Eternal Network, Scrambled Bites & Art’s Birthday, Reverie Noise City

Western Front 2003, 2004, 2005

This series of catalogues document Western Front’s Media Arts program from 1973 to 2005, highlighting the Front’s vast video archives, artist residencies, internet collaborations and telematic experiments. As a series, the catalogues connect by format, type treatment and 2-colour palette. They separate in their visualization of time.

Time is indicated by a vertical running stream of video grabs in Eternal Network. For each of the 4 essays, the video-stream bumps the 3 text columns (English, French and Japanese) over one. The viewer can tell which essay they’re reading by which column the video stream is inhabiting.

Scrambled Bites & Art’s Birthday is two catalogues in one. When the pages are white the viewer is reading Scrambled Bites (the artist residencies) and that is a fairly straight narrative. When blue, the reader is part of Art’s Birthday (networked social spaces by which artists from around the world respond to data flow from one site to another). The events were happening simultaneously, but the actual time of the events was different depending on where in the world the artists were located. The GMT + or - the hours (running across the top of the pages) gives the reader an idea of the time relationship the sites had to each other.

Reverie Noise City is less about time as it is about sound, networked space and the development of a community within which artists plan time-based events and venues for their sound-based work. Visually, this was a much calmer catalogue, taking its cues from the web landscapes created by artist Elizabeth Fischer.