Reynolds 9-28-10

I looked at Hyper-X Blog art exhibition, an on-line gallery founded in 1995. I entered Blog Art and clicked on Triptych. TV. http://triptych.tv/

It’s a very frenetic collage of flashing images and graphics, bits and pieces of Andy Wharhol, TV icons such as Mr. T, Telletubbies, and lots of skulls and assorted voices. The blaring sounds paired with the pictures reminded me of a mixture of very obnoxious video game noises. I thought about the name Triptych.TV. I knew the word triptych meant three and this net art included all of the following: “A set of three associated artistic, literary, or musical works intended to be appreciated together.” I thought the art was very hypnotic and chaotic. After downloading, I had to keep reminding myself to breathe.

http://www.altx.com/hyperx/paths.htm In comparison, Randon Paths by Jody Zellen was on the opposite end of the spectrum of Triptych.TV. It was quite simplicity and I liked how she arranged the photographs and text of her “Roman Holiday.” It’s interactive, you click on the text and the art changes. Or, when you drag the mouse over her sheet of photographs the pictures switch.

http://www.loshadka.org/wp/Loshadka’s Blog had an interesting video dated August 2010. Set to game show type music, I watched a pony chasing and playing with a ball. No words were needed. He had a lot of movement in his net art.

http://www.screenfull.net/stadium/ I opened Screenful to find a black screen and small question mark in the center. It was as crazy and repetitious as Triptych.TV. It screamed of chaos, mayhem, and turmoil. Scrolling down you find a skeleton face against rippling vertical colors, frantic music, and someone yelling obscenities in the background. Behind the skeleton it looked like a Mickey Mouse mosaic. I clicked #screen press and noticed that people could blog their responses.

http://404.jodi.org/ I recognized the net art on Blogroll as it was tied to the JODI website, where the artist’s used the computer as a tool to create art as well as the medium to show it within the network. Click on “sign out” and it pulls up 405 against a yellow background, click on 405 and rows of numbers pop up.

ThruYou takes clips of musicians the “author” relates to and reintroduces them as a mix of “unrelated YouTube video clips.” ThruYou is a collage of both video and music. I have always been attracted to remixes of people talking and or music combined to create a new piece of ‘art.’ As you let this site play it becomes even more eclectic and mesmerizing. I especially like ‘02. This is What It Became’ because of its’ Reggie feel.

Liz Filardi’s project called ‘Facetbook’ caught my eye immediately because of the similarity to the word ‘Facebook.’ I thought that it was intriguing that Professor Amerika would ask us to visit this already familiar site. I was taken back and even more eager to find out what Facetbook was about. Her quote “I’m Not Stalking You; I’m Socializing” was a very interesting stance to take on the current issues of Facebook ‘stalking.’ In general, I have a dual thoughts about Facebook, but regardless of my own viewpoints on ‘stalking,’ I liked that she had a viewpoint I have never heard of or come across.

Reynolds 9-21-10

Anne-Marie Schleiner intentionally wrote an unconventional article, Fluidity's and Oppositions Among Curators. . . it caught me a bit off guard. First, like Digital Art in most cases, the format itself was different, the placement of text and side conversations were free style and unlike most academic articles. Initially, her message was somewhat of a challenge to decode, an example are her descriptions of X, Y, and Z artists, because I didn’t realize she was being a bit humorous with her definitions. Sifting through her paper I found that her main ideas were about how we need to redefine net artists, net curators, and net audiences. She feels that every, “ website owner is a curator and cultural critic, artist, creating chains of meaning through associations, comparisons, and juxtapositions, parts or whole can in turn serve as fodder for another website gallery.” The Internet is contextual and users or website owners are involved with an ongoing process of creating and recontextualizing or changing of the digital material. Schleiner states, “I am what I link to.” The link or linking changes the contexts. I thought her oppositions of past artists and future artists, and past curators and future filter feeders were comical but also true.

Websites:

Turbulence is an active website that has been promoting, commissioning, exhibiting, and archiving "networked art forms" since 1996 to the present. It also offers a research blog called Networked Performance which concentrates on net-art and it's future. In addition, it includes networked, an interactive site where people share ideas and dialogue in a "networked environment" with book authors.

