Our selection of the submitted internet projects takes into consideration artistic works, as well as projects, that work at a mediating level. Subsequent to this, we present the CD-ROM "Vom Hirschkäfer zum Hakenkreuz", that takes up the trail and interconnections of cultural filmmakers and artistic avant-garde between the two world wars.
The inspiration for this project began with the short story of the same name by Franz Kafka. The database for the work consists only of individual words, all of which come from the original Kafka story.
The main technical approach used in this work is based on pattern recognition and Chomskian Formal Grammars. The Formal Grammars are used at the sentence level to generate individual sentences and ensure a degree of correctness in syntactical formation.
This latter strategy has been employed as it was the artists desire to avoid having any form of "story-telling" model in the system.
The artist also wished to avoid using behavioural (Artificial Life) or Agent (for example, modelling a "story-telling" agent) based techniques, as the intention has been to create a system where the story, its subjects, actions and context, would emerge from the formation of the language itself, as something simultaneously written and read.
This technology is still in early development. It does lead to a prose form that is very open, unexpected in its results and poetic.
The project is due for some form of completion in the late Summer of 1997. What is being seen onLine at the moment should be regarded as technical experimentation, a work in progress, rather than as a finished artwork.
This project has received funding from The Arts Council of England. It is produced by the Film and Video Umbrella, London. The CD-ROM and book versions will be published in Autumn 1997 by Ellipsis, London.
The Great Wall of China is a new project conceived for simultaneous realisation across media, including a Website, a CD-ROM, a book and an interactive installation. The foundation of The Great Wall of China is a real-time interactive language machine. This uses the metaphor of the actual Great Wall of China as a navigational device. The system is capable of creating an endless stream of ever evolving and changing texts.
The inspiration for this project began with the short story of the same name by Franz Kafka. The database for the work consists only of individual words, all of which come from the original Kafka story.
The main technical approach used in this work is based on pattern recognition and Chomskian Formal Grammars. The Formal Grammars are used at the sentence level to generate individual sentences and ensure a degree of correctness in syntactical formation.
This latter strategy has been employed as it was the artists desire to avoid having any form of "story-telling" model in the system.
The artist also wished to avoid using behavioural (Artificial Life) or Agent (for example, modelling a "story-telling" agent) based techniques, as the intention has been to create a system where the story, its subjects, actions and context, would emerge from the formation of the language itself, as something simultaneously written and read.
This technology is still in early development. It does lead to a prose form that is very open, unexpected in its results and poetic.
The project is due for some form of completion in the late Summer of 1997. What is being seen onLine at the moment should be regarded as technical experimentation, a work in progress, rather than as a finished artwork.
This project has received funding from The Arts Council of England. It is produced by the Film and Video Umbrella, London. The CD-ROM and book versions will be published in Autumn 1997 by Ellipsis, London.
The CD-Rom "Vom Hirschkäfer zum Hakenkreuz" (From Stagbeetle to Swastika) offers the viewer the possibility, to move their own way through the wovey connection between cultural and avant garde filmmakers, and in this way to discover relationships themselves. More than 60 minutes of filmmaterial from cultural and avant-garde films from 1918 to 1953 may be viewed, so that the direct comparison between the individual filmmakers as well as in the work of the individual persons before and during the Third Reich is possible.
With the institution of the Ufa-cultural film department are associated names like George Grosz, John Heartfield, Vikking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann, Svend Noldan, Nicholas Kaufmann and Martin Rikli. On the one hand, the avantgarde of the films and pictorial art of the 20s, to the other of the cultural filmmaker, who delivered the national socialists of the Third Reich the prototypes of their propaganda films.
Also outside the Ufa cultural film department there were numerous connections between the avant-garde and the cultural filmmakers: The "cultural film father" Hans Cürlis maintains contact to Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, Käthe Kollwitz and George Grozs through his filmed artist portraits. Wilfried Basse assists Cürlis with the film "Die Donau - vom Schwarzwald zum MittelmeerÒ (The Danube - from black forest to the Mediterranean). In 1919 comes Lotte Reiniger in Hans Cürlis½s institut for cultural research and shows him her silhoue ttes. Cürlis got her, to animate these - the first silhouetted film was produced under his care. Already in 1926 Erwin Piscator used background film projection for his production "Storm tide". The filmed workings for later productions are delivered by Curt Oertel, Walter Ruttmann and Svend Noldan, who still is since school days befriended with Piscator.
John Heartfield and George Grosz, who at Ufa had established a trick film department, leave the reactionary Ufa out of protest against the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and make sure the unoccupied job goes to their friend Svend Noldan. Vikking Eggeling and Hans Richter come with their first film ideas in Noldans trickfilm department.
It is of no wonder that the numerous cross relationships, attracted many young artists after the first world war to Berlin, the new art metropol of Germany. Many take on themselves the inspiration of the new film medium, and hope therefore to expand the possibilities of their artistic expressions, and to make them accessible to the public at large.
KONSUM visualizes processes of the net otherwise to be hidden by the graphical interface of the web. KONSUM applications are based on protocols of the internet. Results of KONSUM server communication are used for feeding a self-generating entity. Transformation of protocols, server activities or frequency of transmission into real net-entities are the essence of work for KONSUM. The panopticon of the net is visualized by the KONSUM web-window.
KONSUM provides tools for protocol-visualization and server-transparency in means of the web-interface. Everybody may be supervisor of the system with the aid of KONSUM and its collaboration-sites. Commands of the UNIX-world are transferred into web interfaces. On experimental servers, through instrumental media experience, the net may be manipulated by the individual.
The concrete realisation of the ethics of the net in technical facts represents ideological critics of culture of electronical communications. Myths of the users are destroyed. An own domain for every user, a server for every user!
The KONSUM logo is a mutation of the one of the bankrupt socialistic supermarkets.