The field of contemporary art engaged with technology warrants interpretation, criticism and promotion. The articles commissioned through the Writers Initiative gives writers, as well as artists, critics and curators the opportunity to explore in-depth a diverse range of topics and develop their own language and understanding of this field. We welcome pitches on diverse topics related to new media art. Email editor at rhizome dot org.

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Repackaging Nature by John Alderman

It's easy to see Philip Ross as a recent embodiment of an age-old spirit of inquiry, where aesthetics, personal discovery, and scientific knowledge are linked, and all seem to tap into the fertile edges of local industry. In San Francisco that means computing and biotechnology, and Ross's work makes use of both. The transplanted New Yorker has a body of artwork that centers around human interaction with biological materials like fungus, plants, and mollusks. Ross was also curator of the BioTechnique exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and frequently teaches classes and gives lectures, such as one he delivered December 2 to amateur mycologists at the Oakland Museum of California.

His current projects include a long-term effort to grow a large building out of mushrooms, and a new, ongoing salon ("Critter") at the Studio for Urban Projects, a unique cultural center opened in 2008 by Alison Sant and Marina MacDougal. Ross describes the studio as "a collective of collectives," with about five or six contributing programmers, all similarly interested in ecology, education, technology and other related fields. - John Alderman

Get it? An Interview with Cory Arcangel on Comedy by Ed Halter

Humor has been a prominent but under-analyzed aspect of art in the past century; the comedy impulse is strongest in the history of media appropriation and conceptual art, beginning with Duchamp's poker-faced readymades and continuing through the work of Bruce Conner, Andy Warhol, Dara Birnbaum, Ant Farm, Jeff Koons and many others. Even the very way we talk about art overlaps with laff-lingo: we call certain pieces "one-liners," value work for being "wry" or "witty," and discuss whether or not a viewer "gets it." And of course, one of the first things someone will ask who doesn't "get it" is: "Is this supposed to be a joke?"

Cory Arcangel's work has almost always played on the logic of the joke in its construction: witness his most recent exhibit, "Adult Contemporary" at Team Gallery, which includes work like Self Playing Sony Playstation 1 Bowling (2008), an old bowling game hacked to only throw gutter-balls, and Permanent Vacation (2008 version), two silver iMacs set to email each other and exchange "out of office" messages until they fill up and crash. But the line between comedy and art more or less dissolved in Arcangel's related event at the New Museum's New Silent Series, Continuous Partial Awareness. In this stand-up-style routine, Arcangel performed an hour-long monologue by reading off a huge list of his unused ideas for new artworks, ranging from "give a boring artist's talk entirely through a vocoder" to "have intern watch Lawnmower Man 10,000 times and then make a website about all the plot inconsistencies."

At the very real risk of ruining humor by critiquing it, Cory and I meet recently to discuss the relationship between comedy and art in both his work and that of others. - Ed Halter

Interview with Lisi Raskin by Brian Droitcour

Now that progress is as predictable as an automatic software update or higher resolution in a camera phone, the idea that technological advancement holds the key to a better future -- and the fear that it could be abused as a tool of world domination -- seem like quaint relics of the 1950s and '60s. Lisi Raskin's exaggeratedly ragged, hand-crafted reconstructions of military command centers evoke the thrall such spaces held over the public imagination during the Cold War even as they reinforce the contemporary viewer's distance from that feeling of awe. Over the past year, Raskin's installations on this topic have surfaced in several locations as stages of an ongoing project titled Mobile Observation. This year's incarnations began with Command and Control, an installation at the Park Avenue Armory in February, and continued with Mobile Observation (Transmitting and Receiving) Station at Bard College's Hessel Museum of Art, for which she embarked on a road trip to military sites across the United States and sent back materials to be exhibited. Mobile Observation will peak on Friday with Tipping Point, a performance at the opening of "Soft Manipulation" at Casino Luxembourg, where the resulting carnage will remain on view through the exhibition's run. Here Raskin, who works at studios in Brooklyn and Oakland, California, discusses her newest work and how it represents a change in her perception of Cold War mythology.

