by Claudia Giannetti

General Information

Playing Field is an international co-production of: MECAD\Media Centre d’Art i Disseny of the Escola Superior de Disseny ESDi in Barcelona, Spain; the Netherlands Media Art Institute - Montevideo - Time Based Arts in Amsterdam, Holland; and the IMG - Institut für Mediengestaltung und Medientechnologie in Mainz, Germany, which has the support of the Culture2000 project of the European Community.

In each of the participating institutions, three artists have created works and content using the technology of online streaming media, developing new tools, researching the relationship between video and internet and, above all, elaborating creative languages that are specific to the media. The project was developed from October 2002 to May 2003. The official presentation of all production was made on May 23 in Montevideo, Amsterdam. On June 11 the projects were presented at CaixaForum, in cooperation with the Mediateca of the Fundació “la Caixa”.

The works produced with the support of MECAD were created by Mariela Yeregui, with "Topografías desmesuradas" and Iván Marino, with "In Death's Dream Kingdom". For their technological, conceptual and aesthetic innovation these works could be considered to be pioneers in the use of streaming media resources in España, unequivocally opening up new perspectives for audiovisual creation on the Internet.

The Works

The goal of Mariela Yeregui’s online work “Topografías desmesuradas” is to construct an unreal cartographic representation of spaces that are created and imagined by the users. The artist proposes a collaborative space-map that is in continuous evolution, given that users can create their own cities and modify their location, grouping them together or setting them apart from each other. In each city users can introduce their own contents: for now this entails texts, though in the future it will include video, image and sound. The city created by the artist can also be visited as it uncovers the topographies of the body. “Topografías desmesuradas” thus works as a space containing diverse spaces, within the terms of cooperation. It is a virtual environment, with the necessary tools for the collective and progressive construction of an imagined world, cartography of an ideal space.

In “In Death’s Dream Kingdom”, Iván Marino creates a hypertextual audiovisual discourse on the deconstruction of language and perception, elaborated on the basis of a complex web of videographic fragments. The work is in constant process, occurring both internally and as a form dependent upon the user. A mechanism of internal attractors keeps the access elements linked into the works in the interface; the user, as an external interactor, can reorder these elements and create a new narrative in a temporal context. By navigating an interesting nexus is set up between the images of the deterioration of human perception and accidents arising in the very route of the user, who in his or her interest in uncovering a logical coherence and in the attempt to re-establish the order of the fragments, is slowly caught up in the crisscrossing of temporal, sound and visual lapses. The way that Marino structures audiovisual information into various participative levels and employs the interface, using highly uncommon resources, places this work among the most important experimental productions using streaming.