Icanhascheezburger com is a website founded as a repository for

Net Works

Net Works offers an inside look into the process of successfully developing thoughtful, innovative digital media. In many practice-based art texts and classrooms, technology is divorced from the socio-political concerns of those using it. Although there are many resources for media theorists, practice-based students sometimes find it difficult to engage with a text that fails to relate theoretical concerns to the act of creating. Net Works strives to fill that gap. Using websites as case studies, each chapter introduces a different style of web project—from formalist play to social activism to data visualization—and then includes the artists’ or entrepreneurs’ reflections on the particular challenges and outcomes of developing that web project. Scholarly introductions to each section apply a theoretical frame for the projects. Combining practical skills for web authoring with critical perspectives on the web, Net Works is ideal for courses in new media design, art, communication, critical studies, media and technology, or popular digital/internet culture.

xtine burrough is a media artist, educator, and co-author of Digital Foundations. She believes art shapes social experiences by mediating consumer culture and envisioning rebellious practices. As an educator at California State University, Fullerton, she bridges the gaps between art and design histories, theories, and practices. Her website is: www. missconceptions.net.

http://www.missconceptions.net
http://www.missconceptions.net
Net Works Case studies iN Web art aNd desigN

Edited by xtine burrough

First published 2012 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2012 Taylor & Francis

The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Net works : case studies in Web art and design / edited by xtine burrough. – 1st ed. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Art and the Internet. 2. Web sites–Case studies. I. Burrough, Xtine. II. Title: Case studies in Web art and design. NX180.I57N47 2011 776–dc23

2011022626

ISBN: 978-0-415-88221-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-88222-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-84794-7 (ebk)

Typeset in Garamond by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Printed and bound in the United States of America by Walsworth Publishing Company, Marceline, MO on acid- free paper.

One wedding + one manuscript: for Paul Martin Lester, my December groom, whom I married just two weeks before sending this manuscript to the publisher. Thank you, always, for your support.

vii

CoNteNts

List of Figures x Acknowledgments xiii List of Contributors xiv

Introduction to Net Works 1 X T I N e B U R R O U G H

PART I Formalism and Conceptual Art 3

Formalism and Conceptual Art, introduction 3 e D W A R D A . S H A N K e N

1 Color Field Paintings (Browser) 7 M I C H A e L D e M e R S

2 YouTube as a Subject 16 C O N S T A N T D U L L A A R T

PART II Collections and Communities 25

Virtual Communities: An Interview with Howard Rheingold 25 X T I N e B U R R O U G H A N D H O W A R D R H e I N G O L D

3 WTF?! 27 R O B e R T N I D e F F e R

4 SF Garden Registry 38 A M Y F R A N C e S C H I N I , D A V I D L U , A N D M Y R I e L M I L I C e V I C

PART III Crowdsourcing and Participation 47

Cheaper by the Dozen: An Introduction to “Crowdsourcing” 47 T R e B O R S C H O L z

5 Mechanical Olympics 55 X T I N e B U R R O U G H

6 Google Maps Road Trip 66 P e T e R B A L D e S A N D M A R C H O R O W I T z

viii CoNteNts

PART IV Data Visualization 76

On Data Visualization 76

7 Superfund365 79 B R O O K e S I N G e R

8 Pastiche 90 C H R I S T I A N M A R C S C H M I D T

PART V Error and Noise 100

Seductive errors: A Poetics of Noise, introduction 100 M A R K N U N e S

9 Luscious 104 F e R N A N D A V I é G A S A N D M A R T I N W A T T e N B e R G

10 Tumbarumba 111 e T H A N H A M

PART VI Surveillance 121

Web 2.0 Surveillance and Art, introduction 121 C H R I S T I A N F U C H S

11 F ’Book: What My Friends Are Doing in Facebook 128 L e e W A L T O N

12 Traceblog 137 e D U A R D O N A V A S

PART VII Tactical Media and Democracy 145

Tactical Media, introduction 145 C R I T I C A L A R T e N S e M B L e

13 The Good Life/La Buena Vida 148 C A R L O S M O T T A W I T H e V A D í A z , F R e C K L e S S T U D I O ,

A N D S T A M A T I N A G R e G O R Y

14 Oiligarchy 158 M O L L e I N D U S T R I A / P A O L O P e D e R C I N I

PART VIII Open Source 166

Open Source Creativity, introduction 166 D A V I D M . B e R R Y

CoNteNts ix

15 The Real Costs 170 M I C H A e L M A N D I B e R G

16 Add- Art: Sharing, Freedom, and Beer 179 S T e V e L A M B e R T

PART IX Hacking and Remixing 189

Hacking and Remixing, introduction 189 S T e F A N S O N V I L L A - W e I S S

17 Pigeonblog 192 B e A T R I z D A C O S T A

18 JoyceWalks 200 C O N O R M C G A R R I G L e

PART X Performance and Analog Counterparts 210

Performance and Analog Counterparts, introduction 210 K e N G O L D B e R G

19 The Gandhi Complex: The Mahatma in Second Life 212 J O S e P H D e L A P P e

20 Alerting Infrastructure! Challenging the Temporality of Physical versus Virtual environments 221 J O N A H B R U C K e R - C O H e N

Index 228

x

Figures

1.1 Color Field Paintings (Browser) by Michael Demers 7 1.2 Color Field Paintings (Browser) by Michael Demers 8 2.1 Cory Arcangel (US), Blue Tube, 2007 20 2.2 Ben Coonley (US), Be Cool We’ll Be Back 100% in a Bit, 2008.

