Posts Tagged ‘net art’

I’ve been following Chris Joseph‘s work as a net artist since the late 1990’s when he was living in Montréal–he’s a Brit/Canadian living now in London. He was on Webartery, a listserv I started in 1997; there was great discussion and activity in net art on Webartery, and Chris was an important part of it then, too. I visit his page of links to his art and writing several times a year to see what he’s up to.

I recently wrote a review of Sprinkled Speech, an interactive poem of Chris’s, the text of which is by our late mutual friend Randy Adams.

More recently–like yesterday–I visited #RiseTogether, shown below, which I’d somehow missed before. This is a 2014 piece by Chris. We see a map, the #RiseTogether hash tag, a red line and a short text describing issues, problems, possibilities, groups, etc. Every few seconds, the screen refreshes with a new map, red line, and description.

I sent Chris an email about it:

Hey Chris,

I was looking at http://babel.391.org/remix_runran/2014/risetogether.html

I see you're using Google maps.

What's with the red line?

What is #RiseTogether ? 

The language after "#RiseTogether"--where does that come from?

ja

Chris’s response was so interesting and illuminating I thought I’d post it here. Chris responded:

Hi Jim,

Originally this phrase, as a hashtag, was used by the Occupy Wall Street anti-capitalism movement, but I think since then it has been adopted/co-opted by many other movements including (US) football teams. The starting article and the text source for this piece was http://occupywallstreet.net/story/what-way-forward-popular-movement-2014 . 

It was one of three anti-capitalist pieces I did around that time, which was pretty much at the beginning of my investigating what could be done outside of Adobe Flash, along with http://babel.391.org/remix_runran/2014/capitalist-manifesto.html and http://babel.391.org/remix_runran/2014/thedaywefightback.html . And thematically these hark back to one of my first net art pieces, which isn't linked up on my art page at the moment, http://chrisjose.ph/quebec/ 

The red line was for a few reasons, I think. Firstly to add some visual interest, and additional randomisation, into what would be be a fairly static looking piece otherwise.  But I find the minimalism of a line quite interesting, as the viewer is asked to actively interpret the meaning of that line. For me it's a dividing line - between haves and have nots, or the 1% and 99%, or any of those binary divisions that the protesters tend to use. Or it could suggest a crossing out - perhaps (positively) of a defunct economic philosophy, or (negatively) of the opportunities of a geographical area as a result of that economic philosophy. 

All three of those pieces have a monochromatic base, but only two have the red, which feels quite angry, or reminiscent of blood, of which there was quite a bit in the anti-capitalist protests.

I used the same technique again in this piece: http://babel.391.org/remix_runran/2015/plague-vectors.html - but here the lines are much more descriptive, as an indication of the supposed 'plague vectors'. 

----------------------
Chris Joseph
@cj391
chrisjoseph.org

I’m working on Aleph Null 2.0. You can view what I have so far at vispo.com/alephTouch/an.html . If you’re familiar with version 1.0, you can see that what 2.0 creates looks different from what 1.0 creates. I’ve learned a lot about the HTML5 canvas. Here are some recent screenshots from Aleph Null 2.0.

 

Ted Warnell, as many of you know, is a Canadian net artist originally from Vancouver, long since living in Alberta, who has been producing net art as programmed visual poetry at warnell.com since the 90’s. Which is about how long we’ve been in correspondence with one another. Ted was very active on Webartery for some time, an email list in the 90’s that many of the writerly net artists were involved in. We’ve stayed in touch over the years, though we’ve never met in the same room. We have, however, met ‘face-to-face’ via video chat.

He’s still creating interesting net art. In the nineties and oughts, his materials were largely bitmaps, HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript. Most of his works were stills, or series thereof. Since about 2013, he’s been creating net works using the HTML5 canvas tag that consist entirely of JavaScript. The canvas tag lets us program animations and stills on HTML pages without needing any plugins such as Flash or Unity. Ted has never liked plugins, so the canvas tag works well for him for a variety of reasons. Ted has created a lot of very interesting canvas-based, programmed animations and stills at warnell.com/mona .

I’m always happy to get a note from Ted showing me new work he’s done. Since we both are using the canvas, we talk about the programming issues it involves and also the sorts of art we’re making. Below is an email Ted sent me recently after I asked him how he would describe the ‘look’ or ‘looks’ he’s been creating with his canvas work. If you have a good look at warnell.com/mona , you see that his work does indeed exhibit looks you will remember and identify as Warnellian.

