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.