Since 1995 Net Art has emerged as a radical, instantly global, art form. The Internet, a true "multi-medium", cultivates a plethora of creative approaches to producing art. This vast array of practices and experimentation of Net Art is evident in the artist and artworks within this selection.
As with any art form, there is a benefit in tracing a creative heritage. This tracing helps one understand an artwork's place within a longer cultural discourse. It is important to consider the influences on net art as this art form appears to break so thoroughly from tradition in its technique and distribution. Influences in these six works span nearly a century of art and culture history, some pieces point to specific artists and some to genres.
Inspired by the early photomontage work of Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield , Peter Horvath develops net cinema-montage (remixing both the visuals and music score). These net films use the browser window to break the traditional, single screen into multiple choreographed windows. This technique serves as an architectural device to advance time and space through which the movie unfolds. Horvath 's dreamy narratives are reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky 's films, which emphasize a cinematic language that is based on captivated observation rather than plot-driven preoccupation with what happens next.
David Crawford 's Stop Motion Studies are the perfect children of two qualified parents. First, the Subway series from the early 1980s of photographer Bruce Davidson , and second, the short experimental films of Martin Arnold from the early 1990s (specifically Pièce Touchée and Passage à L'acte ) in which Arnold re-edits scenes from old Hollywood films to create compulsive repetitions of the visual and audio tracks. Crawford creates these nervous, yet delightfully alive subway scenes by allowing the computer to randomly stitch single frames into never-repeating short scenes. In SMS13 the scenes are combined to form a larger narrative. When questioning Crawford as to whether he intended to construct a linear plot he responded, "I was initially, but early attempts at shoehorning things into a framework based on continuity led to a revolt. The material took over at this point. The only narrative that's conscious is the one that's not there."
Early video-based performance by Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci are characterized by repetitive gesture and simple actions. This economy of action is groundwork for MTAA 's Five Small Videos About Interruption And Disappearing . In this project, the artists use interactivity to assign the viewer the role of direct collaborator in executing the work. This relational approach breaks the picture plane traditionally owned entirely by the artist. The screen becomes a meeting ground (or battleground) for direct manipulation between the viewer and the artists.
Portal , a collaboration between dancer/filmmaker Evann Siebens and myself, articulates a relationship between realism and imagined worlds. The work is informed by the tradition of dancefilm, and aesthetically leans towards post- apocalyptic and fantasy sci-fi cinema and video games . Portal positions the screen as an invisible barrier between the protagonist and the viewer by encouraging physical contact.
Perfect Victoria is the first of three works from Victoria Defiled by Seoul-based duo YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. The work combines text, spoken word and jazz. Perfect Victoria evokes the poetry performance tradition that began with the Beat Generation in San Francisco of the 50' and 60's. However, Victoria is a synthesized voice that has been part of the Macintosh operating system since the early 1990. Her voice has been heard in art installations, performances and lectures. In an email the artists wrote: " We thought it would be fun to create a kind of doppelganger -- not so much a bodily but a software-ish counterpart, or a spokesperson. Victoria is YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES."
-- Yael Kanarek
NeverEndingStories
Navigating Yan Breuleux's project, the viewer finds himself in an unquestionably graphical universe made of prefabricated, ready-to-use images, pictographs that are meant to established conceptual shortcuts and abolish the problem of linguistic diversity. With a provided sign language, viewers build narrations in an abstract territory, a space of pure communication. A map of the world serves as background for several of the stories and mediates the idea of a world context having as little relief (differentiated zones) as the unadorned screen on which they unfold. NeverEndingStories brings out the absence of any specific place and the generalization of place in the era of the global village, and highlights the experience of dislocation cyberspace engenders.
The work allows for both directional and optional interaction, making it a dynamic tool comparable to a software application. The keyboard-driven trajectory allows one to replace scenes and choose one fragment after another, resulting in a linear deployment of interlinked events that develop semantic connections as well. The interactive keyboard provides for a choice of ingredients, an extensive vocabulary from which it is possible to produce many combinations. Consultating the work resembles "mixing", the computer becoming a kind of musical instrument or assembly device, putting the visitor in the position of a "processor," the operator of a machine.
The easily interpreted icons available to him are part of the universe of consumerism and communications, all elements being reduced to their symbols, losing their individuality to enter the world of the "generic," of the "generalized," - of language. These pictographs become protagonists in a series of prefabricated scenes in which they assume various roles, often in the midst of situations of power and conflict. They collide, squash or replace each other, disperse, grow, move, propagate, or disappear in rapid, hard-hitting movement. The permutation of signs constantly transforms the meaning of these short stories, where all things and all beings invariably end up being replaced and manipulated.