BoinkFace

Chapter Summary: Chapter 1

Internet Art: Rachel Green

Chapter 1. Early Internet Art

The Internet started gaining increased popularity in the early 1990's, changing the production and exchange of information.  Email, bulletin boards and the independent web site opened new avenues for public discourse.  Methods of communication focused on consumer’s needs for instant gratification, with the rise in cell phone usage, live 24-hour coverage of the gulf war, and reality TV shows. Internet browsers determined by corporate interest often buried Internet art below links they deemed more profitable, in an initial attempt to counter any overly revolutionary ideas.  Internet artists initially sought to create a direct dialogue with other artists around the world.  They met in chat rooms or on bulletin boards and developed valuable collaborations that way. The Russian avant gaurde film scene was adaptable to internet art.  The narratives fit well with the interactive potentiality of the internet.  The graphics of these werks were very lo-fi graphics but the art was more of a means of conveying a message, “reality reflextion” more than a visual aesthetics. A new media vocabulary inclusive in the art commented on the medium.  For instance, in jodi.org’s http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org,  a webpage was turned inside out, with it’s code on the main page and hidden coherent images. 

more to come...

Gimme Fi5e

Within the first chapter of But is it Art, Cynthia Freeland refers to  Lucy Lippard's “three pronged” approach to analyzing Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ by considering it’s material properties, its content and its contextual qualities. I’m sure this is a basic model for critiquing art that she’s adopted.  I find Lippard’s approach particularly relevant to contemporary and postmodern art, as the context of these artworks is usually appropriated and reflects an increased complexity through its compilation of historical movements and references. Looking at  New York artist Fi5e’s Graffiti Analysis  as an example, first, I examine the material qualities of the piece.  Fi5e created a computer program which captures the strokes of a graffiti artist’s pen, translates the pen stroke into pixels, captures them in a computer and then projects them through a digital projector onto any surface. This allows the artist to tag any surface non-permanently, in any size, and any location.  This is in direct opposition of the typical permanence of graffiti’s spray paint to a building, car or wall. 

Graffiti has always been challenged as an art form because artists use it as a rebellious means of defacing property to express idealisms.   Fi5e’s projection allows graffiti to be stripped of this context.  Suddenly, a viewer is subject to a laser light show (of sorts) and can look beyond the negativity that is often attached to a work of graffiti.  The projection is temporary, inoffesive and transitory. Participants have the chance to appreciate the taxonomy, which (Fi5e did a separate brilliant piece on) and the semiotic value of a tag.  Fi5e’s projections nod toward the inevitability that media culture has on our lives, that we experience it and it experiences us. Oh, I could write endless media theory papers on this, but not now.  Finally, the content, the tags that are projected, are collaborative.  They’re not just Fi5e’s tag’s, Typically, though not always, graffiti has been an isolated art, refined to self-promotion of beliefs and style of the individual artist. Fi5e has even put a call on his website looking for more collaborators for this project.  Lippard’s 3-prongged styles is useful for getting really in-depth with any artwork, though I find it particularly useful for works such as Fi5e’s. In the future, when I visit openings, I’m going to jot down briefly in my notebook next to artist and works that I like: material, content, context. Then I’ll answer them as briefly but succinctly as possible. I think this should become a fine habit to get into for exploring and understanding any artwork.

pannarrative=remix

I've been interested in collage poetry for some time now,  especially that which combines more than one sorce text or disjoints one primary source to the point of unrecagnizsability. The Cuckoo by Peter Streckfus is an example of a pannarrative.   Streckfus chose lines at random from Hsüan-tsang’s sixteenth century Chinese novel The Journey to the West, collaging them together into a purposefully disjointed and nonsensical narrative. This poetic form is fascinating to me and complex.  I found an excellent discription of the form on Generator Press which I'll paste below. 

Pannarrativity

 

Pannarrativity:

narratives (bits and pieces [fragments] of narrative) removed from their original

context and placed [incorporated] into a new context take on new meanings (while

retaining something of their original intention). Narrative — the word / logos —

is everywhere. The world is a narrative. The world “writ large.” Pan-

narrativity.

 

The “pannarrative text.” A “text-collage” composed of bits and pieces (words,

sentences, verses, various elements) of narrative (narrative as found /

appropriation) “stitched” together.

 

The pannarrative poem begins by seeing all the world as one great narration, a

narrative that is known in proportion to the degree of the relation of its parts.

 

The pannarrative poem, then, is constituted of fragments of narrative (which in

their dislocative / disjunctive state are potentially plurisignificative) and uses

juxtaposition as a principle of composition. (And like the metaphor, produces

semantic changes, and thereby increases language.)

