Andrea Zapp and 'The Impossible View'
Andrea Zapp
Background information
Andrea Zapp has a background in film and TV studies and creates disorientating digital platforms mixing real, virtual and online spaces, such as The Imaginary Hotel installation (2003) that surrounds a furnished hotel room with metamorphosing virtual walls displaying image contributions sent from the web. She has edited two books, Networked Narrative Environments as imaginary spaces of being and New Screen Media, (with Martin Rieser). Her art works have been shown at the following exhibitions:
> Ars Electronica Linz
> ISEA Liverpool and Paris
> Pittsburgh Centre for the Arts
> Festival of Visions Hong Kong – Berlin,
> Media Forum Moscow
> Austrian Photo Triennial Graz
> Museum of Image and Sound Sao Paulo
> Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts Tokyo
> Kunstverein Stuttgart
> Intern. Art Fair Madrid
> Film Festival Rotterdam
Also at the following conferences:
> Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth, Australia;
> ISEA 02 Nagoya;
> Muestra Euroamericana de Video y Arte Digital
In 2005 she has been appointed Senior Lecturer for Media Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her art works include "Little Sister - A 24 hr. online surveillance soap", 2000; "A Body of Water", networked Telematics installation in coop. with Paul Sermon, 1999; "The Imaginary Hotel", 2003/04, networked installation.
Research
Miscellanious Background Projects
Little Sister>
Little Sister describes itself as ‘The World’s First Online Surveillance Soap and is made up on an Internet page with live webcams. The interface is a circle of black-and-white photos arranged perspectively to form a hemisphere reminiscent of a surveillance mirror in the supermarket. Every segment, or picture, in the configuration corresponds to a camera. To fetch its images, you click on the camera. The photos show street corners, shops, people at work or in their apartments.
The viewer soon realizes that their links with the physical locations are co notational more than anything else. For instance, the view of a darting flame leads to a fire station in Finland. A poster with the inscription ‘Big Brother gucken macht dumm’ (Watching Big Brother makes you stupid) is a reference to a topical discussion about a reality TV broadcast on German private television in 2000, and opens a view onto a domestic room with an open fireplace. In this way, the work plays ironically with the users’ voyeuristic expectations, but also refers to the problems of global monitoring by surveillance systems.
Human Avatars
Human Avatars is a media art installation that creates a visual dialogue between real and virtual participants on two networked stages:
Visitors in the exhibition space discover a small wooden hut, which they are invited to enter. A live image of their body inside is projected into a remote model version of the hut, complete with model furniture, where other visitors can make contact with the tiny moving figures by peeping through a small window. Yet unaware that a second camera inside displays their peering faces back on the window of the big shed, with their eyes now overshadowing the participants inside.
The architecture and the scenario appear very playful, but the immediate interactive experience is controversial, once the voyeuristic strategy behind the idyllic backdrop becomes evident - indirectly hinting at rather ambivalent and melancholic side effects of surveillance and visual control as an intrinsic part of media and entertainment.
Relevant Projects
The Imaginary Hotel
‘The Imaginary Hotel allows visitors to occupy and design their ideal room and fill it with personal content and inspiration. The installation architecture resembles a typical hotel room; yet choosing image and video and footage from the net via the room TV menu, can alter the standard interior and even hotel location. At the same time internet participants can interfere by modifying or uploading further material via the hotel website to the project database and image choice. Being able to add their personal material to the window on one side and the picture frame on the other wall, they create their very own fictitious presence in the installation room. They are also able to ring up the gallery visitors via a specially designed web-telephone interface. A webcam is streaming real time video from the hotel to the website to document the ongoing changes. A hotel as such stands for an anonymous social melting pot in a constant state of flux .
The Imaginary Hotel further mirrors digital travel in a distorted concept of space and time. It represents a virtual retreat accommodating permanently migrating residents. Similar to a blank canvas, the vacant room is successively populated and shaped by individuals. Real and virtual guests arrive, meet and disappear from out of nowhere and leave their personal traces, reflecting the seamless border between physical and imaginative places of being.
The premiere took place at the Chapman Gallery in Salford between October 9th and 31st, 2002 and was further linked to the Cornerhouse, Manchester and the Folly Gallery, Lancaster, where visitors were able to interact with the gallery installation and its audience from a special net-terminal.’
Habbo Hotel
Habbo is a FREE virtual community for teens where you can hang out with your current friends, meet new people, create and design your own personal room, and take part in many activities, such as meeting and hanging out with famous singers, bands and celebs, or even make and run your own events! There are a bunch of games to play and even more contests to take part in!
It's free to play, and once you've registered your Habbo, you can do almost whatever you can think of!
Once inside you have your own console which contains a pager with messages and a friends list. You also have a store which is where any furniture you have (if not placed in a room) is stored and a rooms list. Although I’m too old for this realistically, I can see why teenagers (the intended audience) can get addicted to it. It’s much more involving and demanding than any other chat room on the internet and that’s where it stands out, because it is probably the closest thing you will get to real communication with people you don’t know across the world on the web without the use of a webcam.
Below is a screenshot of the actual virtual hotel.
The Palace
The Palace is a free graphical chat program. Create and wear your own picture (avatar). Build your very own chat server. This I found quite amazing. I’d say that I started using the web in about ’95 and to me it was something crazy, as at home I had windows 3.1 on an Olivetti pc with an amazing 8mb of RAM with no net connection. When I started this project in Oct ’06 I was amazed that after using the web for all this time that I’d never come across this for one and secondly that this was created at that time when the web realistically was only just starting out.
Below is a screenshot of the main window of ‘The Palace’ software’s main window in the lighthouse palace. There are three people in the room represented by either avatars or the default smilie image, which today would be known as an ‘emoticon’. My avatar is a custom avatar I created in photoshop and it’s the name of my company. All images in ‘The Palace’ are 8-bit gif’s. ‘The Palace’ is now defunct and has not been updated for since it was originally created (I think). Which is a shame as it could have been developed increasingly with the many modern web technologies that exist today. However, this may have taken some of the original novelty from the program and the whole idea, so I will rest with the fact that it is a great breakthrough in web technology and that it should be left ‘as is’.
Evaluation
After all of my research on Andrea Zapp and her creations, I discovered a wealth of information. Also she is a benchmark for fellow designers. A lot of her work, ‘in my eyes’ seems to revolve around the whole concept of a person being represented as an image. I find this interesting because as the internet has evolved, we seem to be using this concept more and more, whether it be an avatar on msn or yahoo messenger, an avatar on a forum board or a spray decal in an online game. We are constantly personifying ourselves in images. After my research on Andrea Zapp, it appears that she is the unspoken founder of this idea, which is quite amazing.
Conclusion
In relation to ‘The Impossible View’, I would say that before all of the internet was created, if I had walked up to somebody and explained the concept of owning a virtual bar and being able to talk to my friends from America in there, I would have got a very different response to that of today. Andrea Zapp has created THE best concept so far for communication on the web in a virtual environment. ‘Habbo Hotel’ and ‘The Palace’ relate to each other as follows. ‘Habbo Hotel’ and ‘The Palace’ are both online virtual environments where people can communicate, customise their own image and rooms. ‘The Imaginary Hotel’ combines this with the real world, which is fascinating yet quite scary at the same time.
Bibliography
www.azapp.dewww.thepalace.comwww.habbohotel.commedienkunstnetzwww.littlesister.com
Plot Outline: A man struggles with memories of his past, including a wife he cannot remember, in a nightmarish world with no sun and run by beings (known as "The Strangers") with telekinetic powers that seek the souls of humans.