Interface Aesthetics at the Dept. of Rhythmanalysis by Greg J. Smith

Interface aesthetics seem to push further into public consciousness with each passing month. Consumers are manic about multitouch and contemporary prototypes exploring gesture and performance have hinted at how we will be interacting with technology in the not-so-distant future. This considered, conversations about the desktop metaphor underlying personal computing or Aqua-style might seem archaic, irrelevant in light of emerging tangible media. This is, of course, not the case, and when excavating the idea of interface, one can dig back much further than screen-based interaction and find an extensive lineage of control panels and analog interfaces that prefigure the graphical user interface (GUI). An artist clearly invested in questioning the nature of interface and display is Kevin Hamilton, a researcher and educator based in Urbana, Illinois. Over the last several years Hamilton has been exploring the narrative potential of bare-bones interface and informational systems, quite notably through his ongoing Rhythmanalysis project.

Interview with JooYoun Paek by Tyler Coburn

JooYoun Paek builds small, object-based responses to urban life, transforming the aches and pains we customarily suffer, at the hands of the metropolis, into novel sites of reflection, social courtesy, and rest. The artist's humorous, insightful approach bespeaks her familiarity with her subject; she was raised in Seoul, Korea, and moved to New York in 2005 to attend NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Fresh from her recent participation in "Untethered," at Eyebeam, and "Design and the Elastic Mind," at MoMA, JooYoun caught up with me at her LMCC Workspace Residency studio, on the twenty-ninth floor of the Equitable Building in Manhattan's Financial District. - Tyler Coburn

From Bell Labs to Best Buy by Melissa Ragona

"PREDRIVE: After Technology" (currently on exhibition at The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA November 14-April 2, 2009) features new works by six international artists including Takeshi Murata, Paper Rad, Gretchen Skogerson, Antoine Catala, and Brody Condon. The exhibition was conceived with a very specific group of artists in mind -- artists who placed both the dysfunction and arrogance of ever-changing technologies at the center of their work. In a sense, these artists are working in the shadow of a technological dystopia (and euphoria) that had begun as early as the Industrial Revolution -- as expressed in the vacant, vectored glances mapped out in Edouard Manet's The Balcony (1868-69) or the absolute pleasure of stop-motion animation in Georges Melies' An Up-To-Date Conjuror

Below, I speak with two of the featured artists in the show, Takeshi Murata and Jacob Ciocci (of Paper Rad) -- we cover everything from readymade software aesthetics to the dream of the perfect collector -- someone willing to take the risk of simply buying an idea.- Melissa Ragona

Interview with Alexei Shulgin by Brian Droitcour

Alexei Shulgin's pioneering works in internet art are collected on his site easylife.org, but many of the links there are empty or obsolete; one called Insanity Notification sends visitors to a site indicating that Shulgin went insane at an unidentified point in the past. It has been more than five years since Shulgin left the online environment to focus on the production of tangible, marketable objects. His collaboration with Aristarkh Chernyshev began in 2003, and two years later the artists founded Electroboutique a gallery-slash-gadget shop selling distorting screens and other high-tech toys. Shulgin and Chernyshev called it "Media Art 2.0," and wrote a manifesto saying the plug-and-play nature of their new work liberated them from a "media art ghetto," adding that their manipulation of familiar screen-based interfaces contained a nugget of criticality. Their work was recently featured in "Criti Pop", an exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (along with interactive installations that Chernyshev made in collaboration with Vladislav Efimov). - Brian Droitcour

Interview with Mitchell Whitelaw by Greg J. Smith

Mitchell Whitelaw is an artist and writer with interests in digital ontology and generative systems. His work and theory are invested in a close reading of the networks and tools we engage on a daily basis and questioning modes of representation. Whitelaw is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Communication at the University of Canberra and he also authors (the teeming void), a blog on generative and data aesthetics. In this interview conducted by Greg J. Smith, Whitelaw discusses his recent work and contextualizes several of his writing projects.

Inside Machine Project by Ceci Moss

Machine Project, since its inception in 2003, has grown to become one of those mythic, playful and gloriously idiosyncratic spaces -- on the map alongside destinations such as the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the City Reliquary, or the Pirate Store at 826 Valencia. An interdisciplinary non-profit art space run out of a storefront in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Machine Project host events and exhibitions, which span lectures on the aesthetic cultivation of bacteria to a 3 day banjo performance in their front window. I interviewed founder Mark Allen about his involvement with the space and some of their upcoming projects.

