Online Project 1999-2003
>>> You can now interact with www.re-move.org (again)
via the Net Art Anthology (thanks to Rhizome!)
STATEMENT: “What you move is what you get”
“The pieces on www.re-move.org are an attempt to articulate mathematical and natural principles below a visual surface in an enjoyable and sometimes playful way. People should be able to get their own ideas about the pieces and involve themselves without having any preconception of how to watch or how to “use” the pieces – that’s why there are no instructions or any guidelines. Depending of the used formulas and also depending on who is watching/playing around, the results of the created images and/or sounds will always be different – in that sense, the user can also be seen as an additional random-factor in the code which can help to create a more or less “organic” result.”
// Lia, July 2001
Awards
2003 – Prix Ars Electronica, Net Excellence / Award of Distinction
Linz, Austria
2003 – (6th) Media Arts Festival – Agency for Cultural Affairs, Nomination
Category: Digital Art [interactive] Division
Tokyo, Japan
2000 – Design Austria – Josef Binder Award, First Prize
Category: Vision
Austria
Laboral Opening Exhibition, Laboral, Gijon, Spain, 2007
Exhibitions
NETworking – Net Art From the Computer Fine Arts Collection
www.computerfinearts.com/Haifa_show
Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel – 2007/11/02-2008/02/01
FAD, Festival De Arte Digital
Casa do Conde, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2007/09/29
LabCyberspaces – Laboral Opening Exhibition
Laboral, Gijon, Spain – 2007/03/30-2007/06/30
NetSpace: viaggio nell’arte della rete – Improvvisazioni del software
MAXXI, Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, Italy – 2007/03/30-2007/07/01
Now’s The Time
Kunsthaus Graz, Austria
Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz, Austria – 2005/01/29-2005/02/13
Microwave International Media Art Festival
City Hall, Hong Kong, China – 2004/10/31-2004/11/16
South By Southwest Interactive Festival
Austin, Texas – 2004/03/16
Cartoombria Festival
Perugia, Italy – 2003/12/03-2003/12/06
Transmediale Extended Vol. 1, Biennal of Video and New Media
Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile – 2003/11/19-2003/12/07
Digital Showcase 23
Austin Museum of Digital Art, Austin, Texas – 2003/09/16
FILE – Electronic Language International Festival
www.file.org.br
Cultural Institution and Museum Paço das Artes , São Paulo City, Brasil – 2003/08/07-2003/08/23
Boston CyberArts Festival
www.bostoncyberarts.org
Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, USA – 2003/03/20-2003/07/06
(6th) Media Arts Festival – Agency for Cultural Affairs
www.cgarts.or.jp/festival
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, Japan – 2003/02/28-2003/03/09
The Spiritual in Digital Art
The Evergreen Cultural Centre, British Columbia, Canada – 2003/02/23-2003/03/29
MT0003 – International Forum Medienturm
Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz, Austria – 2003/02/04
Biennale de Montréal
CIAC – Centre International d’Art Contemporain de Montréal – 2002/09/26-2002/11/03
Lovebytes Festival
www.lovebytes.org.uk, Sheffield, UK – 2002/03/14-2002/03/15
Straylight Online Exhibition @ Darklight Digital Festival
Dublin, Ireland – 2001/11/17
2nd Seoul Net Festival
www.senef.net, Seoul, Korea – 2001/11/29-2001/12/02
Batofar
www.batofar.org, Paris, France – 2001/06/01-2001/06/08
NETáforas v.3/on-line and off-line Digital Design Exhibition
MECAD, Barcelona, Spain – 2001/05/10-2001/06/08
Transmediale.01
www.transmediale.de, Podewil, Berlin, Germany – 2001/02/04-2001/02/11
PICAF – Pusan International Contemporary Art Festival
Pusan Metropolitan Museum of Art, Korea – 2000/10/02-2000/11/27
WWVF – 18th World Wide Video Festival
Amsterdam, The Netherlands – 2000/09/03-2000/09/17
Texts
LabCyberspaces Exhibition Catalogue – 2007
LIA / Re-move.org: “what you move is what you get”
The phenomenon „Lia,“ functions like dual a system: the name Lia is an alias, which stands on the one hand for the material person of an artist. On the other hand, Lia describes a new artistic manifestation at the turn of the century, representing the close of Postmodernism and its replacement by the Computer era.
Lia’s body of software artworks form a convincing oevre of a serious working methodology in which concept and intuition complement each other equally. Each of her programs are individual and develop autonomously. Formal and acoustic agreements in all her works can nevertheless be found.
If one gets involved for a longer time with her works, one notices both the sense of security and the certainty of the artist, making moments of absolute beauty and coherence possible. One finds a continuous rhythm and a constantly recognizable harmony in her work, expressed by movement, sound, form and color.
On the Website www.re-move.org, Lia invites the user to enter a game-room in which s/he can experience an imaginary and formalistic drama. The always growing and permanently changing structures and overlays that develop during playful experiments with Lia’s programs take on physical, spatial or representational forms.
These forms make associations possible to pre-conditioned patterns of thoughts. The user begins to develop own identity-specific, stylistic idioms, seduced from the possibilities of Lias programs. Lia however never leaves complete control over the progression of the images to the user. All graphic “play figures” can develop their own personalities, that are often programmed according to the coincidence principle, and can show unforeseeable characteristics. Thus Lia breaks the paradigms of the information aesthetics, and provokes the visualization of social schemes.
