Nostalgia, Art, and Culture

i just read glenn's resonses to a few of my last posts... and i felt like following up those comments with another post.
watch out.. it's a FLURRY OF BACK TO BACK POSTING!!!!
ok. on with the meat of the post:

i agree that it is kind of a fad, and visually i think that the generation that is in the mainstream right now (in art, fasion, etc) is the kids of the 80s.. so yeah, a lot of the 80s and early 90s style is definately coming back. i think that this style preference combined with the tendancy of new art ot be counter culture creates the visuals that we see. i am in no way waying that his style is bad... i actually quite enjoy the pixelated look of old comupter graphics and ASCII images... (but maybe that's just my age showing)
to me, besides being a bit nostaligic it also has a more minimalist effect for me. why make big elaborate webpages (for example) when you can just bust out a few words and pixels and have an entertaining site, and the minimal one will most likely be easier to navigate. but, i am not saing that all flash sites are bad... just that sometimes it's just not needed..
this topic leads to another idea, with next generation, or even just kids who are in elementary or junion-high school feel nostalgic and have a liking towards 3d rendered inages and illustrator styles? One day kids will be talking about how xbox360 and playstation 3 are "old school" just as you can see t-shirts today with the original nintendo controller printed on it with the text "know your roots". but those two will never be exactly the same, because the original nintendo was the first major (yeah, i know atari came first) home system which started this whole crazy industry rolling...
this idea of nostalgia and the cyclical nature of fasion is totally prevalent in art as it is with all history. just as fasion and mass media icons are a part of our culture so too is art, and it is not impervious to the trappings of culture.

i had a friend that had a TI-81or82... can't remember.

Same Great Content Now Without the Paper!

The themes found in Net.Art are not new ones... they are the same themes found in pretty much every new movement of art. one thing i found interesting was presented in this article. it describes the history of one of the first major art magazines. not so much a magazine to talk about art, even though it did at times, but as a magazine as art. much like today we find websites designed not as informational sources but as works of art themselves. the magazine discussed is FILE, which began with the cover being a parody of LIFE magazine. This was an attempt to be subversive to the medium of magazine and its culture as well as to mass media. Which as we have seen is parallel to what the net.artists are attempting to do with wither various webpages. (in general, compared to file the sites i've shown have been more directly subversive to their medium) we find ourselves in a maze of random pictures and digital pages that mimic the internet as a whole. or we find ourselves interacting with blocks of color only to realize that there is no more meaning coming out of this peice than we are putting into it.
FILE magazine focused more on articles and images that were comical and satyrical reflecting the media and advertising. The first issue focused on an article about Mr. Peanut, with him on the cover. It found itself in the strange inbetween of subverting the media culture while also being a part of it, which is true also for the net.art movement. They both simultaneously reject the medium and almost seem to protest it at times while at the same time use it and revel in its power.
Over the years FILE began to coinside with the New Wave movment in art and music, and became more of a magazine for that subculture.

deconstructive contstructions

today i would like to show you wwwwwwwww.jodi.org (yes, the w's are necissary...)
feel free to go check it out and lets see what you think.
it will most likely be something like:
"oh goodie. another site with uninteligable text and random links to bizarre pictures with links to more randomness... "
but i assure you there is more to the site than what you see. if you would like a big hint (the answer to this "puzzle") then read up on the history of the jodi team. if you just want the answer, the trick is in the first sentence of the second paragraph.
this site is a bit more clever in its statement.
if you go to just www.jodi.org you get a different site, also made by jodi.

one thing that i am begining to notice in most of the web-based art sites is the affinity for "low tech"... the use of pixelated images, and basic html commands. i am sure that there are sites out there that do not fit this model, but i have not found them yet.. there seems to be a deconstructive vein running through the web art world. which isn't suprising, as this same deconstructive mindset is also found in a lot of contemporary art. there seems to be an effort to take what we have come to expect from computers (making life more efficent, cleaner, and easier to understand. as well as giving us access to vast amounts of instand information) and turning it on its head, stripping the words and pictures of their meaning and presenting them in nonsensical manner. much like many art movements before, dada for example (but really most avante guarde art movements can fit this description), there is a rejection and commentary of contemporary culture. this culture happens to be web culture.

what might the future hold instore for us?

