The individual stages of this project reminds me a great deal of A Visitor's Guide to London by Heath Bunting, 1995. Like the London guide, the work is in black and white and takes the various cityscapes and filters them down to a more cartoon-like appearance. This methodology works well with the cartoonish characters of the piece which could look out of place in a more photorealistic space. I'm not sure if the London guide was used as a template for the project or not but it seems to me it must have been.

the final group portion reminds me of Maja Balevic's "I Wish I Was Born In a Hollywood Movie" (2006) because of the way the windows (or in this case thought bubbles) overlap, stack on top of each other, but can be closed as desired. The theme is not the same, there is no disparity between real and perceived worlds, but the style is very similar.

A few net.art pieces use avatars to tell a narrative, as we were supposed to for this project. Zombie and Mummy from Olia Liliana and Dragan Espenschied (2002) for instance uses avatars in a comic format. This project is a bit more abstract than that, but as with the other two works, the stylistic similarity remains even if the purpose doesn't.

Dollspace

Dollspace

1997 Francesca Da Rimini, Ricardo Dominguez, Michael Grimm

Francesca Da Rabini hails from Australia and is part of the cyberfeminist art group known as the VNS Matrix. The project "Dollspace" or "Hauntings" is an exploration of the artistic and erotic potential of negotiated email relationships, online virtual communities and web-based narrative architectures that have been reverse engineered into multiple immaterialities. The work takes often innocent images and couples them with sometimes obscene remarks to present a dichotomous relationship similar to that of online interactions between people which can often devolve into the deviant or pornographic despite the fact there is never actually any true contact between the participants. On the internet, all things are possible and every flavor of interest can be found now, making sites like this seem tame by comparison, but at the time such experiments were more shocking and extreme than they are today.

It's interesting going back to some of these old sites that have become passe as society evolves (or devolves, as the case may be) sexually and technologically and we find that the things that were offensive just ten or fifteen years ago are now considered old hat. Sex in particular is always an interesting topic, even if some of the areas it moves into become difficult to look at as the purveyors attempt to push the envelope of what is socially acceptable.

I Wish I Was Born In a Hollywood Movie

3-30-06 Maja Bajevic

Maja Bajevic was born in 1967 in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (now Bosnia/Herzegovina) but studied art in Paris, France. She was in Paris when the Bosnian War erupted in 1992. Her earlier artwork explored war and the effect it has on the people who live through it. She had originally planned to stay in Paris for 8 months, but ended up staying for 8 years as the war and its aftermath continued in her home country. in 2000 she returned to Sarajevo.

With "I Wish I Was Born in a Hollywood Movie" she moves away from politics and war to contrast the shiny face that Hollywood puts on locations with the reality that the people who live there actually have to deal with. she does this using a flash animation that gives the appearance of windows, both metaphorical as with a computer operating system, and literal, as we look through the windows from hollywood imagery into reality.

In a way this piece reminds me of my first trip to New Orleans in 1995. All you really saw of New Orleans on TV before that was either the Superdome for football games or a romanticized look at the garden district with its plantation homes or Bourbon street during Mardi Gras. When I got there I was shocked to see the reality was much grimier and run down than what media had led me to believe. Ah, the innocence of youth!

filmtext

filmtext

2002, Mark Amerika

source: http://www.altx.com/who.is.Mark.Amerika.html

Mark Amerika was named one of the top 100 innovators by Time magazine as part of their series on artists, scientists, entertainers, and philosophers. He got a Master's degree from Brown University and works as both a writer and artist.

Filmtext, part three of a series, was originally commissioned by Playstation 2 and was conceived as a highly ambitious multimedia event. I say event because in order to get the full effect, not only did one need to visit the website, but there is also an mp3 soundtrack, there were museum installations, an ebook, and live performances. The first two parts of the series were Grammatron and PHON:E:ME

source: http://www.altx.com/mp3/filmtext.html

The live performances of Filmtext consisted of the artist himself acting as narrator while the sound artist he collaborated, Twine, would remix his voice and add the distorted version back into the performance.Amerika says "I'm just wondering how to take some of these ideas (techniques) and use them to amplify these writerly effects in live performance. I found that using the net, the WWW, was very helpful. So that in Lucerne, while we were doing the live, improvisational sound-writing remix, I was also projecting my laptop's wireless connection to the WWW and grabbing data off the network in real-time and sampling what I needed from it right into the new story, remixing as I wrote it, and then using the sounds to further distort the narrative's generative meaning (or meaning-potential)."

Filmtext attracted me because the site is designed along a very science fiction inspired template complete with futuristic text, alien landscapes in the background, an unusual and alien sounding soundtrack, and interactive displays all of which create an ambience of mystery.

Bindigirl

Prema Murthy, 1999

There is sometimes a fine line between pornography and art. With Bindigirl, Prema Murthy explores that line. With the site she creates a fictional character Bindigirl, who is an online cam girl. Through this character she explores the concepts of voyeurism versus participation, ownership of sexuality, and how we use the technology we develop. She says "bindi is meant to poke fun at how we have used these tools so far to achieve a so-called "higher existence" and "greater cultural understanding." She also uses the Bindi dot as censorship as commentary of how out religious icons have lost their meaning as we've "progressed."
"The idea of the bindi originated to symbolize the sacred third eye. It also came to signify women's marital status in India. But even now the idea of the bindi for Indian girls has become totally decorative. Back in the day it was made with red powder. Now they're made from disposable stickers you can stick on. So, even in India the meaning has been distorted. There's been another layer of distortion added through its co-opting by pop media and pop culture. Now the bindi has become this trendy fad but women in Queens who wear bindis still get harassed. There's this whole gang of people who call themselves "dot busters" and they harass these women and commit violent crimes against them. In Bindigirl, the round circles I placed over body parts was to play with this idea of what is the sacred and what can be bought. For example, in an art gallery, a red dot by a piece of art it means its been sold. "

I found this site interesting in that it is close enough to pornography to make one feel guilty when looking at it in class, like I might get in trouble, which is undoubtedly one of the buttons she is trying to push. There is also a great deal of humor in the site. If you select the "chat" option you get treated to a cybersex session that is anything but sexy!

