How lazy is it to blog press releases from your very own place of business? Very.
THE WHITNEY LAUNCHES STEPHANIE ROTHENBERG’S OUTLOOK: UNTITLED, SECOND INTERNET ART COMMISSION, ON WHITNEY.ORG
NEW YORK, March 30, 2010—This evening at sunset (7:18pm) the Whitney Museum of American Art will release Stephanie Rothenberg’s Outlook: Untitled, the second in a series of Internet art projects commissioned specifically for the Whitney’s website, (http://whitney.org), which was relaunched last fall. As with all projects in the series, Outlook: Untitled will appear briefly on every page of the site daily at sunrise and sunset in New York City.
Artist Stephanie Rothenberg’s Outlook: Untitled was made in collaboration with Flash Developer Jose Raymond Rodriguez-Rosario. In Rothenberg’s piece, a frenzy of faux pop-up advertisements referencing the current world economic crisis take over the screen space of whitney.org at sunrise and sunset. The advertisements are interrupted by a spinning globe that turns into a Magic 8-Ball fortune telling game, inviting visitors to “try me.” The Magic 8-Ball delivers ambiguous messages or cryptic advice about our possibilities of shaping economic structures or affecting the state of the world at the click of a button. Outlook: Untitled employs the strategies of mediated Internet culture in which all meaning is delivered instantaneously in visual packets of bits and bytes, yet at the same time, it generates messages that disrupt and question this creation of meaning.
Internet Art Commissions:
As part of the Whitney’s ongoing series of Internet art projects commissioned for its website, each project makes an appearance on every page of whitney.org for ten to thirty seconds at sunset and sunrise in New York City, marked by the change of the website’s background color from white (day) to black (night) and vice versa. Several projects will be commissioned annually, with each appearing on the site for three to four months. Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s adjunct curator of new media, notes: “What distinguishes these projects is that they use whitney.org as their habitat, disrupting, replacing, or engaging with the museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the Internet, the intervention in existing online spaces.” First in the series was a project by the collaborative ecoarttech, founded in 2005 by artists Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir. The project, Untitled Landscape #5, consisted of fluctuating, glowing orbs of light that disrupt the “digital landscape.” This project ran on whitney.org from November 2009 through March 2010.
ABOUT STEPHANIE ROTHENBERG:
According to artist Stephanie Rothenberg, her interdisciplinary practice “merges performance, installation, and networked media to create provocative interactions that question the boundaries and social constructs of manufactured desires. Adopting the role of cultural anthropologist, the medium of the techno-sphere itself becomes a laboratory for raising critical questions about our interpersonal relationship to technology and its broader socio-political implications.”
Rothenberg has exhibited and performed at venues including the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah; Banff New Media Institute in Alberta, Canada; LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Center in Gijon, Spain; Trampoline Radiator Festival New Technology Art in Nottingham, England; Performa 09 in New York City; Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, New York, ISEA 2004 at the Kiasma Theater in Helsinki, Finland; and ISEA 2009 at the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, Ireland. Recent awards include a 2009 Creative Capital in Emerging Fields, 2008 New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Award (NYSCA) and a commission for Turbulence.org. She has participated in artist residencies at Eyebeam and Harvestworks in New York City and at the free103point9 Wave Farm. Stephanie is Associate Professor of Visual Studies at University at Buffalo.
