7 December 2006
Spacer.gif{ART} is a great eCommerce site that cashes in on the lack of art that exists within a spacer.gif, which is an empty Graphics Interchange Format block that used to be used as a place-holder in tables on the internet so that they would n
ot be completely empty and collapse in on themselves.
So, they are selling something that only exists as an idea; you do not have to create a spacer.gif, all you have to do is write the tag into your HTML and the computer knows to read that as a blank block of image (which is sort of obvious, I guess.)
I just really enjoy looking at this professional-looking site that has matted artwork framed and shipped to you, and it's just a white square. It is just brilliant, that is all there is to say about it.
16 November 2006
net.art generator is an early piece of net.art that was created by Cornelia Sollfrank. She commissioned four artists to each create a program to 
generate a piece of net.art using a search engine like Google and now has several working generators.
I like this piece because it is interactive but does not require the user to do very much - only enter his or her name and the name of the piece. To the right is my piece entitled Hooray for Sleep.
This is a thought-provoking study about not only the "issues of authorship and authenticity" as brought up on rhizome.org, but about what truly constitutes art. Can layering four images, changing their opacity in various places, and colorizing them make it any more artistic than if you were to just use one of the photos by itself. (In this instance I am talking about a photo that you take, yourself. If you get into using other people's photos and then layering and colorizing, then there is a whole different issue of authorship as was mentioned before, and that is just too hard of a call to make.
9 November 2006
The Million Dollar Homepage is another site that combines commerce with the internet and with pixels as it sells space on its site for $1 per pixel. "Own a piece of history!" it announces.
The page is very busy and has flashy advertisements for anything from a red link stating "I am rich, you are not" and leading to therichjerk.com to a green link that says, "Even Monkeys Fall from Trees" and leads to thebookofcool.com.
This multi-advertiser arrangement is compelling because there is so much information in such a little space. Some people just purchase one pixel to be part of the history, though they have to go in with 9 of their friends in order to buy the minimum 10x10 block.
2 November 2006
A piece of early net.art is _readme, a simple site with simple text where each word is a link.
"On" leads to www.wealthymen.com. "Judge" links to www.judge.com, a corporation that is "a global services provider of Human Capital Management, Talent Acquisition, Training Services, and Business-Technology Solutions."
It is a intriguing glance at how companies buy sites and redirect them and is interesting to see which words they choose for themselves.
19 October 2006
Altar-ations has just the right amount of sarcasm and fact about the entity of marriage in modern-day society.
The easter-egg color scheme and bubble theme depict a typical bride-to-be trying to make everything perfect for the big day. Then Juliet Davis pops each bubble in that pretty young girl's head.
The wedding ring's size now shows a woman's status or how much her fianceé "loves" her. Women cannot marry other women but they can marry Satan-worshipping men. The site also critiques "virginity management" and special-order perfect babies.
My opinion on the subject of marriage is on the conservative side. I think that the problem with marriage today is that it is not given the same sanctity that God asked us to give it. The points that Davis bring up are valid, and they are put in their with such sly wit that even though I may not agree with all of them, they do not offend me - or rather, alienate me. I feel like that since she was making a website to critique and inform it was very good for her to use the tongue-in-cheek, somewhat subtle method of humor rather than pointing out everything that is wrong in marriage today.
12 October 2006
There comes a point in every artist's life where he has to decide how far he is willing to go for his art. In the case of Michael Mandinberg of shopmandinberg.com, he sold almost everything in his house.
In a world where commodity is everything, where you can purchase something from any country and have it Fed-Exed to your house (actually...in a world where Fed-Exed becomes a verb), and when your next purchase - a book...a toy...a pair of shoes...a piece of a celebrity's chewed gum - is just a click away on E-Bay, we have started to place value on things based on availability rather than quality or originality. This is not always the case, but we can now buy rip-offs of the real thing for a fraction of the cost...even if it means that the DVD comes with a novice cover with text written in Chinese.
So where does this leave art, especially conceptual pieces or digital art that are so easily pirated or stolen? At about the same value as Mandinberg's $2 half-eaten jar of pickles?
5 October 2006
Young-Hae Chang's flash piece, Super Smile, is a bright, in-your-face, loud animation that gets on your nerves after a while. But it's fun.
There really is not much to it. There is a yellow circle with eyes, a text box over the nose, and a moving mouth. The text box has a constant stream of a novel-length story that is a cross between a nightmare and a sort of drunken rambling. The background music is kind of jazzy, like you would hear while on hold on the phone.
