We have experimented with the Web to discover its potential for creative, collaborative expression, and to explore and sculpt the boundaries between physical space and cyberspace. Our work has grown directly out of Nina's interactive video installations of the early 1970's, in which she used the medium to sculpt space and time, and to create bridges for shared human experience. Our inspiration, in ParkBench, has been to address the physical disconnectedness of the information age by creating a safe place to congregate in cyberspace. Our work has inspired the development of new technologies, including a wireless telerobotic video camera for streaming video to the Web from remote locations.
Access to a global, self-selecting Web audience, independent of the institutional mandates of galleries and museums, has enlarged our context-world. Unregulated and global, our Web studio is a hybrid public/private space where we define the nature of our work, in dialog with our audience. This dialog completes the meaning of the work.
We delivered a paper by this title at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1997. Complete text
Emily Hartzell is a multimedia artist, whose work
includes photography, artists books, video, multimedia, and
drawings. She was curator of the multimedia shows At
the Intersection of Cinema and Books and Woman on Earth at
Granary Books Gallery in 1992. In 1994 she began collaborating with
Sobell on ParkBench. She works as media-artist-in-residence
in a number of New York City schools, initiating projects in web design,
multimedia animation, and video with elementary and middle school
students. She graduated magna cum laude in Visual and Environmental
Studies from Harvard University and received her MFA in Computer Art from
the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited widely.
Sonya Allin is a student of Computer Science at Columbia University, a
video afficionado, a techie for http://www.gURL.com/ and a dabbler.
Study and research have touched on intelligent systems, specifically
natural language processing techniques. Study and ongoing play pertains
to animation, vision, the brain.
Jesse Gilbert is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, musicologist, and
digital audio specialist. Gilbert's interests have carried him into
various
realms of the digital art/music world - from networking to improvisational
saxophone performance, 3D modeling and animation to sound synthesis.
He has performed in the New York City and San Francisco areas, and is
currently at work on a series of site specific compositions and ongoing
collaborative work with Parkbench at the NYU Center for Advanced
Technology and Power and Light, NYC. Gilbert graduated with honors
from Wesleyan University and
received the Pokora prize
in composition after studying with such luminaries as Alvin Lucier,
Anthony Braxton, Ron
Kuivila, and Abraham Adzenyah. He was awarded a Watson Fellowship
for a yearlong independent study of the relationship of oral tradition to
music pedagogy in a wide range of regions of Ghana, West Africa. Gilbert
is a researcher at EDC/Center for
Children and
Technology, a non-profit research and development organization that
addresses approaches
to technology and educational reform. He oversaw the functioning of the
sound component of PORT, and works
with collaborators
Helen Thorington and Marek Walczak on the ADRIFT project.
The Artists
Nina Sobell is a pioneer video artist whose improvisational time-based sound and image Web performances are embedded
with her drawing, sculpture and video background. She is inspired by the collaborative process that evolves from crossing
the lines of music, art and technology, and opening up these channels interactively to the public, initially through interactive
video installations, and more recently on the Web. Sobell is primarily interested in non-narrative work that leaves open the
possibility for multiple interpretations. Her collaborations and installations as a core member of ParkBench stem from her
efforts to demystify technology by assisting in the implementation of ParkBench Public Access Web kiosks run by inner city
youth. Sobell envisions ParkBench as a way to promote multicultural, transmedia dialogue and as a safe place to congregate
in cyberspace. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the NEA and NYSCA for her pioneering
video performance art. She received a BFA sculpture and printmaking from
Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and an MFA in sculpture from
Cornell University. Her sculptures, installations, and video art have
been shown throughout the World. [more. . .]
[portfolio. . .]
Awards
Winner of Art & Science Collaborations' Digital99 Award
1999 Webby Award Nominee
Pick of the Week Jan '99
Bibliography
Reena Jana, "Web Séance Summons Art," Wired Magazine, July 14, 1999.
Emily Hartzell and Nina Sobell, "Sculpting in
Time and Space: The Interactive Work of Nina Sobell and
Emily Hartzell,"
Leonardo, April 2001.
C. Carr, "A Brief History of Outrage: The 51 (or So) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments," Village Voice, (Sept. 22, 1998).
Hartzell/Sobell, "VirtuAlice", Telepresence, ed. Eduardo Kac, Ylem,
Vol.17, No.9, p. 5 (Sept./Oct.97).
Eduardo Kac, "Foundation and Development of Robotic Art," Art Journal,
College Art Association, Vol.56 No.3, pp. 60-67 (Fall 1997).
C. Carr, "On Edge: The Heart of the Web," Village Voice, Vol. 42, No. 25, p. 50, (June 24, 1997).
E. Hartzell and N. Sobell, "Anarchy, Art, and the Web," Artists' Talk, Uncommon Sense Exhibition, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art,1997.
P. Green, "ParkBench," Interview on KXLU, Loyola Marymount University, (June 1997).
Betty Kevlis, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the 20th. Century (Rutgers University Press, 1997).
musEleanor, "BLAST5DRAMA: ART: IS IT STRANGER THAN DICTION?," Intelligent Agent, (Jan. 1997).
Doug Grunther, "ParkBench," interview on WDST Woodstock Radio, October 1996.
Margot Lovejoy, Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (Prentice Hall, 1996) second edition.
Kevin Smith, "ParkBench Sculpting Performances," The Acid-free Paper, Vol. 1, No. 4 (January, 1996).
Sobell and Hartzell, "ParkBench Public-Access Web Kiosks," Visual Proceedings, The Art and Interdisciplinary Programs of Siggraph 96, 135, (1996).
Robert Atkins, "Art On Line," Art in America, Vol. 83, No. 12, 64 (December, 1995).
TalkBack! edited by Robert Atkins. Issue #1 (December, 1995).
Sobell and Hartzell, "The Buzz," Kimberly Neuhaus, "Technology: Do You Mind If I Sit Here?" I. D. Vol. 42, No. 2, 24 (March-April, 1995).
Sobell and Hartzell, "ParkBench," Felix: Landscape(s) Vol. 2, No. 1, 302-305 (1995).