Open daily throughout the conference, the Cyber Cafe offers 25 state-of-the-art workstations (MAC and PC) for viewing artist-made web sites and CD-ROMs.

Art On The Web

Follow links from our Cyber Café home page to sites that clearly establish the web as a new art medium. For example, visit Friederike Paetzold's lush and eerie The Compound and Juliet Martin's slyly understated Can You See Me Through the Computer. Tim McLauglin uses the web to create evocative animated visual poems, while Animal With No Name's site features percussive Quicktime loops. Also check out Shu Lea Cheang's java-intensive, continent-hopping Buy One, Get One and the visual pyrotechnics of Aureia Harvey's ENTROPY 8 site.

NYFA Computer Arts Fellows

Shu Lea Cheang
Buy One, Get One
http://red.ntticc.or.jp/HoME/javahome.html
Shu Lea Cheang's cyberworks stimulate cross-cultural communication and collaboration, using computer- programmed interactive systems to bring installations to virtual life. Cheang's most recent installations connect to Web-site technology: Bowling Alley (1995) links a Minneapolis bowling lane with the Walker Arts Center and a bowling site in cyberspace; Elephant Cage Butterfly Locker (1996) displays data from the U.S. military base on Okinawa via radarweb, and commemorates U.S. military offenses against the Okinawan populace. Currently Cheang is engaged in Brandon, a Web project relating the story of Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon of Nebraska, while also allowing access to various time-based, interest-shared Net communities.

Auriea Harvey
ENTROPY8
http://www.entropy8.com
"People approach the Web with their own sets of preconceptions. I use the it as a forum for experimentation and feedback, as well as a means to explore interactive imagery and discover new ways of expression and exhibition. My Web site, ENTROPY8, conveys the personal and intimate qualities of art in a confined space, while making my works, thoughts and images publicly available to an international audience in an effort to open minds to the value of beauty and ugliness in the world. ENTROPY8 is about experimenting with where art and technology overlap, complement, and collide....This is only the beginning of what I hope will evolve into a lifelong effort to create and document art, life and the world around me."

Prema Murthy
Web Site
http://www.thing.net/~mimic
Prema Murthy examines the shifting boundaries of a gendered (socially constructed) body by remapping its surface through various new technologies. She explores these new forms of gender embodiment in her performance-based installations and digital prints. She has shown her work and performed at various spaces in New York City, including The Clocktower Gallery, the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre, the Bronwyn Keenan Gallery and the Alternative Museum. More recently, Murthy has collaborated with the art group Floating Point Unit on installations designed to be viewed both physically and online, using new forms of broadcast technologies.

Friederike Paetzold
The Compound
http://www.databass.com/friederike/the_compound/index.html
"I believe the advantages and limitations of a web site (non-linear progression from one image to the next, the circular paths of reference into which the viewer falls, as well as the evanescence of the on-screen images like those of the imagination) parallel the mechanics of the memory and desire, and can evoke what is otherwise an elusive and highly subjective state of mind. My web site piece, The Compound, is a meditation and extended metaphor on 'the state of desire.' The fictive location portrayed in the piece consists of three buildings, each housing a linked series of images inspired by medical drawings and natural history tableaux. The user can navigate at will through the compound and conclude whether the place represents a resort or a penitentiary or both. Ideally, I would like my viewer to happen across my site by accident sometime late at night when he or she is most susceptible to the oblique and evocative."

SVA's Fifth Annual New York Digital Salon

Amy Alexander
The Multi-Cultural Recycler, 1996-7
http://shoko.calarts.edu/~alex/recycler.html
Surveillance cameras at sites around the world send their views toThe Multi-Cultural Recycler, which combines the images into a multi-layered collage. One can juxtapose Manhattan with Stockholm and someone's bathroom. Alexander's website stores images which can then be resurrected and combined with other old or new sites. - Kirsten Solberg

Animal With No Name
Sampling Space, 1996
http://www.flyvision.org/SI/AWNN/SS/index.html
Visit Sampling Space and visit a site that actually economizes its bandwidth needs. This site points to one of the more frustrating aspects of the world-wide-web -- time wasted while waiting, uselessly drumming fingers on the desktop. It also considers the possibility that ambient electronica can be meditative. By using the smallest element from which a loop can be made, the sample, this piece provides, even for users with slow connections, on-screen events. In this piece based upon delays and correspondences, the user is invited to play with sounds and animated images. - KS

Marlena Corcoran
Worst Case Scenarios, 1996
http://www.interport.net/~xaf/wcs/index.html
The web version (there is also a MOO version) of Worst Case Scenarios is a collection of short musings. Corcoran describes a worst case scenario as a form of collaborative imagining, where one asks another (or herself, for that matter) "What's the worse thing that could happen?" Response in hand, one feels confident and safe, knowing what to expect. Yet, Corcoran points out that in feeling safe one is, in fact, "trapped in one's own folly. For there is always something worse, and it will come a surprise." This piece was inspired by Arpanet, the origin of the Internet, which was intended to maintain communications should the worst case scenario happen to the United States military. Read more about this piece in the artist's essay in Leonardo.- KS

