Memento Mori in American Express Black Ink

American Express Publishing Corporation "produces authoritative lifestyle content that empowers affluent, primed consumers – and the businesses that serve them – to make informed decisions".

American Express Publishing Corporation is the publisher of Black Ink - the art of extraordinary living.

Published quarterly, Black Ink is exclusively for American Express Centurion® members. The notorious Black Card and by extension Black Ink is available by invitation only to the highest echelon of American Express cardholders. Each issue of Black Ink focuses on a single topic, such as the worlds best restaurants, and explores it in a way that is relevant and beneficial to the lifestyle of the discriminating, ultra-high-net-worth individual. Black Ink advertisers constitute an elite group of the worlds most respected, super-premium product and services.

The Fall/Winter 2011 issue is The Art Issue and it features an article titled "The Rise of Internet Art". Here are the first few lines of the article.

In 2009, a private collector and San Francisco entrepreneur named Tho Armour acquired a piece of Internet art called Memento Mori. Here's what Armour received: a contract stating that the website's URL was now his property and a lovely Japanese cast-iron box containing a flash drive that held the site's source code, the string of unique demands that functions as a website's DNA. Like most Internet art Memento Mori is created and displayed on a computer. These works are not reproductions of tangible paintings merely shown online. Instead, according to collectors like Armour, this is art that takes full of advantage of and is, in fact, made possible by the Internet...

Needless to say I was very pleased to receive a copy of the magazine that American Express publishing sent to me. As of this writing, I do not yet have permission to display the whole article. I am looking into how I can do this.

My first reaction is that the author, Ben Austin, does a very nice job of combining my enthusiasm and optimism regarding Internet art with reporting on all the issues that surround the actual production of Internet art by everyday artists – including managing intellectual property rights, convincing collectors that this really is an art form, and locating galleries that understand how to educate clients as to this new media.

All in all, a very nice read – and I hope to be able to let you all read the entire article very soon.

Kal Spelletich At The Art Technology and Culture Colloquium

Kal Spelletich is a San Francisco artist who "explores the boundaries between fear, control and exhilaration by giving his audience members the opportunity to operate and control some fascinating and frequently downright dangerous machinery."

The following are some random/disjointed notes I started writing while attending the Art Technology and Culture Colloquium at UC Berkeley with Kal Spelletich as guest speaker on Monday October 10, 2011.

Collecting the Uncollectable

Tomorrow I will be on a panel the Catharine Clark Gallery to talk about my role in acquiring Ken Goldberg's Memento Mori. You can read all the details in this press release.

An Organization to Support Collectors

Portion of image on "Imaginary Museum Projects" by Tjebbe van Tijen

Here is the question of the day: If an organization is set up to help promote and promulgate Internet Art, what should that organization be chartered to do? That was the question at a lunch with the kind lady I had met last Thursday and her husband,also very kind (see previous post).
It's not an easy question to answer. You can't just throw money up in the air and expect it to rain art. So where does one start?

First off, let's look at the different sorts of collectors. I see three broad groupings of Internet Art collectors:

I Left My 'Art in San Francisco

Last night I attended a reception relating to SFMOMA. I don't want to be precise about the details because I've not asked  the people involved for permission to do so. What I do want to record is my excitement and thrill regarding several of the dialogs that took place during this reception regarding Internet Art.

My feeling is that Internet art -  just like so many other things that relate to the Internet - will be launched, bloom and prosper somewhere around San Francisco and the Bay Area. It logically follows that the progenitors of such an art movement would be in the same age group as are all the current flock of Internet titans and techies.  Thus the people I have been interested in talking to have been roughly 24 to 36 years old.

Yes, We Can - Blog Again

It's time to start posting to AotN again. It's been over six months since I finished the two courses on new media  taught by Dr Christiane Paul at UC Berkeley, yet I have been incapable of producing a new post. The whole point of taking the courses was to help me write better posts.

Berkeley Big Bang: Day 3

June 3 was the last day of the Berkeley Big Bang and a celebration of forty years of Leonardo.

Introduction: 40 Years of Leonardo

Stephen Wilson kicked off the event with refections on the 40 years of Leonardo - the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. He wondered “How will the Journal survive?” given the mounting language and production issues.

He then presented a review of computers and art thirty years ago (the time he joined Leonardo and today. I can quibble with facts. He twice mentioned Wired magazine when I believe he intended to say Byte magazine. He talks about the lack of art in the computer field in 1979, yet Melvin Prueitt’s books on computer graphics had already entered their Dover reprints stage of life by 1974. But I cannot dispute his conclusions: the world of art and computers has grown from a smaller and lonelier place to a huge place that nonetheless has issues such as still being marginalized.

Berkeley Big Bang: Day 2

The reason you go to an event like BBB is to listen to highly educated people expound in a highly intelligent manner. You hope, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, that you will understand what they say and, fidgeting with talisman, that they share ideas that are thrilling. With those thoughts in mind let’s double-click on Berkeley Big Bang: Day 2.

