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NET ART
ANTHOLOGY

World of Awe: The Traveler’s Journal (Chapter 1: Forever)

Yael Kanarek

2000

World of Awe is an ongoing multi-platform project by artist Yael Kanarek. Centering around three chapters created between 2000 and 2006, the work follows an unnamed Traveler through a desolate virtual world, Sunset/Sunrise, which is accessed through a portal in New York’s East Village.

Net Art Anthology presents Chapter 1: Forever, in which the unnamed Traveler searches for a lost treasure, narrating their yearning from a laptop that they have rebuilt from electronic scrap. Visitors access the Traveler’s story by opening their files, reading accounts of their journey and their love letters.

Featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial along with prints of 3D renderings of Sunset/Sunrise landscapes, Chapter 1 brings a new cultural interface—the computer desktop—to a timeless narrative genre, the travelogue, and to the enduring artists’ task of worldbuilding. In doing so, it evokes the ever-present longing, isolation, and ruin that are the repressed remainders of digital culture.

Yael Kanarek, World of Awe: The Traveler’s Journal (Chapter 1: Forever), 2000. Screenshot created in EaaS using IE4.5 for Mac.

VISIT WORK IN EMULATED BROWSER

“Through a portal on 419 East 6th street in Manhattan, a traveler crosses into the parallel world called Sunset/Sunrise, to search for a lost treasure.”

Read Kaela Noel’s interview with Yael Kanarek.

Entering World of Awe, the user lands on a simulated computer desktop environment with a single window open, which houses a rendering of a desert landscape—the parallel world of Sunset/Sunrise, where an unnamed narrator called the Traveler journeys. The contents spill out from here. Clicking on any one of the desktop icons or menu items leads to a love letter or an entry in the Traveler’s log.

Read Kyle Thomas Hinton’s essay exploring Kanarek’s work through the lens of theorist Elizabeth Povinelli.

Yael Kanarek, World of Awe: The Traveler’s Journal (Chapter 1: Forever), 2000. Screenshot created in EaaS using IE4.5 for Mac.

The Traveler’s journal entries are mournful, detailed accounts of their experiences in Sunset/Sunrise. Some are direct and documentarian in style, and other entries veer toward the poetic and fantastical. The love letters, written but never sent to an unnamed lover, are infused with an impossible longing.

“Yours forever, your Sunset/Sunrise forever yours, yours forever yours.”

Yael Kanarek World of Awe: The Traveler's Journal (Chapter 1: Forever), 2000. Screenshot created in EaaS using IE4.5 for Mac.

The narrative draws on the conventions of travel literature, a genre that can be traced as far back as the second century CE, but organizes it according to the emerging conventions of the graphical user interface (GUI).

Yael Kanarek, World of Awe: The Traveler’s Journal (Chapter 1: Forever), 2000. Screenshot created in EAAS using IE4.5 for Mac.

In his Language of New Media, Lev Manovich argued that the GUI was a new kind of cultural interface. Like the printed word or the motion picture, the GUI can organize access to information. In the case of World of Awe, it allows the story to be read in a nonlinear way, interspersed with fictional software tools.

Yael Kanarek World of Awe: The Traveler's Journal (Chapter 1: Forever), 2000. Screenshot created in EaaS using IE4.5 for Mac.

The desktop environment was also, for many computer users, a private space that contrasted with their public web activities. The Traveler’s laptop contains glimpses of their inner life, inscribed in fragmentary fashion into this intimate space. For Kanarek, it is also a worldbuilding tool. Because Sunset/Sunrise is only glimpsed through the mediating device of the laptop, it functions as a kind of virtual world within the larger universe of World of Awe.

Yael Kanarek, World of Awe: The Traveler’s Journal (Chapter 1: Forever), 2000. Screenshot created in EaaS using IE4.5 for Mac.

“The story of the internet as a boundless, nonlinear space was a perfect home to Sunset/Sunrise.”

