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]

Web Art: The Surveys

The Surveys

Scroll around the pixel graphics landscape and as you mouseover icons the answer to questions about happiness appear as pop-ups. Do jokes make you happy? 65.3% said "Yes" while 34.7% said "No". The survey questions are fun. As you mouse around you begin to anticipate what the questions will be but the percentages always seem to be surprising.  It turns that the the thing the least likely to make you happy is a Stephen King novel. The most likely thing to bring happiness is sleep!  I learned all this from the delightful conclusions. If youwant you can take the survey yourself.

This Flash application was built by Chris Joseph and David Hume.

The source was www.babel.ca.

Web Art: Eisenstein’s Monster

Eisenstein's Monster 

Create your own Frankenstein monster as easily as clothing a paper doll or building a Mr Potato Head. The end product is kind of creepy to watch as lips move and eyes glance and nose twitches all in a manner that is realistic and unreal at the same time.

This Flash web application is by Chris Joseph who is a writer and artist currently in Leicester, England. You can find out more about him at www.chrisjoseph.org.

One nice thing is that you can design faces or you can let the computer make up its own designs. Thus the application runs unattended.

Sourced from the Rhizome Artbase.

Web Art Gallery: glyf: construct

glyf: construct is the work of Duncan Holby, a designer /developer working in Richmond Virginia. His personal web site is at glyfdesign.com. The name glyf probably relates to the word "glyph" which is "A displayed or printed image. In typography, a glyph may be a single letter, an accent mark or a ligature."

glyf:construct is a gallery with (as of this writing) fifteen individual works. Each work is a Flash file that allows you to control the movement of shapes in 3D by moving the cursor. The first work support very limited motion - horizontal mouse movement only while the later works support X and Y as well as mouse down events.

Each of the works is an example of Web Art. Each is a stand-alone work which allows some user interaction to control the display of the site. My favorite work is ge(o)m.v1. I really like the way this highly symmetrical form occasionally appears to be asymetric. Is this due to the eye playing tricks or the actual lag times in generating the lines. Who knows or who cares? The effect is captivating.

This site was sourced through the Rhizome ArtBase.

Web-Art-Gallery: Rhizome.org

Is there a good place to start in order to get going with Web-Art? Most certainly. The correct starting point is Rhizome.org - ever since 1996.

Rhizome does it all correctly. It commissions web sites as works of art. It writes and about them and proselytizes. It encourages and supports artists and artistic movements. It curates, catalogs and gives prizes. It will even help you set up web hosting for your site. Rhizome is Web-Art.

So where's the best place to start in Rhizome? Of course, it's in their collection of Web Art at ArtBase. You will access over 2,000 sites by title artist name, title, keyword and even using a Java time line.

Why aren't there more Rhizomes?

Web-Art: Forest Grove

Forest Grove is a web site built around a Flash video that's built over a short story by John Cheever. Details and story line available at Wikipedia's entry on Maya Churi. The piece one first place at the Seoul Net Fest 2005 - which is where we first noticed the work.

The video is quite the largest portion of the project but unlike the videos we normally see, this one makes good use Flash technology and allows for good user interaction. You can select scenes, pause and skip. There is good use of the multimedia effects available with flash in combining text, sound with image movement and transitions.

Here is the interesting question: Is Forest Grove a web site that has a lot of movie footage or is Forest Grove a DVD that has a very interactive menu? The good answer is both. Forest Grove was shown at the Sundace Film Festival and it won a price in a web site competition.

If we project the current DVD menu interaction into the future and take that DVD data and make it freely available over the Internet for all time and allow people to add their comments then does the work become Web-Art?