Stateless Half Life, a web-art artwork by Carmin Karasic & Rolf van Gelder.
SEE ‘STATELESS HALF LIFE’ IN ACTION!
2004 (and ongoing)
The Internet – see Stateless Half Life in action HERE!
This artwork was created using Flash, PHP and a MySQL database.
An interactive webart piece by Carmin Karasic & Rolf van Gelder.
See the artwork live! (Macromedia Flash needed in your browser)
This artwork expresses the core concept: Our decisions have a global impact. The work attempts to increase awareness which would hopefully influence the choices we make.
In web art project Stateless Half Life refugee movement is visualized in dynamic trails. Refugees and repatriation are expressed as data points because without living the experience, our only reference is representational data – data that we are free to label and pigeonhole. Stateless Half Life engages you with interactive visuals, luring you deeper into the website, only to kick you out and forever deny you re-entry.
Freedom of choice is an assumed “right” within the context of hypertext engagement. Stateless Half Life is a uniquely limited WWW experience, because you are free to experience the entire site only once. This artwork attempts to evoke an unanticipated and illogical experiential loss of free choice. The project also takes advantage of internet technology to automatically permanently deny banished visitors re-entry to the website.
The artwork is inspired by the varied psychological and emotional impacts of being expelled from one’s homeland. Exile obviously includes the trauma associated with being forced into adjusting to a new “life”. Less obvious is the successive anguish of being denied physical connection to one’s roots without recourse or provocation. After reading Edward Said’s essay, “Reflections on Exiles”, I tried to imagine the plight of asylum seekers. I wanted to invite others to think about refugees via an interactive interpretation of forced human relocation.
“This net.art piece successfully elicits a visceral response to an infringement on assumed rights within the context of cyberspace. The emotional response to the project is meant to cause further reflection on the plight of refugees. Ideally, the work would move one to action. We all have choices. I believe privileged people need to be made aware and or reminded of broad circumstances linked to the influence of our choices. Privilege is tied to power. Complacency masks privilege and obscures power. Increased awareness and personal empowerment informs our choices.”
~ Carmin Karasic
The Virtual Quilt installation was shown at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, USA.
“Throughout its history quilt-making has been viewed as a community-building activity as well as a form of communal creativity. The quilting bee, a gathering of people to construct a quilt, remains a way for people to interact in a group art process. Similarly, the origins of the Internet are community-building in nature. From the beginning, art made for the Internet has had an interactive aspect that allowed for group participation.
For this project, quiltmaker Clara Wainwright and the web artists Carmin Karasic and Rolf van Gelder have brought the communal creativity of the web and the quilting bee together in The Virtual Quilt: An Interactive Art Project. The entire online world is invited to participate in the creation of a virtual quilt that will be made into a real quilt and displayed here at DeCordova.
This quilt-process is the fabric version of the virtual quilt. Through the DeCordova Museum Web site, cyberspace visitors by design a square for the quilt online. On Tuesdays of each week, Clara Wainwright will print out the new square designs, create the squares in fabric, and stitch them to this quilt. You can follow the growth process of the quilt online.
Many thanks to Carmin Karasic and Rolf van Gelder for creating this virtual quilt, which allows us to expand the exhibition beyond the gallery walls.”
George Fifield
Curator of New Media
DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, USA
January 18 – May 27, 2002
DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, USA
An interactive New Media project by Clara Wainwright, Carmin Karasic & Rolf van Gelder
Via a website visitors could create their own square of the Virtual Quilt.
The piece they created was automatically send by e-mail to the ‘real’ quiltmaker, Clara Wainwright (Boston, MA, USA).
Clara created the ‘virtual’ square in fabric and added it to the ‘physical quilt’ in the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, USA.
On the museum’s website visitors could follow the progress of the piece (by photographs).
Using a special Virtual Quilt web app they could see the current state of the Virtual Quilt as well as the current state of the real quilt. That way they also could locate their own square within the ‘real quilt’
Click HERE to see a demo of the Virtual Quilt.
In 2004 the Virtual Quilt became a part of the permanent collection of the Decordova Museum.
The d{s}eduction dialogue installation was shown at the New England School of Art and Design, Boston, MA, USA as a part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival 2001.
On the far wall: printouts of the chats the artists had while creating this piece of art.
On the monitor in front of the printouts: scrolling text of these chats.
Above that monitor: a ‘bejeweled’ gun.
Left and right two lounge chairs with built-in monitors on top, playing the two synchronized, juxtaposed movies.
April 21 – May 6, 2001
New England School of Art and Design, Suffolk University, Boston, MA, USA
The d{s}eduction dialogue installation was shown at the Boston Cyberarts Festival Preview Party, Boston, MA, USA.
November 6, 2000
Massachusetts College of Art, Tower Gallery
The d{s}eduction dialogue installation was shown at the Art System Gallery, Toronto, CA.
September 27 – October 8, 2000
Art System Gallery, Toronto, CA
The d{s}eduction dialogue installation was shown at the Artists Foundation @ The Distillery, Boston, MA, USA.
June 3 – July 8, 2000
Artists Foundation @ The Distillery, Boston, MA, USA
A New Media installation by Carmin Karasic & Rolf van Gelder.
This cyberart collaboration explores the relationships and correlations between replication, sex, power, and violence. This work is based on the collaborators’ two different perspectives: the personal observations by a black American woman and a white European man. Reality is based on perception, as we perceive it to be. Perspective is based on our cultural filters.
Positioned as two simultaneously looping movies, the artists’ visions confront each other’s realities. Concepts of conquest and cooperation circle about the human drive for lineage preservation. Power has reproductive implications. Violence is used to gain power. Their comparisons of perceived power and control create a dialogue that concludes: sex is the primary root of war.
The Saint Lucy Chronicles, a very early web-art piece by Saint Lucy & Rolf van Gelder
July 1996 (and ongoing)
