organized by electronicorphanage.com and assisted by michelethursz.com in Feb 2002

powered by newstoday.com , supported by archinect.com

description :

every two years, the whitney museum of contemporary art in ny, is putting together a major art exhibition which is suppose to collect the most interesting american art of the moment.

in early February 2002, miltos manetas and peter lunenfeld, noticed that the museum has not registered the domain www.whitneybiennial.com.

manetas , decide to put together an internet exhibition which would open the day of the Museum gala. he invited many curators to suggest artists.

(read the story of the whitneybiennial.com)

---

list of curators/writers and organisations who invited artists: jan aman, andreas angelidakis,archinect.com, stefano chiodi , joshua decter, laurence dreyfus, alex galloway,paul groot,patrick lichty ,peter lunenfeld, lev manovich , magda sawon, newstoday.com, hans ulrich obrist ,marisa olson, michele thursz, roosavelt savage, philippe vergne, olivier zahm and purple magazine .

opening : March 05 2002

special thanks : michael rees for "turntable"

carbonatedjazz for webdesign and the cover page , gnac for the music

and rafael rozendaal for the sticker.

---

 

Press release:

Today, is active a new generation of creators .

They are using computers and Internet and they doesn't care much about the so called "Real Space". The work of most of them is TELIC, and a few of them succeeds to do some NEEN work* .

Some of these people, are professional artists , but many work as designers, architects, webdesigners and programmers or they just do "" things"" without care about what this output will be called. Because most of them are absent from the landscape of the contemporary art shows, we decide to present them in a parasite collection which opened online,in the same day with the Whitney Museum show.

We invited them to contribute a Flash piece. It can be either an art work or their logo, something complete, or a note for a possible artwork. Because today, most film previews are today better than the actual films : the WHITNEYBIENNIAL.COM is conceived as a collage of previews.

Question : Why shall they all had to do a Flash animation ?

Answer : It was an experiment : we believe that as Peter Lunenfeld writes at the KLM theory*, "Flash is today's Pop". In fact , Flash is an easy technology which lets you draw a cartoon or a logo, animate it and even make it interactive: the user will click on it and the cartoon(or logo )will reply. It brings together all other forms of art such as photography, written text, movies and drawing in such a way that makes contemporary art of the past century look like a proud grandfather: Flash is, again according to Mr. Lunenfeld , "PoliTech, the irrepressible joy and lightness of being digital after the boom economy has gone bust." It is also scalable, that means that you can display it on different dimensions without any loss of quality. With very little budget and in a short time, you can do something that looks better than any "art video" or "installation".

Question : What is the "Turntable" ?

Answer : It is an application which we commissioned to artist Michael Rees . It works as a normal turntable that you can use it to mix not only sound, but also Flash movies: all pieces become samples and the user, like a visual DJ can make his/her composition online. The viewer, can change the colors of the background , make the animation larger or smaller, transparent or opaque etc."Turntable", is a revolutionary tool, because it open sources material and makes even from any "closed" pieces a work in progress: for the very fist time, the artworks in this show, function in both ways, as samples and as stand alone pieces.

Relationship of the Whitneybiennial.com with the Museum's Whitney Biennial.

Even if the Whitneybiennial.com was naturally in "competition" with the Museum show, (because they are both a different view of the actual visual reality), it was not an anti-show. We weren't concerned about the official show; we just wanted to use it for our own purposes

 

Whitneybiennial.com is dedicated to the Italian artist Gino De Dominicis (1947-1998 ).

Other inspirations :

"Forgotten Silver" New Zealand, 1995
a movie by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes

and

"When We Were Kings", a 1996 Documentary on Muhammad Ali, directed by Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford

 

---

 

*about neen and telic

Almost two years ago, in May 2000, we commissioned from Lexicon Branding (the company that introduced Powerbook and Pentium), a new word which was suppose to define any artistic experience relative to the computer screen. If that name would have been an accurate translation of "what's going on", it would have been a successful term. In fact they proposed us "Telic", a very convincing and sophisticated term invented by the human stuff of the company , but we decide to acquire(and introduce at a Demo/performance at the Gagosian gallery in NY)a name which their machines coined . This was Neen, a palindrome created by a computer program after they feed it with words such as "screen" and let it run the different combinations.

Neen, which by coincidence in old Greek means " exactly now : not a second later "was a controversial name. Only a few people , felt that it was proper to call themselves neenstars and what they do Neen, and this was because most of us, myself included unfortunately, we are doing still a lot of TELIC. Our times, are Telic. But we want to see more Neen happen.

Lets define Telic: Telic is magic through technology. Telic is our relationship with the tools which help us design the World and see things in a perspective. Telic Rem Koolhaas S, M,L, XL : it is constructive: anything related with job, is Telic. People which are busy with aesthetics but who also have jobs and clients, are Telic.

But sometimes these Telics produce very important Neen. Its, usually as a small detail which they will hide inside the nightmare of their job. Neen in this cases, is what their clients don't understand but they have not the courage to ask or they happen to like it anyway.

Telic is serious : it makes sense or it's a sense wannabe. People recognize it easily and trust it. Neen instead, is Telic that went nuts: you wouldn't believe that it's possible and even who makes it cannot easily repeat it. But Neen looks great ! There are a few 100% neenstars , people without a specific profession who linger around us .

Telic is Giacometti , Neen is Fontana. Nature is Telic and Miracles are Neen. Miracles which have a purpose , become Telic, instead miracles like the one where Jesus walks on the water, stay Neen for centuries. But again, if Jesus would come back today and he will start walking on the water he will be very Telic. Really, there is no way to preserve Neen, because it expires a second after. neenstars are the people who are OK with that.

more at www.neen.org

visit also : www.biennale.net , the Internet section of the Tirana Biennial , curated by Miltos Manetas and the Electronic Orphanage