The html-movement-library plus Singing Website Wallpaper
Two web-driven installations by Ursula Endlicher

Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 28, 2007, 6PM - 8PM
Artist's talk: Saturday, April 14, 4PM
Performance: Saturday, May 12, 8PM

MediaNoche, Uptown’s gallery devoted to new media, presents the html-movement-library and Singing Website Wallpaper, two web-driven installations by Ursula Endlicher.

Html, the language of the World Wide Web, is normally hidden from view. Web users usually become aware of it when something goes wrong ¬– the intrusion of code breaking the clean surface of a web page with jibberish or an odd combination of letters and symbols. That code, however, is, what makes all things we see and do on the web possible.

In the html-movement-library artist Ursula Endlicher uses physical movement and gesture to re-invent html as a lexicon for choreography. The html-movement library is an online database of video performances articulating html code through gesture, movement and dance. Visitors at MediaNoche are invited to contribute to the ever-expanding repository of movement by allowing themselves to be video-captured within the installation. They can also browse the library.

In Singing Website Wallpaper Endlicher gives voice to html by re-interpreting code as a musical score and visualizing the scales as printed patterns on wallpaper. While the sound component of the installation is influenced by the actual “flow” of activity on yahoo.com, msn.com and google.com, the wallpaper is “frozen” source code from each site translated into a visual set of functionality-related symbols.

According to Endlicher, "Both installations are data enactments: Singing Website Wallpaper is a graphical and musical representation of the activities on various Websites. The html-movement-library translates the Web’s data representations into choreography." In addition, other art projects are utilizing the library’s collection of videos and images: Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited and html_butoh are current examples of works that source content from it.

Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited will be performed by the artist at the end of the exhibition. The performance will be generated by real-time source code from the Web combined with material collected in the show and submitted online.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Ursula Endlicher has exhibited at artport/Whitney Museum, Rhizome’s ArtBase, ReelNY.web (thirteen/WNET), Artists Space, Austrian Cultural Forum New York, and in galleries throughout the US, Europe, and online. The html-movement-library was initiated by an invitation to participate in a research lab at Tanzquartier Wien in Vienna/Austria in December 2005. It expanded to its current form – a publicly accessible online database driving other art projects – in part with a commissioning grant by Turbulence.org. The html-movement-library is gathering submissions over the Web, but when brought into “physical” space will incorporate material submitted through installations and workshops in a “face-to-face” confrontation in different places and locations. The html-movement-library is accessible at http://turbulence.org/works/html_butoh. More of the artist’s work can be found at http://www.ursenal.net.