Reynolds 10-26-10

Initially I was drawn to the actual design of the book, Rhythm Science, because it is a unique work of art on it’s own; a hole for a spindle piercing the CD shaped pages, alternating paper textures, text, quotes, designs and a music CD enclosed. Then I read Paul Miller’s heady and very perceptive text. He is obviously very bright and his educational background in Philosophy and French Literature is evident in his intellectual ruminating in this book; many varied recognizable and some unfamiliar people from history and the present, are quoted, and their thoughts and/or music explored (remixed). He is an artist, writer, producer, and a DJ. As a DJ he goes by Spooky that Subliminal Kid, a name that refers to the combination of “eerie sounds of hip-hop, technology, ambient and other music,” that he recontextualizes. He not only DJs but he uses the concept of DJing in Rhythm Science as a vehicle to present his cultural ideas and issues regarding art in the digital age.

Miller talks about how the artist uses technology to rearrange many of the ideas, art, music, and beliefs to create and convey infinite new and expressive art. Software becomes the tool and the almost limitless information on the web can be altered or added too at the artist discretion. He said that thanks to technology the entire history of music can be remixed, his CD is a true form of sampling and multiplicity. This is accurate for all art as well.

Some of the themes that he purposely expressed disjointedly are: “Who speaks through you?” Miller’s African American heritage sometimes speaks through him. I feel he was connected to his deceased father and DeBois both activists in their own right. “Who owns memory?” Memory is in our cells and genetic makeup. Memory is in the ethers, open for anyone to assimilate. We all own our own memory but maybe we are multiplex selves. “How does property intervene in the flow of information between the material and the ethereal?” Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. “In an information economy it’s all about how information creates identity as a scarce resource.” “The method becomes actionary rather than reactionary.” I don’t think he believes there is much originality but that all ideas are recombined and re-”paired”. To me the remixing or recontextualizing of material is really a composite of ownership that loops around back to a point where you don’t really know who owns it, but does that really make a difference anyway?

Who is the controller of your universe?

The question really is “who speaks through you”

Influencing every moment of your existence

I am impacted with every cell of my body by my mother

Her voice resonates with every passing thought

She gave me life and imbedded the seeds of who I am

Speaking

Captivating

Ever guiding me through my journey in this lifetime

My intuition and experiences are the hand that guides me

I own my memory

My looking glass changes with every breath

My memory changes

Drifts

Morphs

And sometimes dissipates with the tick of a clock

Paces into the deeps recesses of my mind

Or it is hiding waiting to be evoked from within

But there are memories that will stand the test of time

Playing and Replying

Forever

Reynolds -Jody Zellen

The artist that I chose to discuss is Jody Zellen and her work Ghost City on the website net_condition. She is a contemporary American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She has a BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. In this net art project, she explores the urban environment through different types of media such as photography, poetry, music, newspapers, public art, and books. “The images are from print media sources, texts from books on urban theory or other written words, generally poetic.”

In my blog I’ve linked four websites that reference her work:

http://www.ghostcity.com/

http://aminima.net/wp/?p=492&language=en

http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/artists/zellen.html

http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/TIRW_Archive/tirweb/feature/zellen/index.html#

The site Ghost City started in 1997 and completed in 2005. It started as a hyperlink and continued as a work in progress, as technology evolved so did her web site. In Zellen’s own words, “Ghost City serves as an archive for all my web based work as well as a place for experimentation.”

Jody Zellen designed ‘Ghost City’ which is a website that presents a maze of multiple changing scenes of an imaginary city. “...A city of fragments, a memory, a ghost of reality, a ghost city.” She calls this net art “an interactive urban environment” and she thinks of her web space as a sculptural space. Viewers participate by interacting with the animated graphics allowing them to “sculpt” different views of city life. Each animated image is a link to a different part of the city. The opening web picture is a square divided into twenty-five individual squares against a black border. The nine center squares each contain a letter against a solid colored background that spells out Ghost City, and the center square has one letter that continually alternates, and also spells Ghost City, one letter at a time. The sixteen colorful border squares each flash and shift pictures of city scenes. To enter the city, you can click on any square and suddenly you are in a complex network of visual, textual, and sometimes auditory stimulus, a city environment. “The viewer is a wanderer through the city either moving forward or backward, discovering new spaces in the city.”

