e-[d]entity: Female Perspectives on Identity in Digital Environments

Etant Donné le Bleu (Given the Blue) is a visual narrative—images breaking in a parallel universe, the realm of science fiction and the fantastic. The repetition, multiplication, and mechanization are intended to form a radically artificial world. They are not characters as such, with a past and a future; not beings that would bear names. This is not a space as such, not even a circus. The dubious figures playing the roles of witnesses are of only one color. The screen divides into two, three, and four independent compartments that enlarge, in turn, to expose, analyze, and multiply the drama that is played out over and over again, without end. Tragedy rather than drama, without psychological or sociological range; the irreversible fate of blue women, the chorus which accompanies the action—enormous or minute through technology. Dehumanized undoubtedly, but perhaps guarantors of the future image and reality of human presence. Technical realization: A physical model generates the animation of the aerial-trapeze and defines the movement of the character attached toit. The behavior of all characters has been adjusted with the key-framing technique. All software has been developed at MIRALab-University of Geneva.

The music is an original creation of Jean-Baptiste Barrière and Kaija Saariaho.

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Madi plays an interactive on-line computer game in the privacy of her apartment. Wearing a computer corset that stores her programs in a "Garden Interface", she propels her go-go cowgirl construct WANDA through the game world, encountering an assortment of logged-on players and game identities who trick and confuse her. An aggressive male character WANG logs on, and inserts his cold architecture into her coordinates, draining the power in her corset. His expanding architecture threatens to overtake her Garden Reservoir. To confront this powerful take-over artist, she must rely on her organic memory and is forced to establish some psychological boundaries to protect her identity and preserve her freedom.

Support for Hiatus has come from the National Endowment for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts. The computer model was created with technical support from Advanced Visual Systems, Waltham, Massachusetts and DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), in Nashua, New Hampshire.

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On the Flies of the Market Place deals with the idea of the European space, divided and sacrificed. In a visually surreal world of facts and emotions—using documents from books and magazines—the video suggests a re-reading of the European space, i.e. Eastern and Western Europe. Referencing history, philosophy (Kant), and art, the video elaborates on the idea of Eastern Europe as the indivisible residua of all European atrocities. Eastern Europe is a piece of shit and the bloody symptom of the political, cultural, and epistemological failures of the 20th century.

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This mock-virtual environment is a playground for the imagination. Equipped with helmet, goggles, and a basic understanding of early video game strategies, the artist morphs into an adventureland training camp where she meets with media icons on common ground. She fearlessly changes her intensity and velocity in unison with, and at times under the command of, rival action heroes and network sponsors. The title implies that there are bugs in the program, undetected viruses in the system. This video performance parallels the heightened sense of anxiety inherent in computer games, amplifying a "fear of contamination" to a level that borders on insanity.

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U & I dOt cOm is an experimental narrative/documentary hybrid about Zoey, a teenage girl who negotiates her identity in cyberspace. Dreaming about the perfect true love, she secretly navigates 3-D worlds to find romance. A web contest sweeps her into a dreamscape of desire and deception as hidden mechanisms of e-commerce, online data-mining, and real-time consumer profiling monitor her every move. When Zoey finally rebels, her sense of self, her home, and her relationship with her mother are forever transformed in the new cyber-cultural domain.

A co-production of the Banff Centre for the Arts.

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Believing that we are, "dragging our feet into the 21st Century," Almy made this video trilogy to celebrate technology and the future in an ironic melange of politics, sociology, sexuality, and economics. Flawlessly melding sound and image, the video moves through three sections, "Countdown," "Departure," and "Arrival." In the end, Almy posits this paradox: technology as a human development is rapidly making humans obsolete and interpersonal contact impossible, making the future of man’s presence and very existence uncertain.

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Alphabetically Sorted is a scrolling list of 644 keywords downloaded from CompuServe and spoken by “Victoria: High Quality,” a speech synthesis program.

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A poetic allegory about technology's invasion of the body and the destruction of the immune system, witnessing the pollution of history that drowns us. Sponsored by the CICV, Belfort, France.

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(chatlandia) uses the public bathroom stall as format and metaphor for Internet relay chat lines (IRCs). The video's soundtrack is composed from transcripts of actual IRC sessions; the conversations emerging from this institutional facade speak of lust, intimacy, spunky women, and "what Desiree wants," calling into question the division between humans and machines. In (chatlandia) the larger theme of how the 'net functions as social space is explored and encourages the viewer to ask: Is the Information Age actually bringing us closer together or pushing us farther apart? Is the way we interact physically being transformed by our virtual interactions? Can we be intimate through the plastic interface of the computer and how does the Internet feed this need?

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"code switching began as a contemporary reaction to Adrian Piper's Cornered (1988). It goes on to explore the fracturing of contemporary identity within modern culture, and the mechanisms by which individuals assign and create the cultural, racial, personal, and social identities around us. We all have codes by which we interact with and interpret others. Depending on what situation we are in, we adopt the appropriate persona to fit the occasion, constantly creating representations for others to read appropriately.

The piece consists of a videotape documenting a computerized sketch of my face. By placing three dollars into a mall photo booth, I was interpreted, drawn and given a representation of myself to carry home. The piece is silent. Any information given is mediated by reading. As the sketch develops, the viewer reads the facial features of the person forming in front of them. The only representation of voice is mediated through sub-titles. The text addresses the viewer directly causing a flux in the locutor from monitor screen, to artist and then to the viewer--directly. Sound is established when conscientiously acknowledged as thought. The individual in code switching exists in a purely technologically mediated world and has placement and development entirely within the viewer's interpretation and the assumptions he or she make on them."

--Erin Seymour

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“For quite some time the Hamburg artist Cornelia Sollfrank has been researching female hackers and found that hacking is a field completely under male domination. Nonetheless she was able to produce a series of several videos in which she interviewed female hackers. In December 1999 she came to know a U.S. hacker who attended the annual hackers’ convention held by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). She did the video interview have script, will destroy with her on condition that the woman, code-named Clara G. Sopht, remained anonymous and did not provide specific information about her work. The result is a highly theoretical interview about current forms of political resistance, undermined by seductively beautiful and enigmatically diffuse pictures of a woman wearing sunglasses and a cap, moving around in a low-tech scenario.”

—Yvonne Volkart, “Tamed Girls Running Wild, Figurations of Unruliness in Contemporary Video Art”, Video as a Female Terrain, ed. Stella Rollig (Graz: Catalogue Styrian Automn, 2000)

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lovehotel uses excerpts from the book Fleshmeat by Australian Internet artist Francesca da Rimini, detailing her life online from 1994 to 1997.

“Linda Wallace’s video lovehotel is about the emergence of new spaces of interaction, of new technologies and of new formations of desire; it is about the meandering of an ‘Aberrant Intelligence’ which hovers above and insinuates itself into our familiar habitats (physical and cyber) like a kind of inscrutable and formless spectre of the future.”

—Chris Rose, “Formula for the Emergence of the New,” Life 3.0 (Madrid: Fundación Telefónica, 2000)

This title is only available as part of e-(d)entity.