GAS ZAPPERS is a series of interactive online art game that tackles climate change. The game’s protagonist is the polar bear—that victimized, yet cuddly symbol of global warming. Players embody the polar bear as it progresses through different climate change scenarios: Venice under water, a forest threatened by bulldozers, and an altercation with vicious oil derricks.

visit Gas Zappers

Stealing camera feeds, yikes!

I’ve come back to this post after thinking about this “work in progress” all day. Here is a link to Delk’s site, by the way: http://www.johndelk.com. It seems that a lot of new media work gets a little overly involved in the how and not the why. It’s clever and impressive technically that Delk can tap into people’s nanny cams, but why would he want to do it? I’m sure the piece will be about the loss of privacy in a our lives, but invading peoples privacy in this way may not be the best way to explore this idea. I’ve seen many works on this topics that limit the artist’s and the viewer’s “snooping” to public spaces. Is Delk going to far by “invading” people’s homes? Is that ok for an artist to do?

I have more questions than answers. i hope to see the finished piece one day.

Students in my Special Topics: Internet Art class have organized and curated an exhibition on the internet art site, <terminal>.  

Terminal is a space sponsored by the Department of Art and the Center of Excellence For The Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University to showcase and examine internet art.

Visit Terminal

I’ve been following the work Gregory Chatonsky for several years now (I included him in the first Terminal exhibition). I am always impressed with the way that he can make work that is sophisticated in its use of technology but is still very “human” and touching.

His latest piece is a case in point. “The Waiting / Flussgeist 1″ takes image from Flickr, video of passengers waiting for a train and random twitter posts to create a very touching impromptu narrative. I imagine that we have all sat in a crowded airport or train station and wondered about the private lives of those around us. Chatonsky’s piece takes that sort of day dreaming and uses the seeming randomness of twitter posts to give us a fictional glimpse at the inner lives of strangers. Chatonsky says the piece is “not the life-story of one person or another but the story of the Internet machine that feeds on our lives daily.” The internet has become a place for us to think out loud.

http://incident.net/works/flussgeist/waiting/ 

Critic, artist, and curator Marisa Olsen and Abe Linkoln have created a blog tilted “blog art” that features work by artists that have used blogs as a “medium”.