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CSUDH - Habermas - UWP - Archives

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: June 30, 2003
Latest Update: July 5, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Interactive Art: War and AfterWar

Epic Tales By Carlo Zanni. This link takes you to Zanni's own site.
Center for Contemporary Art, Glasgow This links you through Glasgow's Center for Contemporary Art. Zanni's is the second exhibit listed. The >> marks an active link. Link to CCA Virtual Space for Zanni's Epic Tales. You need sound to appreciate this piece. Come to my office if you can't get sound in the lab.

Here's one way to access Zanni's work:

• Epic Tales By Carlo Zanni. Use this link to Zanni's own site. Note the music especially, it's low information, it's throbbing intensity. Link to USA West Coast to pick up the nearest server. Read Zanni's description of the project, and then link to the examples he provides at the end of his explanation: 1, then 2, then 3. The numbers are active links. As you link to each one, a new window opens up for it. When you are ready to link to the next one, close the window (x in the upper right hand corner) and you will be returned to Zanni's instruction and description window. Then just link to the next one.

Zanni set up a software program that turns the text of any URL you enter at the top of his description page into the dialog box there. "EpicTales is a php based online engine translating and substituting Modern English words with Old English equivalents using a vocabulary taken from the 'Beowulf' manuscript. Users are invited to type a url and to submit it by pressing a button. The displayed page contains the same layout as 'the original' but with changed texts and also with all the images saved in gray scale tones. "Fight for Standards" (the sentence on the "submit" button) is the title of a "war machine and/or tactics" drawing by Leonardo." (From the Virtual Space on Center for Contemporary Art in Glasgow where Zanni's project is on exhibit.)

This is what Zanni has to say about what he's trying to do:

"I think people should not read the translated text, but they should browse those pages as when you open an old book with engravings... I think all our daily behaviours are in some ways "militaristic" oriented. And above all all gov behaviours are. But everything is hidden by adv and pr campaigns.

Also there is a tradition in educating people in believing in their own innocence, fighting back without caring about why things happened.. a kind of Passive - Aggressive National education."
Carlo Zanni

I desinged a file you might like to try in Zanni's program. Link to Zanni's description sheet. Link to the USA server. Then paste the URL http://www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/zannismpl01.htm into the dialog box at the top of Zanni's description page.