Incubation3 Gallery
The New Incunabula : The Shape of A Woman’s Form
Curated by Carolyn Guertin

The New Incunabula: Featured Works

Giselle Beiguelman, Poetrica
http://www.poetrica.net/
Blurring the boundaries between art and advertising, Poetrica hacks public space. It uses visual alphabets in non-phonetic fonts to interrogate reading and reception conventions both online and live in the real time of billboard broadcasting space. Shown over a period of several months in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in Berlin and online at turbulence.org, Beiguelman performs what she calls teleinterventions: altered messages submitted by passersby in readily decipherable code featured on billboards. Using the conventions of advertising and indecipherable alphabets, Beiguelman finds a way to write for the portable media junkies of the under 25 set. These texts are a meeting of urban textual sprawl, what she calls nomadic poems, with telecommunications systems. Beiguelman herself says of the information overload of our urban spaces that: "The metropolitan landscape today is a kind of photoshop image. Everything can be pasted to everything. The modernist dream is over and there is no logic... The landscape is so polluted by ads, signs, outdoors, banners and in cities like Sao Paulo, all covered by different graffiti‹a kind of visual guerrilla‹that you should be reading all the time. The city today is a palimpsest to be deciphered" ("interview"). Beguilman translates the personal text into urban vista and makes private language a public art and act in the electronic space of the new writing.

The winner of numerous awards, Giselle Beiguelman is a multimedia artist and new media theorist who teaches Digital Culture at Pontifícia Universidade Cathólica de Sao Paulo in São Paulo, Brazil.

Natalie Bookchin, Metapet
http://www.metapet.net/
Metapet explores genetic engineering, computer gaming and corporate culture as cultural experiences. As a do it yourself project, the would-be manager uses the principles of computer game play alongside corporate greed to produce a better slave-like employee known as a worker-pet. The manager must motivate the animal with incentives to create a better worker, but he or she would breaks the rules gets a more entertaining animal and game. This text explores the bounds of interactivity, genetics and critiques corporate ethics while (unlike subRosa) staying within the bounds of corporate propriety. As a text for employee training and as a gaming experience, it defies accepted game conventions and in fact critiques the whole notion of gaming and the choices that we make there. What we would otherwise think of as story gets played out through the pet's actions and our (anti)displinary responses.

Natalie Bookchin is a faculty member of Calarts based in Los Angeles and a former member of RTMark. Metapet was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles.

Jody Zellen, Ghost City
http://www.ghostcity.com/
The complicated waltz of Jody Zellen's Ghost City is played out by the opening and closing of flickering windows and the flash of neon. This cosmopolitan ballet uses urban space and decay as a canvas for dynamically exploring the nature of vision and self. Ostensibly about movement in the space of the city, the narrative always keeps the immediate at bay. Disconnected from interactions with the real, Zellen comments that "The modern experience is fractured, [and that] fractured experience takes advantage of memory, [and] representation. Fusing the perceived with the known, delineating the experience of the unexpected." This text kinetically celebrates "the random chaos of the city/urban chaos in the world of language/games [that] rule the entropic nature of the state/of disintegration in relation to the images/the media deems true." The crowds and power have presence and little need of language; their presence is instantly recognizable. All ordinary boxy conventions are dashed aside, the covers of the book blown away, so the perpetual rhythmic dance of the city can step lightly: light in flight.

Jody Zellen is a new media artist based in Santa Monica, California.