The title references YouTube.com’s message during site maintenance 21 2.3 Ben Coonley (US), Opening Ceremonies, 2008. Both screenshots of Ben

Coonley’s work were taken from the series, Seven Video Responses to Constant Dullaart’s YouTube as a Subject 21

2.4 Martin Kohout (Cz), Moonwalk, 2008 22 2.5 Adam Cruces (US), 3D YouTube for Constant Dullaart, 2008 22 2.6 Julien Levesque (FR), Most Viewed, All Time, All Category, All

Languages, 2008 23 3.1 WTF?! character login screen 30 3.2 WTF?! NPCs 31 3.3 PROXY interfaces (1999–2002) 32 3.4 unexceptional.net interfaces (2003–2006) 33 3.5 WTF?! SDK player editor 35 4.1 Amy Franceschini, David Lu, and Myriel Milicevic, SF Garden

Registry can be viewed at gardenregistry.org 38 4.2 A hand- drawn map for the SF Garden Registry 39 4.3 Upload Image page on SF Garden Registry 40 4.4, 4.5 Making Hand Drawn Maps: Redrawing the city on paper should

be just as easy as changing the “real” city. We first drew maps by hand including animations with the intention that this vernacular should influence people to feel like the city is not something that should be left to be planned by architects or urban planners but something that can be modified with as little effort as using a colored pencil, a seed, or a shovel. 43

5.1 Mechanical Turk Workers performing Olympic events for the Mechanical Olympics, 2008 and 2010 56

5.2 Sign created for Mechanical Olympics participants to download and wear in their videos 60

5.3 Manchester- based Wise Move Dance Group perform fencing for the Mechanical Games. © Cornerhouse, Manchester. Photograph by Alison Kennedy 63

5.4 Participants in Manchester perform an Olympic- style warm- up before creating videos for the Mechanical Games. © Simon Webb Photography 63

http://www.gardenregistry.org
http://www.unexceptional.net
http://www.YouTube.com
list oF Figures xi

5.5 Gold medalists receiving their awards at the Mechanical Games Awards Ceremony, Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK, October 3, 2010 63

6.1 Screenshot of the Google Maps Road Trip project in action 66 6.2 Peter Baldes on a green screen in his home set- up for Google Maps Road

Trip. Marc Horowitz appears in the inset box 68 6.3 A view of Marc Horowitz’s home office at the time of his virtual road

trip 69 6.4 Peter and Marc chat with road trip guests on Ustream 70 6.5 Peter and Marc are leaving Albuquerque en route to Virginia 71 6.6 Peter Baldes and Marc Horowitz complete the road trip in Virginia 74 7.1 Superfund365.org screenshot (McAdoo Associates, day 34 of Superfund365) 79 7.2 A view of the CeRCLIS interface. 81 7.3 Quanta Resources Superfund Site, Bergen County, NJ (day 1 of

Superfund365) 87 8.1 Pastiche displays keywords associated with New York City neighborhoods

in an immersive spatial view 91 8.2 Pastiche references the vertical architecture of Manhattan 92 8.3 A list view allows alphabetical browsing of keywords by neighborhood 93 8.4 Neighborhood labels are surrounded by their related keywords extracted

from blog articles 93 8.5 The “hockey stick” graph originally published by the IPCC and

popularized by An Inconvenient Truth. Image credit: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Figure 6.10. Cambridge University Press. Used with permission from the IPCC 95

8.6 An aerial perspective view shows the contours of the city 97 9.1 The RGB color model mapped to a cube 105 9.2 Buckets of color 106 9.3 Buckets with more pixels represented as bigger cubes 106 9.4 A circle template 107 9.5 The resulting image where color is filled in by the software program

developed for Luscious 107 9.6 Italian Blues, part of the Luscious Gallery collection, Fernanda Viégas

and Martin Wattenberg 2010 108 9.7 Warm Glow, part of the Luscious Gallery collection, Fernanda Viégas and

Martin Wattenberg 2008 108 9.8 Escape, part of the Luscious Gallery collection, Fernanda Viégas and

Martin Wattenberg 2008 109 9.9 Absolut, part of the Luscious Gallery collection, Fernanda Viégas and

Martin Wattenberg 2010 109 9.10 Valentino, part of the Luscious Gallery collection, Fernanda Viégas and

Martin Wattenberg 2010 109 9.11 The final Holland America Line composition created for Luscious by

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg 109 10.1 “Little M@tch Girl” by Heather Shaw as displayed by Tumbarumba on

the New York Times website 111 10.2 Detecting a face where none exists. Photograph by Pam Cash,

CC- BY-NC- ND 112

http://www.Superfund365.org
xii list oF Figures

10.3 “Temp” by Greg van eekhout as displayed by Tumbarumba on the New York Times website 115

11.1 Lee Walton performs “Conrad Bakker is tending to the houseplants” for F ’Book: What My Friends Are Doing in Facebook 128

11.2 Lee Walton performs a status update for F ’Book: What My Friends Are Doing in Facebook 135

12.1, 12.2 Traceblog by eduardo Navas 137 13.1 The Good Life/La Buena Vida by Carlos Motta 148 13.2 The Good Life/La Buena Vida Internet archive, Carlos Motta 156 14.1 The start- up screen for the game Oiligarchy, Paolo Pedercini/

molleindustria 158 14.2, 14.3, 14.4 Oiligarchy game interface, Paolo Pedercini/molleindustria 160 15.1 The Real Costs by Michael Mandiberg 170 15.2 The Real Costs on the American Airlines website 172 16.1 Mock-up demonstrating Add-Art on the New York Times website 179 16.2 Add-Art content management system 183 16.3 Shows promoted on the Add-Art website 184 16.4 Art replaces advertisements on the Salon.com website 185 16.5, 16.6 Art replaces advertisements on the Foxnews.com website 186 16.7, 16.8 Add- Art on the New York Magazine website’s Best Lawyers

advertorial page 186 17.1 A pigeon wearing the Pigeonblog “backpack,” consisting of a sensor,

GPS, and GSM modules during the project premiere at the 01 Festival in San José, California, 2006 192

17.2 Releasing the pigeons at the 01 Festival 193 17.3 Screenshot of the Pigeonblog website 194 17.4 A Pigeonblog pollution visualization 197 18.1, 18.2 Two views of the O’Connell Bridge as interpreted by JoyceWalks

participants 200 18.3 Screenshot of JoyceWalks created in Paris 201 18.4 Screenshot of JoyceWalks created in Tokyo 203 19.1 The Artist’s Mouse by Joseph DeLappe 212 19.2 Quake/Friends by Joseph DeLappe 213 19.3 dead- in-iraq by Joseph DeLappe 214 19.4 MGandhi chats with another avatar in Second Life, Joseph DeLappe 215 19.5 Joseph DeLappe walks his avatar through Second Life using a treadmill 216 19.6 Joseph DeLappe with his 17-foot cardboard Gandhi © Christine A. Butler 218 20.1 The Source © Greyworld 222 20.2 Samson, Chris Burden, 1985. Photograph © zwirner and Wirth, NY 224 20.3 System diagram of Alerting Infrastructure! 2003 web view,

