Class exercise

Artport and Rhizome

Artport, an online gallery space to commission net art project, is a webportal of the Whitney Museum for net arts and digital arts. The functionality of Rhizome.org is quite alike Artport. They provide online platform for the contemporary media community. They support creation, discussion, presentation of contemporary arts by using new technologies in a considerable way.

Tap, 2002

Tap is treated as a virtual dance school for animated characters which exist on the Internet and can be downloaded to individual’s Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and desktops. According to the tap website, “Users can choose animated dancers (a male or female) at the Tap website. The dancer takes on a life of its own, practicing, learning from other dancers, and giving recitals. Users do not have to be present during the lessons--the animated characters can be "dropped off" and left to practice for an unlimited time. Dancers can practice at home, as a screen saver on the user's desktop.” The animated figures create individual dance steps which produce new dance steps. So by using the technology, new dancing styles are being evolved. The interesting thing is that the digital artefact is really good for the people who want to learn dancing, and it can be good as screen saver. The artefact is a good example of how arts are interacting with new technology. After creating a dance on your PDA using the Tap application, you can save your dances and share them with others. The web address of TAP: http://www.diacenter.org/buckhouse/.

Implementation

The idea of the Implementation novel is totally new to me although I am familiar with remix art. I could not think that a novel could be written in this ways. But I think this idea was adopted from the movement of Dadaism even though the motto of the implementation novel is different than that of Dadaism. Before we go into details, we have to take a look into the definition of implementation novel. According to its website, “Implementation is a novel about psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place, a project that borrows from the traditions of net. art, mail art, sticker art, conceptual art, Situationist Theater, serial fiction, and guerrilla viral marketing.” Like the web2.0 platform, the user is the main creator of the narratives that the novel belongs to. And the people are the distributor of the novel. So the novel ensures the user participation in every case. The pictures, which are used in the novel, are as alike as the digital art, composition of several arts in one place.

ARG

This game is called ARG (Alternate Reality Game). This is true that we can ague whether it is game or not. According to Wired website, “In it, widely distributed players bring together to find and answer thousands of ringing pay phones all across the United States and provide correct answers to recorded questions. When all the answers have been supplied, the latest episode in an internet-based War of the Worlds-esque radio serial is unlocked and made available to its rabid fans.” The game is a way to publicity halo game. I did not find a step by step description of how to play the game. But a row idea is given into Wikipedia. According to it, “The ilovebees.com website first gained public attention when jars of honey were received by members of the Alternate Reality Game community. The jars contained jumbled letters. When cleaned and assembled, the letters spelled out I LOVE BEES. Later, the game would gain its entry into public fervour with the URL's appearance at the end of theatrical trailers for the Halo2 game on Xbox. From the blurring of media and mystery, it became clear that this was an Alternate Reality Game. Eager to unravel the mystery of the site's hacking, interested internet users began to explore more information, mostly by trial and error.

Dana, the webmaster

Dana, the sites webmaster, had created a weblog stating that something had gone wrong with her website, and the site itself had been hacked. In later entries she reported that her attempts to fix it were in vain, and asked for help.

Early players tried emailing Dana, exploring the ilovebees.com website for hidden data, treating the corrupted data on ilovebees.com as encrypted files and attempting to decrypt them, and any other ways players could think of to attempt to gain more hidden information from the site.”