Panel Statement

While the title of this panel is reminiscent of American country music vernacular, it is in fact more contemporary genres of popular music that could be seen as forerunners of this topic. For instance, hip-hop music has kept the analog turntable as its primary tool while using digital technology more sparingly. It is the intent of this panel to present several projects by “high-tech” artists that incorporate older technologies often deemed obsolete. Each of these projects are embedded within contemporary electronic art practice and offer deep investigations, both conceptually and technically, into areas including: mobile computing and interactivity; scientific, physically- based visualization; computer as entertainer; networked telematic art; and artificial-life. The artists on this panel attempt fluency between analog and digital electronics; old surplus and new technologies; wave forms and data-packets.

For example, Alexei Shulgin has turned his 386 into a singing, pop-rock/cyber-punk virtuoso named DX386. Similarly, Nell Tenhaaf uses low-tech in the sense of low-res, with the intention of investigating the thresholds between media . She is building LED matrices that display both very low-resolution video and swarm algorithms.

• Nell Tenhaaf (Canada) is an electronic media artist and writer living in Toronto, Canada. Her interactive installation work combines algorithms from Artificial Life with familiar
  methods of display such as rows of coloured LEDs. These are used to position viewers as “evolving populations” caught in the act of adapting to artificiality in their environment.
  Tenhaaf is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at York University in Toronto.
• Paul Vanouse (US) is an artist employing pop-sociology and “big-science” in interactive, electronic artworks often designed for mass-audiences. His work, exploring everything
  from the Gulf War to the OJ Simpson affair to the Human Genome Project, has been exhibited throughout the Americas and Europe. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at the
  University at Buffalo and a Research Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.
• Hélène Doyon & Jean-Pierre Demers  (Canada) are interdisciplinary artists who have
  worked together since 1987 in Montréal, Canada. These “socio-aestheticians” have produced many performances and events incorporating both rural and urban environments, in which ordinary citizens become both the material for the work
  and its dispersed authors. They are currently doctoral students at Université du Québec à Montréal.
• Haruki Nishijima (Japan) is based in Japan and has become known internationally for his performative installation “Remain in Light”. It was the winning presentation in the Toride (Tokyo) Recycyling Art Project in (2000) and also a co-winner of the first prize in Vida 4.0 (2001). It is built from fragments of analogue communication data (radio, cordless and cell phones waves) gathered in the street using an “electronic insect net”.
• Alexei Shulgin (Russia) is a Moscow based artist, musician, curator, and teacher. In his work explores the boundaries between art, culture and technology in their relation to “real life” effects and vice versa. His favorite methods are mixing contexts and questioning the existing states of things. He is the inventor of Form Art, leader of 386 DX cyberpunk rock band, webmaster at fu-fme.com and has participated in hundreds of exhibitions, festivals and conferences on art/new media.

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