Jonah Brucker- Cohen 225 20.4 Alerting Infrastructure! online hit counter 225 20.5 Alerting Infrastructure! installation view in 2006, Jonah Brucker- Cohen 226

http://www.Salon.com
http://www.Foxnews.com
xiii

aCkNoWledgmeNts

I would like to thank my colleagues who have encouraged and inspired me to write this book at California State University, Fullerton, including Paul Martin Lester, Tony Fellow, Rick Pullen, emily erickson, Henry Puente, Jason Shephard, Genelle Belmas, Laura Triplett, Coral Ohl, and Mark Latonero. Peers and friends, including Lucy HG, Shani, Crystal Adams, Laurie JC Cella, and Jennifer Justice were equally supportive. Many thanks to each contributor for his/her influence and feedback which shaped the book. Net Works would not have been possible without the support of Routledge. Matt Byrnie understood this project from day one, Carolann Madden intuitively knew how to keep the ball rolling when Matthew left Routledge in the middle of 2010. erica Wetter was instrumental in the final stages. I am eternally grateful for her ability to navigate some of the licensing issues left for her to handle in the eleventh hour. I would like to thank my teachers, both “on and off the mat.” Barbara Bannerman, Cindy Anderson, elizabeth Bolla, and Sasha Papovich kept me relaxed, even in Decem- ber. Thank you, repeatedly, to Christopher James, Steven Kurtz, Charles Recher, ellen Rothenberg, and Humberto Ramirez. Super huge thank you to my students—past, present, and future. Last, I would like to thank my family. Dear Paul Martin Lester, Viola and Bill Burrough, thank you for your continued support.

xiv

CoNtributors

Peter Baldes is a new media artist and educator. As a member of Virginia Common- wealth University’s Painting and Printmaking faculty, his work and teaching focus on the integration of new technologies with the traditions of printmaking, per- formance, and collaborative art works. With a focus on the use of readily available consumer- level digital tools for artistic production, his courses stress the impor- tance of new media history and literacy as well as the significance of the Internet and browser as a new platform for creative expression. Peter has been creating artworks for the web since 1996 and has been teaching since 2001.

David M. Berry is a Lecturer in the Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea University. He writes widely on issues of code and media theory, and his work includes Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source (Pluto Press, 2008), Understanding Digital Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and The Philo- sophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Jonah Brucker- Cohen is a researcher, artist, and writer. He received his PhD in the Dis- ruptive Design Team of the Networking and Telecommunications Research Group (NTRG), Trinity College Dublin. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Communi- cations in the Media, Culture, Communication Department of New York University Steinhardt School of Culture education and Human Development, teaches at Parsons MFA Design + Technology, and has also taught at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunica- tions Program (ITP). He worked as an R&D OpenLab Fellow at eyebeam in New York City in 2006–2007. From 2001 to 2004 he was a Research Fellow in the Human Con- nectedness Group at Media Lab europe. He received his Masters from ITP in 1999 and was an Interval Research Fellow from 1999 to 2001. His work and thesis focuses on the theme of “Deconstructing Networks,” which includes projects that attempt to criti- cally challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience. He is co- founder of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA Group) and a recipient of the ARANeUM Prize sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Art, Science, and Technology and Fundacion ARCO. His writing has appeared in numerous inter- national publications including WIRED Magazine, Make Magazine, Neural, Rhizome. org, Art Asia Pacific, Gizmodo and more, and his work has been shown at events such as DeAF (2003, 2004), Art Futura (2004), SIGGRAPH (2000, 2005), UBICOMP (2002, 2003, 2004), CHI (2004, 2006), Transmediale (2002, 2004, 2008), NIMe (2007), ISeA (2002, 2004, 2006, 2009), Institute of Contemporary Art in London (2004), Whitney Museum of American Art’s ArtPort (2003), Ars electronica (2002, 2004, 2008), Chelsea Art Museum, zKM Museum of Contemporary Art (2004–2005), Museum of Modern Art (MOMA—NYC) (2008), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) (2008).

http://www.Rhizome.org
http://www.Rhizome.org
CoNtributors xv

xtine burrough is a media artist, educator, and co- author of Digital Foundations (New Riders/AIGA, 2009). Informed by the history of conceptual art, she uses social net- working, databases, search engines, blogs, and applications in combination with pop- ular sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Mechanical Turk, to create web communities that promote interpretation and autonomy. xtine believes art shapes social experiences by mediating consumer culture with rebellious practices. As an educator, she bridges the gap between histories, theories, and production in design and new media educa- tion. Her work is archived at www.missconceptions.net.

Critical Art Ensemble (CAe) is a collective of five tactical media practitioners of vari- ous specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photo- graphy, text art, book art, and performance.

Formed in 1987, CAe’s focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. The group has exhib- ited and performed at diverse venues internationally, ranging from the street, to the museum, to the Internet. Museum exhibitions include the Whitney Museum and the New Museum in New York City; the Corcoran Museum in Washington, DC; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chi- cago; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and the Natural History Museum, London.

The collective has written six books, and its writings have been translated into 18 languages. Its book projects include: The Electronic Disturbance (Autonomedia, 1994), Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (Autonomedia, 1996), Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, Eugenic Consciousness (Autonomedia, 1998), Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (Autonomedia, 2001), Molecular Invasion (Autonomedia, 2002), and Marching Plague (Autonomedia, 2006).

Beatriz da Costa is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. She works at the intersection of art, science, and activism. Da Costa co- founded the artist collective “Preemptive Media,” and is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Joseph DeLappe is a media artist/activist and educator. He has been working with electronic and new media since 1983. Projects in online gaming performance, instal- lation, and sculpture have been shown throughout the United States and abroad. A pioneer of gaming performance, much of his work over the past decade has involved taking creative agency in online shooter games and virtual communities. The works engage politics, war, work, play, protest, and human–machine relations, with the intention to critically and conceptually engage while connecting with the everyday; to reify the ordinary into the extraordinary; to intervene in social and political real- ities both real and virtual.

Michael Demers has taught college- level digital art and new media courses since 2007. His work incorporates culture and cultural identity in a synthesis of critical investi- gation and his own adolescent preoccupation with toys and other weird ephemera. He is a member of the White Columns Artist Registry (New York), the Rhizome Curated ArtBase (New Museum, New York), BitStream New Media, and is a core commentator for TINT Arts Lab (London). He received his BFA from Florida Atlan- tic University, an MFA from Ohio University, and a Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Diplom from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich.

http://www.missconceptions.net
xvi CoNtributors

Eva Díaz is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design History at Pratt Institute. Last year she received her PhD from Princeton University for her dissertation titled “Chance and Design: experimentation in Art at Black Mountain College.”

