On Viral Dissonance
I was a juror for this year's FLEFF Exhibition with the theme 'Viral Dissonance'. Together with Eduardo Cachucho I judged a small heap of submissions, selecting Zetamaze as the winner, matching both the theme and being a fascinating implementation.
Zetamaze is an open-source game in which players help construct a maze, decorate its walls with virtual graffiti, and fill folders with files to share with other players. Zetamaze encourages meandering by translating the “lure of the labyrinth” into 3D virtual space. Interaction with other players is entirely anonymous.
The objective of this year's FLEFF exhibition was to highlight projects that run online or on mobile devices and provoke and educate to expand dissonance virally as agentive and knowledge producing.
Many of the submissions were videos. Several were quite nice, but, because they, by design, preclude interaction and participation, we didn't think them as fit as the interactive works.
Curators Dale Hudson and Claudia Pederson selected the interesting pieces as part of the online exhibition. In addition, here are the few I thought also worth mentioning.
+ Channel of the North by Alfred Marseille. This is an online poem that grows and shrinks twice daily as a function of the tide in the Westerschelde river on the Dutch/Belgian border.
Wonderful for its calming effect.
+ Mood Exchange Rate by Alfred Marseille. This is an online poem whose content is determined by the percentage the Amsterdam Stock Exchange Index rises or falls relative to the opening price of the day.
+ A thousand pound bomb by Paul Beck is a fairly straightforward diatribe against American warfare. Particularly the first few minutes are strong.
+ Desert ArtLAB by Matthew Garcia and April Bojorquez is a community initiative dedicated to a civic art practice which explores how connections between ecology, culture and community shape the understanding of where we are and who we are.
+ Bio effector by Mari Ohno is an installation where a membrane is suspended in a gallery, set to vibrate like a drum based on the sound of visitors' bloodstreams which are detected and modulated in real time.
+ DEALT by Stephen Chen is an endurance operatic political performance installation piece, using custom Tarot cards, which collides Carmen with corporatism and commentary to illustrate the impacts and suffering from the collusion of politics and corporations.