Today in the Rhizome Artbase I cam across a couple of interesting pieces by Martin John Callanan: I am Still Alive and I Wanted to See All of the News From Today. The works play with the notion of immediacy - on the web and in text message communication respectively.

News brings together (or at least claims to) thumbnail images of the front pages of every national, daily newspaper from around the world. The web page is filled with the evenly spaced images and interrupted only by a small text box in the top right of the viewer's browser stating "I Wanted to See All of the News From Today: [today's date], Martin John Callanan." Alive, on the other hand, claims to involve a device that searches local wireless networks for open, connected devices like PDAs or cell phones, and when it finds one, sends the message "I am still alive" - translated appropriately for the country of course.

What I enjoy about both pieces are their direct and simple nature. News presents nothing more than "the news" in the form of its most prominent signifier, the national daily paper. Alive does not discriminate between phones more than it has to for delivery and presents the surprised recipient with a message that states a simple, if slightly bewildering statement.

Where News succeeds is in its critique of online news and news aggregators. The project earnestly, ingenuously, and almost feyly approaches its stated goal - one it shares with Google, CNN.com, and of course the New York Times own "All the News..." claim. Yet in doing so, it points out the quixotic and ultimately sisyphean task it really is. In this way, News also parodies the larger project of the socially networked internet: totalizing archivization and the myth that "everything is at your fingertips." The work shows that in fact, when everything is at you fingertips - it's actually just a bit too much and perhaps what we're looking for after all is a different sort of archive. Thus Callanan successfully mocks the major online news outlets' earnestness at the same time as he nods to the enormity of their common project.

What I enjoy about Alive is how it plays with the notion of immediacy in media like text messages or social networks. In these media, users/participants are constantly engaged in a project of updating and enhancing. MySpace users continually fiddle with their profiles to convey just the right message for the moment - Twitter users somehow find the need to update friends and followers with minutiae (and these friends and followers find the need to pay attention). These are media of archivization of the present, where a steady stream of information implies life and a cessation of the flow signals death. This is not only corporeal death - as that certainly is evidenced in suddenly static texts and profiles - but also a halting of participation, which is the equivalent of death in these media.

So in choosing "I am still alive" as the message sent to unwitting participants, Callanan has brilliantly honed the basic sentiment in every message that we send or profile update we make. Every message may as well say "I am still alive" since that message is the function of all such communication. Not just an odd phrase to rouse curiosity, the message is crafted to make the recipients aware of the medium itself.

I really was impressed by these two works and their deadly simple, yet pithy delivery. I strongly suggest that readers take a look.