Constant Dullaart (the Netherlands, 1979, Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, Rijk- sakademie Amsterdam) is trained as a video artist, his work has recently focused on the Internet and re- contextualizing found material. His works are widely discussed online. Brian Droitcour writes for Art in America,

Dullaart’s readymades, however, demonstrate his interest in what might be called “default” style—the bland tables of sans serif text and soulless stock photography that frame ads for some of the most common search terms (auto insurance, cheap airline tickets, pornography), baring the underbelly of the Inter- net’s popular use.

But Dullaart’s readymades are more than a formalist exploration of the Internet at its most banal. They are also a study in the relationship of the index to its referent, an issue that Rosalind Krauss connected to the readymade in her 1976 essay “Notes on the Index, Part 1.” Krauss defines indices as “the traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify.” Dullaart is a persistent inves- tigator of new modes of constructing and relating meaning brought about by the Inter- net. He recently quit his job teaching at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and curated several events in Amsterdam, such as the periodically held “Lost and Found” evenings (with his final event in the New Museum), “Contemporary Semantics Beta” in Arti et Amicitiae, and the recently finished exhibition “Versions” in the Dutch Media Art Institute (NIMK). His work is shown internationally in places as the Centre Pompidou in Paris; Art in General and MWNM gallery in New York; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Montevideo, NIMK; de Appel, W139; the Stedelijk Museum, ellen de Bruijne projects, and Gallery West. Dullaart lives/works in Berlin and Amsterdam.

Amy Franceschini (www.futurefarmers.com) is an artist and educator who uses vari- ous media to encourage formats of exchange and production, often in collaboration with other practitioners. An over- arching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. Her projects reveal the history and currents of contra- dictions related to this divide by collectively challenging systems of exchange and the tools we use to “hunt” and “gather.” Using this as a starting point, she often provides a playful entry point and tools for an audience to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry—not only to imagine, but to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.

Amy founded the artists’ collective and design studio Futurefarmers in 1995, and co- founded Free Soil, an international artist collective in 2004. She is currently a visiting faculty member in the MFA program at California College of the Arts and Stanford University.

Freckles Studio is Antonio Serna and Peggy Tan, two artists who live and work in New York. They work with galleries and artists, musicians, and designers such as Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, and Trisha Brown.

Christian Fuchs is Chair and Professor for Media and Communication Studies at Uppsala University’s Department of Informatics and Media Studies. He is also board member of the Unified Theory of Information Research Group, Austria, and editor of tripleC

http://www.futurefarmers.com
CoNtributors xvii

(cognition, communication, co- operation): Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Informa- tion Society. Fuchs is author of more than 120 academic publications, including Inter- net and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age (Routledge 2008) and Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (Routledge, 2010). Together with Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval, he edits the collected volume The Internet and Surveillance (Routledge, 2011). He is coordinator of the research project Social Net- working Sites in the Surveillance Society which is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF ). His website is http://fuchs.uti.at.

Ken Goldberg is craigslist Distinguished Professor of New Media, co- founder and past Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media, and Founding Director of Univer- sity of California, Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture Lecture Series. He is an artist and Professor of Industrial engineering and Operations Research at UC Ber- keley, with secondary appointments in electrical engineering and Computer Science and the School of Information. Goldberg earned his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990. Goldberg has published over 150 peer- reviewed technical papers on algorithms for robotics, automation, and social information filter- ing and holds seven U.S. patents. He is Founding co- Chair of the Ieee Technical Committee on Networked Robots and co- Founder the Ieee Transactions on Auto- mation Science and engineering (T- ASe). Goldberg’s art installations have been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Buenos Aires Biennial, and the ICC in Tokyo. Goldberg was awarded the Presidential Faculty Fellowship in 1995 by President Clinton, the National Science Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1994, the Joseph engelberger Award in 2000, and was named Ieee Fellow in 2005. Ken Goldberg lives in Mill Valley, CA with his daughters and wife, filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain.

Stamatina Gregory is an independent curator and critic. She is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, writing on contemporary landscape photography, militarism, activism, and the media.

The influence of Ethan Ham’s former career in game development can be seen in the art he makes. The artworks are often playful and demonstrate his continuing inter- est in the interaction between an artwork and its beholder. ethan’s artworks often explore themes of translation and mutation. His projects include literary/art hybrids, kinetic sculptures, and Internet- based artworks. ethan is an Assistant Professor of New Media at the City College of New York.

Marc Horowitz is a Los Angeles- based interdisciplinary artist, working primarily with performance, video, and installation. The central concerns driving most of his work have to do with engaging strangers in public and on the Internet around an absurd- ist principle. His projects also aim to engage in a dialogue with a diverse range of subjects from entertainment, advertising, architectural environments, and commerce, to how to find joy and happiness on a day- to-day basis. Continually, the work carries a makeshift, DIY aesthetic; within this world, he is able to encourage and facilitate exchanges of laughter, provocation, problem- solving, and “improved” ways of living. He is constantly making lists of potential inventions, neologisms, money- making schemes, jokes, absurdist drawings, and impromptu actions, which often inform larger projects or reside on his website. His work speaks to “the moment,” reflects and critiques American idealism, expansionism, and capitalism, and parodies pop culture so when successful, it becomes re- appropriated by it.

http://fuchs.uti.at
xviii CoNtributors

Steve Lambert’s father, a former Franciscan monk, and mother, an ex- Dominican nun, imbued the values of dedication, study, poverty, and service to others—qualities which prepared him for life as an artist.

Lambert made international news just after the 2008 U.S. election with the New York Times “Special edition,” a replica of the gray lady announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He is the founder of the Anti- Advertising Agency, lead developer of Add- Art (a Firefox add- on replacing online advertising with art). He was a Senior Fellow at the eyebeam Center for Art and Technology and is faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. He dropped out of high school in 1993.

David Lu (www.vellum.cc) is a nomadic designer and software developer. He writes soft- ware for drawing and mapmaking. David studied design at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy, and has BA degrees in Computer Science, economics, and Psychology from Rutgers College. He is also a member of the Drawing Center’s curated artist registry.