Net_Condition is an archived exhibition at the Center of Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. The exhibition was referred to as a multi-local networked event because it took place simultaneously in Karlsruhe, Germany, Graz, Austria, Tokyo, Japan and Barcelona, Spain. Webcams were used in the “net lounge.” Net_condition is "about the artist's look at the way society and technology interact with each other, are each other's "condition.

I selected and viewed two of the following net-artists, John Hudak and Jodi Zellen.

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/Hudak/index.html

On turbulence, I found Artifact, by John Hudak ('97). He used actual "artifactual sounds and images collected from the web." To open, you click on an alternating red, yellow and green rectangle with artifact scribbled in black. It opens to entirely black background with a small rectangle in the center. Within the rectangle, 12 small squares flashed and alternate from black and white to the beat of a pulsating Internet sound. When you click on each tiny square it pulls up a different picture and the sound changes. Some of the pictures were in color, for example one brown eye that looks right and left. The sounds seemed too match the movement of the pictures. I thought the sounds and images he chose were clever and interesting.

http://www.ghostcity.com

In Net_Condition, I clicked on Ghost City, by Jody Zellen ('97).

This piece also has a black background and a large square in the center. Within the square are 20 smaller squares, grid like, each flashing with changing urban images (street signs, wires, cars, sidewalks). Viewers must navigate either by clicking on random squares (links), or by following the linear narrative on each page. Each space is made up of images and texts “clipped” from different media sources. It’s a cityscape in a moving collage. The “Random chaos of the city” is beautifully captured in her complicated network of images.

Both of these net-art pieces were from 1997. Hudak’s work Artifact was fun, playful and more simplistic than Zellen’s Ghost City. Ghost city was quite a complex and in depth project. She was making a social statement about chaotic city life. It was a “representation of the city by the mass media...fragments, a memory, a ghost of reality.” Both sites allowed the viewer to interact with the graphics.

Reynolds-9-14

BLOG- History and Theory of Digital Art

      After the second time I read Natalie Bookchin & Alexei Shulgin’s article “Introduction to net.art (1994-1999)” I finally realized that it was not serious technical paper, it was a satyrical parody and social commentary on net art.  The authors wrote a net art “manifesto,” that is, a public declaration of the principles and intentions of net art, tenets and techniques, followed by an almost chronological history of net art, as if the field was old and well established rather than a new field within the world of art.     

     I explored their work on the net and found out that eventually these written words of the “manifesto” were inscribed onto stone tablets by artists Blank & Jeron and together with Bookchin and Shulgin were presented in an exhibition, “Introduction to net.art (1994-1999).”  The symbolic ancient like stone tablets and text committed to stone, are the very opposite of Internet art’s youth, adaptability, and its open ended possibilities.  I read a review by an author who felt that this satyrical exhibition, “was a contradiction of trying to exhibit net art while demonstrating the necessary sensitivity to its values.”

       I was not familiar with the site Adaweb so I went on- line and found that from 1995 -1998 it was an online-art site or gallery on the Internet. Originally, “Adaweb was established in 1995 with the goal of  “providing contemporary artists (visual artists, as well as composers, movie directors, architects, choreographers, etc), a station from which they can engage in a dialogue with users of the internet. The site stopped producing new content in March 1998.”  The Digital Arts Study collection, at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN now houses the complete archives of this visionary website.

      An artist that I liked whose work was part of the initial Adaweb art site was Darcy Steinke and her 1998 work Blindspot.  She is an author and educator whose first web project was commissioned by Adaweb. It was a fictional short story, “ written specifically for the nonlinear environment of the Internet.”  Her story “was linked to nineteen shorter texts, designed with structures called frames that subdivide a single web page into smaller sections. This exhibition reveals how traditional distinctions between disciplines- art, literature, design are blurred by the new medium of the web.”adaweb.walkerart.org/project/blindspot 

I was interested in Steinke’s art, a black and white picture of what looks to be the vantage point of a person looking through the peep hole in a door, to an exterior stairwell, very eerie, mysterious and voyeuristic. The text was not readable but I was intrigued enough to want to read the short story and I did visit the other links.

    Digital Studies: Being in Cyberspace is an early website that immediately hypnotizes one with an alternating and flashing black, peach and blue background and two words of text.  The flashing stops when you click on either word, digital/studies. When the site is open, though it reads like a table of contents, nothing fancy or outrageous like of todays net art sites. It is a site that is divided into three parts; net.theory, net.art, and includes the participants bios and emails. This site is a compilation of artists and net related technical writing regarding definitions and the future of digital arts.  Some of the net art sites are no longer available.

