“Narrating with New Media: What Happened with What has Happened?” by Belén Gache as part of the "3x3: New Media Fix(es)" on Turbulence.org

This work presents Ratzo, the king of rats, immersed in the space-time of a mythical forest and reacting according to the different moments of the day. There, Ratzo will bump into characters such as the hunter, the voodoo queen, the wolf, the cow, the dove, and so on. All of them have ambiguous personalities. Will they try to warn Ratzo about the dangers that lie in wait him? Will they become sources of danger themselves?

In Ground Zero, the enigma is: “ what happened to Ratzo?” As in the traditional narrative model, we try to answer the question about the luck of the main character. Jorge Luis Borges said that there are time mazes as well as space mazes. Ground Zero, a 24-hour narrative, is set up as a big maze of time. Ratzo is defined as an “archetypal creature which walks through the mythical forest in the outer limits of civilization”. As a character from a painting by Poussin, he wanders around an atemporal burial mound and finds other archetypal characters. Ratzo inhabits a parallel universe, a parallel time which differs from linear modern time.

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Animation at the End of Cinema

I've read only bits of this book but it seems to documents the last 5 years of art/animation in nyc. David Navas linked me in here. Surprisingly there's a paragraph about GroundZero.

"The animated image is proliferating outside of movie theatres - on the web, cell phones, television, video billboards and at art galleries. The renewed importance of animation in the digital age has been recognized by artists, designers, critics and theorists alike. This ground-breaking anthology brings contemporary theoretical thinking about animation together with writing by and about important independent artists who use animation in a variety of contexts. "

New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC
[ Opening Reception ] Fri. October 19, 2001 6-8 PM

Cin-o-matic explores the evolution of the cinematic experience and the impact of new technologies on time-based works. The exhibition includes the artist collaborative project Adrift and works by Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig, Yucef Merhi, Joseph Nechvatal, and John Cabral. Each of the projects presented utilizes the Internet as a tool for reconfiguring media-into network performance, net art, software-propelled visualizations, or sculptural objects-and each creates a new cinematic experience. Although they embrace an impressive range of approaches and visual languages, the works in Cin-o-matic share a central concern with how we explore and perceive time, space, and movement through today's advanced technologies.

Adrift, a collaboration by Helen Thorington, Marek Walczak, and Jesse Gilbert with Martin Wattenberg and Hal Eager, is an evolving multi- location Internet performance project that combines projections, narrative text, and richly textured sound streaming in real-time, linking imaginary and actual geographies. Presented for the first time on a large, semicircular screen which recalls the Cineorama, a panoramic projection space used during the World's Fair in France in 1900 to simulate a sense of drifting through an environment, Adrift creates an immersive journey through both real and virtual imagery of a harbor, metaphorically linking Internet surfing and physical movement.

Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig present Appearance Machine, a constructed sculptural ecosystem that produces a cinematic aural/visual space by continuously transforming data input from locally generated refuse via a robotic system and distributing it, using live feed as media, to a global community. Images from the machine, located in Brooklyn, are analyzed for movement by the computer, and an accompanying soundtrack is generated. This sound subsequently guides the machine's mechanisms, creating additional motion and setting in place a continuous system.

When viewed as installations, Adrift and Appearance Machine both imply a reconfiguration of the object into a cinematic experience. These works function as mechanisms in which particular elements are interchangeable so that the structure, context, and content can be translated into a variety of mediums for display.

Using the familiar visual imagery of early video games, Yucef Merhii has created net@ari, a film that breaks down the language of cinema through basic programming and investigates the psychological relationship between human being and machine. Joseph Nechvatal's Computer Virus 2.0 is a synthetic system that behaves like a living organism by gradually eating away at the available visual imagery, commenting upon the fetishization of visual images through technological reproduction. In contrast to the magnification of experience and encapsulation of time found in most cinematic experience, Ground Zero is a real-time 24-hour algorithmic animation that depicts a day in the life of a fictional cartoon character as he tends to mundane tasks.

Cin-o-matic magnifies the artistic process and the artists' use of the "digital studio." Each artist interprets the language of new media to create their own style resulting in original cinematic experiences.

Moving Image Gallery, NYC
May 3, 2001 - May 31, 2001
Opening reception: Thursday, May 3, 6-9pm.

Net art is made to be experienced online. How then should museums and galleries best exhibit net art in their physical spaces? net.ephemera takes an innovative approach to this problem by focusing on drawings, diagrams, notes, receipts and other physical artifacts related to the making of virtual work.

A 24 hour timeline sketch.

Photo of the exhbition.

Here's the exhibiton invitation.