Berkeley Big Bang: Day 1

Today was the first day of a three day “Berkeley Big Bang” event at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA). There were two events and each was quite special. The first was Lynn Hershman Leeson: Virtually Everything, Virtually at the PFA cinema. This was an eight hour marathon showing 16 Hershman films dating from 1977 to 1994. The first three hours (which I watched) provided a glimpse as to why she has attained the stature she has as a filmmaker and as an artist and as, well, an impresario of wonderment.

Up to now my contact with her work had been through her project in Second Life: Life to the Second Power: Animating the Archive in which one of her collaborators is my friend Henrik Bennetson of the Stanford Humanities Lab. So I was delighted to see that Ms Hershman appeared on the screen as RobertaWare, her Second Life Avatar, and gave us a tour of the Dante Hotel while the speaker, Steve Seid, introduced the program.

Web Artist: Ken Goldberg

Ken Goldberg is an artist. Ken Goldberg is a professor of engineering.

So what defines who is an “artist”? What enables a professor at a major university have an alter ego that can encompass whimsy, caprice and felicity? Do his two sides have an irrational connection or a rational disconnection?

Many facets of Ken’s development and output are reported in a 2005 biographical article from the East Bay Express. But there’s more and new data waiting to be explored. In 2008 I hope to be in contact with Ken via a project or two. While doing so I hope to research and report back to you at a later date what Ken is looking into these days and where he is setting his sights.

MBCBFTW

MBCBFTW is an abbreviation of "My boyfriend came back from the war" - which is the name of a web site built in 1996 by Olia Lialina et al. More details regarding the background of the site are available at the Last Real Net Art Museum.

Christiane Paul in her seminal work Digital Art says "Early net art produced some classics of the genre, among them Olia Lialina's [MBCBFTW]..."

As Ms Paul points out, Lialina:

"expanded the piece into the Last Real Net Art Museum, which used the original MBCBFTW as a starting point and then developed an archive of variations on the work by other artists. The project points to the possibilities for creation and presentation offered by digital networks, such as the infinite reconfiguration of information in an open system, but not accommodated by traditional museums."

Today, we often call this sort of endeavor a "remix". Almost immediately upon exploring the site and understanding its openness to the possibilities remixing, I began to build re-mixes myself. As of this writing I have created six variations ranging from Advent calendar to Web 2.0 versions. Most of them are not yet complete. I seem to start yet another new remix before quite finishing the prior remix.

I have created a page on the Art of the Net wiki (Click on the link below) where you can find links to all the remixes as well as much, more more about my thoughts on Lialina's work.

MBCBFTW

Audience-Sourcing FAQ

2007-12-31. This post has been copied to the Art of the Net Wiki. All further updates and edits will occur on the Wiki. Link

What is audience-sourcing?

Audience-sourcing is the act of people, while in the process of observing a work of art, transmitting some aspect of their observation process to others in some durable manner.

Web Gallery: Jim Andrews and vispo.com

I have just spent another perfectly good hour wandering around Jim Andrew's vispo.com. Jim takes visuals, poetry, music, writing, gaming, criticism, coding and much more very seriously. No, on the contrary, he is very playful with all of the above.

Jim builds Web Art Instruments such as the splendid Nio and Jig Sound. These look good, sound good and are fun to play with.

I have been to Jim's site a number of times. There's a lot to read and interact with. For the moment I don't have any great insight into Jim and his work - other than it's great and very much a part of where I think the Art of the Net is heading towards and very much worth exploring. I hope to come back to the site and talk about individual works.

vispo.com

Web-Art: triptych.tv

Progressing from 8-bit/pixel art projects, we are moving onto re-hash work from the dot-come era. Triptych is data overload. Triptych is too much of a bad thing is a good thing. Triptych is de-construction with neither instruction nor construction. Triptych is your Triple-A journey to nowhere.

Tryptych just fits in to my definition of web art. There are links and they do take you to different pages. Three of the pages are empty profile pages for the authors and two other pages bring you to archived pages that re-hash the hash that the other pages had already re-hashed. Therefore the site is not just a digital video piece. It is interactive. It is built upon a Blogger account bludgeoned into submission to be outrageous.

Do I like it? Not really. Does it make a statement about this time period? Only time will tell. Will it cause furor/consternation and intellectual discourse. Probably not.

But it is Web Art. And any and all such experiments are to be applauded. One day there will be artists that will find the wormholes into new dimensions of art through the Internet. Triptych.tv is one of those first halting steps.

triptych.tv [via rhizome]

Web Blog: Gerard Ferrandez

Gerard Ferrandez continues to turn out some of the most amazing JavaScript demos on the Internet. His latest work, Autumn II, combines superb fluidity of motion, subtle transparency and great mouse-over responsiveness. As always, this technology is set against an evocative selection of images and a very pleasant musical riff.