Conor McGarrigle is a Dublin- based artist and researcher. His work is concerned with mapping, psychogeographical exploration of urban space, and the impact of locative technologies on our perception of the city. He received an MFA from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and is currently a researcher at the Graduate School for Creative Arts and Media in Dublin, conducting research into participation in locative media.

Michael Mandiberg sold all of his possessions online on Shop Mandiberg, made perfect copies of copies on AfterSherrieLevine.com, and created web browser plug- ins that highlight the environmental costs of a global economy on TheRealCosts.com. He is a co- author of Digital Foundations and Collaborative Futures. A former Senior Fellow at eyebeam, he is an Assistant Professor at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He lives, works, and rides his bicycle in Brooklyn. His work lives at Mandiberg.com.

Myriel Milicevic is an artist, researcher, and interaction designer based in Berlin. With her Neighbourhood Satellites (www.neighbourhoodsatellites.com) she explores the hidden connections between people and their natural, social, and technical environ- ments. She received her MA from the Interaction Design Institute, Ivrea, Italy and her diploma in Graphic Design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.

Carlos Motta is a Colombian- born interdisciplinary artist and educator. Working pri- marily in photography, video, and installation, he engages with political history by employing strategies used in documentary genres and sociology in order to interro- gate governmental structures, to observe the repercussions of political events, and to suggest alternative ways in which to interpret those histories.

Eduardo Navas researches the crossover of art and media in culture. His production includes art and media projects, critical texts, and curatorial projects. He has pre- sented and lectured about his work and research internationally. Navas collaborates with artists and institutions in various countries to organize events and develop new forms of publication. He has lectured on art and media theory, as well as practice, at various colleges and universities in the United States, including Otis College of Art and Design, San Diego State University, Penn State University, and eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. Navas received his PhD from the Depart- ment of Art and Media History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California in San Diego, and is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Information Science

http://www.vellum.cc
http://www.neighbourhoodsatellites.com
http://www.AfterSherrieLevine.com
http://www.TheRealCosts.com
http://www.Mandiberg.com
CoNtributors xix

and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. He researches the history of Remix in order to understand the principles of remix culture. Selected texts and research projects are available on Remix Theory at http://remixtheory.net. His main website is http://navasse.net.

Robert Nideffer researches, teaches, and publishes in the areas of virtual environments and behavior, interface theory and design, technology and culture, and contemporary social theory. He holds an MFA in Computer Arts (1997) and a PhD in Sociology (1994), and is a Professor in Studio Art and Informatics at University of California, Irvine. Robert has participated in a number of national and international online and offline exhibitions, speaking engagements and panels for a variety of professional conferences.

Mark Nunes teaches courses in New Media Studies at Southern Polytechnic State Uni- versity, where he is also Chair for the Department of english, Technical Commu- nication, and Media Arts. He is author of Cyberspaces of Everyday Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). His most recent work includes an edited collection of essays entitled Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures (Continuum, 2010).

Paolo Pedercini is an artist, independent game designer, and educator. His work inves- tigates the relationship between digital entertainment and ideology. On the Internet he is mostly known as Molleindustria, an entity that re- appropriates video games as tactical and strategic media. He dreams of a world without barriers between high and low culture, where artists desert galleries and museums to inject critical think- ing in mainstream cultural production.

Christian Marc Schmidt is a German/American designer and media artist. Stem- ming from an interest in working with data, his approach is parametric and content- oriented, often resulting in the design of adaptive systems—dynamic models that change form as their content changes. Generally, his work is concerned with evid- ence, disclosure, and the materiality of information, while thematically he is inter- ested in modeling individual experiences and behaviors in aggregate to identify patterns that may help describe a collective identity.

Trebor Scholz is a writer, conference organizer, Assistant Professor in Media and Culture, and Director of the conference series “The Politics of Digital Culture” at the New School in New York City. He also founded the Institute for Distributed Creativity, which is known for its online discussions of critical Internet culture, specifically the ruthless casu- alization of digital labor, ludocapitalism, distributed politics, digital media and learning, radical media activism, and micro- histories of media art. Trebor is co- editor of The Art of Free Cooperation (Autonomedia, 2007), a book about online collaboration, and editor of Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (Routledge, forthcoming). He holds a PhD in Media Theory and a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Forthcoming edited collections by Trebor include The Digital Media Peda- gogy Reader and The Future University (both iDC, 2011). His book chapters, written in 2010, zoom in on the history of digital media activism, the politics of Facebook, limits to accessing knowledge in the United States, and mobile digital labor. His forthcoming monograph offers a history of the social web and its Orwellian economies.

Edward A. Shanken writes and teaches about the entwinement of art, science, and technology with a focus on interdisciplinary practices involving new media. He is a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and a member of the Media Art History faculty at the Donau

http://remixtheory.net
http://navasse.net
xx CoNtributors

University in Krems, Austria. He was formerly Universitair Docent of New Media at UvA, executive Director of the Information Science + Information Studies program at Duke University, and Professor of Art History and Media Theory at Savannah Col- lege of Art and Design. Recent and forthcoming publications include essays on art and technology in the 1960s, historiography, and bridging the gap between new media and contemporary art. He edited and wrote the introduction to a collection of essays by Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Con- sciousness (University of California Press, 2003). His critically praised survey, Art and Electronic Media, was published by Phaidon Press in 2009. Many of his publications can be found on his website: www.artexetra.com.

Brooke Singer is a media artist and educator who lives in Brooklyn. Her practice blurs the borders between science, technology, politics, and art. She works across different media to provide entry into important social issues that are often characterized as specialized to a general public. She is Associate Professor of New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York, and co- founder of the art, technology, and activist group Preemptive Media.

Stefan Sonvilla- Weiss (AT/FI), PhD, is Professor of Communication and education Technologies in Visual Culture and Head of the international Master of Arts pro- gram ePedagogy Design—Visual Knowledge Building at Aalto University/School of Art and Design Helsinki. He coined the term Visual Knowledge Building, refer- ring to “a visualization process of interconnected models of distributed socio- cultural encoded data representations and simulations that are structured and contextualized by a learning community.” In his research he tries to find answers to how real and virtual space interactions can generate novel forms of communicative, creative, and social practices in global connected communities.

For the last 20 years he has worked as an art and design teacher, media artist, graphic designer, author, multimedia- developer, and university teacher. Sonvilla- Weiss has also served as an expert advisor and reviewer for a number of scientific and research bodies, including the european Commission, and has received several honors and scholarships.