– Yael Kanarek

“One could construct identity out of language; one could construct an entire world. And this is what Kanarek sought to do, and arguably achieved.”

– Kerry Doran

Over more than two decades, World of Awe has taken shape across a range of media and platforms. Along with the three chapters of the Traveler’s journal, there were two earlier web-based manifestations; a series of 3D renderings, entitled Nowheres, depicting the landscape of Sunset/Sunrise; a Love Letter Delivery Service, which sent the Traveler’s letters to subscribers’ inboxes; and the interactive dance piece Portal: A Net Dance (in collaboration with Evann Siebens, Meeyoung Kim, and Yoav Gal). A fourth chapter called The Traveler’s Journal is forthcoming.


Yael Kanarek, _Terrain7a5: Bits, (2002). From the series 48 Nowheres. Ink drawing on Lambda print, pleximounted. 44 x 34 in.

Through storytelling and translation, Yael Kanarek reshapes cultural associations of language. Her work enters spaces of meaning determined by global networks and her observation of the internet as a metaphorical space written in human and computer languages. In recent years, her creative practice centers on the dynamics and form of multilingualism and the synchronization of narrative with standard time.

Selected for the 2002 Whitney Biennial, exhibitions of her work also include The Drawing Center, New York; Beral Madra Contemporary Art, Istanbul; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; CU Museum, Boulder; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University; The Jewish Museum, New York; Exit Art; The Kitchen; American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; LIMN Gallery, San Francisco; Holster Projects, London; Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh; bitforms gallery, New York; Nelly Aman, Tel Aviv; Boston CyberArts Festival; HVCCA, Peekskill; Arena 1, Santa Monica; California College of the Arts, San Francisco; Orsini Palace, Bomarzo; and Sala Uno Gallery, Rome. Kanarek’s work has also been shown in New York at Kenny Schachter Contemporary, Silverstein Gallery, Ronald Feldman Gallery, Derek Eller Gallery, A.I.R Gallery, 303 Gallery, Schroeder Romero Gallery, and the Art in Embassies program of the US States Department.

In addition to a Rockefeller New Media Fellowship, an Eyebeam Honorary Fellowship, and a LABA Fellowship, Kanarek has received grants from the Jerome Foundation Media Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts; commissions from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Turbulence.org; Kanarek’s distinctions also include the 2014 WTN Award in the Arts, and 2002 CNRS/UNESCO, Lewis Carroll Argos Prize, Paris. In 1999, she founded Upgrade! International, a network that served the New Media Art community for ten years.

Kanarek holds an MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and teaches Net Art at the MFA program at Pratt Institute.

More From CHAPTER 2: 1999-2004

05/04/17 Black Net.Art Actions Mendi + Keith Obadike 2001-2003
05/18/17 Samsung Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (장영혜중공업) 1999
05/25/17 skinonskinonskin Entropy8Zuper! 1999
06/01/17 Marisa’s American Idol Audition Training Blog Marisa Olson 2004 - 2005
06/08/17 Gatt.org The Yes Men 1999 - 2002
06/22/17 Airworld Jennifer & Kevin McCoy 1999
06/28/17 Neen Neen 2000 - 2004
07/13/17 Velvet-Strike Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre, Brody Condon 2002
07/21/17 Screenfull Abe Linkoln and Jimpunk 2004 - 2005
07/27/17 Telepresence 2 Corpos Informáticos 2002
08/04/17 Data Diaries Cory Arcangel 2003
08/16/17 Rent-a-Negro damali ayo 2003
08/30/17 Re-move Lia 1999 - 2003
09/13/17 Epithelia Mariela Yeregui 1999
09/21/17 alpha 3.4 tsunamii.net 2002
09/27/17 Life Sharing Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.ORG) 2000 - 2003
10/20/17 Dispersion Seth Price 2002 - ongoing
11/01/17 How Do You See the Disappeared? A Warm Database Mariam Ghani & Chitra Ganesh 2004
11/09/17 distributingmartin Pope.L 2000 - 2008

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