Mark Amerika
Born in Miami, 1960
Lives in Boulder, Colorado

Grammatron, 1997-   (http://www.grammatron.com)

Website

Grammatron is an experimental multimedia environment developed by artist Mark Amerika in 1997. The nonlinear narrative concerns Abe Golam, an "info-shaman," whose alternate persona is Grammatron, a genderless digital being. Abe's surname alludes to the medieval Jewish legend of the golem, a robotlike servant made of clay and brought to life, who is considered a prototype for man-machine myths from Frankenstein to cyborgs such as the Terminator.

Lew Baldwin
Born in East Brunswick, New Jersey, 1969
Lives in Los Angeles

Redsmoke, 1995-   (http://www.redsmoke.com)

Website

Lew Baldwin launched Redsmoke in 1995 as a vehicle for a fictitious rock band but says it "quickly evolved into a depository for the subconscious." The content includes "Platters," an episodic story begun in 1997 about a man who finds evidence of an escaped "programmed" human worker. The narrative unfolds through textless animation, using Flash, a software program that requires no interaction from the viewer. A soundtrack of electronic music, composed by Baldwin, accompanies the animation, echoing his original concept for the site.

Ben Benjamin
Born in Indianapolis, 1970
Lives in San Francisco

Superbad, 1995-   (http://www.superbad.com)

Website

Superbad is a seemingly endless funhouse of graphics, images, and text launched in 1997 by web designer Ben Benjamin. Laced with references to popular culture, from the rock band Iron Maiden to the cult film Planet of the Apes, the site also features stunning abstract animations and satirical texts. There is no fixed entry point because Benjamin changes the homepage every day, adding new content on an ongoing basis. The unpredictable and nonlinear experience offered by Superbad mirrors the medium of the web itself.

Fakeshop
Organized in 1995
Based in Brooklyn, New York

Fakeshop, 1997-99   (http://www.fakeshop.com)

Website. Core members: Jeff Gompertz, Prema Murthy, Eugene Thacker

Fakeshop is both an ongoing electronic art project and a performance and installation series. The website serves a dual function: broadcasting Fakeshop's live performances in real time and later exhibiting extracts from these performances in what founder Jeff Gompertz describes as "a series of multimedia tableaux vivants." A visit to the website automatically opens a series of windows that reproduce text and still and moving images, accompanied by a soundtrack. In conjunction with the "2000 Biennial," Fakeshop will produce a live event, developed in collaboration with other digital artists, musicians, and theorists.

Ken Goldberg
Born in Ibadan, Nigeria, 1961
Lives in San Francisco

Ouija 2000, 2000   (http://ouija.berkeley.edu)

Website

Website commissioned by the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and originally presented as Ken Goldberg/MATRIX 186/Ouija 2000. Courtesy Catherine Clark Gallery, San Francisco

Project team: Billy Chen, Rory Solomon, Steve Bui, Bobak Farzin, Jacob Heitler, Derek Poon, Gordon Smith; Graphic design: Gil Gershoni; Illustration: Dave Garvey; Flash: Paulina Wallenberg Olsson

Ouija 2000 was created by Ken Goldberg in collaboration with engineers and designers at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is an industrial engineering professor. Visitors to the website manipulate a real Ouija board, located in Goldberg's lab, by moving the mouse on their computer. A live streaming video of the board's progress is visible on the web page. Equating occult mysticism with the web, the artist slyly critiques the mystification of new technologies and satirizes an uncritical reliance on the Internet as a source of information.

®^TMark
Incorporated in the United States, 1991

®^TMark, 1997-   (http://www.rtmark.com)

Website

At the core of the multimedia project ®^TMark (pronounced "art-mark") is the Internet database rtmark.com. Although this site may appear to be just another corporate presence on the web, ®^TMark's purposes are diametrically opposed to those of the corporate world it imitates. Using the site to research one of ®^TMark's "mutual funds" yields "accounts" with stock-ticker-like names, suggesting how users can engage in acts of corporate sabotage. ®^TMark also pairs "donors" (investors) with "workers" who undertake projects ranging from serious campaigns, such as preventing corporate juggernauts from usurping intellectual property, to sillier ventures promoting llama delivery services in lieu of expensive and environmentally damaging overnight airfreight.

John F. Simon, Jr.
Born in Louisiana, 1963
Lives in New York

Every Icon, 1997   (http://www.numeral.com/everyicon.html)

Internet project
Sandra Gering Gallery, New York, and the artist

John F. Simon, Jr.'s Every Icon is a Java applet, a small program that automatically downloads from the Internet and runs on a computer's hard drive. It generates every possible combination of black-and-white squares in a grid of 32 x 32, or a total of 1,024 squares, beginning with all white squares and ending with all black. On an average home computer, it would take several hundred trillion years for the process to conclude, which is Simon's way of "making you think about a very, very long time."

Darcey Steinke
Born in Oneida, New York, 1963
Lives in Brooklyn, New York

Blindspot, 1999   (http://adaweb.walkerart.org/project/blindspot)

Internet project commissioned by äda 'web; Digital Arts Study collection, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

In 1998, novelist Darcey Steinke was commissioned by the website äda 'web to write a short story specifically for the nonlinear environment of the Internet. The central story is linked to nineteen shorter texts, designed with structures called "frames" that subdivide a single web page into smaller sections. The inclusion of Blindspot, created as a work of fiction, in this exhibition reveals how traditional distinctions between disciplines-art, literature, design-are blurred by the new medium of the web.

Together We Can Defeat Capitalism (TWCDC)
Founded San Francisco, 1997

Bellagio Casino Gallery of Fine Art, Las Vegas, 2000   (http://www.BellagioArtGallery.com)

Website

"Bellagio is taking us all to the ultimate orgasm and one day we'll all come together and it will end in the big crunch or the density of desire will be too great to hold together the bodily mass and it'll expand forever, or go supernova. Fuck defeating capitalism. Let's welcome it, push it to its limit. No more inoculations, irony or subversion. Just dress stylishly, be cool, stay at Bellagio, learn from Las Vegas and pretend to be a revolutionary." From TWCDC's essay Bellagio - The Ultimate Orgasm
(the complete essay is on the Bellagio web site)

Annette Weintraub
Born in Brooklyn, New York, 1946
Lives in New York

Sampling Broadway, 1999   (http://www.turbulence.org/Works/broadway/index.html)

Internet project commissioned by Turbulence with a grant from the Jerome Foundation and supported in part by a grant from The City University of New York PSC-CUNY Research Award Program

RealAudio narration: Bill Rice; Second voice: Annie Shaver-Crandell; Sound mixing: John Neilson; Photography assistant: Reyna DiCiurcio

Annette Weintraub's Sampling Broadway is a virtual tour of five downtown locations along Manhattan's famous thoroughfare. The site equates the city with media space by layering panoramic images of the five locations with movies and animations interspersed with text, voice-over narration, and sounds of the street. Weintraub is interested in the simultaneous experience of reading, seeing, and hearing as a metaphor for the dynamics of urban life. Rather than present a frozen, literal view, as is typical of panoramic photography, Weintraub evokes the density and complexity of city space.

Internet art is sponsored by France Telecom North America.