special topics: apsu student selections
austin peay state university students enrolled in art 410v special topics: internet art select their favorite works
side effects - nicolas clauss
selected by alex ewin
Nicolas Clauss’ work meets the criteria of being multi-accessible from all over the world and relies on Internet browser technologies. His works consist of paintings and scanned media to which he applies code to allow interactivity with the work. He takes the concept of the painting past the canvas in this sense. This in itself is an interesting use of and old medium and meshing it with something new.
The novelty here seems to be the fact that he has used a programming language, and abstract concept, and combined with what is regarded as a classical fine art. His works can fully exist outside the realm of the Internet and could theoretically have the same impact, since they are paintings. An interesting note is how they would be viewed, that is, not on a wall but through a screen. Clauss’ works use the Internet as a means to propagate his artwork, as opposed to using the Internet as its medium. This gives his pieces another level of interactivity in that they can be experienced without hardware or software limitations.
In “side effects,” he has combined interactivity with a surrealists twist even in the loading screen. As the mouse moves around, an odd figure follows your silhouette with its eyes. In addition, as the silhouette ventures towards the edges, the audio changes as well adding to the creepy feeling this piece seeks to illustrate.
call and response - risd tv
selected by jarrod walkerThe current trend in video sharing on the internet is dominated by the likes of YouTube, Google Video and other similar services. It is a straight-forward system of users uploading videos with tags to help in wading through the vast repositories. The Rhode Island School of Design’s RISD.tv has approached video sharing in a new way. Users view and upload video responses via the “Lepton” interface. This intuitive design presents the ever-growing collection of videos with literal threads connecting each submission with others that users have connected to it.
This approach differs greatly from the rest of the video sharing world. Videos are not uploaded to simply share. Users submit their videos as responses to previously uploaded pieces. The result is an organic growth of interconnected ideas that go beyond mere entertainment. It is more than interactive. It is democratic. The base interface is provided and the art becomes the product of every user, ready to change when the next set of responses are submitted and new connections made.
do you want love or lust - claude closky
selected by brett shumakerClaude Closky was born in Paris, France in 1963 and trained at the École Normale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. Do You Want Love or Lust? was released on December 11th 1997. I came across this piece on rhizome.org and it immediately sucked me in and I couldn’t stop clicking. Do You Want Love or Lust? begins by asking the viewer that question. Make your decision and continue to the next question, which has two more answers to choose from. The piece feels like a pop culture psychological quiz that makes you feel that after several random questions, some profound, inner truth about your personality will be revealed. Page after page, question after question. Some of them make you think and others just make you laugh. The seemingly endless string of questions keeps you clicking through the piece making you wonder what it will tell you about yourself. The more time you spend going through the questions, the more you start to think about your answers and what the questions would be if you had chosen the other option. You start to consider your choices even though the next question is completely unrelated to the previous. Soon you begin to almost judge yourself; thinking about what your answer says about you. You end up working towards the profound inner truth you were waiting to have revealed to you.
great wall of china - simon biggs
selected by heather leeThe process for looking for a piece for Terminal has been an interesting one. I have been looking for days and days now, trying to find something that speaks to me in some particular way. Choosing something for a gallery seems like an important decision - don't want any crap, right? Also, I struggled with how to evaluate a piece; do I go by my reaction, by the scope of the work that it seemed to take, or the visual and/or audio aspect? After hours of browsing, I decided that I wanted to choose something with at least some interactivity. While I don’t feel that not all Net Art needs to requires the participation of the audience, interactivity is an integral part of our everyday Internet experience, and that to me should be reflected in the work I chose.
The piece that I have ultimately chosen, based on interactivity, scope, and plain ol’ running out of time, is the Great Wall of China project by Simon Biggs (http://hosted.simonbiggs.easynet.co.uk/wall/thewall.htm). Surprisingly, this work was created in 1996. It is, in essence, an exploration of words in a non-linear way. A database of words – only words, not phrases – is used to create phrases that are randomly generated when the user mouses over them. The images that go along with these rapidly changing words relates to human anatomy – hands are a common theme. The images are a mix of numbers and hand imagery, along with words that move almost too fast to read. The work speaks to me about memory and language – of words disappearing as soon as they are realized or linked together. There is no record of what has been created. There is only a collection to derive from, much like what we ourselves must do when communicating. But even as the words are in English and phrased in ways we could understand, their rapid change reminds me of the speed at which things pass by, and of technology’s ability to outpace us, as the creators of that technology. Technically speaking, I like the work for it’s interactivity but also it’s simplicity.