Melinda Rackham, Carrier
http://www.subtle.net/carrier/
There is a tension between the architectures of time and space and the material networks of the communications media. Architecture builds and organizes actual geographic and political spaces while the media construct and deconstruct virtual space-time (Virilio, 1991b, 22). Rigid, durable,
physical architecture is on the decline as our world swells, becoming increasingly informational, and the virtual world surfaces, acquiring a kind of aestheticized structural materiality that is fluid, transparent and in such a state of flux that we might call it viral. Like the twist in the Möbius strip though, neither of these architectures can be entirely freestanding or inseparable. They are conjoined surfaces that leak or bleed into each other. Maurice Merleau-Ponty talks of leakages, — 'échappements' — in the system of the subject that, like Bergsonian duration, indicate a system that is fragmentary and all-encompassing. Science tells us that every surface embodies this tension for "[e]ach surface is an interface between two environments that is ruled by a constant activity in the form of exchange between two substances placed in contact with one another" (qtd in Virilio, 1991, 17). Virilio cites this definition to demonstrate the pre-existing contamination in any system in the electronic age, the innate condition of information overload, where the transfer of ideas or substances is inevitable since all boundaries have become permeable entryways and all surfaces virtual (1991, 17) or viral. Such leakages are inevitable in complex systems where our interactions are expressions of becomings, and the unfolding space of our navigation is an inscription of our own in/visible subjectivities as browsers. The interface itself is also such an unfolding of a new mode of representation for a theoretically infinite number of entry points, vectors, surfaces and dimensions. The narrator of this text is infected with the Hepatitus C virus, but in [carrier] this virus is not reviled. Instead sHe is a smart bug that guides us through the text. Exploring the experience of being a carrier shows the permeable and informational nature of the body that allows it to be open to a fluid new (mostly) female gender and virus. sHe is an infectious agent that opens herself to you in a gesture of desire. The text leaks as the boundaries between cells, bodies and words break down and a chorus of voices enters. Her later work, empyrean http://www.subtle.net/empyrean/, continues this exchange and takes it to the next level, spreading the infection out onto the Web.

Melinda Rackham is a pioneering new media artist and writer based in Sydney, Australia. [carrier] has won many awards including the Faulding Award for Multimedia at the Festival Awards for Literature, Telstra Adelaide Festival 2000, Australia, 2nd Prize National Digital Art Awards 1999, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia and an Honourable Mention Art on the Net 2000, Machida City Museum, Tokyo, Japan.

Victoria Vesna, Bodies© INCorporated (1996)
http://www.bodiesinc.ucla.edu/
Firmly situated in the culture and language of consumer culture, Bodies© INCorporated allows one to build a body of one’s choice. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, Bodies INC. uses modeling software that creates bodies that might have only previously existed in the mind: “as with many other on-line WEB sites, visitors to the site must agree to recognize and abide by various copyright restrictions, legal disclaimers, and limits of liability--including liability for disappointment in the outcome of the body one constructs.” (Gonzales http://www.bodiesinc.ucla.edu/frames1.html). Our culture’s accepted refusal of satisfaction with bodies is built into the irony of the site. Here body boundaries can literally revel in Donna Haraway’s cyborgian confusion, mixing or matching patches with little regard to biological necessities, gender boundaries or race (replaced by ‘textures’ at this site). The mission statement, corporate outlooks, overviews of shareholdings are all present at the site and there is "even an essay by Christopher Newfield that conceptually locates Bodies© INC as a specific kind of corporate structure that:

...establishes a virtual corporation as an 'active community' of participants who choose their own bodily form. The primary activity is the creation of a body in exchange for which the creator is given a share of stock. Corporation B thus exists to express each members' desire about his or her physical shape. Production serves self-creation. Firm membership formally ratifies expression. These expressions have none of the usual limits: men become women; black becomes white and white becomes brown; flesh turns to clay, plastic, air; clay, plastic, air are attached on one body. Bodies need be neither whole nor have parts that fit" (qtd in Gonzales).

These new bodies are a new kind of viral engagement with notions of text, corporate politics, informational entities and narrative conventions as this site explores how our sense of self changes as we redraw our own body boundaries.

Dr. Victoria Vesna (http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/) is an artist, professor and chair of the department of Design | Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts. She is internationally sought after as both a speaker and an exhibitor, and is the recipient of many grants, commissions and awards, including the Oscar Signorini award for best net artwork in 1998 and the Cine Golden Eagle for best scientific documentary in 1986.

