Deptford X 'Ephemeral Cities'
An internet art project
Deptford X Festival 2005
29.10.05 to 27.11.05
Welcome to ' Ephemeral Cities ' Net Art Open.
Contributors : Caspar Below, Melanie Clifford, Elizabeth Coulter-Smith, Errol Francis, Valery Grancher, Rob Grant, Fung Lin Hall, Susie Hinchliffe, Julian Konczak, Mac McKean, Paul Malone, Andy Parsons, Nicola Rae, Jurgen Trautwein
The following will help visitors in viewing the artists projects:
The artists have been asked to address the Deptford X theme of 'Ephemeral Cities' and the collection below reflects diverse interpretations from around the world. It has been interesting to see a range of approaches, from text blogs to Flash animations and movie clips.
Thank you for taking the time to visit and we hope you enjoy your journey around our very own ephemeral city. Thanks also to all the contributors who got their projects together in record time and hope to see you again in 2006.
Susie Hinchliffe (UK)
Title : " Who am I talking to? "
Description : " I'm fascinated, in cities, by the sheer volume of people leading separate lives - individual strands interweaving and moving apart. It strikes me the web's a lot like a city itself - a shifting mass of places built, visited and occupied by invisible strangers who come into contact with each other fleetingly, or possibly stick around to form relationships. There needn't necessarily be any conversation. 'Who Am I Talking to (London)?' is a short piece of observation about connections between strangers. If you've ever felt the same way, then you and I connect too. "
Technical requirements : Flash animation. Follow the red dot with your mouse.
Artist's website : http://www.little-nomad.com
Valery Grancher (France)
Title : " The Shiwiars Project "
Description : A bond between the Shiwiar people, living in High-Amazonia, and the Palais d' Tokyo, contemporary art gallery, in Paris.
Valery Grancher's blog shares with us his recent experience of village life with the Shiwiar peoples of the Amazon.
Technical requirements : Valery posts his blog on a Google site - the text is in (easy) French. You can either improve your language skills or scroll down to 'Tools' on the right column where you can translate the text to English. Further translation tools at Altavista
Artist's website : http://www.nomemory.org
Julian Konczak (UK)
Title : " Cracked Cities "
Description : The crack is an entrance into a subcutaneous world, a scar that allows us to peel back the surface, recalling associations with the broken, the deranged, hard drugs that challenge the social fabric and pirated software. The idea of the Cracked City is one where aspirations of architectural wonder, the domination of design over the environment, start to break down.
Cracked Cities looks to evoke something of the haphazard analogue technology of projectors where images appears to re-order themselves and the remote jumps back and forth, one, two, three images at a time. The slideshow is a form as old as photography itself, now incorporated into the digital realm with the automation of metronomic presentation and dissolves.
Technical requirements : Sound card required. In the 'Options' column, click on 'View Cracked Cities' then click on the banner to start.
Artist's website : www.hidrazone.com/artists/julian_konczak/julian_konczak.html
Mac McKean (USA)
Title : " Video Installation for Subway "
Description : A video work for a subway or public space that explores the role of shared story, once played by religious texts and myths, now played by common advertisements
Public advertisements--which we all naturally absorb by virtue of our participation in public space--serve as shared narratives in our otherwise fragmented and warring culture. In this piece, I am drawing out the implied stories that appear in subway billboard ads, which count among the cultural devices we still have with which to draw common self-definition. Here, Eve is a shoe ad, Adam plies vodka and the Snake...pushes the ever tempting home mortgage.....
Technical requirements : Quicktime Movie best with broadband
Artist's website : http://heaventree.com
Fung Lin Hall (Arizona, USA)
Title : " Archive for Cities "
Description : A City Blog that has as its approach a focus on the "archival". Fung Lin builds a personal mini web museum/library with a distinctly iconoclastic approach. Each post is complete in its formal, structural, psychological, historical and esthetic concerns.
" ... the city which can not be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honey-comb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember..." Italo Calvino.
Technical requirements : None
Artist's website : http://www.mutanteggplant.com
Jurgen Trautwein (USA)
Title : " She says He says "
Description : ." she says he says ", as part of the NIESATT drawing and multimedia hybridisation project, is a web project exploring the fictional meeting of two strangers in a subway station, passing by each other while talking to themselves. An ephemeral moment of the two persons thoughts overlapping.
Jurgen Trautwein studied at the University of the Arts Berlin : 1990 Masters Degree. He has taken part in exhibitions in Europe, Asia and America.
Technical requirements : Flash animation
Artist's website : http://www.jtwine.com/
Andy Parsons (Ireland)
Title : "St Patrick's Hall "
Description : Buildings like this are in every city I have visited. The neo - classical temple is a courthouse, bank, school, church, customs - house, seat of government, museum and concert hall. Why? This one is in a village called Fintona in Co. Tyrone, Ireland.
Technical requirements : Flash animation
Artist's website :www.a2arts.co.uk/andyparsons
Nicola Rae (Deptford, London, UK)
Title : " Creek Life "
Description : The inhabitants of one litre of muddy Deptford Creek water have been filmed under a microscope. Their actions and interactions with each other have their own individual patterns of movement. All want to escape confinement but with varying degrees of success. The water leech made it onto the floor before being put back into the Creek.
Thanks to Chris Gittner from the Creekside Centre (Deptford) and Paul Malone for his technical help.
Technical requirements : Multiple Quicktime movies
Artist's website : www.a2arts.co.uk/nrae
Errol Francis and Caspar Below
(Deptford, London, UK)
Title : " Black Park "
Description : A website where people can report and read reflections on the urban foxes and deers of Deptford and other events.
Technical requirements : You can add your ephemeral urban wildlife observations by clicking 'Salon' in the Menu on the left of the Black Park page.
Elizabeth Coulter-Smith (UK)
Title : " Interior 20.10.05:1200 "
Description : This work is an interaction between the artist, webcam,and her location. This short interactive video interprets the images through sight and sound at one point in time.
Technical requirements : Flash player, sound card
Artist's website : www.coultersmith.com/ecs/index.html
Nina Danino (UK)
Title : " Close to Home "
Description : Filmed in Berlin and Straits of Gibraltar.
The long documentary shots filmed from a car journey and from a ferry leaving a harbour, a voice reading from family letters and a chronology of division of the two cities builds up a melancholia of separation and 'home' as an distant place.
Technical requirements : Multiple Quicktime Movies
Artist's website : http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/id/607902/
Melanie Clifford and Rob Grant (UK)
Title : " 3 sound postcards "
Description : 3 recordings made as part of a peripatetic sound postcard correspondence across Bow in East London. Capturing and sending sound events / edges cut out of the audible: known noises or tiny secret sounds; irritating or beautiful. They are meant as a slight communication; a generous thing.
Technical requirements : Soundcard; speakers / headphones. This is a sound only project
Artist's website : www.corrugated.demon.co.uk
Paul Malone (Deptford, London, UK)
Title : " Aero City "
Description : In the airspace above London there can be as many as 10,000 people aloft at any one time. I often go out early in the morning and see, to the South of London and along the Thames Estuary, the 'stacks' of planes and their occupants circling around waiting to land.
In this piece the planes and the buildings of the city flash friendly greetings to each other - a babble of radio noise filling the air between. Empty foyers await arrivals.
Technical requirements : Multiple Flash animations. Sound card. Press F11 for expanded screen.
Artist's website : www.a2arts.co.uk/malone