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1997 JUL 24
Web Artist 2/2
JIM ANDREWS, CANADA
WEB ART: NEW ART?
Here's a golden oldie: 'Art doesn't progress though the materials
change.' T.S. Eliot said something like that. Is it true? Does
cinema, for instance, or photography, or recorded sound represent
a progress in art? Or are they just changed materials?
It seems clear that art doesn't progress in the sense that art does
not get better and better over time. This is different from many
scientific bodies of knowledge, for instance. Compare physics three
hundred years ago with physics today. Physics has progressed in a
way that art has not.
But this doesn't mean that art should get cracking and progress in
the same ways physics has. Physics and mathematics form relatively
unified bodies of knowledge -- or are forever being drawn
together into bodies -- and new results in physics and math
draw on previous results in a way that doesn't hold when applied
to successive works of art or even generations of art, though the
debt artists acknowledge to previous artists is real. But one
artist's work does not generally follow from a previous artist's
work in the same sense that modern calculus follows from the work
of Newton and Leibnitz, for instance.
Postmodernism follows from Modernism certainly in a chronological
sense and Postmodern works are often reacting against certain
modernist tendencies and yet informed by them and attempting to do
something more capacious and better attuned to contemporaneity, and
even expanding on questions first taken up in modernist works (such
as Eliot's line) or reworking the questions or giving them very
different answers. Yet even though this is true, the world of art
is more discrete than the world of science that possesses a kind of
continuity and progression -- even amid revolutions --
that is foreign to art.
"To me, explorations of what seem to be an almost
ideogrammatic or hieroglyphical language emerging, in part,
from the experience of the contemporary graphical user
interface (though that's only part of the phenomenon)
are among the most fascinating areas of artistic
endevour occurring on the Web."
MEDIA AS MODES OF EXPERIENCE
I think cinema and photography and recorded sound -- all new
forms from the twentieth century -- are not just new in their
materials of celluloid, dark-room materials, and recording
tape (now digital) etc. The interesting work done in those media
is not translatable to an earlier media. The ways they mean, the
world views they show, the sensory experience of them, the artistry
involved is not reproducible in other media. Interesting work in
any medium inhabits the unique dimensions of the medium steadfastly.
New technologies -- which are often artistic media -- are
extensions of the senses or body or nervous system or memory or
cognitive structures. The telephone is an extension of the ear.
The car, the legs; the microscope and telescope, the eyes. Written
language, the memory and the very experience of living.
Jean Baudrillard, the French McLuhan of the nineties, has remarked
on the cinematic quality of his experience in America, of the
cinematic quality of life in America. Artistic media are extensions
of our cognitive structures for arranging and making sense of the
world. They change us, change how we experience the world and
ourselves. We make sense of the world, of our experience, by
telling ourselves a story in the language, images, sounds,
and songs we know.
THE UNION OF 20C ELECTRONIC MEDIA ++
So what does this have to do with Web art? Well, I take it that
Web art will be as distinctive as photography or cinema or recorded
sound in its status as an artistic medium. Of course, currently it
can handle photography and other digital images but still is not
suited to sound or moving pictures. That will change, presumably.
But it also can contain text in a more crucial role than any of
the above. And it can contain neath text (whether this is HTML
or Java or Javascript or Jscript, or ASP, etc.) that enables types
of experiences at least difficult to simulate in the other media.
It is a multi-media and extremely flexible in its elements.
The Web and the computer take all the electric artistic media of
the twentieth century and amalgamate them into one medium. And
throw in the telephone, live video, the postal system (only much
much faster), television, the good old printing press, etc. At
this point it seems to resemble an artistic medium less than a
communications empire, perhaps -- but make no mistake --
it is a single medium.
Currently, the skills required to produce multi-media span
the cultures of art and science, so Web artists tend to be unusual
birds possessing not only the associativity of the artist but also
the analytical and even programming acumen of the scientist.
Consequently, a lot of relatively innovative Web art is synthetic
of the cultures of art and science.
Often this translates into Star Trek with a line of poetry
here and there and some fantasy art thrown in for good measure.
