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(excerpts)Julia Scher
Julia Scher: Hi. My name is Julia Scher, and Benjamin is going to stop me when I'm running over my time.
I talk kind of like what is happening on the web. I can't wait for the web to be more blobbed-out wired sucked-in gooped-out as my thought processes are.
So in a way next time maybe we'll gather here ten, twenty years from now, we'll be able to like stick tubes in each other and hear all our thoughts at the same time. I'm not saying that's great or desirable, but it's just one idea.
As a quick note to the end of all kinds of things, I want to briefly talk about a quick one liner into movements around anti-democracy. I believe that all forms of supremacy can be very dangerous. And in a new book coming out called "Too Close for Comfort" by Chip Berlet as well as in other recent publications, manifestos and the like, there's a lot of commentary about how supremacy reveals itself in many different ways now using the "techno" world. We're not discussing that this evening per se, but I just want to let you know that -- given that through the web we do -- are in a protracted social institution, that it's an interesting thing to think about. That is, think about the supremacy of people who control surveillance systems, for example.
Right here I'm holding a phonebook. Why? Because I'm always carrying this with me. It's my phone. It's my link. It's my hyperlink to all kinds of sites, and I'm going to start out with some sentences appropriate to the artists in the crowd.
Now, what happened to this project? This project is now part of äda 'web. So why am I bringing up this slide last? Inside äda 'web or inside the digested network of Securityland which is part of äda 'web combined with many other odd projects, I was able to put images from a live installation into live pages that you could scroll though as you sit at your computer at home. So you could have a secondhand or tertiary hand experience of a live installation.
Previously, in my installations, you needed many many different screens to show simultaneous activity. On the web that's no longer necessary.
Simultaneous separate states of time, motion and energy can be viewed simultaneously without dragging in 10, 20, 30 or so monitors and switchers.
Here's some of the places you can go live on äda 'web. Here, inside Securityland, we have live images; that's in a place called One House. So, in addition, to pre-recorded states of being or previous tenses of my subjectivity laying over some --physical-- institutional space, I'm able to drag pre-selected live spaces into äda 'web through the phone lines. Here we even have outer space coming into äda 'web. So I'm making a joke about how important that is. We're just going to cruise through this right now.
Now, I'm going to go backwards for the artists here. What are some of the problems working with live digitals? I have no vocational training in the things that the äda 'web masters are like really cool and good at, and they helped me out. I started doing computers in 1972, but this has no bearing on the kinds of ways I'm able to perform this collaborative effort.
Over here on the right you see an exploded large woman. Now, this was done in Photoshop and I imported it into Quark. This was first a page layout not for äda but, for another art project (published in Artforum International). I wanted an exploding woman. I found that this body, this chunk, this blowing up thing in Photoshop wasn't cool enough -- it just wasn't -- it didn't turn me on. So it failed in a way. These shrink wrapped packages don't always work for artists and, in fact, if you make up your own packages it might be more appropriate.
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