is this goodbye?

well, this is my last mandatory post. i have had a good time working on this project. at times i did feel rushed, but that is what happens when you have deadlines. i imagine that i will not be adding much more new content to this blog after this, even though i do enjoy the subject. I hope that i have given you all a good tour of web based art, and maybe raised some questions (questions are allways good). at the very least i have provided a decent list of links (if i do say so myself) for the casual user to use to find entertaining sites and cool art projects.
i know that i learned a lot about a subject that i never had a huge exposure to, and what exposure i did have i didn't realize it until recently that it was in fact web art. i found some cool and inspiring projects, and hopefully i can put that inspiration to use in the future. and hopefully anyone who reads these blogs will also be inspired.
and who knows maybe this blog will be revived in the future.
feel free to comment on anything i've said, i'll still get notifications of comments.
thank you for reading.

beautiful art

i saw something interesting in one of my classes the other day. my teacher, Craig Hickman showed us a program that he had made in Director called Beautiful Dorena. it was basically a simple photoshop/paint/kid pix(he actually made kid pix)/etc kind of program. it is available for download on his website. this may not seem like it would qualify as a peice of art. but it is a product, created by a person, and not only that but it also has a sotry behind it. the program includes sound effects that are time based (as well as randomized) to create the sense of a person being in this fictional town that is described in the "about" of the program. In the about it is described as being created by a group of kids after school, and the name comes from one of the fictional students at the school.
also, when the user is using the various tools there are sound effects that are made while the tool is going. some of the tools also change over time, like the gravity brush for example that drips off the screen the longer the button is held down.
the fact thathte program creates an imaginary space, and has interactive and reactive effects puts it in the same category as any other new media peice of art. it is quite similar to the effect that mark napier creates with his programs.
although this is technically not "web based" art (but it is downloaded on the web) i still feel that it is a good example of the types of projects that can be created. this could have easily been mae for the web in flash and placed on a web site.

interact with it

well, i guess i got off on a bit of a tangent there because i forgot to mention the part of the post that i was leading into... but i think my tangent made an even better lead in...
i found examples of two internet art projects that are getting out of the box, and onto the street. literally. these two public works use both user interation in person and on the internet. the first is an electronic billbard that displays websites that people can enter into the webpage associated with the billboard. the second uses viewing telescopes to look around a city from street level and as the viewer looks around the coorinates are sent to a program that then plays back various sounds depending on the location that hte viewer is looking at, people online can send the project an email that will then be translated into voice and then played with a certain coorinate creating a new soundscape for the othewise banal city.
these are great examples of new technology allowing the concepts of the internet to enter the realm of the "real world".

(also, as an aside.. i realized that the maker of electroplankton, Toshi Iwai, was an interactive media artist before he got into game design. which explains the art project presentation of the "game".)


in the coming years i am sure that the new technologies (new screens, portable devices, wireless capabilities) presented will alllow the internet and interactive media to have a larger presence in our lives. i think that (since we are on the subject of games) the new generation of gaming consoles may allow artists a new medium, since most come with internet access. the line between artist and game designer may begin to blur. (there is already a large argument for games as art... but that is another story for another day)

touch it...

again on the topic of displaying internet art...
i had been thinking about this topic a bit lately. and ther eare ways of putting computers into intallations or presented at galleries that will work. but you still have to maintain each computer. I thought that a projector or large screen with a mouse for the user to interact with would be a good idea. (then later today i saw a picture of that technique being used). then i thought that instead of using the mouse to interact with the medium you could use a touch screen instead. bringing the senory impact of touching the surface and altering the project. this then leads me to the idea of other more involved interface devices for interacting with internet art, and then makes me think that we are getting into the realm of gaming devices. there is a device that i saw being made by a third party for the next generation gaming consoles that is meant not only to allow the user more free form movement (the thing is essentially a ball on some mechanical arms, where the user moves the ball around) but the ball also gives feedback. so a person pulling an arrow back to shoot it, they can feel the tension. this sort of device could give viewers of internet art the tactile feelings that they may be missing compared to traditional art.
speaking of gaming and interactive art and touch screens, this reminds me of a game that i saw that is for the nintendo DS, electroplankton. it is a "game" in the looses sense, being that there is no end or winning, but there is also no losing. the player uses the touch screen to interact with little cartoon microbes and screen material to alter the music that is playing. they can create patterns of movement and repetitive rhythms. this is some of the same content and subject matter that many web artists are dealing with only presented in a more polished "cutesy" look.

