The 80+1 team made public today the recipients of the “Live Bits” commission competition. The competition, based on a Call for Proposals last fall, was for “art exploring real-time connectedness,” where the one essential requirement for all proposals was “live bits:” real-time digital information via any network of any viable quantity.
“An exhibition of live artworks of this breadth and scale has never been done before, and frankly, probably couldn’t have been as recently as a couple years ago” says 80+1 Project Director Michael Naimark. “Because of our own time constraints, applicants had less than two months from the first announcement to our deadline. Still, we received almost 300 entries from 42 countries. Blogs and other networks have reached a point of connection to almost anyone anywhere on the planet.”
Fifteen projects were accepted, from countries including Bangladesh, China, Mali, Switzerland, Rumania, Argentina, Israel and Gaza. They range from video from a live taxicab in Jerusalem to sensors monitoring the flow of water from the single well in a village in Mali, plus lullabies from Argentina, shadows from Mexico City, smells from a Beijing restaurant, vibrations from a Swiss tunnel through the Alps, video from markets in Bangladesh, sounds from a town square in Gaza, smiles from Bhutan, and more. “We were as interested in art projects having something to say with a small amount of live bits as we were in ones using the highest bandwidth currently available.”
Descriptions of the complete exhibition can be found at http://www.80plus1.org/art-projects.
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A related exhibition which toured in 2001 and 2002 was the landmark “Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace”. Curated by Steve Dietz and based upon a 1989 essay by Roy Ascot, the exhibition, organized by the Walker Art Center, included 8 installation works, 9 online projects, 27 past and recent film clips, and a “telematics timeline,” all thankfully preserved on the exhibition website.
http://telematic.walkerart.org/datasphere/index.html