Name: Akuvido

Nationality: Ukraine
Title: City_Interactive
Artist: Akuvido
Year: 2004
URL: www.akuvido.de/city

Biography: Akuvido is the name for the two Berlin-based Ukrainian media-artists Hanna Kuts and Viktor Dovhalyuk. Both artists completed education at the Academy of Art in Lviv, Ukraine, and at the Institut für Neue Medien in Berlin. Akuvido has exhibited at numerous international festivals including Transmedial e (Berlin), netmage (Bologna), New Forms Festival (Vancouver), and received First Prize in the Concours International de Net-Art at Villette Numerique Festival (Paris).

Synopsis: City Interactive is an announcement of the city as an art object and an investigation of it as an interactive media space. By using physical manipulation and navigation of real objects, language and intelligence, as well as the historical, philosophical, social and political factors of a city, Akuvido created an interactive multimedia view of a modern city. Akuvido considers 'the city' as a program that controls information. Akuvido wanted to investigate the different fragments of 'the city', and to unite these fragments in one whole for the public imagination. Creations in City_Interactive show how physical space transfers or digitizes into virtual space and how virtual space, with the tools of new technology, begins to influence the real space of the city.

Name: Mauricio Arango

Nationality: Colombia
Title: Vanishing Point
Artist: Mauricio Arango
Year: 2005
URL: www.low-fi.org.uk/vanishingpoint

Biography: Mauricio Arango is a Colombian artist residing in the United States. His work has evolved around issues regarding flow of information and visibility. One of the central questions of his practice is "how can art allude to the things that are happening out there but that somehow are ignored by most of us?"

Synopsis: Vanishing Point consists of a map of the world connected to a database fed by news coming from several international newspapers. The visibility of each country on the map results from the quantity of media coverage the country receives, so those countries that do not make the news disappear progressively. The goal of this project is to decipher the world that news media reconfigures and to observe if media coverage, or lack thereof, is creating a new cartography.

Name: Beat Brogle and Philippe Zimmermann

Nationality: Switzerland
Title: Onewordmovie
Artist: Beat Brogle and Philippe Zimmermann
Year: 2003
URL: www.onewordmovie.com

Biography: Beat Brogle is a Swiss artist living in Berlin. His work investigates issues of morphological transformation and associations at the edge of perception. This investigation spans media as diverse as drawing, sculpture, films/video, and interactive installations and has been shown across Europe, and recently also in Australia and Korea.

Philippe Zimmermann studied Environmental Sciences in Zurich, Switzerland. He worked in the corporate IT-Departments of IBM and

Siemens for several years before he co-founded a company for web application development. Since 2001 he works at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in the Man-Machine Interaction group where he also pursues his doctoral studies. His current research interests include the measurement of affect in the context of HCI and affective reactions to design and designed objects.

Synopsis: Images. Images turn into a movie. This project plays with the tension between online and cinematic approaches to images. What images are associated with what words? Onewordmovie reveals a glimpse into the "collective psychology" of online cultures by showing patterns of word-image associations as created by millions of people around the world.

Name: Bernd Oliver Fischer

Nationality: Germany
Title: Odysseus
Artist: Bernd Oliver Fischer
Year: 2005
URL: www.odysseus.warrobs.com/main.php

Biography: Bernd Oliver Fischer, an independent media artist, has studied geo-media technology, screen and web-design in Munich Germany where he currently resides, along with Barcelona Spain. He has exhibited works at Preisverleihung Jugend Forscht (1997, Munich/Germany), Film Festival Lindenberg (2003, Lindenberg/Germany), Proyecto Metropolis (2003, Barcelona / Spain), Studio Tropica Fine Arts Exhibition (2004, Germany), Exhibition of Fine Arts (Allgäuer Festwoche, 2004, Kempten/Germany), Hotspots Aachen Festival (2004, Aachen/ Germany) and Video Formes (2005, Clermont Ferrand/France).

Synopsis: Odysseus tries to simulate the behaviour of a commercial search bot. It roams \ the Internet automatically, following links on websites randomly. In theory, Odysseus is able to connect to nearly any existing URL on the Internet. Unlike a real search bot, Odysseus does not collect data; it displays fragments of the source code on your screen. Odysseus is secured by a password to regulate server traffic - use 'go' as the password and username.

Name: Han Hoogerbrugge

Nationality: Netherlands
Title: Hotel
Artist: Han Hoogerbrugge
Year: 2004
URL: www.submarinechannel.com/hotel

Biography: Han Hoogerbrugge is an internationally renowned artist. Since 1996 he has presented animation work on his website www.hoogerbrugge.com. Initially attracted by the unprecedented possibilities of the web, Hoogerbrugge developed a website called Modern Living. It was an experimental page where the potentials of electronic publishing were investigated. In collaboration with Gil Kay from Wiggle, Hoogerbrugge also made Flow for the NPS Short Film website. His work comes about in an intuitive manner; thoughts and ideas are converted into interactive animations. Han Hoogerbrugge is striving towards evoking an atmosphere, making something recognizable that cannot be expressed in words.

Synopsis: Hotel is a 10-part interactive animation in the anonymous space of an extraordinary and strange hotel. The visitor looks around in the rooms, meets people and encounters objects. The hotel is large. The hotel is a head. The hotel follows the logic of a dream. The hotel is also the home base of Preconstruction (www.preconstruction.biz) - the business of Dr. Doglin that conducts research into 'freak accidents'. In exchange for payment, volunteers agree to undergo tests that Dr. Doglin performs on them. Hotel can be dark and worrying and also light-hearted - it is a game in which seemingly nothing can be lost, but also nothing can be won.

Name: Pip Shea

Nationality: Australia
Title: My Fellow Australians
Artist: Pip Shea
Year: 2004
URL: www.myfellowaustralians.com

Biography: Pip Shea is a new media artist, web designer and community arts-worker. Her interests lie in hybrid arts and convergent media practices and how these forms can be utilised for art making and the dissemination of ideas. Since 1997, Pip has worked specifically with digital media. She has worked extensively for ABC New Media and EMI music and has been involved in numerous other creative projects including the inaugural Melbourne Aquarium artist in residence program, AquaArts. In 2004, Pip travelled to Canada to take up a six week Australia Council artist residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts. She has most recently been engaged by RMIT, Melbourne teaching Networked Media.

Synopsis: My Fellow Australians, dissatisfied with the two hundred odd years of colonial culture offered up as our collective Australian identity? Dissatisfied with the futility of seeking moral certainties, and finding them in the imaginary homogeneity of the past? Dissatisfied with attempts to fix our identity in one historical moment or in a single mythologised individual (insert Don Bradman here)? Me too. My Fellow Australians is an online artwork by new media artist Pip Shea conceived and developed during the IntraNation artist residency at The Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada in 2004. My Fellow Australians was made possible by the Australian Government through the Australia Council New Media Arts Board.