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Aaron Oldenburg (Baltimore, MD, USA)

Suction - 2009 - computer game

 

My primary interest is in game rules as an expressive medium. Suction is a simulation of the verb "to suck". It is a short, one-level game created in about a day. It is part of a series of experimental games where I take verbs that have not been well-represented in games and simulate them.>

 

 


 

 

 

Alan Bigelow (USA)

Love Is - 2008 - web-based Flash multimedia with database


"Love Is..." moves toward a definition of love in three stages: first through a standard, accepted lexicon; then via a series of individual expressions of love; and finally as defined within randomly selected statements about love provided by visitors to the site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Filimowicz, Andres Wanner, Melanie Cassidy (California, USA)

Cursor Caressor Eraser - 2010 - Flash based interactive multimedia

 

 

Cursor Caressor Eraser is an interactive installation and net artwork contemplating the erotic image and themes of sensuality in time. Caressing gestures of the interactors produce erasures of digital photographic imagery, resulting in visual palimpsests. These erasures thematize temporal dialectics of touch and bodily encounters with others, such as forgetting and remembering, or recognition and strangeness. A simple gesture- a stroke across a touchpad or the movement of a mouse – creates a series of rich variations of bodies in change.

 

 

 

Stephane Shibatsuji-Perrin (Japan)

Porn Hero - 2010 - Diildo and video game running on a Mac

 

In video games you can play sports, music, play a character of a different universe, of a different gender, kill people, be a god, pilot a plane, manage cities or countries, and so forth. Porn Hero takes a provocative stance through the "detournement" of the use of the Wii Remote, the video game console Wii being arguably the most family-oriented console. Porn Hero is a parody of the famous Guitar Hero video game series. The game is a simulation of a porn actor performing his job. The game player can become a porn star for a moment, and can advance if "talented" enough. The player uses a specially designed controller called the "Diildo" that is to be used in combination with a Wii Remote. The game duplicates the orientation and back-and-forth movements of the penis of a porn actor with the Diildo. The Dildo can be hand-manipulated or attached to the body at the actual location of the sexual organs of the player.

 

 

Francis Farmer

Barely Legal - 2010 - color print on cotton paper - approx. 1cm x 1 cm each

These pieces belong to an ongoing body of work that addresses, through an experimental technology-informed process, questions that concern ownership, sexuality within visual pornography and revealed hidden states of desire. The source images for the work are taken from the magazine Barely Legal, which is published by Groupe MVP (Canada). The images have been scanned in to a computer and, after manipulation in software, returned the world as altered 'hard copy', with the original magazine subsequently 'shredded' to make die-cut confetti.

 

Peter Madzelan (Nebraska, USA)

Unidentifiable feeling

"Unidentifiable feeling" is a mixed medium piece. Painting, photography and structural elements combine to form this installation.  The photography faced monitors depict internet web cam interactions with the jeans representing the sexuality of such encounters.  The painting in the background represents the love that developed through mutual compassion, understanding and finding someone that makes you feel not alone anymore. This piece represents how the internet can foster sexual maturity as well how the landscape of dating has evolved. A confused teen can learn  what his feelings mean as well as find refuge in the company of other like minded individuals. Relationships also can be establish without boundaries. Where once prospects were limited to a neighboring town, the internet has made it possible for anyone anywhere to connect. 

 

 

Toban Nichols (Los Angeles, CA)

The Oppobrium book project - 2009 - installation: book and stand

The Oppobrium book project is an appropriation, deconstruction and reformat of Vogue’s Book of Etiquette and Good Manner,1969. The original text was physically taken apart and each page was scanned utilizing several large format scanning machines at one time. Directly from the scanner bank it was compiled into a single computer  file to create an exact copy of the original text. The writing was then mechanically read by a computer program that details and translates the scanned text in a process called Optical Character Recognition or OCR. Next, an engineer designed a computer algorithm that would read the contextuality of the document and categorically replace every fourth word in the entire 750 pages with one specific word, in this case the word, Pussy. 

After the replacement word was chosen and digitally impregnated into the text, it was reprinted and re-bound.  The idea was to pair the original, antique book along side the “new” “updated” version. It would be bound using color and style as close to the original as possible with small changes only hinting at what is to come when picked up and read. The replacement word was chosen after a poll was taken of consumers, artists, and people on the street. A list was then compiled of the words that first came to mind by respondents when the original book and it’s ideas and contents were discussed with them. The word chosen was felt to best explain and provoke the overall idea this relic of a different age spawned in the self-percieved “modernity” of our culture.

Upon reading through the original book, Vogue’s Book of Etiquette and Good Manners from 1969, the reader is at once aware of how humorous and ironic it seemed by today’s standards. The book not only seems to contain out-moded ideas of propriety, but also takes itself very seriously thus enhancing the complicated “joke” it reads like in our modern culture.  An idea was formed to exacerbate that joke, to make it more of a one-liner, streamline it’s humor and create a political statement at the same time.