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.

Interview with soundtoys.net

How long have you been working in this area?
with computers since 1991.on the net since 1996

Were you an artist/ musician first who got into using computers/the net or did you respond to the net in an artistic way?

i have an art background and have experimented with many different media over the years.... i am now settling into the net

What/who has influenced you in your work? (themes, other artists etc)

feminism-- theory and activism has influenced my thinking and therfore my art

Are there any other artists covering the same field as you?

there are several artists using the net as their platform... there are even fewer artists working with sound on the net... and there are even fewer who combine feminist theory into their on-line art practice

With regard to 'soundtoys' especially, why do you think the audio visual metaphor is so key to the net?

well, it's about appealing to more than one sense, no? so that we, as a culture, can move away from emphasizing one sense (the eye) as dominant over all the others.

Does the net promotes visual awareness that is unique to it?

all too often, people emphasize technology over meaning. so, the net promotes a turn away from content. artists need to insert messages where-ever and when-ever we can.

The use of the net for non-net paradigms is becoming more frequent. Do you feel this happening, and is it something to be wary of?

yes. and we better be careful for what we wish for (ie more bandwidth) because it will come with a pretty high price.

Would you describe yourself as a multimedia artist, a net.artist, programmer, or none of the above?

net.artist is good for now...

What software do you use most?
eudora

Tina LaPorta mailto:laporta@interport.net

<<<eye to the ear remix>>>
http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/i/ga2750/tina/mix.html

<----> Distance <---->
http://turbulence.org/Works/Distance/

:::net.works + avatars:::
http://heelstone.com/meridian/templates/laporta/