Mapping new Territories, Neue Kunsthalle St. Gall, exposition de groupe avec Knowbotic Research and Marlene McCarty. 29.1. – 27.3. 2005. L'exposition a été initiée et facilitée par l&Mac226;'Office fédéral de la culture / sitemapping.ch. Partenaire de production est [plug.in] Bâle.
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A Dual-Media Hybrid
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56kTV – bastard channel –  the international online art project curated by xcult.org at the invitation of the Arts Council of Switzerland Pro Helvetia
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"What conditions does online art have to take into account and question in order to be regarded as a genuinely creative response to this new means of communication?"  The projects concocted since 1985 by Basel-based curator Reinhard Storz, editor of www.xcult.org, together with Studer/vdBerg, examine selected contents and at the same time test the specifics of the medium. In his latest project in collaboration with Pro Helvetia, Reinhard Storz has once again broken with several seemingly unchallenged internet conventions.  56kTV – bastard channel is an internet platform which, according to Storz, "is writing its own story as the history of a broadcasting company."  The television parody takes the form of a work in progress, and thus gratifies the online user’s need for constant updates. Since its premiere in November 2004, 56KTV has offered seven so-called programmes, with new programmes being added monthly until spring 2005. Storz commissioned the programmes from artists in Basel, Berlin, Geneva, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Ostrava, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo and Zurich.
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The online simulation of television puts the conventions of two different media to the test. Bastard channel  flies in the face of the web’s constant worldwide availability by adopting the programme structure of television: programmes can be accessed only at certain times of day, which differ according to international time zones. Storz uses this artificially imposed restriction, as he says, "to give the finger, in media terms, to the surf-now mentality". In doing so, he holds up a mirror to our attention spans and to the web as a time-based medium. What is more, the new site, unlike others, is not designed for the latest hardware, but for a modem speed of just 56k. In this way, the media hybrid is a cross between the full-blown promise of a television station and the modest technical equipment of the average home.
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The individual programmes have a certain leeway within this tongue-in-cheek meta-history of television. Exonemo undertakes the most obvious transformation of the computer monitor into a television screen in the programme "ZZZZZZZZapp", with digital pixels sending fuzzy analog signals across the screen as on a television with poor reception. For their aesthetic exploration of what Storz calls the "boundary zone before the image target", the duo Exonemo, who are in great demand as videojockeys and musicians in Tokyo, fish images from spam mail and simulate the sounds, producing different variations whenever the audience tunes in to bastard channel.
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Some of the other programmes refer more or less explicitly to the various broadcasting forms used in television, such as news, talk shows, or erotic advertising. In Beat Brogle’s www.onewordmovie.ch project, we can go online and create brief plots in the nature of a TV series. We can type in three search terms – Spock meets Sally, Skippy eats Flipper – whereupon the software developed by Brogle and Phillipe Zimmerman immediately trawls the internet for images and presents them as a rapid-fire slide show. Since there is no programme yet that can recognise images and sort them by content, the images posted on the web are selected by the name of the file, shedding light on the linguistic appropriation of images, which is often intuitive and shaped by subconscious thought patterns.
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Most of the other "broadcasts" deliberately adopt the non-participatory form of television in programmed sequences of sound and image. The contribution by Nathalie Novarina and Marcel Croubalian features a North American talk show host winding up the studio audience in a programme titled "News from the Dead". Before our eyes, in the repeatedly interrupted, snowy image, a ghost-like little figure can just be made out in the white noise, whispering through the online ether. It caricatures the hunger for sensation that talk shows pander to, trivialising even such a breakthrough in telecommunication as talking to the dead.
