Mindaugas Gapševičius (b. 1974) – artistic pseudonym mi_ga – lives and works in Berlin and Vilnius. He is one of the most active artists in the field of new media, who works within the international art scene. He was among the initiators of the first Lithuanian new media art platform on the net http://www.o-o.lt. Mindaugas Gapševičius was an active participant of the international new media art networks, which stimulated the formation of networks between Western countries and Baltic States in the last decade of the 20 c.
The work of Mindaugas Gapševičius is to be associated with net art, software and interactive user interface. The artist conceptualizes the flow of digital information, analyzes its inner logic and modes of application. In his works Mindaugas Gapševičius often links virtual and physical space. He engages deeply into social themes and takes up critical position towards contemporary neo-liberal tendencies.
Mindaugas Gapševičius is also actively involved into collective work, initiating interdisciplinary events and creative laboratories which include net art, open-code strategies, audiovisual artistic practices and visual art.
Works
1. Carpet/?s, 2006.
http://triple-double-u.com/carpet/?s
”carpet/?s” is an internet based project that allows you to purchase a
personalised carpet made out of ascii (American Standart Code for
Information Interchange). It runs on a php application where internet
resources are used as yarn to make ascii cloths.
The user only has to do one click and a machine does the rest. The
program generates textual output, and the ascii is always unique. It is
based on the time when the surfer goes to a web site. The time in a form
of hh:mm:ss is then used as a keyword for the results taken from a
search engine. The program downloads the contents of a second given
result, rejects html tags and white spaces and puts all textual content
into a carpet-like form. The produced carpet-like image can be printed
out or weaved in a factory and then shipped to the addressee.
2. Mailia, 2006.
http://triple-double-u.com/mailia
Mailia analyzes emails coming to ones mailbox and simply replies to
them. Forget automated standard 'Out of Office' replies, Mailia is as
intelligent as software like Eliza and as flexible as open source
products. The email answering machine works in the following way: it
grabs an incoming message, analyzes it, sends requests to the Google
search engine, then picks up given results, sorts them, and outputs the
information into an email form which is sent back to the sender. If
answers are publicly saved, search engines will index the answers again
and utilize these as output for other similar replies. Ironic as this
statement may seem - 'Why not let the machines live their own lives'.
Mailia is free software released under the GNU General Public License.
3. Bookshelf, 2006.
http://triple-double-u.com/bookshelf
Rapid flow of letters and numbers on a monitor wall
has nothing to do with chaos theory which can cause big
disruptions in our world. It has also nothing to do with
hackers world as one would like to say. Bookshelf
represents a network traffic translated into descriptive form,
so the unseen side of "networking" would be understandable or
at least readable. In a technical terms the flow of letters and
numbers on the monitors would sound like 'tcpdump', a common
computer network debugging tool.
4. ascii, 2006.
http://www.ascii.lt
At present the rapidly expanding Semantic Web analyzes digital
information in order to distinguish valuable content from digital trash.
As well modern day search engines give more and more precise results of
searched information yet how far will this artificial intelligence go?
Will we eventually be able to leave it to machines to perform automated
tasks such as creating images or writing texts?
For example digital information that is delivered via email increases
daily if not hourly which in turn takes more and more time to answer and
sort. The email answering machine provides a solution for this as it
will write the answer emails using material available online.