artists vs corporation, in a battle for the net

speaking of commodity...
a lot of contemporary artist are becoming mini coporations or factories creatiting a product, it may be an art product, but it is still a product that is created and then sold. This is just one way that artists are interacting and reacting to corporations and the growing powers of capitalism. Some are less embracing of the corporate model.
an a swedish artist collective known as etoy takes such an aporach to their art, even refering to themselves as "artivists" (a combination of artist and activist) in their rejection of comericalism. they have a webpage at etoy.com their webpage is set up as a corporate site even offering job listings and such as a sort of mock-buisness.
when the company eToys got a complaint about etoy's site they wanted to have their rights to the domain name (which they had before eToys even started) revoked. etoy protested their claim, as well as many other online activists, even staging a online stand-in on the eToys site to clog traffic for potential shoppers. a movement was created with a large following. almost turning into ome sort of internet stunt.
which is where the irony, and the connection to my subject comes in. this is a group that is constantly clashing with corpotations in their art topics and now they are actually clashing with a corporation on the web. creating a comotion that some dubbed connected to their art projects.
so, i guess this raises the question: if an artist collective protests on the net is it net art?

Buying things that don't exist...

the topic of what to do with internet art is one that is very important to this blog. and there are many ways of dealing with that problem. today i have found a new way. Mark Napier (examples of his internet works can be seen here: potatoland.org) has sold 3 shares of his peice Waiting Room for $1,000 each. This is not the first peice of art that Napier has sold, but it is one of the first interenet peices to be made into a commodity and sold. what the buyer gets is a certificate of authentication and a CD-ROM with a program to install. the viewer installs the cd and is then promted to interact with the inages on the screen. with the interactions the abstract shapes change. but it doesnt stop there. if there are other people who are also logged they too will interact with the same image. it is described as a "visual chat room".
the fact that he is able to sell interenet art, especially in the post-dotcom boom era, is a good sign that there is more to internet art than a flash on a screen.
but the fact that these works may not last long does not necissarly make them not worth while. many works are created with more traditional materials, or performances, that are meant to be experienced at the time and then they are done.
one buyer was quoted saying:
"A lot of art is ephemeral. I'm willing to accept that it won't last forever. If it does, and people are willing to rewrite the code, I'll go with that. And if not, we enjoyed it while it was here."

i have a gif(t) for you.

so far most of the projects that i have showcased have been older projects fro mthe late 90s. but here is an example of interenet culture and the influences and trappings of such a medium being tanslated into "real" life...
there is a show going on right now in san francisco that is all about GIFs. it is taking place at the Rx Gallery from may 3 to june 9th.
the show consists of video, prints, sculpture, etc that are based on or influenced by GIFs. (if you don't know GIF is a picture file format. and one of it's characteristics is that it allows animation.)
there is also a myspace page dedicated to the show (warning: it takes a while to load because so many people have posted images on the page and there is a lot of animation...)
the GIFs shown vary quite a lot in style and presentation. ranging from "crude" pixel oriented works to more polished and smooth animations. some are abstract and some are representational.
i could not find a picture of the sculptures that are shown at the gallery but i am curious to see how they are influenced and relate to GIFs...
this show relates back to my discussion about how gallery and museum owners are dealing with this new media art. here they are actually doing it. these are not as interactive as websites, so the issue of dealing with web interface and such is not present. i am assuming that there are projections of the GIFs on the walls, and the more traditional mediums are presented as you would expect.
i found this show through rhizome.org's spotlight right on their front page. rhizome.org is a site dedicated to new media art, which encompases any art that "uses technology in a significant way" so, althought it is not specifically web based art, it is related. because GIFs, as you know, are around because of the net and are most prevelant on the net.

the re-remix!