But at a deeper level, the multi-media combination of text,
image, etc. that obtains on the Web, the reintroduction of the
written word into the whole modus operandi of what will presumably
replace television, and the fusion the Web embodies of scientific
and artistic culture, together with the active, participatory
nature of driving the beastie as a user, all these factors pose
to me a new kind of media literacy, a new kind of art, and an
art that comprehends the logical and the emotive associations
of artistry.
But before talking about an example of such a fusion (Neuromancical
as it may be) allow me first to talk about a site emanating
strongly from a less profoundly nerdy hemisphere.
DIANE FENSTER -- THE ATTIC WINDOW
Diane Fenster's site,
The Attic Window, consists of five "Web
installations," an impressive portfolio of commercial digital
graphics, and a statement and resume which includes a link to an
interview. Fenster is a master of Photoshop. Her compositions layer
and blend photographic, scanned, and other elements in compelling
juxtapositions suggestive of visual narrative or perhaps a more
associative poetical form. Oh yes, definitely a more associative
form: Fenster herself cites the influence of Dada and Surrealism
upon her work. Certainly she has developed a seductive, poetically
suggestive sensibility of association. She juxtaposes, layers, and
blends images together much like poets overlay incidents,
observations, and metaphors.
Each of the installations consists of many graphical works
accompanied with texts that develop the theme of the particular
installation in a literary vein. My favorite of her installations
is Hide and Seek, which consists of thirteen
"cantos". A canto, is one of the subdivisions of a long
poem. Fenster's cantos, however, are quite short: they consist of
one of her amazing graphics together with a short quotation from
the Chilean surrealist poet Vicente Huidobro. However, each canto
is also linked by a keyword to various far-flung sites on
the Web (one link per canto).
Each canto follows the same format. They all contain an image
together with a title Fenster has given the image. The title
always has a word that is hyper textual which, when clicked,
leads you completely away from Fenster's site (she doesn't even
hang on with a frame -- good for her!). And each canto also
has a quote from one of Huidobro's haunting, lyrical texts that
often deal (sometimes simultaneously) with loss and cosmic gain.
FENSTER AND THE VISUOLINGUO
And each canto contains the words "text in image".
Indeed, though you must look carefully, the Huidobro text is
contained within the image. Hide and Seek is an unusually
Siamese conjunction of text and image and, as such, embodies a
kind of deep experimentation in the new language-image
emerging on the Web where language and image are joined at the
hip to form new language, new image. To me, explorations of what
seem to be an almost ideogrammatic or hieroglyphical language
emerging, in part, from the experience of the contemporary
graphical user interface (though that's only part of the
phenomenon) are among the most fascinating areas of artistic
endevour occurring on the Web. And Fenster's explorations are
moving and emotionally resonant with the accompanying loss
and discovery.
Loss of language as we have known it, loss of image also as we
have known it. But discovery of new modes of living and experience.
The writings of Plato contain a sense of loss in the transition to
the written word. He knew what was being lost in the shift to a
literate culture: the cognitive ways of the oral culture. Yet he
pressed on nonetheless with his brilliant writing. So too are we
experiencing a shift to the digital in matters of literacy and art.
The multi-media nature of the shift, which blends the word
and the image, sound, film, the telephone, the printing press,
etc., into one medium carries with it deep changes in how people
communicate and how we understand ourselves. New language, new
mind.
Hide and Seek. What is hidden? What is sought? Well,
Fenster is an artist and so lets you seek your own particular
hidden meanings and associations. She approaches loss from two
primary directions: romantic and bodily. The images in Hide
and Seek often deal in parts of the body, often in various
states of disrepair. It's about pain and loss and re-emergence,
memory and forgetting, death and rebirth.
The content concentrates on these familiar elements of growing
and waking up, going under again and breaking free. The final
accomplishment -- the work itself -- is admirable.
It grew into something rare and beautiful and wise and unexpected.
RAZORFISH
Razorfish is a very ambitious and thoroughly professional
site featuring many different artists and a considerable body
of work that takes several hours to surf completely. When I
first visited, I had a tremendous sense of excitement about the
site and the work there. However, on going back several times
to write this article, I don't feel the work is as strong as
I originally did.
