international online art project. a Pro Helvetia and Xcult project EDITORIAL bastard channel is a cross between a television and a web project, a platform in the Internet that tells the story of itself as a television channel. The channel works with the lowtech and financial means of network art and has collaborators on three continents. Its programme can be received all over the world. On 18 November 2004, bastard channel will be celebrating its start with six programmes within the framework of the Viper Media Festival in the Basel Kunsthalle. By the spring of 2005, new programmes will have been added every month. The participants are artists from Basel, Berlin, Geneva, Los Angeles, Mexico, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo and Zurich, as well as collaborating text writers, translators, programmers and graphic artists. It will not be possible to receive all the bastard channel programmes at all times, for our online project operates according to the television programme structure. Trailers will provide information about the times of day and night when you will be able to receive the next programmes in your part of the world. Whereas the terrestrial television stations are working on making it possible for programmes to be broadcast online independently of times and dates, bastard channel is set on limiting consumption: we do not want our programme to be available all the time, and we take the opportunity of wagging a cautionary medial forefinger at the "zap & surf attitude". bastard channel is intended to reflect the web as a time medium. This is a cross between the babbling TV promises and the hesitant web response of a 56k modem. Some of our programmes are run like films, animating the screen at a breakneck pace, others step intentionally on the brake, tempting and frustrating at one and the same time. Still others bring streams of data onto the screen or make interaction offers where the public can spend 30 minutes or 30 seconds. At bastard channel, even the TV test pictures are interactive, and viewers receive personal answers to existential problems from the Television Sphinx - without, however, knowing whether they will receive a written or spoken answer from the Sphinx herself or her intelligent robot within two to three days. 56kTV - bastard channel has its own programme magazine. International authors from the worlds of the film, art and the media sciences comment on the TV project and the individual programmes, thus enriching the audio-visual online offer by a print & read version. We are investing in a good visual concept and leaving the print-on-demand to our public, since the TV magazines can be printed on every home printer. All programs on 56kTV. abridged version ZZZZZZapp. Commercial break When adjusting a new TV set’s stations for the first time, within the white noise images and voices announce themselves which lead to a flawless transmitting channel only after different stages of distortion. In their program ZZZZZZapp Japanese artists’ group exonemo makes these early stages of station-scanning the main program. Their software, developed in Java, uses advertising images from spam mails and converts digital picture data into sound. The artists, who also perform with DJ and VJ productions in Tokyo clubs, produce a distortion orgy for irritated pupils and infected outer ears. ZZZZZZapp is a daily changing, endless commercial full of polluted musicality and aggressive beauty. Plugin: Java / sound: music / interactivity: - / nerves: ooo / Travelogue. An interactive game format Today’s TV stations wish for more interactivity. They invite players from mass audiences to their game shows or rely on audience participation via telephone. In Travelogue by Studer/van den Berg anyone can be a player. There’s not the thrill of being watched mass media-wise, it is true, instead we get a long-term game with the possibility to save interim solutions. Clicking lost in thought, in Travelogue, the player masters the task of saving herself from the dreary hotel room into televisionary Nirvana. Doing that, iconographic categories confuse themselves. Is it 3-D painting or photo graphics which we experience as space and cinematically put into motion with the finger on the mouse? If art already wishes for some deepened looking and thinking, one will have to deeply reflect and brood, in Travelogue, too, in order to come to a sensible close. Plugin: Flash / sound: music + voice / interactivity: + / nerves: oo Tv-Bot. Striking News The Web is being infiltrated by the news media. It equally transports Webcam photographs, newspaper headlines, and radio and television programs. No matter from which part of the world and in which language: in Omni and Tele Presence news are retrievable around the clock. Since there are electronic nets and programs our language has found nothing but metaphoric paraphrases für these electric spaces. Marc Lee’s Tv-Bot renders them visible in that he scans the Net through for data streams. Via programing code he forces transmission sources from 5 continents in front of our eyes and ears, and puts them together to a permanently self-regenerating news event