Garden city goes digital with conference

Christchurch will play host to a spectrum of digital artists, musicians, programmers, and designers this weekend for Tending Networks, the yearly symposium for the Aotearoa Digital Arts network. Highlights include a keynote and new work presented by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, the Seoul-based masters of flash who first came to light with their cheeky, minimal work "Artist’s Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site" shown above.

Stella Brennan will be discussing her most recent work, "South Pacific", a poetic micro-narrative overlaid over satellite imagery which I've previously reviewed.


Eddie Clemens, now based in Christchurch on residency, will be talking about his Pinball Lanterns installation in the Auckland Central Library space. Douglas Bagnall will show us how to "take the tedious work of experimentation, abstraction and learning out of the process of making art" via his myriad machine creations, which range from A Film Making Robot to Te-Tuhi Videogame machine and Cloud Classifier. Finally, cyber-performance group Avatar Body Collision will most likely focus on UpStage, working between countries, and the nuances of the virtual theatre.

Full Symposium programme here.

New work on Window: Pippin Barr and Xin Cheng

This month's Online artist at Window is a selection of work from Stimulus Response, "the sprawling web-based diary of Wellington artist, writer, and game theorist Pippin Barr. From comic strips to delicate pencil drawings, interactive video works and maps, Barr chronicles the bizarre, banal, and boring in the everyday."


I've also completed a range of 'additional data' for Xin Cheng's recent show: a massive repository of texts, theses, links, and streaming audio research that provided the basis for the work shown at Window. From green roofs to gannet calls, the psychology of blogging and motorcycles in galleries, there's an array of interesting articles.

Sneak preview of Annie Bradley's "Interpulsator"

Opening on Friday at Window Online and On Site, thought we'd give you a sneak preview of "Interpulsator", a screensaver-based work by Annie Bradley. Coming to life when the system becomes idle, the piece embraces some of the conventions of the medium, while ignoring others - installing itself as traditional software but then 'failing' to save, allowing parts of the screen to burn in because the pixels are never refreshed. Annie provides additional tangents on her show page, ranging from the first digital watch to time-keeping stars (Pulsars) and hardware diagrams of LEDs. Available for PC or Macintosh systems.

Raison d'être

New media work, digital art, even the less used net.art, whatever you want to call it. This space has undergone an explosion in the last few years, as our societies and cultures get more comfortable with navigating the terrain. From performance groups in Second Life (SecondFront), to art games challenging traditional gameplay (Braid), to activist pieces taking aim at institutions (Google Will Eat Itself), work in this space is becoming more accessible to more people, with more complex, interesting ideas being incorporated.

But while there's a deluge of work coming out of the US, Australia, and Europe, New Zealand seems strangely quiet. Searching for 'digital art' brings up cut-price webdesign companies. Our core cultural site, The Big Idea, has a confusion of terms and pages which don't get updated. Other art sites, while great, focus on other areas, or ignore the space entirely. Artists, designers, coders, and writers working in the space seem isolated, lacking a central place to share ideas, a rich media hub to post projects, a collection of texts to learn from.

This blog hopes to tackle some of these areas and provide some of these resources. It's a start.