CyberSpaceLand is the unclerical net/text VJ show, featuring VJ Übergeek, the geek VJ who seeks to wrestle some bits of daily life from the jaws of the endless workday. The technical concept is fairly simple: Internet text, derived from a search engine, becomes colorful and funny club motion visuals. But there’s more to the story. Textwise, the emphasis isn’t on making art from a search engine, but on specific queries, which form a loose and strange kind of narrative during the course of the show. The queries are mostly in the first or second person, e.g., “I’ve had problems with Prozac.” Forming queries this way, you get much different types of results than if you look at the usual “Top 10 results for Prozac.” You get more personal results, and you get to see some of the stuff that Google, etc., doesn’t normally spit back at you.

The focus of the onscreen text is not only on the query results but also on Übergeek’s sporadically typed queries and the loose narrative they form. Some of the queries are specific, and some are more general, like “I’ve never smoked that.”

But the on-screen visuals are only half of the CyberSpaceLand Textperience… Computers in private life and leisure culture are typically used the same way as computers are used at work: sitting down, typing at a desk. The performer at a laptop techno concert might really be working on email or a database during the show—all you can see is someone sitting and typing. This doesn’t seem to be questioned often, perhaps because we work so much nowadays that, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, we forget to stop when we leave the office—the separation in our lives is gone. In the CyberSpaceLand show, VJ Übergeek, although a bit geeky, is inspired by thrashing guitar players. She performs standing up, using all hands and feet to frantically type on her stomach-mounted keyboard, but also to manipulate visuals with her neck-mounted remote control, a joystick/gamepad, and by dancing on a dancepad, aka a FIFOSY (Foot-Operated Software You-Know.) In other words, she moves around a lot on stage (and sometimes off.)

Primarily a public performance project, the Cyber-SpaceLand Live Show has been performed at both nightclubs and art festivals in North America and Europe. CyberSpaceLand software—CyberSpaceLand Home Edition—can also be downloaded from the cyberspaceland.org website. In further pondering the juxtaposition of work and play in computer applications, the Home Edition includes a music visualizer option. Besides the original web search version, a psychedelic e-mail client, CyberPOP, is also available to home users to further deutilitize your desktop utilities.


Links: http://cyberspaceland.org

Amy Alexander (US) is a software and performance artist and software-yapper who has worked in film, video, performance, music and UNIX systems administration as well as in digital media art. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. Since 1996 she has been working primarily in net art and software art. Much of her recent work has been in public performance and software art (often at the same time), playing with the juxtaposition of geek culture, business culture and leisure life. Amy is one of the founder/developer/administrators of the runme.org software art repository. She’s also a member of the TOPLAP livecoding audio-visual performance group.