from all over the world. Thus 56kTV – bastard channel is being supplied incessantly with renewable topicalities. Plugin: RealVideo / sound: music + voices / interactivity: - / nerves: - AcidMissile. A scatter-zapped action movie Part of a TV station’s repertoire are action movies, and part of a TV consumer’s behaviour is the zapping action. Parisian artist jimpunk’s action movie AcidMissile presents an aesthetics of picture-musicality, a dynamic montage of sound and image, which samples itself through news and entertainment programs’ clichés. From the Comic-Ego to the AsciiCode Warrior to Saddam’s sabre monument, from the googled Western actor to the freely gliding monitor astronaut – the fictitious TV night’s character selection flickers across the computer screen for four minutes. AcidMissile is a graphic punk animation which applies html and javascript techniques in order to produce cinematic effects, a choreographically through-composed zap automation which tells of terror and sends sensible operating systems into turbulences. Plugin: flash / sound: music / interactivity: - / nerves: oo / Sphinx. The adviser program The bastard audience can ask the Sphinx questions concerning affairs of the heart and will get an answer minutes, hours, or days later. Sphinx is a literary project by Birgit Kempker, it is about language and life’s semantics. Here, all broadcast stations’ wishing for interaction is fulfilled: Our listeners get into contact with the tele-oracle and are personally being given advice. It’s just that one never knows in advance if the Sphinx itself or her machine will answer us. Since, here, two answering-instances are acting: on the one hand the Sphinx, the medium with a human voice, and on the other hand the machine, the advice of which is written in lissom sextain metre and being read by varying voices. Already dozens of people from Asia, Europe, and America have sought advice with the Sphinx – one can read up on her answers on bastard channel. Plugin: Flash / sound: voice / interactivity: + / nerves: - / MILK 2. Adults only Artist Shu Lea Cheang’s work establishes a link between the number of Aids fatalities in Africa and the wide range of pornographic images in the Internet. A program code imports these onto the MILK page’s surface. Here, an image inflation governs: a rampant carpet of commercial porn photographs. Rapidly flashing women’s bodies in sexual poses, cheap complexions, permeated with colorful type, “click here – all access”. There is nonstop motion in regrowing image-pustules, a flickering state of overgrowth and image satiation. The small pictures are briefly being wiped away and open up the view of a slowly growing nude in the background. For a short moment it appears brightly stripped in order to be covered by the next layer of images right away. Only after 30 minutes the nude will be fully loaded and become visible. Relentlessly, the counter up front counts the statistic numbers of Aids fatalities and hardly differs from a time-counter when visiting porn pages bearing a charge. Plugin: - / sound: noise / interactivity: - / nerves: ooo / The Series, a TV miniplot encyclopedia In The Series by Brogle/Zimmermann there are two lists: one with 104 figures from TV series, and the other one with 56 verbs. One can assign actions from one list to TV subjects from the other one. For instance: Flash Gordon > seduces / Sabrina > is afraid / Bad Girls > knocks down. These are 3 out of 5824 possible combinations. Each combination generates an animated show in which images from the WWW’s anonymous archive take turns. Each subject-image is followed by an action-image. Thus Two-Word-Movies of varying duration result. The Series creates absurd plots. Subject-choice Sabrina, for instance, not only shows the stuffy little witch out of American TV, but also private Sabrinas and porn Sabrinas. And the action-words lead to amazing image-finds anyway. One follows this image-bustle with growing fascination, since The Series illustrates the wide and at the same time narrow horizon of images and image-titles stored in the Web. Plugin: shockwave / sound: music / interactivity: + / nerves: o / View and Plan of Seoul. A Transpacific Intrigue. Espionage thriller in 13 parts The artists’ group Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries from Seoul contributes a soap opera in 13 parts to the 56kTV program, to the orally told plot of which rhythmic jazz sounds are being provided as a background. It’s about the report of a Korean agent. She tells about the El Greco incident and about her mission to kill the Toledo (Ohio) Art Museum’s cute curator. But as a devotee of the Critical Theory she strays off mockingly holding forth on the main things and minor matters of a globalized world, on graffiti in men’s rooms or the comparison between concrete architecture in Tokyo and Seoul. View and Plan of Seoul combines literary and musical qualities and illustrates them with an expressive typographical animation. Plugin: Flash / sound: music + voice / interactivity: - / nerves: - News from the Dead. The ultimate mediashow What is a medium? Nathalie Novarina and Marcel Croubalian from Geneva