So, in response to the comment on my last blog post ( i was just going to simply add a comment after his, but i decided that i probaby had more to say to explain, and hey, this is MY blog.. i get to write the big entries. ;)...

Yes, that is one of the beauties of web art, that is it is accessable by the masses, which is showcased in Andy Deck's sites where community involvement is not only encouraged it is used to create the peices. But the museum dillema arises not so much for the sake of the art itself and how it can be presented, but how the art will be presented in the future... basically the problem is: what is a museum going to do with this type of art?
or will museums (the big building full of stuff) become places of "old" art as the new style of web galleries and networks grows?
The artport at Whitney is an impressive blend of the two, a website run by the museum to be a portal to art on the web. the only problem with this is what happens when the artist's domain host goes down, or they stop paying for the storage space.. then the links are broken and there is no art. i guess the museum could purchase or acquire these peices and store them on servers of their own, but then they would need to pay to upkeep the servers...
(which is not that differenet than paying to maintain and restore masterpeices which is what museums have been doing for years and years... but they do not resore everything.. so, then they have to decide what is worth restoring and what is not.. and the same is true for web art basically...)
they could keep a CD catalog or maybe store sites in flash drives, so someone could come to the museum and load up a certain piece. so, the museum could become a digital library of websites long since taken offline?

I hid a little man.

speaking of the artport...
artcontext.net is a site created by Andy Deck. He is an Internet artist who well known and even has been commisioned by the Whitney Museum in New York for their artport site. His art focuses on interactivity, community, and politics, and is indeed created in a context; the context of the U.S. Many of his works are commentary on the current issues of the U.S. and his opinions are made very clear. He does stay away from being too preachy and instead presents his opinions in a more humorous context, with silly phrases and the use of icons and familiar computer text boxes and install windows.
One of his pieces that i enjoyed was the glyphiti project. It involves simple black and white pixel art that is gridded into square sections. the user can click on a section, which is then displayed enlarged and can be edited by the viewer. there is some pretty impressive "graphiti" on this site. I made a small addition, as i didn't want to disturb other's additions, and the project is very full. My addition can be seen in large right here: ------canyoufindhim?------>
there is also an inverted version of him somewhere else on the image.
and while you are looking, go ahead and add your own touch to the site. that's what it is there for.
that is one thing that i really like about his projects, they are very on topic with current events (usually) but are also very playful and interactive.

A Portal to Art

Continuing the discussion about how to show new media art...
the Whitney Museum (New York) has a section of their website, called the artport, set up as a 'virtual museum' of internet based art. the site is a grat resource and example of net.art being accepted and displayed in a museum context (even though the setting is not in a building). the site is very easy to navagate, and has the sections that one would expect from a webpage of a museum. there is an exhibitions page, which lets you browse previous online exhibitions of net.art. there is a resources page which is very comprehensive and contains links to organizations, project sites, festival listings, and written material about net.art and related subjects. the site has regular "shows" of web art, and even commissions artists to create original work to be displayed on the main page of the site. this is a great site that gives all the compresensive materials and history that a regular museum would, but is translated appropriately into web form.
even though the museum is based in New York, and the museum is titled the Whitney museum of American Art, the artport does not discriminate by local. There are works linked to made by people from around the world, which is fitting seeing that the internet really is an international concept.

super GOOD!

