Sarah Hromack

While finishing my presentation for this evening’s #ArtsTech Meetup—Digital Fundraising! The Whitney, Kickstarter, and Big Duck! 7 pm at Pivotal Labs!—I realized that Austrian net art duo Ubermorgen had changed the splash page of their website, ubermorgen.com, to feature this GIF. Imagining myself navigating there during my talk (UM designed CLICKISTAN, the net artwork-cum-video game I’ll be showing and telling about) a wry smile escaped my lips: Pwned.

In fact, the file is Ubermorgen’s contribution/intervention to Occupy the Internet, an online exhibition of obvious intent launched a couple of weeks back on fffff.at. Nice work, Hans and lizvlx.

It’s my Tumblr, so I’ll say thanks here if I want to.

Those who follow me on Twitter (or—much less likely, given my total lock-down policy there—Facebook) are just going to have to cope here for a moment, as I need more than 140 characters to say thank you to my colleagues, who have graciously lent their skills and expertise (because hey, that’s our jobs!) to the re-launch of Watch and Listen, the section of whitney.org dedicated to audio and video content. We’ve been working with the ever-ingenious design firm, Linked by Air, for about a year to develop and implement a new, feature-heavy design that includes a public-facing tagging system and lots of cross promotion within the site’s larger architecture. The “share” and “collect” features are good, clean fun for the entire Internet, too.

Manager of Interactive Technology Brad Henslee wrangled tech from the Whitney’s end, as he does, while Marketing & Digital Content Coordinator Sarah Meller did the heavy lifting in the database and at the page level (because that’s how we make Internet on wiki-based whitney.org). In the Education department, Manager of Interpretation and Interactive Media Dina Helal and Kress Fellow in Interactive Technology Gene McHugh (yeah Gene, I found your blog) are working with collaborators Plowshares Media to produce an ongoing series of videos, including this recent piece on the Charles LeDray show, MEN’S SUITS. Margie Weinstein, Manager of Education Initiatives, keeps the site outfitted with public programming-based content, too. The re-launch of Watch and Listen marks a new focus on multimedia for the site, and I’m truly excited—people: this is me, excited—for the projects planned for launch in the coming year.

Well done, folks.

Office Report: As part of the closing festivities for Christian Marclay: Festival, the Whitney Museum will stream daily, live performances from the galleries through September 26th on whitney.org and livestream.com, our partner for this initiative. Obviously, I am pleased that we’re using the museum’s website as a means of opening the in-gallery experience to a larger public; the Whitney has a stellar history of supporting the performing arts, and I hope this project is the first of many future forays into web-based performance documentation at the museum.

+ Visit whitney.org for an ongoing schedule of in-gallery performances. Generally, there are at least two live performances in the gallery every day; from 1–5 pm today, Butch Morris and Chorus of Poets will perform at random intervals in the fourth floor galleries.

+ Upcoming: Are you subscribing to the museum’s RSS feeds? If so, you already know that Thurston Moore is playing Marclay’s score, Wind Up Guitar, on Friday, September 17th at 7 pm (which is also pay-what-you-wish night, FYI). Shore up, Sonic Youth fans.

A very happy launch week to WikiFactCheck, the work of Andrew Lih, UCSC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism professor and pundit on All Things Wiki (he wrote The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia). I appreciate the way in which Lih positions this project as an open model “for brainstorming and prototyping how a WikiFactCheck project could provide rapid, crowd-sourced fact checking of news events,” relying on community editorial efforts for the moderation of accuracy in real time. Though in its very nascent stages, the project—or its creator, rather—is entirely self-aware: while would-be authors are obviously encouraged to sign up, log on, and edit away, pages filed under “Topics of Interest” initiate the user to a broader conversation surrounding wiki-ness by linking to existing web-based fact-checking efforts, luminaries in the field, technical implications, and best practices; though still stubs, these pages are certainly a start. And a strategically launched one, at that, given recent developments in Wikiland.

Another favorite wiki-based initiative of mine: The 2010 Whitney Biennial Artist Wiki Project, a digital petri dish wherein we offered each artist their very own page on the Museum’s site, whitney.org, which was built using a collaborative, wiki-based model. Best in show there, in my opinion, was Kerry Tribe’s page, which gave the back story on her Biennial film, H.M. (2009). I’m currently rallying support to extend this project into the future, and hope to offer every living artist that shows at the Whitney a page on the site. Wikis for all!

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.