(continuing the discussion...)
in my opinion, authorship cannot truely be lost. but instead the act of remixing will create a mostly hidden quasi-geaneology of this collection of works. peices of works can be traced from one work ot another, each peice (of collages, for the most part paintings, sculptures are not included in this discussion, escept those that quote or reference other works...) being the child or parent to another work. this geneology analogy is not completely precise, as the sampling of other's works does not need a mother and father. collaging can be an asexual process up to a multisexual process, either using just one peices from another's work, or taking parts from many peices to create a new one.
this topic that i seemed to have stumbled upon really isn't even a new one for me. for a previous project for another class (unfortunately i do not have any samples of the work on hand.) my group and i created a collage family tree. each of us, finding 5 source images, then creating a collage (with photoshop) per person with our seperate 5 images. then two of us would then give each of our five images to a third person (who would then have 10 original images) then that person would use 5 of those images to create a new collage. this new "child" collage could then be "bred" with a new collage (created with a seperate 5 images) and the process would continue, and lineages could be traced, and the "phenotype" of the collage children can be seen as the peices of the seperate images used in the collage itself. and the "genotype" of the collage would be the list of 5 files (selected from the combined 10 of the partent collages).
this project was both fun, and also apparently was quite relevant to the topic of this blog. :)

this is the remix!

here are some collages. feel free to view them. there is even an essay commenting on them. but before you go and check them out, may you would enjoy some light reading?... (now, on with the show!)
these collages are not your average cut paper collages... or even the modern collages created with photoshop. these are web collages
(just kidding... get it; remix?!)

the idea of the act of mixing and remixing, using samples to create new works that both reference old works and create new ones is discussed in the essay about the hybrids at 0100101110101101.org. In the article Hyland states, "Eventually recombining and remixing is likely to become so prevalent that it will be all but impossible to even identify the original source of samples, making questions about authorship and origins largely irrelevant..."
remixes are very popular, not only in the visual arts, but maybe even more so in music. remixing has become an art in itself, and sampling is still just as prevelant as it was when it began to be used. But in music now, samplers have to pay royalties to use parts of other's work. this makes getting exactly the sample you want a much more trying task, especially if the original artist is asking a lot of money for the rights.
the same may be true in the visual arts, but it is easier to get around the legal issues, especially digital images. with the aid of the internet finding images to use is as easy as a click of a button (with sites like google images) then one can use a picture and as long as it is altered enough to not be clearly recognised, the copier will most likely get away with it (unless the original artist studies the peice closely).
the idea that remixes will make ideas like authorship and original sources obsolete seems pretty far fetched to me. no matter how obscure the sample may be, there is someone out there that knows. even if the source is hidded to the general audience.

collages for the new millenium

here are some collages. feel free to view them. there is even an essay commenting on them. but before you go and check them out, may you would enjoy some light reading?... (now, on with the show!)
these collages are not your average cut paper collages... or even the modern collages created with photoshop. these are web collages. they consist of parts of webpages and images that ahave been reorganized and redisplayed, usually creating works that are unrecognisable from thier originator sites. the presentation of the materials reminds me of superbad. but there is less of a feeling of connectivity through out the peices... because each is meant to be a seperate work, where superbad is one work on its own.
these works play into the deconstructive and sometimes subversive nature that is very apparent in web art, especially in the earlier years, which is when these were created. sometime in the late 90s. and the idea of the collage is very appropriate for this. When collages were fist presented as art in the early 1900s they were very much as commentary on pop culture and a subversion of the current painting status quo. this idea can be seen again in these new technologically inclined collages. they steal from popular websites and mix parts together to create a commentary on the culture of this then new medium of the internet.

more project examples

recently i was browsing this site it has a collection of net.art projects. i wanted to seek out works that were not focused on being deconstructive and more "primitive" as far as computer design... most are java based works, but some are executable programs that are available for downloading. althought these works are not specifically "web based" they do have a lot in common in execution, although based in a file to be downloaded instead of an applet that loads on a webpage. These works are less concerned with the topic of the internet and more with the functionality of computers in general. The works utilize the capabilites that are inherent in the programming languages (for example java) to create various patterns that are partially controlled by the viewer. this is one thing that these executable files have in common with the website projects. the medium of the computer and internet encourages interactivity. so this commonality is not suprising.
The projects on the site are mostly abstract "drawings" that are created with the execution of the program with the interation of the viewer. they are visually similar to what can be seen on a screen saver.
one is an interactive map that, when three countries are selected, lists the qualities that link that axis. most of the qualities are simply basic facts, but some are fairly comical.
All of these works use a more advanced design model than the previous projects that i have showcased. i am glad to have found some examples that do not fit my previous description, and that broaden the example base for my definition of web based art.

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?