Virtual Revolutions - Review

Act and Read

Curated by Ilyana Nedkova

(Liverpool Audio-Visual Research Editions, 2000)

Virtual Revolutions appropriately comes in a transparent jewel case adorned with a bright red circle and the bold subtitle Act and Read. Embedded on the enclosed CD are 30 individual or collaborative artworks by 50 digital artists and enough text from more than 20 additional contributors to fill a book of essays. New media publishers have finally resigned themselves to the fact that no reader will tolerate the monitor radiation absorbed in an effort to digest all this written material, so the back cover of the CD conveniently offers a series of line drawings that describe a journey from compact disc to paper volume. The technologies involved include a laser printer, a hole puncher and a ring binder. Bringing office supplies into the multimedia equation certainly keeps the revolutionary promise alive from the outset.

Once the CD drawer closes and the VR icon is mounted, however, there is no doubt that the revolutions at play are intimately caught up in the spinning data that deliver these projects. A common interface features a constantly moving array of lines that shift back and forth between X coordinates like a team of digital playheads gone astray to the tune of a catchy techno loop. Individual contributions cycle through sets of thumbnails that must be caught before a blend function erases the ROB settings, and your computer mouse quickly becomes a predator to catch the link before it is gone. In the attached files, the pun on another revolt revolves primarily around software and code, and the now infamous slogan and logo Made with Macromedia" may as well have had another preposition placed between creator and product. Virtual revolutions is first and foremost a design portfolio for digital artists that display decent skills with a commercial authoring package but largely shut down as far as issues beyond the scripte d stage are concerned.

Contributions are almost exclusively focused on the mechanisms of "interactivity" and many of the links on display can be found in the Lingo library that offer prepared scripts for programmed subroutines. When the branching narrative structure essentially comprises a series of static displays, it Is also tempting to make every sprite (a cast member on the Director stage) rotate and move to keep a notion of interactivity alive in the pauses between triggered events. The impressive timeline clocking 2600 B.C. to 1768 A.D. in Nina Czegledys piece Aurora for instance, jumps distinctly from marker to marker in the hidden score to capture time periods while Lingo scripts keep the sprites turning. As if one spin cycle was not enough, many projects attach handlers to moving sprites, cycle color palettes with random integers, loop sounds and use the tired trick of blind navigation to keep the user clicking on everything (or nothing in the tempting case of Command-Period) to locate the exit and proceed. The sense of pr ogress advertised by these cycles of repetition is that interactive digital space is fluid and infinite while in fact it is mathematically/logically determined and experienced through heavily controlled portals. Maybe we should be thankful that Virtual Revolutions plays like a broken record?

The Artist Portrait Series: Images of contemporary African American Artists, text and photographs by Fern Logan. Southern Illinois University Press/125 pp./price unavailable (hb).

Blancs: Marie-France Briere/Barbara Claus. Dazibao (4001 Berri Street, Suite 202, Montreal, Quebec H2L 4H2)/28 pp./price unavailable(sb). This book is bilingual, written in both French and English.

Brad Austin Smith 1983-2000. Photosmith (39 East Court, Cincinnati, OH 45202)/120 pp./$100.00 (hb), $30.00 (sb).

Cutting Edge Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde, by Joan Hawkins. University of Minnesota Press/320 pp/$19.95 (sb).

Elemental Landscapes: Photographs by Harry Callahan, by Katherine Ware. Philadelphia Museum of Art/56 pp./$28.00 (sb).

COPYRIGHT 2001 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group