He is the author of Synthesis and Nullification: Works 1990–2010 (Springer, 2011), (In)visible: Learning to Act in the Metaverse (Springer, 2008), Virtual School: kunst- netzwerk.at (Peter Lang, 2003), and has edited Mashup Cultures (Springer, 2010) and (e)Pedagogy Design: Visual Knowledge Building (Peter Lang, 2005).

Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are digital artists and computational designers. Viégas is known for her pioneering work on depicting chat histories and email. Watten- berg’s visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered Internet classics. The two became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia, leading to the “history flow” project that revealed the self- healing nature of the online encyclope- dia. Their visualization- based artwork has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Lee Walton’s work takes many forms, including drawing, performance, net art, video, public art, and more. Walton has exhibited and created projects for museums, insti- tutions, and cities both nationally and internationally. His public art is often situ- ational and involves collaboration with numerous participants. His work can be viewed at www.leewalton.com.

http://www.artexetra.com
http://www.leewalton.com
1

IntroductIon to net Works xtine burrough

This introductory book was written for new media practitioners, artists, and students of communications technologies and media art. As a new media educator who teaches art in a department labeled “communications,” I wanted to create a book that I could use in a variety of classroom situations—one that would bridge the gap between theory and practice in a way that satisfies the curiosities of students interested in either or both disciplines. In so many practice- based art texts and classrooms, the technology is divorced from the socio- political concerns of those using it. Meanwhile, there are excellent resources for media theo- rists, but practice- based students sometimes find it difficult to engage with a text that fails to relate theoretical concerns to the act of creating. In my own classroom, I rely on lectures, discussions, demonstrations, and critiques; but I also use my personal experience both in the commercial industry (albeit, that was long ago) and as a practicing artist. Through dia- logue with my colleagues and peers, I realized that many of us tell personal stories in the classroom to help students relate to new technologies. This first- person narrative was some- thing I wanted to capture here. So, remaining true to the spirit of Net Works, here is the story of its making: I first wrote my chapter for this book, “Mechanical Olympics,” as a submission to an entirely different edited collection. Had the chapter been rejected, I probably would have put it away until enough time passed that I could regain some sense of confidence with the material. Instead, the editors reported that they had lost my submission. When I men- tioned my disappointment in not even being seen to my husband Paul, he suggested that I edit my own collection, using the structure of the chapter I had already completed. Even though it seems like an obvious path now, I never would have thought about organizing this collection if Paul had not suggested it. Thank you, Paul Martin Lester. In the summer of 2009 I proposed the book to Matthew Byrnie at Routledge and by the end of December we agreed on a contract. I spent the first quarter of 2010 asking artists to write chapters for this book. I did not open a call for submissions because I already had a conceptual map of the book outlined, including the artists whom I had hoped would be willing to participate. In retrospect, I may have opened this to a public call for submissions, but I wanted to complete the manuscript within the year and I knew that the sooner I could confirm each author, the more likely I would meet my deadline. For each of the ten themes governing the chapters in this book, I am well aware that hundreds of other artists have created suitable projects. However, I wanted to keep in mind the technical learning trajectory that a student might be taking. The earliest chapters in this book are about works that are not terribly complicated from a technical perspective, and remain true to themes I tend to address in the first few meetings of an introductory course. I selected the ten themes based on topics I have been teaching in the new media classroom for a decade. This likely ensures that some of the themes will continue to be relevant in future years, while others will surely become outdated. Similarly to the 20 chapter contributions, there are many

2 xtIne burrough

other themes that perhaps should have been included. For instance, one contributor asked why I did not include a section about mobile media. Since I never have enough time to reach this topic (or many others) in an introductory practice- based course, it is not surpris- ing that I ran out of page- count for this important topic. In the classroom, mobile media is simply too advanced (we spend the first few weeks writing HTML code by hand) at the time of this writing. In the future, it may be as simple to create applications and projects for mobile media as it is to produce “hello world” in a web browser, but the technology currently requires a steep learning curve for beginners. So, I believe that even if, as Wired Magazine declared on the cover of their August 2010 issue, “the web is dead,” students will continue to learn how to create interactive, networked- based projects using the methods outlined by artists in the chapters that follow. The scope and depth of so many of the chapters included in this book push against the boundaries set by the themes of each section. Creating themes is helpful for outlining course material, while simultaneously preventative for those wishing to cross boundaries. One contributor wrote that while she was happy to fulfill the “assignment” I had given, asking her to write about her project with a specific theme in mind, she became aware that her project actually fit several of the section topics in the book. I agreed. My own chapter, which I placed in the “crowdsourcing and participation” section could just as easily fit the themes of “collections and communities” or even “performance.” I encourage readers to con- sider thematizing new media projects as they encounter them, to propose new themes that could- have-would- have-should- have been included in a book such as this, and to rethink the order of the projects in this book, as most fit multiple themes. By the summer of 2010 I had secured the media scholars and practitioners who agreed to write short introductions to each section. There is a noticeable difference between the scholarly voices of the theorists and the first- person narratives written by the artists/authors of each chapter. The reader is left to find relationships between the introductory texts and their following chapters. In many cases the scholars were able to read the artists’ chapters before writing an introduction, but in some instances it was not possible. Like so many books and projects, this one became “finished” about a day before the deadline. By the end of 2010, all of our materials were declared final, and you are reading a version of the text that is just one edit away from being something else entirely. Finally, I was shy about using the term net.art in the title of this book. Many of the artist/authors consider their projects net.art works. However, I wanted this text to appeal to a wider audience. My own students are interested in professional communication industries, including (but not limited to) journalism, advertising, public relations, photography, inter- active media design, and entertainment studies. Viral media, communities, collections, crowdsourcing, participation, error/noise, data visualization, surveillance, democracy, open source, hacking and remixing, and performance are topics or practices common to art and communication specialists.

3

Part I FOrMaLISM and COnCEPtUaL art Edward A. Shanken

Many important parallels can be made between conceptual art and the art and technology movement in the 1960s. As a result, the history of conceptual art has great relevance to contemporary artists using the World Wide Web as an artistic medium. Conceptual art has its roots in the event scores of Fluxus artists such as George Brecht and Yoko Ono, dating from around 1960. Informed by the aesthetic theories of John Cage, these simple textual descriptions served as a “score” to be contemplated or per- formed, as in La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #10 To Bob Morris:

Draw a straight line And follow it.