     The final site I visited was Beyond Interface which opens with a quote I liked by Mark C. Taylor, “Along the endless boundary of the interface, nothing is hiding.”  The site is black and white with a picture of what looks to be a glass filled with either twisted roots or a network of nerves, and computer generated spurts of budding growth on top.  Below, is a list of all artists included on the website circa 1998 (including Professor Amerika’s grammatron!).

     One of the sites that I viewed was jodi.org.  It was created by two Dutch artists, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans.  For their time, it was very innovative art because they used the computer as a tool to create art as well as the medium to show it within the network. Heemskerk stated, “we explore the computer from inside, and mirror this on the net.” They used computer screen imagery with references to computer viruses, crashes and error messages. In a historical context, “Their art brought visual excitement to a webpage when low modem speeds made it impractical to post large or moving images amid a site's textual content.”

     On their jodi.com Walker Art website, the screen is black aside from their names,  title, and URL.  The viewer can click on four different squares and each one pulls up different computer patterns. For example, the first square is entitled “Transfer Interrupted” and it has a black background with green computer workings.  I read that Internet art at that time was largely related to the dot-com mania.

Reynolds 9-7

For this week’s blog the three links I’ve focused on are ‘DISTANCE,’ ‘Redridinghood,’ and ‘DAKOTA.’ In my opinion the conceptual frameworks (context/format) for these stories share similar qualities but evoke different feelings and thoughts. The net artists blur the distinction between autobiography and fiction through the very medium they are using. The electronic environment is basically impersonal because interpersonal relationships are separated by a screen and cyberspace. Even when totally truthful on line, actual identity is blurred because “technology is a veil,” we are just, “pixels on the screen.” 

In Donna Leischman’s cartoon like and remixed redridinghood narrative, she used the well known children’s fairy tale Little Red Ridinghood as a conceptual framework because of its familiarity to most people. It’s an instantly recognizable, relatable, and symbolic story of a young girl who is confronted by the big bad wolf, which sounds like some contemporary relationships today.  In other words, a seemingly naive girl is confronted by a seasoned womanizer.  The viewer interacts with the narrative by pointing and clicking, slowly moving the two characters through the story.   Their faces were flat and their expressions never appeared very happy.  Even though one already knows the story you still feel the apprehension, anxiety, and uneasiness surrounding the relationship. It’s possible that Leischman’s version of Little Red Ridinghood could have related to her alternate persona.  Maybe she was making a social statement in general, or had an experience in which she encountered a type of man that appeared friendly or harmless, but was really unpredictable and menacing.  I don’t think the click/point interactivity took away from the story, it moved it along from a different angle/vantage point. 

In Tina Laporta’s ‘Distance’ it was easy to follow because I could move at my own speed through the story and analyze the presentation at my own pace.  It’s hard to say whether or not Laporta created an alternate persona. The digital narrative was like looking at a computer screen with each photograph freeze-framing a variety of alternating images of different men and women.  In cyberspace she could have been assuming different identities/personas, or the various faces were many women interacting with one or just a few men. The text makes the presentation appear as if only two people are communicating with each other.  Laporta states, “technology is a veil” and “is the virtual real.”  When in cyberspace we can easily be veiled and change our identity.  It was a very interesting visual experience and conceptually intriguing.

In Young Hae-Chang’s ‘DAKOTA’ the conceptual framework seemed like an extremely fast digital flipbook.  The tempo of the presentation was staccato, flashing, black and white text in alternating sizes.  The motion and the visual made me feel uncomfortable, anxious, and almost nauseated.  It was a creative work of digital art, but also a disagreeable read. The story is about some guys on a drunken escapade or dangerous adventure which takes place in the Dakotas.  The background drumming music escalates as the guys become more intoxicated and filled with bravado.   The black and white lettering seemed very linear and rather hypnotic.  It could have been the creator’s autobiographical experience or just his psychological take on drunken male bonding in a stark unsympathetic parking lot.   Perhaps he had a memory of a friend or someone who had died violently at a young age and his feelings underlying this narrative.

I experienced these artworks as synthesis of literature, reading a book, and performing arts.  These distinctions become less arbitrary and more blended in electronic environments.