Lora Dibner
Roses Grow as Roses Go, 1996-7
http://www2.sva.edu/hereandthere/lora/rosesgrow/index.html
In Roses Grow, the artist retells the story of her coming to grips with the painful deterioration and ultimate death of a parent. With vivid characters the artist shows a talent for story-telling. Each character's emotion seems palpable. Although the web may seem at times cold and distant, the artist is able to convey her suffering and understanding with great facility. - KS

Juliet Martin
Can You See Me Through the Computer?, 1996
http://www2.sva.edu/threads/juliet/seeme/index.html
In this piece Martin examines the new and different relationship one has with a dynamic, digital work of art. In what she calls the Bionic Dialogue, the user, the computer and the work of art all interact. She sees the computer as more than a communications tool because it supplements the user's ability to comprehend the work. Can You See Me Through the Computer? has four different components: oooxxxooo, Drowning Girls Are Sexy, A Witch's Work is Never Done and cocktails. Each component engages the viewer at various levels of this dynamic dialogue. She discusses this concept more thoroughly in her artist's statement in Leonardo. - KS

Tim McLaughlin
Threw the Read Window, 1996
http://www-nmr.banffcentre.ab.ca/Artists/tmcl/index.html

Sonya Rapoport and Marie-Jose Sat
Brutal Myths, 1996
http://www.lanminds.com/local/sr/brutal/index.html
Brutal Myths examines myths about women and specifically about the perpetuation of the myth of the evil female temptress or femme fatale. - KS

Jacques Servin
Beast, 1997
http://www.sva.edu/salon/salon97/servin/Beast/index.htm
In Beast, Servin looks at the aesthetics and content, or lack thereof, of the world-wide-web and the takeover of technology. He is particularly critical of the web, a medium that depends upon "the utter transience of attention" and the support of commercialism. Servin presents two opposing approaches: he allows the reader the feeling of being in control as he reads, but then will periodically subvert the hypertext medium by inserting jarring messages that take over the system's functions. - KS

Keren Tzur
Rachel, 1997
http://www2.sva.edu/threads/keren/rachel/index.html
In this piece Tzur recounts the story of her grandmother. Rachel is a provocative epic of the life of a female Jew who championed feminism and challenged traditional conventions in a strongly resistant environment. The artist's love and respect for her grandmother comes through in this elegantly handled work based on the words of the grandmother. - KS

Andrea Zapp
Last Entry: Bombay, 1st of July, A Collaborative Travel Log Through Time, Space and Identity, 1996
http://www.fh-brandenburg.de/~zapp/lastentry/index.html
Zapp presents the story of a multifaceted, multi-gendered flaneur. She based her piece on Virginia Woolf's Orlando. The world-wide-web provides an excellent metaphor for time travel and is a place where one can hide one's true identity. In the anonymous space of the web, a male can pose as a female, a female as a male, old as young and vice versa. - KS

Andruid Kerne, Francis Kofi and Melissa Lang
Coded Messages: CHAINS, 1996
http://cat.nyu.edu/chains/index.html
Communications technology -- the Internet, satellite television, global networks -- , the great liberator, makes it possible for humans from remote locales to engage in open communication and dialogue. Or so we would like to think. What exactly are our means of communication, and how much dialogue is really possible? We meet our brothers and sisters in Ghana in the intercultural interface ecosystem of the World Wide Web site Coded Messages: CHAINS to explore our points of contact and test the chains of multinational capitalism that bind us all. We begin our journey into CHAINS by raising Trinh T. Minh- ha's metric: "Who speaks? Marginality: who names? whose fringes?" - Melissa Lang

Other Destinations

Our Cyber Café home page also offers links to other sites that can lead you further into the world of online art:

The Foundation for Digital Culture http://digicult.org seeks to promote and support digital culture and art on-line. Its site provides links to 16 member organizations that feature artist projects, resources, news, discussion, commentary, and community building. You can find the work of artists at adäweb, artnetweb, PLEXUS, and Postmasters Gallery sites, among others.

Turbulence http://www.turbulence.org features work from established and emerging artists that explores the specific characteristics of the Web, making use of multimedia and online technologies such as RealAudio, Java and VRML. Its purpose is to provide artists with the opportunity to explore the medium and create substantive new work. Works range from hypertext stories to hypermedia works, and may be music-driven, sound-driven, text-driven, graphics-driven or any combination of the above. Artists currently featured on the site include Diane Bertolo, Annette Weintraub, John Neilson and Helen Thorington.

ArtsWire is an online network of artists, arts workers, arts organizations and arts funders, providing the arts community with a communications network that has, at its core, the strong voices of artists and community-based cultural groups. You can follow a link http://www.artswire.org/artproj.html to many of Arts Wire member artist sites.

Sharing Sites

While at the conference, feel free to ask Café volunteers to assist you in bookmarking your site, and browse the sites of other artists and organizations attending the conference.