The combination of these elements makes for a loud piece, as I said before. In a lot of ways, Chang did all the things that you should not do when creating a web page, such as making the background bright yellow and playing obnoxious music, but he did it with a purpose. The theme of the story is "a guy who, despite his best effort, ends up going to work naked from the waist down" and the other elements, with their crazy and obnoxious qualities work very well with it.
28 September 2006
I went on the New York City Artsbus over the weekend and 
saw Rafael Lorenzo-Hemmer's work at the
bitforms gallery.
His interactive pieces involve Software, LCD Screen, Computers, and Cameras. My favorite of his pieces was "Close Up", which
has a "surveillance" aspect that is pervasive and allows the viewer to interact with his/herself and hundreds of others who have
previously viewed the work and been recorded.
I, of course, started to goof off and make faces at the camera, trying to get my fifteen minutes of fame in whatever playback my actions received when others look later. This piece was interesting because it explores the idea of impermanence and reflection.
21 September 2006
Nicolas Clauss's "White Vibes" is a piece hosted at Turbulence. It is an interactive flash animation with a sketched-out layout. This layout contains Xs that the user can mouse-over and nudge, which makes a squeaking noise, a small television box with an animation of people. When the user clicks on this the screen zooms forward as if through a tunnel and follows little Os on a trail through this "rabbit hole".
Each element on the main page has some little tic or link to another page that incorporates the imagery of whatever the element is. For example, clicking on the red floral element leads to a page where there are more red flowers. In this section, the television is there as well, but is not animated unless the user mouses over a star button. Then the page does a sort of clockwise animated rotation that shows a loop of animation at a faster speed.
One other thing that the user can do is "erase" the elements by clicking the mouse and holding down while sweeping around the page. After a certain period of time, the elements on the page begin to reappear no matter how many times you erase them.
This piece was very enjoyable for me because something is always happening. Almost every time I scrolled around with the mouse I found a new tic that an X or an O would "perform" if rolled-over or clicked on. The layout is something that I can interact with and play with to see what will happen next.
The use of scribbled letters and numbers is used throughout the piece, and it gives it a thrown-together, yet well thought out look. Although some of the elements are less sketch-y, such as the red floral one, it still keeps with the theme because it looks raw and a bit crude.
The one thing that would make me like this page better is knowing a little more about it. The stylized look of the entire piece has me second-guess exactly what the content is, because I do not know that the red element is supposed to be a flower; I make the assumption because it looks like a flower was repeated in order to create it. It is possible that there really is not something deeper to the site, but I would like something more so I would feel more like I was seeing something the artist wants me to see, or wants to make a statement about, and less like I was making up a story to match something that may not even have significance.
14 September 2006
This week I looked at aPproPiRaTe, a piece created based on the fact that when a video is pirated it becomes a collaborative effort of "artists" who rip it, encode it, and make it widely available to the general public. Because of the multiple times this video is edited, the final product is far from the original film.
Sven Königs takes the transformation a step further and created a script that the user can feed video through and see a disjointed image and video that illustratates his collaboration theory. I have a little bit of trouble understanding the more technical aspects, but between the review of his project on furtherfield.org and my analysis of the individual frame sequences he created and the final movies, I hope I have gotten a pretty good idea.
Visually, this piece is stunning – in a beautiful and an “ugly” way. Perhaps the word ugly is not right; the piece is very distracting because of the overlap of textures (especially since the keyframe is replaced by a checkered pattern.) It is fascinating to watch the faces and other images in the video come out of the checkers. It gives the feeling of the checkered pattern almost becoming something that is alive.
7 September 2006
I visited furtherfield.org and looked at some of the net.art exhibited there. The piece that I chose to comment about is Juliet Davis' Pieces of Herself. This piece of net.art is exhibited at D/t\P disturb.the.peace [angry women].
Pieces of Herself is a project that allows the viewer to "explore embodiment and feminine identity in relationship to public and private space". The viewer can figuratively go through rooms in the house of this everywoman and add various objects to a blank body on the side. These objects represent pieces of her identity.
I like this piece because it is very interactive and I can get glimpses of this unknown woman's personality through the conversation snippets and objects in each area of the house and outside of the house. The idea of painting the objects and conversation in your life onto your body is inventive. I know that associating objects and conversation with someone and even making them become that person is not new, but the medium in which Juliet Davis presents her work puts a spin on it.
Because of the interface, I can make hundreds of different women using the small amount of objects that she provides. I also love the visual aspect, especially the paper doll aspect to the blank woman. I think that the Flash adds to this because it makes it more dynamic.
The one thing about this project that I would change is some of the objects that are provided. I can understand and interpret most of the objects, but some seem so randomly placed. What does a frog jumping on the bed represent?
As a whole, though, this project gives a look inside this woman and how the things around her effect her.