 

While not quite on the level of the metaphor, I see pannarrativity as coming to

be a sort of stand-in for the metaphor, requiring, to its own end, an intuitive

competence — an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars as found

in the disjunction (the logoclastics) that posits the juxtaposition. (And like the

metaphor, produces semantic changes, and thereby increases language.)

 

Pannarrativity and Anonymity

 

The problem of pannarrativity and anonymity.

 

anonymous writing. one does not belong to what one has written.

signature / voice / sensibilities

 

 

 

u and your pansy doll face

actually, the elouai site, where you can create your own digital paper doll, even in the likes of Madonna, opperates under the same premise as Everlandia, in terms of limiting the user to certain tools and extending the results into reality.  The elouai site makes it very easy to share your paperdolls and to print them, extending them from virtual reality into the real real reality. Really. yeah. I've been seeing these little cutsie patootie dolls all over myspace, wondering what artist was making them for all of my friends, DUH, shoulda guessed it was a program.

see my doll on myspace

My Utopia has Unicorns

Oh wow, virtual shrinky dinks, whooohoo! Hey wait a minute! If your imagination limits you to a landscape of setting+ shrubbery+insect+animal = fantasy land, then you need to go back to grade school and read the Chronicles of Narnia. Oh wait, it's supposed to do that. Uh, I don't know about this.  Everlandia is an interactive multimedia art experiment that lets you create your fantasy utopia and share your virtual environment by saving it and sending as a postcard. This seems like a good idea in theory, but how the heck is it any different than StampPad, a paint program for kids that lets you do the same thing, only has more versatility, cooler tools and way snazzier characters? Everlandia is all about the suppression. In the virtual world of Everlandia, while we are sharing out fantasies, we are limited by the apparatus that we create them in, but this isn't really saying much for the expanse of the human imagination. I'd be much more satisfied with this project if I were allowed to upload my own images into this already exhisting environment. I sure don't like being censored and I don't like the fact that it " challenges the imagination to pick and compose from those landscapes, plants and animals, which most accurate express the image of the individual's dreamland" because I don't see any unicorns, viking penguins or any of the panda posse chillin in the mix. I don't like being stifled, I don't like the way your monkey is posed, and why can't i make these animals look like they're properly humping each other?
The touristy aspect of this project is kinda cool, by visiting the gallery opening, you're visiting Everlandia itself, as the exhibition is turned into a travel agency. This brings the virtual into the real and is kinda cool, but it would be cooler if there were unicorns and dancing bears and it were a travel agency for the circus of the weird.

Itunes Signature Soundflux

I stumbled across the I-tunes signature maker, a program that compiles your favorite or most listened I-tunes into a short sound clip. By filling out a simple form and allowing the applet to interact with I-tunes, it compiles snippets of a select number of songs into one signature sound file, and attempts to define your musical taste as a signature sound. I find this effort almost completely inaccurate, though I like in affect what it’s trying to do and the mash-up that it creates ware quite compelling. For instance, upon my first attempt with playing with this, the songs that were selected were based on recent playback. This was inaccurate because the songs chosen were played numerous times not because they are my favorite, but because they were on a mix that I was meticulously creating for someone, oh and there was the break up, where I’d play the same song over and over. That was strictly for cleansing-of-the-soul purposes, and not because the song was my favorite by any means. Ironically, the song was titled “Favorite One”. This produced an inaccurate jumble of murk that strait up pissed me off, mostly because I was so emotionally involved with all the songs. So, I decided to redo it, with fewer songs, less overlap and by artist instead of album. These results were fairly more accurate. I’m ashamed to admit I’m obsessed with “Golddigger” (Kanye West) at the moment and that was the first on this list, followed by others that I’ve genuinely rocked out to recently! Horah! But this tells me nothing of my overarching musical taste! That is something that changes over time and is conditional upon its environment, economy and stimuli.
How is this Internet Art? First off, it’s interactive, with its viewer, as there’s a feature that allows you to launch your signature into cyberspace and poof, you’re a part of the website (You can find my signature in the gallery, listed as Boink). Secondly, this net-art piece is conceptual and inclusive to the internet, as you must interact with the web to participate, and it assumes that you’re technologically equipped with I-tunes. The I-Tunes signature creator provides a temporary porthole into my musical momentum. It would be interesting to constantly visit this site over a period of time and compile a chronicle of my ever shifting musical milieu. More than simply providing a signature sound file that might explain a person’s musical taste, this program provides opportunity to map out the transition and expansion of an individual’s musical catalogue; the program also compresses and remixes songs into a new song that can be circulated and distributed freely as a newly created song, or isolated and documented as a stationary sound file on the web.

