Online Project 1997-2001
Video of all archived Shockwave Files
Award
1998 – Design Austria – Josef Binder Award, First Prize
Category: Vision
Austria
Exhibitions
21. Stuttgarter Filmwinter
http://www.wand5.de, Filmhaus Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany – 2008/01/17-2008/01/20
MAK night
Museum for Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria – 2004/01/26
Design Interactif
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France – 2003/11/19-2003/01/05
Plug.In – impress//youself
in the scope of Art Basel, Basel
Foundation Beyeler, Kunstraum Riehen, Riehen, Switzerland – 2003/06/18-2003/06/23
Art Futura Festival
CCCB – Centro de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain – 2002/10/31-2002/11/03
Sounds and Files
Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna, Austria – 2000/03/10-2000/04/16
Texts
Online Review on www.generatorx.no – 2008
The early-to-mid 1990’s were an interesting time. “Multimedia” was a hot buzzword, and people were wondering if CD-ROM and Internet was here to stay. Macromedia Director ruled the world of interactive graphics, and World Wide Web and HTML was finally transforming the Internet into a visual environment.
Early experiments using the web for art purposes quickly became iconic: Jodi hacked HTML, Form Art was briefly defined as a genre, Net.art considered ironic approaches to art production via this new channel and artists like Stanza explored Director as a tool for generative graphics.
During this (golden) period, Vienna was a hotbed of experimentation. A large group of artists pushed the boundaries of abstraction in visual art as well as music, often experimenting with code-based tools. It should be noted that the term “generative art” was not in use at the time. Nevertheless, the work produced at the time clearly articulated generative and procedural approaches to sound and image synthesis, prefiguring the current interest in such work.
Among this loosely affiliated group were artists like Farmers Manual, Tina Frank, Monoscope, Pure, Lia and Dextro. The music label MEGO and the film label Sixpackfilm provided publishing outlets. Norbert Pfaffenbichler put together an overview of the scene in the exhibition Austrian Abstracts in 2006, which expanded on the previous exhibition Abstraction Now, focusing specifically on the activities of Austrian artists.
Early pioneers of generative Director programming, Lia and Dextro quickly became influential both inside and outside the Director community. Their mix of crisp pixels, erratic animation and blurred surfaces was unique at the time, presenting a perfect visual counterpoint to a musical scene experimenting with glitch and sound defects.
Together, they produced Turux, a seminal web site which featured Director “soundtoys” and generative visual sketches. Thanks to the site’s intentionally cryptic interface design and the “anonymous author” fad popular with the Vienna artists (many of which used pseudonyms or group names), the authorship of Turux was unclear to outsiders. Often, visitors had no idea if Lia, Dextro or Turux were actual people or just project names. Nevertheless, Turux became an important reference for the nascent scene, its fame only heightened by its obscure origin.
When the collaboration ended some time later, Turux remained online practically unchanged. As a document of a specific time period, it became a time capsule of styles and strategies.
The original Turux.org is now offline for good, having been replaced by a placeholder. But Lia and Dextro have both set up their own archives. Lia recently launched Turux.at, a partial archive of her half of the project. Included are 21 works in Director, documented as stills and interactive Shockwave movies.
Dextro’s Turux experiments have been integrated into dextro.org, which presents his work chronologically organized from his early period up to now. See the Turux subpage for a list of sketches. For an example of his newer work, see c079.
Text: Marius Watz
Online Description on www.maxalot.com – 2008
LIA
Early pioneers of generative Director programming, Lia and Dextro quickly became influential both inside and outside the Director community. Their mix of crisp pixels, erratic animation and blurred surfaces was unique during the early and mid-1990’s, presenting a perfect visual counterpoint to a musical scene experimenting with glitch and sound defects.
Together, they produced Turux, a seminal web site which featured Director “soundtoys” and generative visual sketches. Thanks to the site’s intentionally cryptic interface design and the “anonymous author” fad popular with the Vienna artists (many of which used pseudonyms or group names), the authorship of Turux was unclear to outsiders. Often, visitors had no idea if Lia, Dextro or Turux were actual people or just project names. Nevertheless, Turux became an important reference for the nascent scene, its fame only heightened by its obscure origin.
When the collaboration ended some time later, Turux remained online practically unchanged. As a document of a specific time period (1997-2001), it became a time capsule of styles and strategies.
Text: Maxalot