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Young-Hae Chang’s series "View and Plan of Seoul. A Transpacific Intrigue", is a lyrical 13-episode take on soap opera. This story of a female secret agent is set in a Starbucks in Seoul, with words taking the place of actors. Needless to say, the news is represented as well, and is best left running in the background, like a television in the kitchen. Marc Lee developed a "Live Stream TV-Bot" for bastard channel, which trawls the web in search of live webcams and TV streams, diverting the images to home screens where they are commentated by current news headlines. Unlike most online communications, the contents are always brand new: breaking news. In this way, Lee surpasses the material offered by commercial news pages, while the slow and uneventful images strangely mute the sensationalist language.
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Shu Lea Cheang also exploits the formal discrepancy between image and text – in this case to point out a simultaneity of events so unbearable that we tend to filter them out in everyday life. Barely censored images of naked women flood the computer. The sheer mass of images seems to reproduce itself autonomously like the addictive potential of consuming pornography. We are reminded of the extent to which the internet, like most new media, owes its dynamics to commercial porn production. The slow download speed is both appealing and tormenting. Shu Lea Cheang exploits emotionally what the sex industry exploits financially. The "cost" is counted not only by the image of a clock, but by the rising toll of AIDS victims in Africa during the time it takes to download the images. Sexualised recreation and political repression are linked here in a double morality so gruesome that only a cynic can watch for any length of time.
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Shu Lea Cheang’s contribution leaves aside the illusionism of the television monitor and addresses the location of the image – the monitor as "desktop" – by superimposing pop-up windows. Jimpunk’s furious choreography of sound and image, too, uses the floss of computer culture, setting Google dialogues, spam headers, pop-ups and typograph-ically constructed figures to a soundtrack of computer noises: error alerts, the digitally simulated click of a camera lens, beats, Indian drums. Underscored by stills from websites and snippets of film music, the wandering, emerging and fading windows take on a filmic character. They are pre-programmed, rehearsed as it were, but the almost simultaneous download of data onto the screen makes them seem like a live performance.
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The last of the programmes to be called up in the first phase vaguely recalls seers and psychologists who promise life-changing help by phone from the screen. Birgit Kempker, with the aid of programmers, has developed her literary alter ego into a Sphinx for the internet. The quiet, briefly looped sounds of the Sphinx breathing and clucking, and the image of a silvery mechanism shining in the shadows evoke an enigmatic female robot that responds to our questions by taking our keywords, mirroring them and re-arranging them to create a new poetic meaning. Or perhaps it was the author herself, who writes, "The Sphinx is a complex system, cutting and sphinxing pathways between realities. Tracks through the snow, ant roads, the flightpaths of swallows… That could mean that in order to understand something, one has to take it in, perhaps even eat it. The Sphinx of Pontresina and her machine, the Pontresina of the Sphinx, listen to the questions each in their own way and learn from one another as well as from the questions." The Sphinx thus becomes a strange metaphor for the internet.
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P.S. Just what is it that we want from television and, essentially, from any electronic medium? Insight or distraction? Studer/vd Berg recently added a wickedly tongue-in-cheek mystery game to the bastard channel, which ironically deploys the media as getaway vehicle. Stranded in an anonymous hotel room, we try to click our way out into multimedia nirvana. The good old pen, that humble and antiquated agent of self-determined thought, features too –as something to adjust the aerial with.
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Text: Annina Zimmermann
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Jimpunk utilise lui aussi les composants de la culture informatique pour sa chorégraphie effrénée d’images et de sons: il anime des dialogues Google, des titres de " spam ",  des " pop-ups " et des personnages formés de signes typographiques en les accompagnant d’une piste son faite de bruits d’ordinateur – annonces d’erreur, mais aussi simulation numérique d’un obturateur de caméra, " beats " et tambours hindous. Sous-tendues d’images fixes reprises sur des sites Web et de bribes de musiques de films, les fenêtres qui bougent, surgissent et s’évanouissent acquièrent un caractère cinématographique. Même si elles sont préprogrammées, " apprises par coeur " pour ainsi dire , elles ont l’aspect d’une performance en direct, à cause du téléchargement presque simultané des données sur l’écran.
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