Theoretical knowledge is not needed to use re-move.org. The website is open for global use to be played with. Lia does not offer pacification through highscores, or the possibility of a profit. The involvement with movement and form is the profit of the individual player. The social process becomes the work of art. That´s how the title of the work, „Re-move.org“ can be interpreted: The „Re“is taken of the short form for „reply “in E-Mail conversations, and „move“is to be understood as command for the viewer.
Lia’s sign language can be related to the historical forms of modern art and the avant-garde. Her agenda, however, is completely different from that of Modernity. Her work differs both from the development of abstract painting in modern art, and also from the early computer art, which intensively was dealing with the idea of mathematics, fractals and software as the art per se. In Lias work order and chaos as well as logic and intuition hold the balance, ornamental patterns, which might eventually appear, always break up quickly and become overlaid by new structures. The picture forms itself during the expiration of interaction.
The longer one is busy playing Lias programs – learning about the influence which their own interaction can take, the more interesting becomes the play. Each session has its own history. Permanently short image moments appear, which change from a purely abstract level to symbolic legibility. The experience of the movement, and the experience of the moment frame a sophisticated interplay. In this method, Lia extends the language of painting, film, performance and the tradition of computer art.
Text: Joanna Render after an intense e-mail conversation with LIA
CIAC’s Electronic Magazine – no 16 – Fall 2002
http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/archives/no_16/en/lia.htm
With Re-move, Lia gives us ten interfaces that present forms and sounds for the user to modify, transform, fiddle with at the whim of his mouse, either by clicking or by dragging it across the screen. The result consists less of a finished “work” than of aleatory visual and audio events, always different and always changeable. The title of the work, Re-move, underscores the permanent redistribution of forms in works that are always to be renewed.
Art work assisted by a mathematical model is nothing new. In antiquity, well before the invention of computers, models allowing for the application of mathematical formulas, subject to combination, manipulation, transformation, and interpretation, and in view of an outcome not necessarily (although always somewhat) predictable, were implemented in music and architecture, in particular.1
A mathematical model always comprises four components: vocabulary, which corresponds to the list of terms or elements that will be used and related by way of a grammar, which places on their potentially infinite combination certain rules that guide and limit the possibilities; selection, that is, the choice of using certain elements of the vocabulary ordered according to certain rules, following the context of utterance or production; interpretation, finally, which analyzes and applies the resulting combinations. Naturally, this interpretation will be more or less open, depending on the level of determination invested in the combined elements to begin with: the component terms in the vocabulary of a natural language, for example, are more ambiguous, and therefore more likely to give rise to multiple interpretations than those of a formalized language; on the contrary, a model used to combine forms and even sounds to produce “artistic” output may allow greater freedom to user and performer alike. But such models must, from the outset, be rich enough at the vocabulary level and in combinatory possibilities to allow for “interesting” results, from an artistic point of view.
What is precisely “interesting” in Re-move, besides the formal beauty of visual arrangements on the screen, is this tension between chance and necessity that leads the user to consider his own role in their production. This tension is possible here precisely because the “vocabulary” and “grammar” are never explicit. The visitor indeed has, or thinks that he has the possibility of selecting one or the other graphical element, the choice of “launching” or re-launching such and such a motif, of dragging forms one way and the other with his mouse, but, at the same time, these “works” (if one can use the term to describe the ephemeral creations or, rather, re-creations that play out on the screen before his eyes) preserve an aspect of independence and ineluctability that ensures their remaining out of the user’s control. The work of art here is less an object than it is a meeting place between the code and the visitor, or rather a place where the code incorporates the visitor in its web and in its play, like one more factor likely to enrich it and to refine its complexity still further.
Text: Anne-Marie Boisvert
Online Review at www.newmedia.com (now: www.internetnews.com) – 2000/10
Viennese digital artist Lia sees organic qualities in computer programming, a field most people think of as sterile and artificial. Her site, Re:move.org, is stark and simple, but underlying it is an artistic vision of tremendous depth. The site begins at a bleak splash page with little besides two corresponding bars of numbered buttons and virtually no labeling. Click one of the buttons and suddenly it’s as if your childhood Etch-a-Sketch had been granted supernatural powers. Groovy ambient music sets the mood while you explore a bit, because there are no instructions. The eight white numbers each link to corresponding conceptual pieces. “1” is something of the anti-game: It pretends to let you control it but, frankly, you’re not the boss. It’s like landing the space shuttle with a squirming night crawler as your control stick.
Your actions have consequences, however. For example, one button unleashes a torrent of horizontal lines; another wipes the screen clean. Red and black dots march across the browser window like ants, but by all appearances you can pretty much forget about predicting any outcomes. Whatever algorithm drives the on-screen process is way beyond simple intuition. You can affect the process but it’s not yours to strictly define.
Each piece is like this. Each has a separate feel. “3” practically begs you to take a whopping dose of ecstasy and lose yourself in the space age soundtrack and the pixie dust interplay between a photon spray of little white boxes as they chase your cursor around the page. “8” grates with the noise of a piece of small machinery–like a mechanical pencil sharpener going bad–while an army of ant-like black pixels fan out in paradoxically organized yet random patterns. Click “4” and triaxial shapes vibrate on a seemingly molecular level to the underwater sounds of what appears to be a synthesized kettle-drum/garbage compactor.
There’s something soothing about all of Lia’s creations, despite their sometimes hard edges. When most sites are overly literal and bludgeoning, the art of Re:move.org is compelling, like watching clouds change shape or watching a huge flock of birds suddenly shift direction, with every bird moving according to some pre-ordained signal that’s invisible to us. Even for Lia the work process holds an element of surprise and wonder. “Because mathematics is just working its way and the results are not completely foreseeable,” she explains, “programming can be like creating my own butterflies and watching them fly.”
Text: Andrew Rice