present an esotericism show in which this question is being remodeled into the question "Who is a medium?". The technical Web protocol becomes the transmissionary channel of metaphysics. From the ethereal hereafter a swooshy being is talking to us, a dead Chinese woman? The broadcasting channel doesn’t completely open, voice and face conceal themselves in image and sound flicker. This daze of information transmission goes against our wish for pure sense signals, but it opens the promise to be able to forge ahead, by means of media technique, into immortality. One’s faith is only shaken by the off-voice of an American emcee which comments the transmigration of souls as mere rating routine. Plugin: Flash / sound: voice / interactivity: - / nerves: o Crime Scene. a tv crime scene investigation The successful US television series Crime Scene Investigations (CSI)’s picture fiction compares itself to the pictures of real homicide scenes – as still life their scenes of the crime with body certify the virtuosity of Californian film studios. They are the modern heirs to the academic illusionism, and they compare the success of their pretence to the Richter scale of shock effect. Where the television audience turns shiveringly pale, the trompe l’oeil effect finds its certification. Photographer and media artist Jody Zellen, who, in LA, doesn’t live far from the CSI Studios, makes investigations into these tv pictures. She assembles them to dreadful photographic tableaus which can be newly arranged with a click of the mouse as if they were a Memory game for snoopers. An assembly line with sentence fragments from CSI series and newscasts condenses the text/picture-arrangement in layers into a hard poetry montage. Plugin: - / sound: - / interactivity: ++ Crime Time. a crime film collage Berlin artists Martin Dahlhauser and Dorothea Hein isolate genre-typical plot patterns and elements of suspense from classical TV thrillers and crime films and assemble them to picture sequences the continuation of which remains unclear and its ending irrelevant. Against a backdrop of suggestive music Dahlhauser/Hein clean and overlay picture sequences from TV series, their plot is meant to get a typological quality. Thus they becomes free to take on a new role in Crime Time. The viewer is requested to interactively find his aimless way through the picture sequences, he is to stray off into the pictures. On a suspense arc swelling and ebbing away again, he suffers an interplay of dramatization and coincidence. Plugin: Flash / sound: music / interactivity: + telenouvelle vague. A Mexican Soap Opera During his nouvelle vague period, Jean Luc Godard created a very particular french taste of the american thriller, now he's celebrated in México in that infamous fiction tv genre known as the 'telenovela'. but instead of opting for the old grandeur of the tv screen which has captivated housewives and unrepented romantics all over the third world, telenouvelle vague opts for the diy (do it yourself) approach of streaming media, avoiding the stereotypical while focusing on offbeat topics which concern contemporary mexico city, a place where technology and nature clash in an almost imperceptible low-intensity war. Plugin: Flash / sound: music + voice Take Away. A World View. One face, the face of Amitabh Bachchan is omnipresent in Indian Television: through his movies, where he has often played a common man (who is angry and not quite so perfect) – and in the commercial breaks, where he agrees to play an image of himself, fed by the projections and memories of his audiences.Over the years this image has turned into an icon. But in the ads it stands for something more precise, it symbolizes “the achiever” (as far as I know Bachchan has never played a character as simple as that in his movies.) And the image has turned into what is today called an asset. An asset to be used to promote New India. Estee Oarsed from Bangalore has collected some movie clips. Plugin: Flash / sound: music + voices The 56kTV-Interface The Interface is the hardware of the 56kTV - bastard channel, the monitor-linked receiver. At first, one has to understand how to operate it, the way we know it from new TV sets after we have unpacked them. But the way bastard channel is operated catches one’s eye. In a black-and-white design the Interface confirms the project’s lowtech character – only the two switchplanes via which one directly reaches the TV programs are marked red. The bastard program isn’t at the viewers’ disposal at any time; a time switch automat offers but 4 – 5 contributions simultaneously. In like manner we know that from TV stations; but with net projects this limitation is new and mean. Five artists have worked on the Interface. Martin Woodtli is responsible for its structure and aesthetics, Marc Lee realized the time switch programing and was involved in working on the conceptual fine tuning. Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg developed the basic idea, along with Reinhard Storz who also is responsible for the basic programing and the Interface’s text contents. Plugin: - / sound: - / interactivity: + / nerves: ? text: Reinhard Storz