The primary reason, I suspect, is that the work on the site
lacks the sort of depth present in Fenster's work, often,
though it is usually better presented in terms of the design
of the pages -- and the comparison is a little unfair,
given the quality of Fenster's work. If you have ever perused
professional design magazines, you know the feeling. Most of
the work is expert in technique, brilliant in color but, as
happens too often in design magazines, one look is enough.
It captures attention in the way beautiful advertisements
do: briefly.
Nonetheless, the variety of the work, both formally and
otherwise, the innovative nature of some of it, and the careful,
beautiful design of the overall site are noteworthy.
Razorfish consists of six sub-sites:
- the blue dot, which in turn contains work from
sixteen different artists;
- bunko, which apparently contains games (though I
was never able to get any of these working);
- theNvelope, which contains futuristic, multi-media
presentations of an imagined (and disappointing) future of the
Web;
- this girl, situation comedy presented in various
episodes;
- typoGRAPHIC, an interesting type of Web essay on
typography;
and
- Disinformation ("the sub culture search
engine").
Also, there is a sense of experimentation to the site sometimes,
of their having tried to become imaginatively acclimatized to
the Web as an artistic medium in its own right rather than just
importing material from other media.
The most ambitious project in this vein is theNvelope.
It consists of seven vignettes that oscillate between imagined
immersion in the Web of the future to comments on the nature of
the Web now. The project is ambitious in its use of
Shockwave (a plugin from Macromedia). In one of the
vignettes, we are apparently applying for a NuMate and are given
the choice of at most nine appendages that may adorn our
apparently synthetic NuMate. The graphics are supposed to be
funny and the situation is supposed to be relevant.
In another, we hear of the destruction of the Web from a voice
shouting about the general collapse of the Internet (set in the
near future) and wasn't it good for eighteen months. In another,
we're presented with a government page asking us to do our
mandatory poll voting for the day on such questions as
"Which subject should be added to the math requirements
for the sexual reproduction license?" The choices are
"topography (sic), fluid dynamics, and control
theory".
RAZORFISH: SUPERIOR SIZZLE
Still, it isn't a salesman's pitch about the Web. It's a kind
of an anti-sell pitching innovation. Razorfish is
in the business of designing Web services. Superior sizzle.
Check it out for yourself.
The work of J.K. Potter in The Blue Dot is fascinating
(still morphs). Also at The Blue Dot is some fine poetical
work by Yael Kanarek (Love Letter From a World of Awe),
great pictures by Jill Greenberg (The Manipulator), and
Dick For a Day (various artists, site maintained
by Yael Kanarek).
The typoGRAPHIC site is also rewarding for those with an
interest in language and typography. Certainly it's the best
thing I've found on the Web concerned with typography, along
with Microsoft TrueType, a site on new Web tools of
typography.
A&T 05/29/97
And this girl is amusing and well done if slightly
annoying in its wholesale adoption of situation comedy to
the Web. Still, you get the impression she'll get that job
she wants (if she already hasn't by virtue of her site).
It's like grunge-nerd Mary Tyler Moore.
WHAT IS A WEB ARTIST?
Expectations run unusually high for art on the Web, just as
expectations run high regarding all things on the Web. Sites
like Razorfish show some innovative elements amid a
site whose primary imperative is to attract customers. So
they must sizzle but don't really need the steak. They must be
able to supply a look and feel and organizational coherence and
strong function to their clients' Web sites. They aren't
professionally interested in content, per se. But, then,
strong art on the Web -- as anywhere else --
is a very personal endeavor, as seen in Fenster's site.
Perhaps it's encouraging, in a sense, that of the two sites,
Fenster's is the more appealing. It's primarily done by one
person rather than a very talented company. It can be a deeply
collaborative medium, however, like film.
What is a Web artist? I haven't answered the question.
But the question, at this point, is more valuable than any
answer we might formulate. The possibilities remain open.
The art is young and leaping.
The Attic Window
www.art.net/Studios/Visual/Fenster/ritofab_Home/fenster3.html
Razorfish: typoGRAPHIC
www.rsub.com/typo
In part one of Web Artist,
A&T 07/17/97, Jim shares his thoughts on the Web,
the page, futurism, and responsibility.
Would you like to see your work in Zn?
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