For my first 'case study' (aka showcase of a net.art site...) i present to you superbad.com. This was my first exposure to a true peice of web art. I was in junior high when i first saw this, and at the time i had no idea about the concepts of net.art was, all i knew is that this new type of webpage i had sumbled upon was very unique in its experience, and that i loved it. superbad is usually one of the first sites i point people to when the topic of strange websites comes up.
One of the most noticable aspects of the site (and one that makes it quite dynamic) is that the front page changes periodically (the front page as i saw it today when i visited the site can be seen to the right). The rest of the pages that make up the site do not change, but the order that you experience them is sort of random, based on blindly clicking on unlablel links within pages, that then direct you to new pages with more strange links.
Each page is a mini exercise in design. Which should come as no suprise, since the maker of the site, Ben Benjamin, is a graphic artist by trade.
Things that i enjoy about the site, and keep me coming back, are that it is an interesting visual adventure, it is comically absurd, and it has a very strong sense of design (however disjointed that design is...). The adventure begins with the ever changing front page, and every path through the links that you choose is different. It is like a maze in that aspect, but there really is no way out, only a way in and the means to navagate around. The sense of humor comes out in the references to pop culture, and bizzare stories, usually about very mundane or grim events but with some odd twist.
On the Whitney Museum's 'Artport' there is a collection of some net.art sites, as a sort of exhibition.. and superbad is one of them. On that site they describe Benjamin's seemingly random maze of mini sites as a reflection of the web as a whole. Whether this was intended by Benjamin to begin with or not, it is intrinsically true, probably just due to the fact that it is on the web itself. But, never the less the meaning has been placed on it, and there it will stand.
Whether you choose to look at the superbad as a reflection of the internet or not, it's still a strange and fun experience.

Web vs Gallery: A Battle for the Future!

I was just reading an article about currating new media art. In the article they are mostly refering to showing new media art in museums and galleries. This is an issue becuase the art is not really made with the intent of being displayed in a given room or wall. They talk about how maybe new media art needs to be in a different context, like clubs, community centers, or even on the streets.
This concept of moving art out of the galleries isn't a new one, most new movements in art involve a rejection of the formal trappings of art and art culture... but this was a discussion between the people who run the galleries and museum currators about how they should approach showing new media art in the future.
you may be asking yourself, what this has to do with web-based art (or maybe you're not.) but it really does. web based art is a sub-genre of new media art, the web is a new medium for art. and web-based art can possibly be one of the more dificult forms to show in a gallery or museum, unless the museum has a computer on display for people to use to look at the art. And even so, should the webpages and programs be displayed by projector on a large screen, or should they be left on the computer screen where they were origionally intended to be seen?
The worst case scenario would be that years later, museums still have no web art displays, and a whole movement in art is lost to the ages. But i doubt that would happen. Maybe with the coming of the electronic age and the growth of the internet museums will become old news, and online galleries will become more prevelant.
But even today it is a mixed message. Artists are often expected to have website portfolios, but those are not equivelant to being shown in a gallery. Traditional artists get credibility from showing in galleries, as well as giving people the experience of their paintings or photographs or sculptures in person. the web site only acts as a reference.
web based art does not have this option. there is only the web version, and since there is nothing to be shown in a gallery it seems that in the academic world, web art is not taken as seriously.

Setting the stage....

welcome to my blog.
i am going to be discussing web based art (also known as Internet Art, Web Art, Net Art, Net.Art, etc...) and things relevant to that topic here. This blog will be in progress for the next few weeks, and you should expect (at least) twenty posts by the end..
so hopefully someone will find this interesting, or if the text isn't interesting, at least come back and click the links.
over the course of this blog i hope to showcase some web based art sites, discuss topics that are relavent to creative web development as well as how internet art plays into the whole art scene through history and in relation to other contemporary art movements.

but first, an explaination... "web based art"...

when i refer to web based art here i am not refering to animations used for ads, or icons on a web page, or web pages that jsut show art. what i mean is that the webpage is turned into an art peice. this can be thought of the same way as a video or photograph. the web is just another medium which can be used to create art.
if this page were a discussion of video based art, i would not be discussing videos of sculptures or paintings, and i would not be discussing an advertisement. the same is true here with web art. hopefully that clears up some stuff. feel free to respond with questions or comments, especially if you need some clarification...
but of course, in the world of mass media and contemporary art the lines between "art" and "advertising" are constantly blurring, so it may be hard to avoid reflecting on some advertising, but if that does happen. it will be only a very select few, and it will have to stand up as a peice of art just as every other web art peice will.
well, hopefully that is a decent introduction to this topic, and hopefully my intentions are clear.