Zellen’s theme is a narrative about being immersed in a city environment; the memories, feelings, smells, sights, tastes, sounds, both past and present. When entering her imaginary city one is immediately sensory bombarded and in constant movement. These are some of the stylistic and consistent feelings Ghost City evoked in me while navigating: congestion, colorful, intriguing, creative, noisy, claustrophobic, frustration, alienated by the energy, frenetic, overwhelming, smelly, smoky, bus fumes, conversation, honking, bodies, pushing, opportunities, laughter, crying, joy, sadness, ringing cell phones, and blinking lights. This is a very in depth net art piece, it envelopes you as you click deeper, you dig deeper into the heart and fragmented history of Ghost City; windows of images of old buildings, signage, cars, and clothes pop up and disappear. Simultaneously, pictures and text of the present contrast pictures and text of the past.

It really stimulates your memory of what one feels like in the midst of a city. I like Ghost City a lot, but I don’t like big cities in general so I have somewhat of a negative reaction to this digital immersion. On the other hand, there are many people who can’t live without the chaos and tempo of an urban environment and they would be right at home in Ghost City. It’s also stylistically consistent because you are always in the confines of an urban environment. Cities are all about growth and expansion and Ghost city as a good example of this process.

Zellen’s work is valuable because it is an example of the changeability and evolution seen in a specific art piece over an extended period of time, which is a distinctive element of digital art. Ghost City is technologically innovative, as digital art advanced, so did her work. In a contemporary arts context, it is important that this work appear on the internet because it’s a very creative forum that one can utilize to interact with “a city” via the web. The digital medium is actually unique and a very artistic way to experience and explore an art piece. Obviously, you can’t interact with a painting or sculpture of a city in the same way you can on- line.

Reynolds 10-5-10

The Yes Men are said to have a “hactivist approach to art.” I looked up the definitions of hacker + activist. Activists: “the actions of those who try and bring about political or social change. Hackers: those who gain unauthorized access to computer data or some system, and/or innovative users of digital media.” When you combine the definitions they describe some of the methods used by performance artist’s in the film The Yes Men. According to Wikipedia ‘The Yes Men’ do culture jamming which “is a tactic used by many consumer social movements to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions.” http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=cultural+jamming

The way their website was formatted mirrored that of the WTO, “an organization that intends to supervise and liberalize international trade.” The website was extremely believable, people would contact ‘The Yes Men’ group thinking that they actually were the WTO. Then the Yes Men would set up interviews or meetings with media sources with these organizations.

As hacktivists, they assumed aliases and impersonated representatives of the WTO at several conferences and media interviews. During interviews and presentations they appeared to be believable representatives, but they made radical, and avant-garde statements said in a subversive and satirical way. People often don’t question authority figures or those who are supposedly highly respected in their field. Their message not only made fun of the WTO, but through parody they delivered ridiculous strategies on how to fix the global economy.

I looked up the definition of “tactical media art” in Wikipedia and found the following website that uses activism through humor and politics in an attempt to create public awareness about specific issues. It’s not exactly like The Yes Men group and there are similarities, but they are social activists.

http://www.appliedautonomy.com/mission.html

http://www.appliedautonomy.com/lb.html

The conventional thought of a studio artist is someone who creates art in a studio like painting, sculpture, photography, etc. within a studio. The Yes Men used their website, and also their satirical fake personas as performance artists as their medium to express themselves artistically. I think art mixed with constantly changing technology has changed the “artist as genius” model. Borat is a performance artist who is somewhat of a hactivist who also uses exaggeration and imitation in films.

The Yes men are performance artists and hactivists who use parody to make social commentaries. The other two artists used websites and parody also to make social commentaries.

Example: net art’s “manifesto” and etched tablets, and Fluidity.... used a lot of humor about the future of net art.

I have ambivalent feelings in regards to whether or not The Yes Men’ are ‘artists.’ This hesitance to call their work ‘art’ or the group ‘artists’ has to do with my own internal struggle as to what defines ‘art’ and who is an ‘artist.’ On one hand, I feel that their work is mainly hactivism and not art because their main goal is essentially political. On the other hand, I think they have a very unique style and approach which I can see as performance art. After trying to decipher my own interpretations of the Yes Men and film, I came to the conclusion that I really do consider them ‘artists,’ because the ability to take on pseudonymous personas and act or perform the part is a form of art.

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.