[spectre] Rerelease of _pause by Garrett Lynch and Michaël Sellam

[Garrett Lynch]

Collaboration for artists can be one of the most productive endevours.  
It produces work by the artists involved which would have unlikely been 
produced individually and also obliges the artists to make conceptual 
compromises they might not usually have to.  It frees up the creative 
spirit as each artist realises at a point that they have to let go of 
their single vision to accommodate the thinking of the other.  The 
OTHER is the crucial element in collaboration, it not alone designates 
the other artist but also implicates the unseen, inexperienced, 
unknowable, unthinkable and inconceivable of the former

Under this framework Garrett Lynch and Michaël Sellam would like to 
announce the rerelease of a net.art work entitled _pause.

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_pause
http://www.asquare.org/project/_pause/

"_Pause" was a work initiated as part of the "Atelier de recherche 
interactive" (interactive research studio) at Ensad, Paris France.  Its 
initial purpose was to explain an object to an audience that did not 
have access to the object itself and to use any interactive medium 
(website, cd-rom, dvd etc) to explain in ways more than simple 
photographs could do.

It was decided to create a website, a distribution medium that would be 
accessible to the widest audience possible yet still in complete 
control of its creators.  Instead of creating something visual and 
interactive which would sit in the browser and function we wanted to 
create a work which would include the browser and use the browser as 
part of the work.  Simple things, such as seperate windows defining 
different sections of the object/site, these sections/windows being 
placed in order, appearing or disappearing when necessary and in 
general performing certain functions when used, much as the original 
objects parts do.

The choosen object was a coffee maker.  When the user connects to the 
site their internet connection becomes this virtual coffee makers 
power, its electricity.  Photographic representation of the complete 
object is not used apart from the last page when interaction with the 
site is complete, instead the site and browser combine to become the 
object which the user has to interact with to understand.  The process 
is started by clicking on the three squares on the first page which 
launch three seperate windows.  Each window is entitled 'read', 'act' 
and 'wait' which indicates how to proceed.  The first window leads the 
user through a series of simple interactions via the style of an 
instruction manual and familiarises them with the object.  Once the 
process is finished in window one it unloads and loads the second 
section in window two.  Each window has a different series of 
interactions to perform, window by window, each getting more complex, 
visually and aurally to help the user build up an impression of what 
the object is.  On completion all windows close and the user is given a 
non interactive application to download, a metaphorical coffee, a pause 
from what they are doing which their computer can consume or be 
consumed by.

While there is a surface simplicity to this work it is an approach 
towards more complex issues.  Questions asked include, how do you take 
a physical object and represent/reconstruct  it in a virtual space? 
Does such an object in a virtual space become a transcription of the 
original or a new 'object'.  If for example we envisage inhabiting 
virtual spaces sometime in the future, how do we expect to do this? How 
do we transfere the objects we need and use in reality to a virtual 
space?  Will necessity for objects be superseeded?  What will be the 
result on materalism?  Will in fact these new 'spaces' be used as an 
escape from both people and object overcrowded spaces?

_pause has previously been shown as part of the Jouable series of 
exhibitions (http://www.jouable.net/) in Geneva, Kyoto and Paris and 
online in the Rhizome Artbase.

Requirements:
Please make sure your browser has popups enabled and the shockwave 
player installed which can be downloaded here - 
http://sdc.shockwave.com/shockwave/download/

a+
gar
__________________
Garrett at asquare.org
http://www.asquare.org/