A new feature on the site is a very extensive selection of links. To get to the links, move your mouse over the orange arrow at the bottom of the page until the workd "Links" appears then click. Any link recommended by Gerrard is certainly going to somewhere worth investigating. An on-going feature - very rare with most artist's sites - is a forum where you can ask Gerard questions or (as most people do) sing his praise.

I visit Gerrard's site frequently. He is one of the most talented artists working on Web Art. He is also one of the most open. All the source code, images and music he writes or uses are available with a click of a button under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.

Learning to navigate through the site has a tiny learning curve. But all your efforts will be extremely rewarding.

Link

Web Artist: Jason Nelson

I found Jason Nelson because was the 2006 Web Art award winner of the Drunken Boat Panliterary Competition. His prize-winning entry, This is how you Will Die is quite a fun little Flash applet available from his bio page. Note: It takes quite a while to load. Click on "Death Spin" to get things started.

Also on the bio page were links to his own web sites. I have wandered around secrettechnology.com and found quite a few web art files. I didn't really like his main 2007 work, Between Treacherous Objects. The ten or so pages seemed repetitive - the same algorithms with just differences in the bitmaps and music. And I could not really see a thematic link other than the usual diatribe against a retro modern life. But Evil Flying Mascots and several other works I played with were quite amusing.

His own web pages are offer a limited background, but you you can find out a bit more on his profile at Griffith University in Brisbane Australia.

Jason's skills cover a lot of areas from coding to interface design, from music to literature. In other words he has all the skills and interests that being a Web Artist requires. I do think though that his greatest work is still in front of him. I say that only having seen a small portion of his rather large body of work, but do feel that he could really double-click into the themes and symbology that he is trying to express. Right now he is good at making tools for art and at making comments about art. Maybe one day Jason will simply make art.

secrettechnology.com [via Drunken Boat]

Web Art: Fark Photoshop Exquisite Corpse: The Fire Escape

The Fire Escape is a a crowd-sourced example of web art. A number of artists have been asked to doctor a given image of a fire escape. As you scroll down, you see each artist's interpretation of the fire escape. One is two men descending an image of Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. And there are Simpsons, Spiderman, Pixel Art, PhotoShop effects and much more, more. One could do a whole study on the symbology of this project.

The whole effect is similar to a project I've written about before: zoomquilt. You will spend a happy few minutes smiling at the visual puns and another period of time wondering just what on earth does THAT mean.

An unfortunate aspect is that image are being sourced from a number of sites and some of those images are no longer available. Thus the site does not complete loading and there are occasional blank images as you scroll down.

This work and other works like it would really benefit from a bit more technology. For example, it would be nice to walk down passageways and be able to branch in alternate directions while seeing such images.

The Fire Escape

Web Art Discussion: Are you ready for Web Art 2.0?

The Web Art of the Dot Com era is a Flash widget that you click on and lots of insanely great artistic things happen. People are happy with this. It works and it's fun. What more could you ask for?

Art marches on. Comments like "She's wearing Balenciaga. Last year's..." are just as appropriate about web sites as they are about the rag trade.

We have real-time googling and mash-up Web Art sites now. Are they the Web Art 2.0 sites or is there something more that will happen? Is Web Art 2.0 officially under way or is it yet too happen?

A good test case might be the existence of Web Art Widgets for FaceBook or the Google OpenSocial Widget program. Once there are several such widgets, It will be say to say that Web Art has been upped to 2.0. Are there other such tests we can think of? Probably.

Web Art Instrument: Visual Acoustics

ample interactive design appears to be a "business card" web site for Alex Lampe. Perhaps "Lampe" is an anagram of "ample". In any case this sites links top a number of clever and well-designed commercial web sites constructed in Adobe Flash. One link, however, (pointing to a folder on the the ample site itself) is a link to an on-line Web Art Instrument that, with your input, can create visual music.

First you load one or more instruments from the list at the top or bottom of the screen. Or click one of the presets on the right to load several instruments all at once. Then move your mouse around the screen. On screen symbols appear and musical instruments play.

The whole effect is more like an orchestra warming up more than a symphony in progress. There is obvious sophistication, care for detail and full technical sophistication here. Nevertheless, we await Rev 2.0.

Visual Acoustics

Web Art Gallery: Haifa Museum of Art - "NETworking"

NETworking is an excellent introduction to early 21st century Web Art. Each work is well-designed, interactive and original.

Originality is the key element. Think of walking through a gallery of recent paintings. If you know art history, as you look at each painting, a little voice in your brain is saying - "Derivative of Warhol." "Follows Picasso in the 50's." "Really bad Rauchenberg." "Fontana did it better." And so on.

The Haifa Museum exhibits of fourteen works of Web Art. Although all the works are presented on-screen via your monitor and are thus 2D (though they may represent 3D), you feel the freshness of a contemporary sculpture garden.

Each piece takes you into a unique environment - it's own little world. Ultimately the viewing experience is more complex, more nuanced and more rewarding than any equivalent show of static canvasses.

Link [Through Rhizome.org]