Marcel Duchamp: ‘Nude Descending A Staircase’ Revisited

In 1912 Marcel Duchamp (1886-1968) painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. When exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an art critic for the New York Times describes the work as "an explosion in a shingle factory". This canvas was controversial, provocative and, for many people, simply upsetting. Today, hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the painting is called an 'iconic holding'.

DMF

The DMF web pageallows you to create music by clicking on a board. Each click causes a peg to pop up and be played. It's very similar to the mechanical mechanism of a music box. As the music is being played a visual presentation of the music is displated that swirls around the position of the mouse.

If you like the piece of music that you have composed, you can copy and paste the score into a text file and replay it again later.

The delight of this page is that is is a combination of visual, aural and interactive elements. You control the sound and the display and both are pleasing.

The DMF page is not a masterpiece of the art world or in any way a great work of art, but very much a nice work to bring up every once and a while for a few minutes of play and relaxation.

Web Art Works for Sale?

If you know of examples of works of Web Art that might be available for sale please contact theo at artofthenet dot com.

Crowdsourcing Art?

The other evening I was at a wine bar thinking about my next post here. What started running through my mind were two web sites - one from 2004 and one quite recent site - where a number of people came together to create works of art. It soon dawned on me that the question I was asking was "Can social networks produce art?" and, if so, could a social network actually produce high art. I became quite excited. Wow, I've invented something new here: social networks producing art. And then I continued: is the art that social networks produce inevitably banal or low art? Is low art bad? Wow, this is going to be big, etc. It's amazing how a glass of Prosecco will boost your confidence.

100 Years of Cubism

© 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The original painting is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This image was copied from Wikipedia.

Pablo Picasso finished painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon one hundred years ago this month. Les Demoiselles is the tipping point between old and new art. There have been some tipping points since, but none as important.

This post is a celebration of that moment.

Introducing the Links Menu

In some good time the Links menu will have links to perhaps a couple of dozen web sites. The intention is to provide you with a good feeling regarding the possibilities of Art of the Net.

Do not expect masterpieces. Art of the Net is still in its infancy.

On the other hand be prepared to explore and interact with art in ways impossible with paper, photos or video.

Ellen Pronk - Web Art Blogger

Ellen Pronk has created over six hundred 'presents' just for you at lfs.nl.

In the process of opening these presents you will get to know Ellen. You will see that she lives a normal urban life and at the same time she has this pernicious streak to create stuff for you to play with.

Ellen's work could be considered as a blog not of words but of graphically oriented code.

Some presents, like the days of Ellen's life, are better than others and looking through all your presents can take a long time. A handy shortcut is to take a look at Ellen's favorites.

Korean Web Art Festival 2001

KWAF2001 is probably very important. Is it the earliest exhibit of the art of the Internet still on-line?

The exhibited works are very much in tune with the spirit of where we think web art is headed.

Bodytag

Bodytag is a series of thought experiments or "web programming explorations" by Glen Murphy, a computer scientist. He describes himself this way:

Glen is an English-born Australian (Melbourne) who works as a UI Software Engineer at Google. At night he produces installation software artwork and human-computer interaction 'stuff' for fun. When curators looking for an artist statement threaten him with pokes in the eye, he usually just says that he likes to "computationally connect wonder and reality".

Bodytag is a gallery that displays the work by an artist/scientist. The Bodytag home page is an array of data boxes that resembles the periodic table. Each box links to a demo. Some are interactive such as smoke2 or gravity2 others are just videos - albeit programmatically generated. Every demo has been built with great care and with much consideration to visual appeal and a high graphic design standard. Of particular relevance is that this is a public exhibit or gallery of a series of works created over a number of years and yet presented and accessile from a single web page with its own URL.

Superbad

See the Wikipedia entry for Superbad, one of the very early web art sites, created in 1997 by San Francisco artist Ben Benjamin.

The site involves dozens of web pages. You must discover where to click to get to the next page.