There was a excellent turn-out for the Turbulence presentation at our third Upgrade! International session. In the publicity for the event, we promised that the session would make Net.Art accessible to non-techies and Turbulence Co-Directors Helen Thorington and Jo-Anne Green did not disappoint.
Helen, the founder and co-director of Turbulence.Org, gave the opening lecture. Speaking with clarity and a refreshing lack of jargon, she provided a valuable overview of how Turbulence came into being and then a highly accessible history of Net.Art. The roots of Turbulence lie in an earlier medium - radio art. New Radio and Performing Arts was established in 1981 to fund the development of experimental radio and sound art. Over 11 years, the NRPA funded over 300 original works for public radio before turning in 1996 to recognise experimental work in the new medium of the Internet with the establishment of the Turbulence web site and the associated commissions.
Helen Thorington presenting her a history of Net.Art through a selection of Turbulence.Org commisions from the last ten years.
Looking back over the last decade, Helen commented on the early works which Turbulence commissioned in 1996 - 1998. It was a time when artists working in the new medium were struggling to define Net.Art, by remediating other and earlier forms. She compared it to the early decades of the Novel when writers drew upon existing forms of prose writing in order to create the new form.
Yet unlike the Novel, early Net artists were also struggling with the technological limitations of the Internet. The first commissioned piece on Turbulence, Grim Tale by Marianne Petit, was an example of how a simplifed mode of hypertext writing was transposed to the Net. The early experiments struggled with the possibilities for sound and networking using new programming languages as they became available. Snuff was an example of an early Java-based work which harvested graphics, text and sounds from across the Web and deposited the "destroyed" remains on the website. Helen spoke about the thrill of being able to manipulate audio in this manner and the first experiments in "finger-clicking" interactivity.
Other works, such as Radio Stare, explored new modes of networked interactivity by scanning police radio frequencies and bringing these random elements into the work. The same work, however, is a salutary instance of the effects of changing technologies - it is no longer working and exists merely as a an empty site on the Web.
By the end of the ’90s, Helen observed that it was a time when a fascination with pure data came to prominence. Engineers and Mathematicians explored novel ways of collecting and harvesting data. Works such Shape of Song, Secret Lives of Numbers, and Cory Archangel’s Data Diaries produced visually compelling but abstract mediations on patterning of data.
Works in the new century saw artists make use of the increased possibilities offered by broadband access (in the USA) to create intense visual and audio experiences on the Web. MTAA’s reworking of "classic`" examples of performance art such as "One Year Performance Video" were only possible because of access to video streaming technologies; while works used the new blog and podcasting technologies to explore intimacy and communication.
In the vigorous discussion that followed Helen’s presentation, her Co-Director, Jo-Anne Green responded to questiosn from the audience. She emphasized that they focus on works rather than big names, and how Turbulence attempt to maximise the number of works that they can commission. (Their commissions range from $2000 - $5000 on average.) She also revealed the delicate juggling act that the site must follow - trying to get the largest possible number of visitors because stats are an important tool in their negotiations with funders, but at the mercy of bandwidth excesses! However, when they’ve been in crisis, such as the unprecedented number of visitors who connected to the streaming video files of MTAA’s "One Year Performance Video", their community of supporters have stepped in to provide alternative hosting.
Photographer Mikhael Subotsky, visiting from Cape Town, was able to attend the Turbulence presentation at Wits Digital Arts and ask questions of Jo-Anne Green.
