Philip Pocock

Philip Pocock, born Ottawa, Canada, 1954, is an artist who combines media including Internet art, installation, sculpture, photography, painting, drawing and writing. In the 1980s, he lived and worked in New York City, experimenting with the borders between painting and photography, private and public art. His early Cibachrome ® art works were exhbitied in solo shows at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science, Piezo Electric Gallery and Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario. He was also a faculty member at the International Center of Photography for 10 years, and in 1987 along with painter John Zinsser, he co-founded the Journal of Contemporary Art, the first desktop published art magazine containing interviews with artists.

His collaboration continued upon his relocation to Colgone, Germany, where he painted and drew with German artist Walter Dahn. Their works were exhibited in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Galerie Monika Sprueth in Cologne and with Joern Boetnagel Projekts also in Cologne. In 1993 he began working digitally, first with a laptop, modem, software and digital cameras for a project he made with Swiss artist Felix Stephan Huber titled Black Sea Diary his first travel-as-art project for the Electronic Cafe at the Venice Biannual. In 1994, he began work on one of Net Art's earliest entries, perhaps its first 'live' and 'remote' performative, conceptual website made on the fly while underway in Canada's wilderness. The website titled Arctic Circle was hosted by The Thing in New York for the traveling show Photography after Photography. In 1996, he was invited by documenta X director Catherine David to propose a new Internet-based work. In 1996, he began work assembling a team of equals for an ambitious project ot take place along the Equator in Africa entitled A Description of the Equator and Some ØtherLands. ØtherLands as it was called extended his experimentation with cinema beyond the cyber-road-movie form Arctic Circle had taken, to include the audience in the conceptual creation of the film. While core authors on The Equator were uploading scenes and stories, online guests were uploading their own, sometimes connecting and at other times interrupting the flow in a never-ending web of broken stories, much like life itself.

In 1999, with another group of collaborators and the support of the ZKM Center of Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, he produced h|u|m|b|o|t on the request andd with further support by the Goethe Institute Caracas Venezuela. h|u|m|b|o|t was a movie-mapping, a single screen world drawn from a database of text and video, mapped together with the help of a neural-net-like Self-Organizing Map algorithm developed by the Finnish mathematician, Kohonen. The text source was primarily the 1799 travelogue from South America by Alexander von Humboldt. All chapters and paragraphs in his "Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent were 'read' and marked up with GPS, emotional and other text-locating markers used to drive the Kohonon SOM system. Video made by h|u|m|b|o|t collaborators including Roberto Cabot, Philip Pocock and Wolfgang Staehle in 1999, 2oo years after Humboldt's journey, were integrated into the SOM h|u|m|b|o|t screen map with the same marking system, which amounts to an atlas through which online guests travel and their tracks are recorded and may be retraced by future online guests to the site. In 2002, with Axel Heide, Gregor Stehle and onesandzeros, Philip Pocock produced UNMOVIE for 'Future Cinema' at ZKM Karlsruhe, a stage of actor-media or 'Bots' avoiding one another, or conversing in various goupings along with online guests, the on-going script of which drives an endless stream of anonymous net-video, which have been given stream of consciousness descriptors by UNMOVIE core authors and when a topic word emerging from the conversation on the stage is send to the video database a playlist is set and subsequently streamed 24 hours a day 7 days a year since 10. November 2002.

All Internet-based works, Philip Pocock has installed in major Museums most often as site-specific situational installations. Venues have included the Museum of Modern Art Paris and St. Etienne, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany, Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland, and others.

'Collaborative Internet Works include: Arctic Circle 1995 [1] (http://www.dom.de/acircle) - A Description of the Equator and Some ØtherLands 1997 [2] (http://www.aporee.org/equator) - h|u|m|b|o|t 1999 [3] (http://www.humbot.org) - UNMOVIE 2002 [4] (http://www.unmovie.org) and Datatecture.net (http://www.datatecture.net)