Group Project

When we did the self portrait project, we were relating ourselves to the internet. As an active online gamer, that is easy to do as my presence on the internet is more me than me in real life. If you google me, you won't be able to find me. But if you google my online persona, it's the first result you get. Both the self portrait and my part of the group project reflect that.

Of the sites we've looked at as part of our net.art research, the ones that have influenced the development of my part of the group project are as follows:

Halbeath. I liked the use solely of flash, and the addition of sound. I wouldn't have sound in mine if not for that site more than likely. Also their use of real world photography influenced my decision to use the waterfalls outside of Portland, Oregon (these are pictures I took there in 2007) as the location for my character.

a number of the sites, from Superbad to the Bomb Project used the "click around" approach to guiding you through the content, which led me to likewise us that approach to advance through different portions of the narrative..

Halbeath

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
and Takuji Kogo for Candy Factory 2002

This is a multimedia flash film that tells a few different narratives at the same time. The main "story" relates to the story of Halbeath, Scotland where "South Korean Company Hyundai & LG started a project...for the construction of microchip plant... The construction of the factory was delayed by the financial crisis in Asia in those days. The factory was restarted by US Company Motorola since 2000. But now the factory is closed again since they left in 2001." This is the story relayed visually by clicking on the screen. Images of the closed and fenced off plant appear as a blight upon a once pristine landscape.

the song is actually a remix of two different songs. "Arirang" is an old Korean folk song that dates back at least 600 years. there are multiple versions of the song, this particular version was recorded in 1946. the other half is a Scottish folk song "I Ainse Loved a Lass" that also dates back several hundreds of years. both are love songs dealing with loss and help paint a picture of emotional desolation caused by the construction and abandonment of the plant.

The cel phone that forms the main image of the film clip represents Motorola, which is most well known for their cel phones.

Siberian Deal Kathy Rae Huffman and Eva Wohlgemuth, 1995

The mission of the Siberian Deal was, as the producers put it: "...trading real objects and virtual information. At these two levels the project explores values and concepts for East and West. It tries to establish contacts and to find out parameters of communication with people in Russia/Siberia."

In the west, we have grown up with a very specific image of Siberia, given to us by Hollywood and the news media: a harsh, inhospitable, frozen wasteland where the only people are those sent there as punishment for crimes committed against the Soviet Union. This project portrays Siberia differently. It is still harsh, but it is portrayed more warmly, as a quaint, old world region. It focuses less on the environment and more on the people.

Part of the site focuses on the "deals" in which rather than buy stuff form the Siberians, they use items obtained in the west to trade for comparably valued items from Siberia. In that way it acts as more of a cultural exchange between nations and peoples.

An amusing anecdote from the end of the travel log is that they had to communicate through pictures in order to tell the restaurant what they wanted to eat for dinner, which is a nice analogy for the internet since so much of internet communication is done through images.

Something2

Boaz Zippor

"Something2" is an interactive flash page by Boaz Zippor, an Israeli artist born in 1972 now working in Thailand as a photographer. He has an extensive resume as a commercial graphic artist. "Something2" is an earlier example of his web art from 2001, a follow up to an earlier piece called "Something." The work is a blend of abstract visual web art, music, and poetry created in flash. The artist refers to it as "Yet another useless site you never expected" and he's right. But that is in some ways the purpose of web art, to just sit out there, unexpected, and to have people stumble upon it. Once found, the viewer can explore and enjoy it as they please.

It was interesting to watch and play around with the piece as we begin learning flash as it becomes easy to identify elements of the composition and how they were created. For example, the squares at the bottom of the screen work exactly like the buttons we created in class, including rollover graphic changes. One can also make out the tweening and looping going on. One interesting thing I noticed in writing this that I wouldn't have had I not been taking the time to write this is that, over time, the image in the backround changes.

net.art

Superbad
Ben Benjamin 1997

“Superbad” is a website consisting of seemingly random images and stories that link to each other in an apparently endless variety. While the actual purpose of the site is unclear, it mirrors in concept a web version of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Garden of Forking Paths about a book that is written in such a way that it is constantly changing. Superbad is also ever-changing when browsed by a viewer as pages link and link back and forth with no discernable purpose. Initially, the site’s creator, Ben Benjamin, changed the homepage on a daily basis, further randomizing the user’s experience.

It received a 1999 Webby in the “Weird”category, and was one of nine websites featured in the Whitney Museum Biennial in 2000. The Webby awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The Whitney Museum says of Superbad, "The unpredictable and nonlinear experience offered by Superbad mirrors the medium of the web itself."

Benjamin himself had this to say: "People just keep asking me whether the inclusion of Internet art in the Biennial validates Net art. I say that it's already valid -- what I think it does, it makes it look more valid to the art crowd. So all of a sudden because it's in a museum it's not crap anymore?"