January 15, 2007
Turbulence Commission:
"html_butoh" by Ursula Endlicher
Turbulence Commission: html_butoh by Ursula Endlicher :: [Needs Flash Player; high speed Internet connection (DSL/Cable or better); speakers on; Mozilla Firefox 2.0+, Opera 9.10+, Netscape 8.0+, and Safari 2.0+]
"html_butoh" questions the way information is indexed on the Web; it enacts the "Global Top 500" websites and is choreographed by their real-time HTML structure. Small video clips show participants translating the "functionality" of each HTML tag into movement. The URLs, and therefore the "stage," changes every 3:28 minutes, running through 500 websites within a twenty-four hour cycle. "html_butoh" runs on the html-movement-library, an open-for-participation video clip database. In Butoh--a Japanese dance technique--the dancer "becomes" an image through her movements, which parallels to how a web browser scans through HTML and displays its content. By submitting to the html-movement-library every participant instantly becomes part of the "html_butoh" performance.
"html_butoh" is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.
BIOGRAPHY
Ursula Endlicher was born in Vienna, Austria and has lived and worked as a "multiple-media" artist in New York since 1993. Her work resides at the intersection of Internet art, performance and multi-media installation. She focuses, with a critical and yet humorous eye, on the underlying structures of the Web, questioning online identity while often anthropomorphizing and enacting the Web, and bringing the Web into a "physical" realm via alternative human-machine communication interfaces. Endlicher has been shown internationally, including "artport," Whitney Museum, New York and "Illegal Machines" at Art Athena, Greece. Recently she participated in "No body on this line", a research lab at Tanzquartier, Vienna, Austria. Endlicher initiated a discussion and web conference about "Curating net art" with Mobile-Studios.org in 2006. She has lectured about her work in the US and Europe.
Posted by jo at January 15, 2007 09:57 AM