The Downtown Show NYC and Jean Dupuy

Absolutely perfect. I really can't even begin to convey how very overwhelmingly inspirational. Yay and stuff. Lots of yay and yay yay. Ok now for real speak. Fo real.I mean, really though. I made a point to visit The Downtown Show at NYU's Gray Gallery this weekend on my last bit o fun before the onslaught of my final semester sets in. The Downtown Show captured all of my interests in one place including underground literature, music and art of that period. It also aroused and affirmed my general aesthetic preference, broadened my spectrum of artists of that period, but most importantly my punk rock experimental forefathers fuel the multifaceted interests that lead me towards the the degree program I have chosen. I'm currently working towards an interdisciplinary degree, one which combines many many things. When I try to explain my degree, many people look at me like I'm sneezing at them instead of speaking. Some get bored at the long windiness of my explanation because interdisciplinary is a broad term which can be applied to many facets of the program, to include not only the combination of many subjects, but educational approaches and teaching styles. Anyway, what I have studied is a shit ton of poetry and book making and printmaking and painting and hypermedia art and art history (and all the gen eds). These courses combine together quite nicely into a multimedia environment, and the Downtown Show featured a variety of artists who worked in these individual mediums, but also sought innovative ways of experimenting with them.. Ze new media is what eventually came from zis and it is a beautiful thing.

So sprinkle this with that and you get a lot of dabble. And the reason this is all relevant is the Downtown Show was a lot of dibble dabble. It featured a lot of artists doing a lot of different things, notably those involved in the Fluxus movement (thank god no yoko ono) including Nam-June Paik of course and others. I can't really think of anything more exciting than staging events that involve audience participation and I've been interested in this sort of thing ever since I can remember. For instance here's a healthy does of fluxus conceptual art smarts for ya:Tehching Shieh decided to punch his time card for a whole year every hour on the hour.

This reminds me of 'Clockwork,' by Jeanne C. Finley and John Muse, (mentioned on the flawed art news Wednesday). I wonder what his date thought when he jumped up from the table to go punch his time card? Maybe they just ordered Chinese to the studio? Snack segway….

Check out Art Dirt to see what cool artist types look like when they feast on rice and other yummy delights. Jean Dupuy was a cool dude in the downtown NYC scene back in the day known for Heard Beats Dust aka Cone Pyramid a conceptual multimedia contraption (just in time for Valentines day!)

I think it's kinda romantic. Anyway, Dupuy was not a net artist, but his multimedia approach paved the way, combining sound, interactivity and immediacy which are all various elements found in the genre. Below is a description of the piece:
Directly from Media art.net cuz it was kinda hard to find:

Jean Dupuy
«Cone Pyramid»

1. After having inserted your forefinger into a cylinder (an optoelectronic human-pulse sensor) which is mounted on the front panel of a (0.60m x 0.60m x 2.25m) box having one transparent side, you will be able to view your heart beats - once amplified - lift a latex membrane covered with a red organic pigment whose density is 1.56. This membrane is stretched over a loud speaker located at the bottom of the box. The pigmented particles, dispersed in a cloud-like formation in the box are seen in the luminous beam of a projector, whose nature is (apparently) circular at the top and square at the bottom, thus composing a sculpture of dust "conical and pyramidal at the same time."CONE PYRAMID, designed in 1968 is the first of a series of objects which I created, whose very existence requires the public's participation.
2. Since I was interested by the creation of a work of plastic art, built of plastic material, the Celanese company gave me in 1967, 180 sheets of polyethylene (200/140/0.6cm) in a stack of approximately 3 cubic meters. The stack's load of static electricity was such that it drew to its surface "all" the dust in my studio. The weightlessness of the dust (gray cells and random material) appeared to me as the only tangible element of matter to consider in this stack of plastic, for the development of the creation I had in mind.
therefore decided to execute a sculpture of dust.
3. To put the dust into motion I had the idea of using an organic energy: heart beats.This is why at first the work was called "HEART BEATS DUST". Later on, I decided to use these organic elements (heart and dust), to create a geometrical sculpture, This idea was suggested to me while watching a movie, when I saw the motion of the geometrical beams, thanks to the dust, traveling from the projecting room to the screen in the movie theatre.

There is more that I want to write about this show but there's so much I have to break this into two posts. DANG!