Peter Courtemanche (Vancouver/Karlsruhe), Roberto Paci Dalò (Rimini/Karlsruhe) with Fujui Wang aka Ching Shen Ching (Taipeh), Kim Dawn/Scott Russell (Vancouver), Tim Mark Didymus/Emilia Telese (Brighton), Andrew Garton (Melbourne), Ken Gregory (Winnipeg), Wolfgang Temmel (Wies, Steiermark), Lori Weidenhammer (Vancouver), Ushi Reiter, Markus Decker, FirstFloor Eastside

The associative point of departure for this networked project, which has gone online in January 2002 as a potentially never-ending installation, is the story The Music of What Happens by the science fiction author Howard V. Hendrix. It features a book entitled Cadillac Desert, whose protagonist is planning to make a photographic record of the Yosemite National Park down to the smallest detail and, having achieved this, to flood the entire area and transform it into a gigantic, lucrative irrigation project. "Once an extract from the real world has been copied into the virtual domain, man's sense of responsibility for this fragment of reality starts to falter" (P. Courtemanche).

..devolve into II.. is a virtual, extendable structure in which, with the help of an interactive software developed by Peter Courtemanche, those mostly generative image and sound streams become networked whose artistic parameters are determined autonomously by artists participating from different locations around the globe. On a given occasion, for example during intermedium 2, for broadcasts of Ö1Kunstradio etc., a number of the artists involved or any of them individually act as users of the online installation and 'render' from it new performative/installative, on-site and/or on-air versions. These can in turn be monitored on the Internet, where they are also documented. A version compiled jointly by the artists for the medium of audio CD provides a further interface to the project.

..devolve into II.. belongs to an artistic tradition in which the medium of radio, itself under the pressure of a convergence with new transmission, recording and surveillance technologies, is regarded as an exemplary context for a critical analysis of the drastic impact of digitisation on processes of cultural communication/production/distribution.

ORF Ö1Kunstradio/Western Front Vancouver/intermedium 2 2002