Turbulence and Gavin Jantjes

^{helen thorington of turbulence.org @ upgrade! johannesburg showing off net.art commissions: Shape of Song by Martin Wattenberg (that’s Jo Green on the far right, too)}

Yesterday was probably the most crowded and exciting, diverse and collaborative, Soiree / Upgrade! event Johannesburg has ever seen. There to hear a kind of biased history of net.art from turbulence, and to briefly learn about Gavin Jantjes’ plans for Trans Cape, the audience ranged from WSOA and Digital Arts students, to top-notch and rising-star artists; we had a full house! Most pleasing was the engaging and intellectual/curious dialogue that progressed, including potential collaborative links made between, not only our two presenters(!), but also most orgs and artists who wanted to be involved in future. Turb’s talk went through, among others, the following works (in chronological order, both historically and in their talk – from 1996 – 2006!):

^{helen thorington of turbulence.org @ upgrade! johannesburg showing off net.art commissions: SMS-Tokyo (Stop Motion Studies) by David Crawford}

turbulence.org – the net.art commissioning hub
networked_performance blog – Millions of visitors monthly, one of the best new media art blogs around
Grimm Tale: Chapter 7 and Grimm Tale: Chapter 10 – their first ever commissioned net.art, by my grad supervisor at ITP, Marianne Petit!
Snuff – early interactive java art that pulled content from live sites
FT2K – quirky "promise of a greater tomorrow" type net.art
Radio Stare – Beautiful, linear, non-narrative piece that pulled from live police frequency streams for its soundtrack; note that some technology on this piece is obsolete and therefore no longer working
Solitaire – random narrative constructions
Culture Map – clever mapping of how we surfed aol and yahoo! back in the day
Imprimatur – make a poster through the web, and print it offline
Shape of Song – beautiful and clever look at visualizations of popular and historical music
Secret Lives of Numbers – Golan Levin’s infamous work that charts the popularity/use of all numbers online – from zero to one million
Data Diaries – Cory Arcangel converts his RAM into video
SMS-Tokyo [1] [2] – gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous stop motion studies on subway trains in Tokyo
1 Year Performance Video – MTAA’s brilliant Sam Hsieh update that I have written about extensively on this site
<event> – slowed down and mediated news to "look at"
Tap Evol-The Setup – interactive, evolutionary visual applet that pulls from a database of tiny movies to produce odd moving imagery on the fly
IN Network – long distance relationship via a blog and podcast
Grafik Dynamo – live blog feeds creating a dynamic Lichtenstein-like panel comic strip; the images and text are a web zeitgeist!

And the list goes on… Discussion ranged from interrogations of performance, art and activism, to questions about access, influence, and surfing habits.

^{Gavin Jantjes presenting Trans Cape}

This was actually a great transition into Gavin’s presentation of his plans for what has come to be known as the kind of new mega-exhibition of South Africa, due up this September.  From the sound of it, he’s very interested in focusing on the African diaspora, contemporary African art, education and involvement of local communities, and empowerment through knowledge and creativity. Keep up to date, here. More to come….