An additional thought about art on the Internet. It is an odd sort of gallery environment, where the audience doesn't know what's there, or when any particular piece will no longer be available. A good portion of the things I was really interested in - reading in a compilation book, or mentioned on another site - would no longer be available. Digital work is by nature ephemeral, and with Internet the length of existence can be unpredictable. Take our sites, for example. One crash, and the site can be down. Also, the relevance of a work erodes, it seems, much quicker when presented on a medium that is constantly evolving. Older works can no longer be viewed when their plug-ins are invalid; but an artist can not create anything too advanced technology-wise, if they wish to have any kind of audience.
the negative motivation project - sylvère armange
selected by matt bullQuoting the about page, "Tetris is a game with a very strong negative motivation. You never see what you have done well, and only your mistakes are seen on the screen, and you always want to correct them." Indeed that is the crux of The Negative Motivation Project, which is viewable in both English and French. It takes a relatively familiar format, the game of Tetris, and glorifies the motivation behind playing it. Thanks to the interactivity of the Internet, viewers are given an opportunity to play an Adobe Flash version of the game. Losing "scores," represented by screenshots of the final moment of play, are saved in a gallery, which is arranged by number of holes left. Viewers should also note the Extras page, which, among other things, posts a bar graph with data concerning the screenshot distribution by number of holes left.
The site is simple, clean, and notably minimalistic. Text and image tends to be white reversed out of black, and even the navigation text pays homage to the pixilated text of Tetris' time, though other text is a more contemporary sans-serif. Considering that Tetris is well known for its square-heavy aesthetic, the game and the subsequent screenshots have a great variety of reversed out blocks on the black background so far as their position on screen is concerned. It should be noted that a long standing tradition of vertical scrolling on websites makes the gallery page particularly unusual. The gallery's horizontal scroll keeps the page from feeling off balance aesthetically, but does nothing to keep the page from feeling a little empty.
Generally speaking, the motivation to continue playing Tetris is negative. Theoretically a game of Tetris can go on forever, but because of the inaccuracies of the human element, players inevitably end the game prematurely. In this, all Tetris players know it is only a matter of time before they lose. They also see their mistakes displayed before them in the form of holes between the blocks. Each mistake requires a certain amount of compensation to recover from the loss of adequate playing space, forcing players to constantly beat themselves, rather than an actual opponent.
Because each screenshot in the gallery represents a different game session, and because each session is virtually, perhaps even absolutely, irreproducible, each screenshot is unique, so as a result of the stark black and white scheme, players' mistakes are displayed in sharp contrast. In some ways, the gallery is a "hall of shame" instead of a high score board—a common element in video games. If not by their own losing performance, the gallery serves to even more negatively motivate players by showing them ways others have lost.
island of consciousness - mario klingmann and oleg marakov
selected by ryan sampleThis piece of artwork has a very central idea and that is the randomness of the work. The piece came about from two separate pieces from each of the two creators. One piece was generating random images; the other was generating random sounds. It was obvious that with the two combined; a very interesting piece would be born.
The piece works by generating random photos from Flickr.com and arranging them with a random soundtrack. With both components being random, the experience is never the same. If two people were to look at the art at the same time, they would both get a different collection of photos.
The photos are random, but follow an associative stream-of-consciousness rule. Basically, each new image shares at least one tag with the previous one. This can help to create a theme to the piece by accident. The soundtrack is built upon an idea to run multiple mp3 players parallel in shuffle mode just like musicians playing different instruments. Layer one plays synth background pads, layer two is the piano track, layer three hold ambient atmospheres, and layer four contains all kinds of different sound effects.
Obviously the interesting thing about this artwork is that is can never be the same. However, something else that is interesting is how sound and image can relate to each other. The images themselves are not disturbing. They are not even meant to be disturbing. They come from a popular website where thousands of people upload their photos. However, add music and some transition effects to these photos and the piece changes shape. It adds an entire different dimension to the art that can’t be achieved with out both medias together.
This piece is a good example of work that is made to be viewed on the Internet because it is not possible anywhere else. There is no other place that has such a huge collection of photos from all over the world. The music could be recorded and played in an installation somewhere. However, the random generation of the photos is only applicable through the web.
Island of Consciousness is a perfect example of medias coming together, not only the music and video, but the use of the Internet as well. It leaves the viewer to decide what the piece is about and that is always a good thing.