Interview with eteam by Marisa Olson

eteam is the New York-based duo of German artists Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger. In 2008 they received a Rhizome Commission for their Second Life Dumpster project in which the levels of consumption and disposal typically occurring blindly in the virtual world are manifest in the form of an ever-evolving garbage heap composed of deleted items tagged with a decay script by the artists. This exploration of the social life of spaces and systemic behavior within them is an interesting follow-up to their incredibly ambitious International Airport Montello project in which, after purchasing a piece of land in rural Nevada on eBay for the sum of US$1, they created an airport employing locals -- which they call "an impossible machine, which is perpetually in motion and sometimes on strike." Despite flying a handful of art world insiders there (putting commissioning organization Art in General's curators to work as flight attendants), eteam worked to underscore Montello's outsider status. The contested frontier between the so-called real world and spaces and cultures operating at the edges of constructed reality provided a nice point of comparison between Second Life Dumpster and International Airport Montello in this interview with the artists.

Action, Reaction, and Phenomenon by Nathaniel Stern

In his book, Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi calls for "movement, sensation, and qualities of experience" to be put back into our understandings of embodiment. He says that contemporary society comprehends bodies, and by extension the world, almost exclusively through linguistic and visual apprehension. They are defined by their images, their symbols, what they look like and how we write and talk about them. Massumi wants to instead "engage with continuity," to encourage a processual and active approach to embodied experience. In essence, Massumi proposes that our theories "feel" again. "Act/React", curator George Fifield's "dream exhibition" that opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum last week, picks up on these phenomenologist principles. He and his selected artists invite viewer-participants to physically explore their embodied and continuous relationships to each other, the screen, space, biology, art history and perhaps more.

Fifield is quick to point out that all the works on show are unhindered by traditional interface objects such as the mouse and keyboard. Most of them instead employ computer vision technologies, more commonly known as interactive video. Here, the combined use of digital video cameras and custom computer software allows each artwork to "see," and respond to, bodies, colors and/or motion in the space of the museum. The few works not using cameras in this fashion employ similar technologies towards the same end. While this homogeneity means that the works might at first seem too similar in their interactions, their one-to-one responsiveness, and their lack of other new media-specific explorations -- such as networked art or dynamic appropriation and re-mixing systems -- it also accomplishes something most museum-based "state of the digital art" shows don't. It uses just one avenue of interest by contemporary media artists in order to dig much deeper into what their practice means, and why it's important. "Act/React" encourages an extremely varied and nuanced investigation of our embodied experiences in our own surroundings. As the curator himself notes in the Museum's press release, "If in the last century the crisis of representation was resolved by new ways of seeing, then in the twenty-first century the challenge is for artists to suggest new ways of experiencing...This is contemporary art about contemporary existence." This exhibition, in other words, implores us to look at action and reaction, at our embodied relationships, as critical experience. It is a contemporary investigation of phenomenology.

Structure over Style by Caitlin Jones

In recent years numerous exhibitions have been mounted on the subject of "art and music." The Chicago Museum of Art's 2007 show "Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967" was an excellent example that explored the cultural and social crossovers between art and music and the stylistic effects they have had on each other. "Looking at Music," a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (curated by Associate Curator of Media Arts Barbara London), also looks at these cultural synergies but illuminates them further by focusing on the structural and theoretical connections between not only music and art, but also writing, filmmaking and performance. By starting in the early 1960s, the show focuses on a time when the very nature of art was in flux, new forms of writing were emerging, new technologies were pushing the boundaries of moving image and sound recordings, and social attitudes about self expression and gender were radically changing the cultural landscape.

Interview with Astria Suparak by Lauren Cornell

Astria Suparak took the position as Director at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in Spring 2008. This fall, she begins an ambitious calendar of exhibitions that includes a solo show by artist Julia Christensen and a retrospective of the prankster-politico collective, the Yes Men. Before this position and a stint at the Warehouse Gallery in Syracuse, Suparak developed her distinctive style as an independent curator; from 1998-2006, she developed touring packages of emerging video and new media works and took them on the road, stopping at Museums, highschools, film festivals and dime stores, introducing audiences, mainly in the US and Europe, to a new generation of artists working with the moving image. One show was in collaboration with this interviewer entitled Fail Better. This interview took place over email before her fall calendar at the Miller Gallery began and sketches out a curatorial career that went from toting video and film prints in a suitcase to more rooted practice.

