Elizabeth
Fischer
Elizabeth Fischer is an inter-disciplinary artist who has been active in digital technologies and Internet specific, multi mediatic art for the past ten years. As well as contributing her work to Internet art projects around the world, she is the curator, editor and designer of NWHQ (www.NWHQ.net), the first Canadian WWWeb site to focus specifically on the creation of Web sites and multimedia, hypertextual environments.
She is the situ resident curator and is also designing and facilitating the Web site for this project.
Elizabeth Fischer is presenting her most recent work:
Grandfather Gets a House, is a hypermedia work expressly developed for the Internet. The Web site houses a visually enhanced diary containing a series of texts, written over a year, to the email list of a small group of Net-active writers and artists. They chronicle the artist's travels to Transylvania, the Hungarian region of Romania and the subsequent efforts of the group to help an impoverished Gypsy family.
Within the site, the navigational elements are constructed in such a way that the viewer is encouraged explore the narrative as well as venture to another level, that of stories, poetry and other content informed by the experiences. These are works that link only to themselves; however, they also link to and from the singular emails that are being referenced. As a third added level of information, the navigational elements also encourage the viewer to access a complete and searchable archive of all the unedited communications of the mailing list.
The site seeks to publicize the plight of a much-maligned and marginalized people in Eastern Europe and equally importantly, seeks to lay bare the process by which art is made.
The site is in process, new elements are continually being added.
Lora McElhinney is a Vancouver spoken word artist who has performed widely in galleries, cafes, correctional facilites and for mental patients. Her work comprises biography, fiction and poetry. This project will be her first foray into a digital environment and thus, a wider audience:
The experience of storytelling both for the teller and the audience is one of juxtaposing the familiar and the unknown. This is often our experience in our lives as these experiences cross cultures, cross media, cross generations. In this piece I will be exploring digital ways of tracing the paths of storytelling, of finding yourself and losing yourself as you straddle the boundaries of old and new, digital and oral, visual and literary, place and no place. Inspired by the implications of Sappho’s fragments as gleened from the papyrus leaves of entombing cloths, I will bring in the burial, the loss of writing in time, the placement of text, the absence of text and the translation of text in the visual aspects of autobiography.
Over a period of two months, she will undertake walks in several Vancouver neighbourhoods, which she will then describe in a series of autobiographical, textual pieces. An interface will be created on the project Web site, into which these pieces will be uploaded sequentially, every week for the duration of the proposed timeline. These elements, date stamped and time stamped, will then, automatically, be incorporated into the visually enhanced interface.
Tim Mclaughlin is active in Internet mediated art. His work has been featured. in SIGWEB, the Fifth Annual Digital Salon (School of Visual Art, NYC) and CIAC Electronic Art Magazine, among others. Tim Mclaughlin is also a contributor to NWHQ:
The work is an exploration of place as the works of "Stain" are generated "in situ." Stain is a collaboration with three elements: earth, air, water. Initial texts will be prepared on a number of surfaces: copper, paper, canvas, wood. These will then be positioned in the elements for a fixed amount of time. By positioned I mean that the works will be suspended from the canopy of the forest, chained to the sea, interned in the earth. The works will be removed from their environments at specific intervals and digitized. The final electronic work will consist of these images presented with related materials and texts as may be necessary.
Maija Graham is a digital/analog artist and writer who has been involved in the Calgary arts community for the last six years. Recently she has been travelling and studying navigation and cartography-- ongoing themes in her work. She is interested in the movement of people through space and time and the traces both meaningful and meaningless left behind in names of places and people. Her most recent work is a self-portrait as a girl named Agathe, on the inside the lid of a sea chest on board a 16th century replica ship currently sailing from Sydney to Amsterdam:
Trip Diary is a collection of short narrative sketches which parallel, intersect, and collide with one another, sometimes braiding together to become a larger narrative, sometimes diverging to become finite episodes which have nothing but cartography to bind them with the rest. They are random mind shots from the window of a moving vehicle: encounters, departures, abandonments, characters briefly met, landscapes glimpsed, jumbled details of a bigger territory encoded and reduced to symbols on a map.
Some shots are autobiographical, all of them are fictional. The voices in them echo calls that I have heard, not all of which were intended for me, though I happened to be around to hear them. I'm interested in exploring who owns the calling voice, as much as what the owner is called, so meddling with proper nouns is bound to be part of the trip. I can never remember people's names anyway.
I'll be adding moments and revising and rearranging previous ones. There will be conclusions only in the same way that maps have edges.
Sheila Urbanoski is a Canadian media artist who has pushed the envelope in video, performance and new media.
She has a long history with Canadian artist-run access centres, has served on the boards of over thirteen arts organizations, was Programme Coordinator at EMMEDIA (an artist run media centre) and the Prairie Region Representative on the Canadian national Independent Film and Video Alliance
She has received a number of grants and awards for her work and has been active in the creation of artist-driven websites and internet-based projects since 1990. Additionally she is committed to the development of an informed audience for new media through lecturing, workshops and writing. She has collaborated on a number of projects with other artists and has an extensive background in training people within her field. Her artists' projects have received over seventeen awards and have been selected for numerous international festivals and exhibitions, as well as being a regular attendee and panelist of numerous media festivals.
She is currently residing in London, England.
Where Am I consists of a custom database combined with a Flash interface website.
This piece uses the database to search for and then display Urbanoski's text and images within the interface based on keywords that the user will enter. And to expand upon the curatorial premise, the content of the other artists' projects literally informs and shapes the content of Where Am I.
The user is asked to enter keywords - much like a search engine - and the database will then find the location and frequency of the corresponding words as used within the other artists' projects.
The words are associated with different text and images created by Urbanoski that will then be displayed. If the keyword is not within the database then a page is randomly generated, incorporating that keyword (also if the user chooses not to enter one).
Emphasizing the use of keywords in order to generate the project itself makes the point that ultimately, it all comes down to words anyways, even with the most technical or technology-based efforts.
The technical aspects of this project are important in that
this is a project that explores, utilizes and manipulates the backend
(literally the programming) as well as the front or visual end of website
creation.
By using database design, the artist is adding a level of interactivity
and connectivity to the actual data itself, and relaying it across the
work of all the artists involved.
Additionally, the process is intended to reflect and expand upon the curatorial premise by creating literal and figurative dialogue between the various pieces.