TRANSMEDIA :29:59
+media art in public urban space+

curated by Michael Alstad and Michelle Kasprzak

March 1 - 31, 2006:
29th minute: Myfanwy Ashmore - 'Mario Trilogy'
59th minute: Kate Armstrong + Michael Tippet - 'Grafik Dynamo'

Year Zero One is pleased to present TRANSMEDIA :29:59, a year long exhibition on the pedestrian level video billboard at Yonge-Dundas Square in downtown Toronto. Launched August 1st 2005, TRANSMEDIA :29:59 features one minute video works 24/7 every half hour on the 29th and 59th minutes.

Featured for the month of March is Myfanwy Ashmore's 'Mario Trilogy' and Kate Armstrong + Michael Tippet's 'Grafik Dynamo'.

Myfanwy Ashmore's Mario Trilogy is three hacked versions of the original Super Mario Brothers video games dumped to single channel video output for Transmedia :29:59. Mario Trilogy is part of the 'CONTROLLER: Artists Crack the Game Code' exhibition at InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre from February 24- March 25, 2006.

Myfanwy Ashmore would like to express her gratitude to year01.com for their support and generosity since the initial mario battle no.1 work was made in 2000 through providing space for the software and dealing with intense hits to the server when it was linked off places like joystiq.com and other RSS newsfeeds.

Kate Armstrong + Michael Tippet’s Grafik Dynamo is a net.art work that loads live images from blogs and news sources on the web into a live action comic strip. The work is currently using a feed from LiveJournal. The images are accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. Animating the comic strip using dynamic web content opens up the genre in a new way: Together, the images and narrative serve to create a strange, dislocated notion of sense and expectation in the reader, as they are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes perfectly in sync, and always moving and changing. The work takes an experimental approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of data animating the work and the formal perameter that comprises its structure.

Grafik Dynamo is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.


BIOS

Myfanwy Ashmore graduated from the Sculpture-Installation department at the Ontario College of Art in 1996, and received her MFA from York University in 1998. She has been the recipient of numerous grants as well as awards from various councils and artist run centres. Most recently she was nominated and short listed for the prestigious 2003 K.M. Hunter award through the Ontario Arts Council. She has exhibited internationally in Amsterdam, Chicago, Seoul and Philadelphia alongside Yoko Ono, Sol Lewitt, Liam Gillick, Robert Gober, George Brecht, Oliver Wittchow, lo-bat and COVOX.

 Kate Armstrong is an artist and writer with interest in contemporary practices with particular emphasis on new media art, networks, distributed experience, and hybrid fields. Her artwork centres around text and experimental narrative, especially open forms that bring poetics and network function together. In the past this has taken a variety of forms including net art, psychogeographical work, audio, mobile applications, and painting. She is currently making pieces that use robotics to bring networked and responsive information into tactile, sculptural space. Armstrong also works collaboratively with bnode in the field of public art and organizes Upgrade Vancouver, monthly gatherings around art, technology and culture, in conjunction with the international Upgrade network. She has written for P.S 1/MoMA, the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, TrAce, Year Zero One, and The Thing, as well as for catalogue publications. Her first book, Crisis & Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture, was published in 2002.

Michael Tippett has a decade of experience creating and managing technology businesses. With expertise in design, namespace, distributed & mobile media and wireless technology, Tippett's media background is in pioneering new forms of networked content. His newest venture, NowPublic.com, uses emerging technologies like camera phones, digital cameras, blogging tools and RSS standards to change the way news is created and distributed. NowPublic lets people build their own news - providing a hub for citizen reporting and for viewing world events though the prism of an alternate, distributed, real time media. ).




Year Zero One gratefully acknowledges the Ontario Arts Council,Yonge-Dundas Square and Clearchannel for their support of Transmedia :29:59.




TRANSMEDIA :29:59

<<Rewind
February 2006: Shaan Syed, Ed Pien
January 2006: Donna Szoke, Chris Meerdo
December 2005: Gwen MacGregor, David Crawford
November 2005: Cheryl Sourkes, BlueScreen
October 2005: Honeybyte, Risa Horowitz
September 2005: Pascual Sisto, Luke Lamborn
August 2005: Manu Luksch, Jillian Mcdonald

 
 
YEAR ZERO ONE is an on-line artist run centre which operates as a network for the dissemination of digital culture and new media through web based exhibitions, site-specific public art projects, an extensive media arts directory and the Year01 Forum.