Olia Lialina and Heath Bunting, Identity Swap Database (year unknown)
http://www.teleportacia.org/swap/
Like Bodies© INCorporated, the Identity Swap Database allows its site’s interactor to select body traits towards constructing a self. But where Bodies© INC. focused on the physical body, Lialina and Bunting are concerned with the parameters of a subject’s identity and how identity is formed once the physical becomes fluid. This is a new kind of text for a subject to author and the newfound ability to rewrite, revise or change the self across linguistic, cultural and political boundaries poses radical (if only human, in this instance) possibilities for new conventions in personal identities and the body as text.

Russian Olia Lialina (http://art.teleportacia.org/) is one of the world’s leading multimedia artists. She has been the recipient of many awards.

Sally Pryor, Postcards from Writing
http://www.sallypryor.com/postcards.html
In Postcards from Writing, Sally Pryor explores the thinking behind the grammars of visual writing, the alphabet and speech. In the gap between language and the real comes the process of communication, she argues, which creates signs that can be written. Following the teachings of linguist Roy Harris, Pryor explores what the school of integrationism has to offer the new media, multimedia and computerized communications in general. This new grammar has far-reaching implications not just for the gap between the written word and speech, but for how we spatialize communication in general.

Dr Sally Pryor is an Australian digital artist/programmer/animator and independent multimedia developer who has been working with digital art for 20 years. Her most recent work examines the connections between writing and the human-computer interface.

Hazel Smith (with music by Roger Dean), the egg, the cart, the horse, the chicken (year unknown)
http://www.ce.canberra.edu.au/inflect/01/eggsite.3/eggindex.html
Working with notions of the split screen and the hyperjump, this text can be read in a seemingly more traditional way or the reader can ferret out the hot spots to jump through the text. This is Smith’s way of allowing us to see the new vistas of possibilities in the electronic realm. Opening up spaces for the practice of theory in a narrative framework, this text integrates multimedia elements across split screens, drawing together hypertext narrative with dynamic images. Putting the cart before the horse and figuring out whether the chicken came first are just a few of the investigations of the conventions of hypermedia that Smith undertakes. To study the parameters of the new form, she draws in kinetic text, random elements, arbitrary connections and disparate ideas.

Hazel Smith is performance poet, multimedia artist and hypertext writer. She works as a Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark or Out-of-Sync, museum of rumour (2004)
http://turbulence.org/studios/rumor/museum/
Museum of Rumour explores the telekinetic nature of the rumour, examining how it spreads across six degrees of separation from Gertrude Stein and (other) female saints. Using scientific bases to map and measure the circulation of rumours, they explore the nature of space within the leaky boundaries of the form. These are texts that move out into the world. Multidimensional, these texts, thoughts, words and voices take flight. Likewise, their rumour-based texts bleed out into real space to become installation art, soundscape, monument and portal for two-way communication.

Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark are Australian new media artists who collaborate as Out-of-Sync. Maria is a visual artist and Norie is a sound/radio artist. Their work has been exhibited internationally and includes installation, cd roms, and internet art. Currently they are interested in working with the fictive possibilities of the net -- playing on the borderland between fiction and reality.

Works Cited
Beiguelman, Giselle with kanarinka. “Interview with Giselle Bieguelman” (sic). Posted to the nettime mailing list. 08 Dec 2003. http://www.nettime.org

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia, 1994.

Haraway, Donna. “The Cyborg Manifesto.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991. [1985] 149-181.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge and London: Mediawork MIT, 2002.

Pajaczkowska, Claire. “Issues in Feminist Visual Culture.” Feminist Visual Culture. Fiona Carson and Claire Pajaczkowska, Eds. New York: Routledge, 2001. 1-21.

Palumbo, Maria Luisa. New Wombs: Electronic Bodies and Architectural Disorders. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2000.

Ulmer, Gregory L. "Grammatology Hypermedia." Postmodern Culture. June 1997.
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.191/ulmer.191

Virilio, Paul. The Lost Dimension. Trans. Daniel Moshenberg. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.