this in pseudo-code though, if I had used real code, say html, the review would probably have taken over Leonardo's server and created havoc on the net!

{output=2,, A number of the artists are concerned with authorship, especially in a Derridian sense. Their works address the notion of; how many authors does a digital work actually have, are not the authors of Photoshop or the machine's operating system for example, part-authors of the final (?) images? Then of course there is the new authors to be considered as interactive works change and evolve according to their inputs.
{comments} The question of authorship is most interesting, specifically because it involves an exploration of the differences between the use of a tool (say a traditional carving chisel) and other newer 'more complex' tools(?) (say Photoshop). Is the creator of the chisel equally a co-creator (author) of a sculpture as the creators of Photoshop are of a digital image? {input=3,, 'Protect Your Databody Clone it!' {comments} This is a slogan of the Swiss LAN group, Tracenoizer which is a work which aims at producing 'Disinformation On Demand', commenting on '...hiding away in a society where information [about individuals] is everywhere' (p. 31). Part of this sub-group's work is a creatively re-programmed computer car-race game where the control slips out of the user's hands. I found this work to address some very important and challenging questions, not least of which is just how much control are individuals 'allowed' in their interaction with official (eg. banking, government) on-line software?
{input=4,, alteridem.exe{comments} The group used this title because it means 'another exactly the same' combined with 'exe' (stand alone executable) = '...something compiled in 'native code' or, otherwise phrased, which flies by itself, which triggers in me the image of butterfly-pixels flying frantically in cyberspace' (p. 02).
{input=5,, Emotional Architecture '°is a leader for a larger project which will consist of two documentary movies, three video installations and a web site. The film explores the textual/human/architectural strata of the Bucharest cityscape using a guy (Pacala = one who deceives) carrying a door on his back, partly as a metaphor for the shamanic journey of discovery in the urban mutation '...which is mainly about the manipulation of concepts and people' (p. 30).

{comments} This work addresses numerous contemporary urban issues, I would love to see the finished film, apparently it will be released as a standard TV video clip. Perhaps 'kinema ikon' could post release details and availability on their web site.
{output=3,, The catalogue is a tantalizing glimpse of this cutting-edge multimedia collective of artists. Their work challenges many areas of contemporary discourse including art, technology, politics, social control and of course, virtual reality.
{comments} exciting and inspiring.

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