Conceptual art, as theorized in the work of philosopher and anti- artist Henry Flynt (who coined the term “concept art” in 1961) focused on concepts rather than the phys- ical form of a work, further connecting this emerging tendency to language and away from actions.

“Concept art” is first of all an art of which the material is “concepts,” as the material of, for example, music is sound. Since “concepts” are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language.1

Conceptual art was further elaborated in the work of artists such as Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Wiener, and Art & Language later that decade, also employ- ing language as an essential element. Their work, like that of artists exploring perform- ance and other experimental practices, can be seen as a revolutionary counterbalance to the dominant formalist art theory prescribed by critic Clement Greenberg. Following Greenberg, the physical materiality of paint and canvas took on unprecedented impor- tance in postwar art, exemplified by the New York School of abstract expressionism (including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem De Kooning.) By contrast, con- ceptual artists, following Marcel Duchamp, explicitly challenged the “beholder dis- course” of modernist formalism. Such postformalist tendencies (to use theorist Jack Burnham’s term) were identified as heralding the “dematerialization” of art. Informed by Marxism, many artists sought to undermine the art market’s capitalist logic by pro- ducing dematerialized works that defied commodification. For example, Brecht’s artist’s book Water Yam (1963), which included many event scores, was published as an “inex- pensive, mass- produced unlimited edition . . . [in order] to erode the cultural status of art and to help to eliminate the artist’s ego.”2

In his essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967), LeWitt asserted that “In con- ceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work . . . [t]he idea

4 Edward ShankEn

becomes a machine that makes the art . . .” Such a notion underlies the artist’s wall drawings, in which the “idea” for the work would be written by LeWitt (sometimes accompanied by a diagram) and then executed on site, typically by assistants. In many of them, the title of the work describes the idea that “makes the art,” as in Wall Drawing #46: Vertical Lines, Not Straight, Not Touching, Covering the Wall Evenly (1970). Kosuth emphasizes “idea” even further, insisting that in conceptual art, the art is not the result of the formal elaboration of an idea, as LeWitt suggests, but that the concep- tual core of a work of conceptual art remain an immaterial idea. This conviction is made explicit in his phrase “art as idea (as idea),” which appears as a subtitle in many of his early works. Thus the “art” in Kosuth’s classic One and Three Chairs (1965) consists not of the formal realization of an idea in a material artwork, but solely in the underlying idea itself, which persists immaterially as an idea. Conceptual art has sought to analyze the ideas underlying the creation and reception of art, rather than to elaborate another stylistic convention in the historical succession of modernist avant- garde movements. Investigations by conceptual artists into networks of signification and structures of knowledge (that enable art to have meaning) typically have employed text as a strategic device to examine the interstice between visual and verbal languages as semiotic systems. In this regard, conceptual art is a meta- critical and self- reflexive art process. It is engaged in theorizing the possibilities of signification in art’s multiple contexts (including its history and criticism, exhibitions and markets). In interrogating the relationship between ideas and art, conceptual art de- emphasizes the value traditionally accorded to the materiality of art objects. It focuses, rather, on examining the preconditions for how meaning emerges in art, seen as a semiotic system. There are important parallels between the historic practices of conceptual art and the art and technology movement that emerged in the 1960s. The latter, reincarnated in the 1990s as New Media Art, has focused its inquiry on the materials and/or concepts of technology and science, which it recognizes artists have historically incorporated in their work. Its investigations include: (1) the aesthetic examination of the visual forms of science and technology, (2) the application of science and technology in order to create visual forms, and (3) the use of scientific concepts and technological media both to question their prescribed applications and to create new aesthetic models. In this third case, new media art, like conceptual art, is also a meta- critical process. It uses new media in order to reflect on the profound ways in which that very technology is deeply embedded in modes of knowledge production, perception, and interaction, and is thus inextricable from corresponding epistemological and ontological transformations. In doing so, it challenges the systems of knowledge (and the technologically mediated modes of knowing) that structure scientific methods and conventional aesthetic values. Further, it examines the social and aesthetic implications of technological media that define, package, and distribute information. A visionary pairing of conceptual art and new media took place in the “Software” exhibition (1970). Curator Jack Burnham conceived of “software” as parallel to the aesthetic principles, concepts, or programs that underlie the formal embodiment of actual art objects, which in turn parallel “hardware.” He interpreted contemporary experimental art practices, including conceptual art, as predominantly concerned with the software aspect of aesthetic production. In this way, “Software” drew parallels between the ephemeral programs and protocols of computer software and the increas- ingly “dematerialized” forms of experimental art, which the critic interpreted, meta- phorically, as functioning like information processing systems. “Software” included works by conceptual artists such as Kosuth, Robert Barry, John Baldessari, and Les

FOrMaLISM and COnCEPtUaL art 5

Levine, whose art was presented beside displays of technology including the first public exhibition of hypertext (Labyrinth, an electronic exhibition catalog designed by Ned Woodman and Ted Nelson) and a model of intelligent architecture (SEEK, a reconfig- urable environment for gerbils designed by Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group at MIT.)3

A key figure bridging conceptual art and new media art is Roy Ascott, who used textual and diagrammatic elements in his work, employing the thesaurus as a central metaphor in 1962. While Lucy Lippard’s book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972 (1997), was dedicated to Sol LeWitt, Ascott was promi- nently quoted on the dedication page. In the mid- 1960s, he envisioned remote collabo- rations between artists, writing that, “Instant person to person contact would support specialised creative work . . . An artist could be brought right into the working studio of other artists . . . however far apart in the world . . . they may separately be located.”4 His classic 1983 telematic artwork, La Plissure du Text, used computer networking to link artists around the world, who used ASCI text to create a collaborative “planetary fairy tale.” This homage to Roland Barthes’ essay, “Le Plaisir du Texte,” emphasized the “generative idea” of “perpetual interweaving,” but at the level of the tissue itself, which is no longer the product of a single author but is now plaited together through the process of “distributed authorship” on computer networks. At the conceptual core of Ascott’s telematic art theory is the idea that computer networking provides “the very infrastructure for spiritual interchange that could lead to the harmonization and creative development of the whole planet.” In this light, Ascott’s work can be seen as visionary working models of forms of community and sociality that have, in significant ways, emerged over the last two decades. Since the advent of Graphical User Interfaces (i.e., computer desktops and web browsers) and the World Wide Web in the mid- 1990s, many contemporary artists with a prevailing interest in ideas and concepts have mined online media as a vehicle for artistic creation. Fields of practice such as “software art” and “database aesthetics”5 have emerged as artists have deployed browsers, search engines, databases, and social net- works in critical investigations of the technical systems and protocols that construct and disseminate knowledge, structure identity and community, and produce and determine value. In addition to the following case studies of work by Michael Demers and Con- stant Dullaart, a shortlist of works that offer critical insights into these issues must include wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, the Web Stalker, Bodies INCorporated, Carnivore, They Rule, Female Extension, We Feel Fine, Google Will Eat Itself, The Sheep Market, The Real Costs (see Chapter 15), and A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter. Of particular relevance to the trajectory defined by LeWitt is Casey Reas et al.’s {Software} Structures (2004), in which the artists used computer code to interpret and implement the concep- tual artist’s wall drawings as computer programs in order to “explore the potential dif- ferences and similarities between software and LeWitt’s techniques.”6

