Linkage - Favorite Arts Sites

compiled by Michael Nicolella

http://www.walkerart.org/education/activities/simpson/interac tive.html
The Walker Art Center has one of my favorite websites. It is rambling, confusing, and appealing to the eye. Gallery 9, part of their New Media Initiatives, has many online art projects.

The list begins with Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin's Universal Page - a web page that crawls the World Wide Web and offers an objective average of its content. The color seems to be puce, the html characters form obtuse patterns, and the links lead to a page that looks the same. "All users on the Internet are invited to join together to witness the consummation of global collectivity."

Interactive themes and presences predominate throughout Gallery 9, and many of its sites are worth visiting when you are free of mind.

Elsewhere in walkerart.org, Lorna Simpson has presents a whimsical interactive project called Another Look. "Lorna Simpson often explores the way in which African Americans are identified based on their physical appearance and personal styles." Viewers use controls on the web page to create a portrait of themselves or someone whom they know. There is also a portfolio of an exhibition of Simpson's of lithographs of wigs painted on felt. (Newsletter readers may remember mention of Allison Saar, who tackled similar subject matter, described in Part 3 of Therese Schwartz's series, The Year That Was: Marching Towards the Millennium.)

http://www.spolin.com/
Viola Spolin's philosophy of theatrical training created the American art form of Improvisation. Her son, director Paul Stills, created the first improv troupe in the United States, The Compass, as well as Chicago's classic Second City troupe. The technique is now being used in business and education. The site contains articles about Improvisation and Theater, and the Improv Page, a clearinghouse for information about improvisational theater.

http://www.stadiumweb.com/
Stadium, an independent site for Iinternet art, merged with the Dia Center for the Arts, becoming Stadium@Dia. Lousie Lawler's Without Moving / Without Stopping downloads images from a mixture of films, and captions from common language which that are not related directly to the still images. Says the site, "Each QTVR affords a 'total' picture of the scene, but because the viewer must constantly frame and reframe the image, the work goes beyond traditional still panoramic photographs, investigating the concepts of frames and boundaries." The archive is worth visiting as well.

http://www.fbi.gov/majcases/arttheft/a rt.htm
The National Stolen Art File is, maintained by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations. "The National Stolen Art File is a computerized index of stolen art and cultural property as reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation by law enforcement agencies throughout the United States and internationally."

http://www.rodencrater.org/
In the Painted Desert of northern Arizona, artist James Turrell has been working to turn Roden Crater, a cinder volcano, into an artwork. Work has been mounting since 1972, and completion is scheduled for this year, transforming the crater into a large-scale artwork, "that relates, through the medium of light, to the universe of the surrounding sky, land, and culture."