During March on -empyre-, we'll focus on the work of two artists with strong involvement in interactive video for the Web: Barbara Lattanzi and Nicolas Clauss. In their work, the experience of watching video is significantly altered. Not simply that the video itself is altered, but that the experience of watching it is altered. The viewer becomes also an interactor or annotator or works with downloadable software to alter the video, etc. Barbara and Nicolas will discuss their own work and also point out other interactive video work of interest. Toward our being able to get a sense of the current state of interactive video for the Web and, possibly, where it's going. BARBARA LATTANZI http://wildernesspuppets.net Barbara Lattanzi is a media artist whose current projects involve the construction of software for video improvisation as well as other works of interactive media. Her work has been presented at such venues as the 2003 Ann Arbor Film Festival, the 2002 European Media Art Festival, and Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in New York. Her experimental software, "C-SPAN Karaoke", received an "Honorary Mention" in 2005 at Transmediale, the Berlin-based international media art festival. Her interactive media works have been exhibited at the 2003 Version>03 Digital Arts Convergence - Chicago, the 9th New York Digital Salon, Electronics Alive II Invitational, the 4th Seoul Net and Film Festival, and Turbulence. In 2005 she contributed a gatepage to the Artport website of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The production of her multimedia applets and software has been stimulated in part by the open structures of net-based cooperative venues such as Moscow on-line software art archive, "Runme.org" and Rhizome "Artbase", where her work is included. An essay about Lattanzi's software in relation to 1970s experimental film appears in Millenium Film Journal Nos.39/40. She currently teaches at Smith College in Massachusetts. NICOLAS CLAUSS http://www.flyingpuppet.com Flyingpuppet.com is the work in progress of Nicolas Clauss, a Paris based painter who stopped "traditional" painting to use the Internet as a canvas. Nicolas's site is a place of experimentation offering pieces where interactivity and play are essential. Much of Nicolas's work is done in collaboration with a range of artists including Jean-Jacques Birgé, François Baxas, Frédéric Durieu, Thomas Le Saulnier, Antoine Schmitt, Bernard Vitet, Denis Colin, Patricia Dallio, Hervé Zenouda, and Stéphane Copin. ============================== -empyre- is an arena for the discussion of media arts practice, and regularly invites practicioners, curators and theorists in the media arts field to discuss specific projects, publications, and issues. Subscribe to -empyre- at: http://www.subtle.net/empyre/