Notes

1. Henry Flynt, “Concept Art,” in An Anthology, ed. La Monte Young, New York: George Maciunas & Jackson Mac Low, 1962. Note: slight grammar modifications in this quotation were made by the author.

2. Michael Corris, “Fluxus,” Grove Art Online, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007–2010. 3. See Edward A. Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,” in

SIGGRAPH 2001 Electronic Art and Animation Catalog, New York: ACM SIGGRAPH, 2001: 8–15; expanded Leonardo, 35, 4, August 2002: 433–438.

http://www.jodi.org
6 Edward ShankEn

4. Roy Ascott, “Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision,” in Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, ed. and intro. by Edward A. Shanken, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 2007.

5. See, for example, Florian Schneider and Ulrike Gabriel, “Software Art” (2001), November 19, 2010, www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/software_art_-_transmediale.html; and Victoria Vesna, ed., Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow, Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press, 2007.

6. Casey Reas, “A Text about Software and Art,” {Software} Structures (2004), November 19, 2010. http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/text.html.

Bibliography

Ascott, Roy. “Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision.” In Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theo- ries of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. Ed. and intro. Edward A. Shanken. Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 2003, 2007.

Corris, Michael. “Fluxus.” Grove Art Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007–2010. Flynt, Henry. “Concept Art.” In An Anthology. Ed. La Monte Young. New York: George Maciu-

nas & Jackson Mac Low, 1962. Reas, Casey. “A Text about Software and Art.” {Software} Structures, 2004. November 19, 2010.

Online: http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/text.html. Schneider, Florian and Ulrike Gabriel. “Software Art.” November 19, 2010. www.netzliteratur.

net/cramer/software_art_-_transmediale.html. Shanken, Edward A. “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art.” In SIG-

GRAPH 2001 Electronic Art and Animation Catalog. New York: ACM SIGGRAPH, 2001. Vesna, Victoria, ed. Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Minneapolis: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, 2007.

http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/software_art_-_transmediale.html
http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/text.html
http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/text.html
http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/software_art_-_transmediale.html
http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/software_art_-_transmediale.html
7

1 Color Field Paintings (Browser)* Michael Demers

Key Words: Browser, Formalism, Hexadecimal Color, HTML, Javascript, Markup Lan- guage, Modernism, Modernity, Source Code

Project Summary

Color Field Paintings (Browser) are online artworks created when website visitors click a link to generate a series of browser windows, each with a randomly assigned color based upon a palette established for the piece. These “paintings” reference the color field paintings that emerged in the late 1950s, but in a digital format.

Figure 1.1 Color Field Paintings (Browser) by Michael Demers.

8 miChael demers

Project Developer Background

Digital art is a tricky field to endorse. Sharing many of the same biases against it as photography endured in its time, digital art is often viewed as a process too new and unfamiliar for many connoisseurs of art and academia to support. Often sacrificing the physical object for a conceptual and technical approach, digital art, like the digital file, finds itself somewhere in the ether, formless and too varied to place into a typical art- historical framework. However, digital art does not have to be ambiguous. One often finds it manifest in mundane and overly familiar territory, such as the personal com- puter, the browser window, or the inkjet print. If the great Formalist experiment of the 1950s and 1960s both pointed to and justified an exploration of the most fundamental elements of painting, and presented these findings visually in the form of large canvasses of line, shape, and color, I wondered if there was a parallel to be found for digital art? Could one use the ideas of Formalism’s greatest propo- nent, Clement Greenberg, to justify and ground the objectless digital object? For the student of digital art these are vital questions, stimulating answers which may determine both success academically as well as in the realm of one’s own artistic practice. As a painting student, these were questions that engaged my own work; and as a digital artist, especially within traditional academic circles, these questions remain. What are the fundamental characteristics of digital art, and more specifically, of net art? Can we strip these formless objects down to their most basic elements and still see them function as art objects? If so, what would those objects look like? And is there a way to escape the familiarity of our daily interaction with mundane digital technologies to produce art that speaks to those familiar and mundane characteristics in new ways?

Introduction to Color Field Paintings (Browser)

In the summer of 2009 I became interested in the idea of creating a randomly generated online digital work that utilized color as its main focus. Initially I thought of using

Figure 1.2 Color Field Paintings (Browser) by Michael Demers.

Color Field Paintings (Browser) 9

javascript (a programming language used to add interactivity to websites) to create a webpage that would cycle through a series of colors that changed depending upon the time of day. Further, I wanted the range of colors to shift within a predetermined array, so that these digital “paintings” would rarely replicate themselves, even if viewed at the same time each day. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the code to make such a site work was not only widely available, but was rather mundane. Some code could be used to randomly load an array of colors, other code could recognize the user’s time of day, and another line of code could automatically refresh the browser window after a set period of time. How was this work advancing the medium of digital art? Why am I bothering to make such a work, I wondered, if all I am doing is producing the technical and conceptual equivalent of a colorful screensaver? What my project lacked was conceptual rigor based on an art- historical dialogue. I knew that I wanted to use a particular kind of technology to do something visually spe- cific while recognizing the possibility for variation. This in turn led me to think about what I was originally seeking to explore: color. I thought about the idea of color in Western representation, and the use of color both historically (in Modernist painting and sculpture), and contemporarily (in diverse forms of digital output). More specifi- cally, I thought about color as represented through a browser window, and how that use of color served as a reference to and further investigation of the use of color in Formalist paintings of the 1950s and 1960s.