Internet Art Chapter 4

The first person that stuck out to me while reading this chapter was actually on the first page of this chapter. He goes by the name of Wolfgang Staehle. Wolfgang Staehle was born in Stuggart, Germany in 1950. In 1976 he moved to New York City to attend the school of Visual Arts where he studied closely with conceptual artists. He had a successful career in New York City, however he wound up in many European galleries until 1991, he created "The Thing." "The Thing, was an online innovative online forum for artists and cultural workers. The Thing began as a Bulletin Board System, a form of online community dialogue used before the advent World Wide Web" (lacan.com). In 1996, Staehle, began to produce an ongoing series of live online video streams. The first of the works was Empire 24/7, which was an online video stream of the Empire State Building in New York City. He then created ones that captured streams of Berlin's Fernsehturm, and the Comburg Monastery in Germany. In 2001, the cameras documented the terrorist attacks on Lower Manhattan, the installation suddenly became clear, if unintentional, articulation of the role mass media images could potentially take on. According to the book over, "an era in which surveillance, controlled media environments and individual freedoms became heightened topics for debate" (173). Here is his documentation of the event.

The next person that stuck out to me while reading is Michael Mandiberg. Michael Mandiberg is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator. His work traces the lines of political and social power online, working the internet in order to comment or intercede in the real and poetic flows of information. Interesting facts about him is that he "sold all of his possessions online on Shop Mandiberg, created Firefox plugins that highlight the real environmental costs of global economy and transformed all of Wikipedia into books for Print Wikipedia" (mandiberg.com). His works have been in the New York Times, ARTnews, and The Washington Post. He is currently an associate professor at the College of Staten Island and lives in Brooklyn. 

Below are pictures of Staehle's documentation of 9/11 and Mandiberg's works.