Conflux 2008 by Patrick Ellis

This past weekend, Barcelona-based artist Liz Kueneke offered a cloth map of Manhattan to passing downtown crowds, inviting them to sew, as roads and icons, their daily routes and personal events onto what amounted to a communal quilt. This may sound quaint in the age of Google Maps, and the legion of amateur cartographers it has created, but such a project would not exist without Google: people's lived landmarks were seldom considered of interest prior to online mapping. The implied value is that our interior, local maps are as worthy as the Mercator. Kueneke's map, "Manhattan's Urban Fabric," formed a fraction of the cartography, art, talks, performances, and "situations" included in this year's Conflux, the sole arts festival devoted to psychogeography. (Conflux was at one time categorical about its subject, and was called the Psy.Geo.Conflux, but the affixes have since been dropped.) "Psychogeography" -- still a nebulous term that proceeds unrecognized by the standard dictionaries -- here encompasses a great scope of projects, from futurist utopianism and street art to anarchist rhetoric and Situationist homage. With over four hundred submissions, it is not surprising that one of the curators described the selection process as "chaotic." Another divided the works at the festival broadly into categories which either "read" or "wrote" the city, and further, into analog or digital creations.

Report From Ars Electronica 2008: A New Cultural Economy by Jonah Brucker-Cohen

In it's 29th year as the one of the most important media arts festivals in the world, Ars Electronica 2008 focused on trying to make sense of the economic and social realities of a "knowledge-based" society, where limits of intellectual property and aging copyright laws are beginning to lose relevance in an increased international atmosphere of open systems, sharing information across networks, and collective artistic action and utility. This year's theme was "A New Cultural Economy", a vision of the present and future that imagined cultural and artistic exchange and remixing as a key indicator of the success of current and future generations. Through this 6 day festival, events ranged from conferences, exhibitions, performances, to student exhibitions such as a wide range of projects from the University of Tokyo entitled "Towards a New Horizon of Hybrid Art."

Interview with Kevin Bewersdorf by Gene McHugh

In this interview, conducted by Rhizome Editorial Fellow Gene McHugh, artist Kevin Bewersdorf discusses his philosophy toward surfing the web, the spiritual dimension of his work and his upcoming show "Monuments to the INFOspirit" at the New York gallery V&A.

Interview with Marta de Menezes by Luis Silva

Marta de Menezes is a Portuguese artist working at the intersection between art and biology. Last year, Menezes founded Ectopia, an experimental laboratory and artist residency housed at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Oeiras, Portugal. The program fosters collaboration and discussion between the Institute's scientists and participating artists. In this interview, conducted by Rhizome Curatorial Fellow Luis Silva, Menezes discusses her experience with Ectopia and her larger body of work.

Tools of the Trade: Justin Downs on "Playing the Building" by Justin Downs

Tools of the Trade is an ongoing feature on Rhizome. Here, we invite artists to discuss the nuts and bolts behind their projects. Justin Downs worked with David Byrne in the design and fabrication of his Playing the Building installation for Creative Time (on view until August 24th). Below, Justin discusses how the work was created. Justin is an independent fabricator and a recent graduate from NYU's ITP program. His website can be found here.

OTHER "CONVERGENCES": Hans Jenny and Carsten Nicolai Explore Cymatics and Synesthesia by Thomas Bey William Bailey

As any techno-cultural aficionado will enthusiastically tell you, the 21st century is the century of "convergence", in which the communications industry progressively rolled out its own rendition of the Swiss Army knife: pocket-sized, hand-held, wireless devices which function simultaneously as movie and music players, mobile phones, gaming engines, internet connectivity devices, still image and video cameras, musical instruments, calculators...with so many functions now capable of being handled by little equipment and energy expenditure, visions of the future both Utopian and dystopian have flown off the shelves at a hitherto unprecedented rate (and wireless electricity is just around the corner as well.) Prophesies abound that this synthesis of communicative modes and cross-pollination of technological functionality is a stepping stone towards realizing some kind of fully-integrated Übermensch; eventually our ability to communicate with and comprehend each other will accelerate to the point where humans morph into sophisticated telepaths. More grandiose yet, there are the fantasies of some ultimate "awakening" along the lines of the "Omega Point" suggested by rogue priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, an ultimate synthesis of human intelligence with cosmic consciousness- the inventor Ray Kurzweil calls the same "universal awakening" phenomenon the "Singularity," albeit with a much more technophiliac gloss to it.

Thinking Global by Ed Halter

This summer, the Whitney mounted a major exhibit on Fuller's life and work, Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe, on view through September. The show features a variety of Fulleriana, arranged in chronological order, allowing for a roughly biographic experience: sketches, architectural models, concept designs, numerous looped clips from the 1971 documentary The World of Buckminster Fuller, maps and diagrams, original publications, and a 12 foot high cardboard geodesic dome built for the exhibit. Though largely a show about architecture, Starting With the Universe presents Fuller as a revolutionary and visionary thinker who worked, as he put it, "comprehensively," across disciplines, and a forerunner of 21st century environmental design and networked culture.