LOCATION 1 - NEW YORK

14 SEPTEMBER - 8 NOVEMBER 2008

Virtual collaboration at Location One, New York, uses newest media to confront Presidential campaign

Can three complete strangers – from different continents, cultures and creative disciplines – collaborate from afar to create a forceful artistic statement about a political event? They can. They have. Location One presents “Mission Accomplished,” a virtual-residency collaboration of Hidenori Watanave, Susanne Berkenheger, and Andy Deck. Their work, prepared without ever meeting face-to-face, uses Google Earth, Second Life, wikis and blog technologies – not to mention old-fashioned hand-printed Agitprop posters – to address the forthcoming U.S. Presidential election.

Virtual audiences will be able to view and participate in the work at http://location1.org/missionaccomplished.

“The tools of tele-collaboration have become incredible rich and powerful in the ten years of our existence,” said Location One executive director Claire Montgomery. “We were founded on the themes of collaboration, technological experimentation and social consciousness. When we found that three talents this interesting were willing to take on the elections together, how could we resist? You have to see what they did.”

Susanne Berkenheger (Berlin) is an author and journalist, who writes for “SPAM”, the satirical section of German magazine Der Spiegel. She has been involved in projects in Second Life and “Chat Theatre”.

http://spiegel.de/spam
http://www.berkenheger.de/index_english.html

Hidenori Watanave (Tokyo) is Associate Professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University, and is researching 3Di (Second Life) and 3DGIS (Google Earth). He is interested in collaborative work in the realms of Architecture and Environmental Design in tele-existence and the metaverse.

http://mapping.jp/archi/cat18/
http://mapping.jp/index_en.html

Andy Deck (NYC) is an artist specializing in Internet media. His work addresses the politics and aesthetics of collaboration, interactivity, software, and independent media. Deck combines code, text, sound, and image, demonstrating new patterns of participation and control that distinguish online presence and representation from previous artistic practices.

http://andydeck.com/
http://artcontext.org/