May 24, 2002
open_digi: a review
Two nights ago I went to the Dogstar to see the first event of open_digi. The event, billed as "artists and activists working online and in digital media, talking about their work and ending with a digital jam session with visual projections and sounds mix", turned out to be deeply disappointing; someone earlier had suggested to me that it would be "a dorkbot clone", and they were indeed proved correct. open_digi was like dorkbot without any of the essential qualities that make dorkbot wonderful.
The first quality: interactivity. The presentations at open_digi were singularly lacking in the involvement that the presentations at dorkbot show. dorkbot presenters will demonstrate, answer questions, mingle with the crowd, and make new and interesting connections. The crowd is equally as important as the presenters in this respect. The open_digi presentations - with one singular exception, which I shall mention later - were flat and uninvolving.
The second quality: timeliness, or the "cutting edge" quality. Nothing shown at open_digi was remotely amazing or particularly new at all. In fact, some of it felt positively dated.
I'll go through the presentations one at a time now and explain what I felt about them.
First up was electric sheep. The project is a sort of screensaver of which the images are calculated, via some complex algorithms, in a distributed fashion across lots of people's machines, much like distributed.net or Seti @home. The person presenting, however, didn't bother to show or tell us this himself, relying instead on a pre-prepared video, complete with pretentious voice-over (why do some people imagine that pitching your voice an octave lower makes whatever you're talking about seem more important?). The voice-over, in fact, was truly cringemaking in its earnestness and self-importance. As if that wasn't annoying enough, the graphics shown in the video weren't actually what you could see if you were running the software. They were, in fact, higher-resolution images generated at the project HQ's render farm. So it felt like a bit of a cheat, in addition to being dull. Although the graphics were pretty, and the technology distributing the process seemed quite adequate, there wasn't anything particularly new or stunning about it.
Next up came someone calling himself Stanza and billing himself as some sort of net artist. His presentation was a mind-numbing combination of pretentious waffle - which included such gems as "Convergence is used to fuse the meeting of medias onto the the paradigm of new technology. Subvergence scrambles the sins of the internet." - with a relentlessly boring demonstration of his website and the things on it. It started with his paintings (I could scarcely express my disbelief at this point) and then moved on to his "generative art pieces", which might have been considered interesting about five years ago, but now appeared to be on a par with an average screensaver. All of the pieces were remarkably naïve compared with the calibre of the work displayed every month at dorkbot. I also didn't appreciate the way that "Stanza" was lecturing the audience about the "nature of net-art". (Side note: in addition to this, his web pieces use Shockwave. Just now, I clicked through to his site to look at something, and Internet Explorer started downloading the Shockwave Player. It promptly crashed, and destroyed the previous version of this entry, which I have now recreated from scratch. Wonderful.)
Next up came James Stevens, a friend of mine for several years now, who was supposed to be talking about consume.net, a grassroots community wireless networking project. I say supposed to, because James was evidently completely caned, which was extremely amusing.... He began by explaining the nature of his work on and with the Web, and such projects as Backspace and its successor Deckspace, and the beliefs he has which have influenced the course of the things he's been involved with. Due to his being somewhat addled, the course of his talk tended to wander a bit, but always eventually got back on track. Evidently slightly influenced by the previous talk's policy of going through its website, next he demonstrated his Blink project and outlined how it worked and why he had done it. At this point someone in the audience reminded him that he was supposed to be talking about Consume. He switched to explaining that instead, and laid out the rationale and details of the project. Whilst doing so, he referred to the Most Recently Modified Nodes section of the site; and top of the list was actually mine, which I had set up earlier in the day. I had to explain my node for the audience's benefit, which wasn't quite so easy - it's only at the speculative stage at the moment. James spoke for about half an hour, and even though he wasn't sober, the strength of his ideas and his enthusiasm for what he believed in greatly outshone the po-faced words of the earlier presenters. His talk was by far the most interesting part of the evening.
After James came bongo from piratetv.net, who talked briefly about Pirate TV's streaming media projects. Although the material that they're working with is interesting, it was only a walkthrough of their site and offered nothing new or particularly amazing.
Finally, once the talks were over, there was this apparent "digital mix session", which appeared to be Stanza clicking through his little "art" pieces whilst music was played by someone else. That is, I wasn't sure if the music was coming from Stanza's work, or if Stanza's work was reacting to the music; either way, the music didn't sound generative; it felt too close to "normal" music; too regular. In other words, boring. Stanza's pieces were uniformly banal, with the sole exception of one that seemed to be layering an image of a fragment of a map repeatedly over itself, like dragging the clone brush around in a graphics application; the patterns it made appeared to be maps of a city which changed from moment to moment, which was pretty, but didn't do much else.
Overall, open_digi was dull, and if James hadn't been there I would have regretted wasting an evening.
Posted by Earle Martin at 5:02 PM |