Tina LaPorta is a media artist who lives and works in New York City. Her most recent work has been created specifically for the internet as a continued exploration of female subjectivity within a global networked environment. In 1999, Ms. LaPorta received a commission for the creation of Distance, a web-specific work hosted on Turbulence.org (New York) with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work Distance has been chosen as a SEMI-FINALIST in the Arts and Culture category of the Fourth Annual Global Information Infrastructure (GII) Awards.

Ms. LaPorta's net-specific work Future_body Version 1.0 premiered at the Alterities conference this year at the Ecole Suprieure Nationale desBeaux Arts in Paris where she also lectured on her work. This work is mirrored on the Les Penelopes website in France and "remixed" for Rencontres D'Art Contemporain 99; Aix en Provence (France). Future_body v1.0 has been included in SEAFair '99 at the Museum of the City of Skopje (Macedonia), the PaperVeins exhibition, "Landscape" and the upcomming exhibition "Particle Accelerators" at the Boston Photographic Resource Center (Boston, MA).

LaPorta has been an Artist-in-Resident at Ars Electronica's FutureLab (Linz, Austria) where she created her first web-specific work titled TRACES. Traces has been included in many international festivals including SEAFAIR '98 (Macedonia), the International Festival for New Film (Croatia) and VIDEOMEDEJA (Yugoslavia).

Other net.works by Tina LaPorta have been included in the ALT-X exhibition, "Being in Cyberspace", "Maid in Cyberspace" exhibition at Studio XX (Montr?al), the "Sex and Consciousness" exhibition on the FranceArtist website (Paris), as well as the Leonardo Electronic Gallery (MIT press.) Her work has been included in the Web Site for the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, China) and the Women and Performance On-Line Journal "Sexuality in Cyberspace."

Artist Statement
Foregrounding the relationship between technology, the body, and female subjectivity, my work explores both the potentialities and the meaning(s) of presence, absence and the desire for connectivity within a global networked environment.

Using the model of the Network as a platform for interaction, I am interested in exploring the separation of the corporeal world implied by the use of telecommunications technology. The restrictions of our chosen technologies in many ways function as a collapsed environment for our simulated contact. Thus my work focuses in on connection and disconnection, fluctuations in transmission and reception between geographically separated participants mediated by the surface of the screen.