ArtFutura 2002
The Web as Canvas
October 31st – November 3rd / CCCB, Barcelona
FuturaCircuit: Valencia, Vitoria
Paul Friedlander . Cory Arcangel . Hi-ReS! . area3 . Shynola . Adam Valdez / Weta Digital . Eric Zimmerman . Innothna . David Casacuberta Jeremy Boxer (Resfest)
Exploring the creative possibilities of Internet as a canvas, the CCCB accommodated the area of conferences, exhibitions, projections and workshops for ArtFutura 2002.
The conferences about net.art and digital art featured the collective RSG and the multimedia studio Hi-ReS!.
Among the presentations on 3D and visual effects, the presence of Adam Valdez from Weta Digital, the company responsible for the digital effects in the trilogy The Lord of the Rings stood out.
The festival of digital cinema RESFEST and Shynola from Britain were featured, among others, in the presentations dedicated to new audiovisual expression.
The on-line exhibition “Web as Canvas”, curated by Roberta Bosco and Stefano Caldana, presented ten artistic proposals conceived for Internet and included the project World Wall Painters, a production undertaken for ArtFutura 2002 by the group from Barcelona area3, an application for the Carnivore Project from RSG Radical Software Group.
The exhibition by Paul Friedlander used lights controlled by computer and infrared sensors to create sculptures that simulate giant holographs of particular beauty. Among the pieces exhibited ‘Hyperspheres’ and ‘The Equation of the Wave’, specially created for the exhibition, stood out.
The audiovisual program grew in this edition. Along with the classic “ArtFutura Show” and “Infography in Spain”, new monographic programs dedicated to Motiongraphics, Demoscene and Digital Cinema were incorporated.
ArtFutura Show 2002 presented titles such as “The Cathedral” from Plastige Image. And Motiongraphics recompiled independent works, while the monographic Demoscene included the most outstanding recent pieces from the creative program.
In the sessions dedicated to videogames, Ernest Adams (Madden NFL) and Gonzalo Suárez (Commandos) conversed on the coming together of art and videogames, while Eric Zimmerman, founder of the company GameLab, debated with TeamChman and Innothna the idea of independence in videogames.
“Ochoporocho (eight-by-eight): videogames, abstraction and simplicity” convokes figures from digital art, the design of interactives and the independent creation of games based on the idea of recovering the values of simplicity, abstraction and playabilityness that characterized the primitive videogames of eight bits.
Finally, the Mercat de las Flors was the scenario of PLAYTIME, a more recreational area of the festival with musical interventions and audiovisuals, performances collective sessions of gaming.
“When asked about his photographic montages, David Hockney simply replied, ‘The canvas does not stretch.’
Let’s talk about canvases. Since the oil technique of the Van Eyck brothers, we have “stretched” the canvas in every possible way. From Impressionism to Cubism, to Pollock’s drippings, Warhol’s serigraphs, and Keith Haring’s chalk.
We have slashed it, spilled paint on its surface, painted it entirely black, and left it completely white. We have fused it with photography and sculpture. We have reduced it to the size of a stamp and enlarged it to the point where it no longer fits in galleries. We have twisted it, flipped it, textured it, deformed it, and burned it. And now… what?
Well, now we have a canvas on which we can paint live and in real-time before a potential audience of billions of viewers. We can interact with it and send it from one end of the globe to the other. That canvas is the Internet.”
Montxo Algora
“More processing capacity, more bandwidth, more definition lines, more polygons, more pixels. Faster and more real.
“More” is the magic word that hardware manufacturers constantly offer their best customers, those who explore the crossroad between creation and technology“.
José Luis de Vicente
