[from: El Pais / Ciberpais, (Spain) Thursday, January 11, 2001

reviewed by Roberta Bosco + Stefano Caldana]
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Tribes Gallery Exposes the
Panorama of Net.art
at the Dawn of the New
Millenium
New York exhibition reunites artists who use the network.

by Roberta Bosco + Stefano Caldana

The state of creation on the web.  "Dystopia + Identity in the Age of
Global
Communications" reunites artists who have pioneered net.art.  The
exhibition, at
Tribes Gallery in New York, "...reflects the two poles of thought:
visions of death +
destruction, to positive representations of a world that began believing
in its
potentialities", according to its curator, Cristine Wang.

"Artists at the beginning of the 20th century embraced the notion of the

all-encompassing role of art: the profound belief in the ability of art
to effect change.
Almost one hundred years later, into the new millenium, we have seen the
effects of
this utopian vision: the failure of modernism and its various
permutations on a global
basis" explains Wang.

Andy Deck presents the anti-militarist piece "Progressive Load" and Mark
Amerika its
ironic "How to be an Internet artist", its pseudo-autobiography, that
"tries to
demonstrate how the industrialists of dotcoms who have swollen the
market are the
true net.artists".

"Street Action on the Superhighway", a project by Natalie Bookchin,
represents the
different spaces opened up between art / activism / the streets / the
network: "The
internet has become another cheap, fast and ductile material in the
hands of the
artists."

The concept of the exhibition is evident in works like "Ocean Landmark"
by Betty
Beaumont, a created virtual world utilising vrml technology (Virtual
Reality Modeling
Language) located 40 miles beyond New York Harbor. It is itself, both an
underwater
sculpture on a massive scale: 500 tons of an industrial waste product
made of
processed coal-waste, a potential pollutant that has undergone a planned

transformation into a flourishing ecosystem: a poetic vision 70 feet
below the surface,
on the floor of the Atlantic Continental Shelf.

The minimalist "Silence" by Olga Kisseleva focuses on that which we
cannot see at
first site.  Unlike most works of net.art that bombard the viewer with a
flow of visual
and sonorous stimuli, like the impressive and politicized "The Days and
the Nights of
Dead", by Australian artist Francesca da Rimini; in order to discover
the beauty of
"Silence" one must know to be patient and watch the screen as things
evolve over
time.

Among the most provocative works, stands out the porn film "IKU" by Shu
Lea
Cheang (an artist from Taiwan, living in New York). After a large
trajectory of work
in video art, Cheang first came to prominence in the net.art world with
"Brandon",
the first project commissioned for the Guggenheim Museum website, based
on the
transexual news story that served as the basis for the film "Boys don't
Cry".

Present are some of the "masterpieces" of the history of net.art, like
"Telegarden" by
Ken Goldberg, with its positive and collective vision of life; the
transgenetic and
interactive works of Eduardo Kac; the particular "hacker" aesthetic of
Jenny
Marketou; and "Netomat", the "anti-browser" that the Polish artist
Maciej Wisniewski
conceived of as an artistic instrument able to activate the creative and
aesthetic
potential of the network. The only Spaniard present is Daniel García
Andújar, with
his "Technologies to the People", a virtual company that exists
exclusively as an art
project, whose objective is to provoke a reflection on the use of the
technology and
the mechanisms of exclusion in information society.

The Exhibition:  www.tribes.org/dystopia

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                                  [ -- Reviewed by Roberta Bosco +
Stefano Caldana, El Pais /
Cyberpais (Spain)]



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                           For More Information, Contact:

                                 Cristine Wang
                            New Media Arts Curator
                               Tel: 917-318-0081
                         Email: [log in to unmask]

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