Programmers used to be nerds - now they're cool. Uebergeek wanted to be a rock star - but couldn't play an instrument. Now it doesn't matter: Uebergeek can program...

No longer is Uebergeek hopelessly lost in the world of pop culture: pop culture has gone geeky - from the clerical performances of laptop techno to feature films you can view without leaving the comfort of your desk.

The tools of work have become the tools of leisure - and so leisure has become virtually indiscernible from work. Coffeehouse culture is lattes and laptops. And at the center of this new culture is the search engine; it's not just the TV Guide of the internet anymore - it's the MTV. Except that MTV is now RealityTV. Well anyway....

Uebergeek is The Live Internet VJ for the Geek Age - determined to transform the tools of technical toil into contraptions of coolness, thus providing a new, liberated, dare we say, "conceptually wireless" vision of pop culture. Armed with air mouse, mobile keyboard and swanky clothes, Uebergeek (Amy Alexander) performs a search engine. She inputs a search term intto her custom search engine VJ software, and search engine results interactively animate in psychedelic colors and patterns ranging from Fischinger to Pong. Slightly hyperactive Uebergeek drives the visuals by banging away on a keyboard taped to her body and conducts the swirling text with her trusty remote control. (A semi-retired Mattel Power Glove makes an occasional appearance as well.) And the music's got a good beat you can dance to. Aestheticization of data taken to the ridiculous extreme, but also data visualization in reverse; the "literary voices" of internet text content and culture are brought center stage rather than aggregating them into abstraction. Search for "love" and find out where you can download the appropriate utilities. Search for "peace" and choose from the neatly-packaged offerings of a variety of institutions. But search on "I've had problems with Prozac" and a different voice of net culture starts to emerge. Now you have some wicked raw footage, let the eye candy begin....

Coming soon - discussion from a visual music/performative/algorithmic perspective. How do the algorithms interact in ways that are appropriate to VJ or visual instrument performance? In other words, why does Uebergeek prefer to perform with a self-coded, somewhat unpredictable VJ tool?