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hey jim,

further to earlier thoughts about your query re “looks” in my work (and assuming that you’re still interested by this subject), here is something that has been bubbling up over the past week or so

any look in my work comes mainly from the processes used in creation of the work – so, it’s not a deliberate or even a conscious thing, the look, but rather, it just is – mainly, but not entirely, of course – subject, too, is at least partly responsible for the way these things look

have been thinking this past week that what is deliberate and conscious is my interest in the tension between and balance of order and chaos, by which i mean mathematics (especially geometry, visual math) and chance (random, unpredictable) – i’m exploring these things and that tension/balance in almost all of my works – you, too, explore and incorporate these things into many of your works including most strikingly in aleph null, and also in globebop and others

so here are some thoughts about order/chaos and balance/tension in no particular order:

works using these things function best when the balance is right – then the tension is strong – and then the work also is “right” and strong

it is not a requirement that both of these things are apparent (visible or immediately evident) in a work – there are some notable examples of works that seem to be all one or the other, though that may be more illusion than reality – works of jackson pollock seem to be all chaos but still balance with a behind-the-scenes intelligence, order – works by andrew wyeth on the other hand seem to be all about order and control, but look closely at the brushstrokes that make all of that detail and you’ll see that many of these are pure chance – brilliant stuff, really

an artist whose work intrigues me much of late is quebecer claude tousignant – i’m sure you know of him – he is perhaps best known for his many “target” paintings of concentric rings – tousignant himself referred to these as “monochromatic transformers” and “gongs” – you can find lots of his works at google images

the reason tousignant is so interesting to me (again) at this time is because while i can see that his paintings “work”, i cannot for the life of me see where he is doing anything even remotely relating to order/chaos or the balance/tension of same – his works seem to me to be truly all order/order with no opposite i would consider necessary for balance and/or to make (required) tension – his works defy me and i’d love to understand how he’s doing it 🙂

anyway, serious respect, more power, and many more years to the wonderful monsieur tousignant

Look Again – warnell.com/mona/look.htm

is a new (this week) autointeractive work created with claude tousignant and his target paintings in mind

in this work are three broad rings, perfectly ordered geometric circles, each in the same randomly selected single PbN primary color – the space between and surrounding these rings is filled with a randomly generated (60/sec), randomly spun alphanumeric text in black and white, and also gray thanks to xor compositing – alinear chaos – as the work progresses, the three rings are gradually overcome by those relentless spinning texts – the outermost ring is all but obliterated while the middle ring is chipped away bit by bit until only a very thin inner crust of the ring remains – the third innermost ring, tho, is entirely unaffected

as the work continues to evolve, ghostlike apparitions of the missing outer and middle ring become more and more pronounced… because… within the chaos, new rings in ever-sharper black and white are beginning to emerge – this has the effect of clearly defining (in gray and tinted gray) the shape of the original color rings – even as order is continually attacked and destroyed by chaos, chaos is simultaneously rebuilding the order – so nothing is actually gained or lost… the work is simply transformed – a functioning “monochromatic transformer”, as tousignant might see it

that’s the tension and balance i’m talking about – the look you were asking about likely has something to do with autointeraction, alinearity, and most likely by my attempt to render visible order/chaos and balance/tension in every work i do

your attempt in aleph null (it now seems to me) might be in the form of progressive linearity on an alinear path – and well done

ted

PS, “Look Again” is a rework of my earlier work, “Poem by Numbers 77” from march 2015 – warnell.com/mona/pbnum77.htm

which work is a progression of “Poem by Numbers 52” from april 2013 – warnell.com/mona/pbnum52.htm

which work was about learning canvas coding for circular motion

Poem by Numbers works usually (not always) are about coding research and development – moreso than concept development, which comes in later works like “Look Again”

other artists have “Untitled XX” works – i have “Poem by Numbers XX”

I put together a twenty minute video talking about a fantastic piece of digital poetry by Joe Keenan from the late nineties called MOMENT. Check it out: http://vispo.com/keenan/4. MOMENT, written in JavaScript for browsers, is a work of visual interactive code poetry. It’s one of the great unacknowledged works for the net.

I used Camtasia 8 to create this video. I’ve used the voice-over capabilities of Camtasia before to create videos that talk about what’s on the screen, but this is the first time I’ve been able to use the webcam with it. Still a few bugs, though, it seems: at times the video is quite asynchronous between voice and video.

Still, you get the idea. I’m a big fan of Joe Keenan’s MOMENT and am glad I finally did a video on it.

Vispo.com is pretty much my life’s work, such as it is. Most of what I have created is available for free on the site. No, I haven’t zactly got rich on it. I’ve been publishing vispo.com since 1996. It’s my “book.” In the sense that I haven’t published any books but think of myself primarily as a writer and vispo.com as my main work. It’s been an adventure in creating and publishing interactive, multimedia poetry, among other things. So I thought I’d write about that adventure for The Journal of Electronic Publishing and its issue on digital poetry. Specifically, I thought I’d try to explain why I chose the net as my main artistic medium.

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Aleph Null makes color music. Colors are tones. Musical notes are tones. Music is tones moving in time. Aleph Null makes changing color tones move in time. There is no audio.

Aleph Null is an instrument of color music. This is about how to play it. It’ll play on it’s own. But it profits immensely from a human player interceding continually. It’s interactive online art.

Color music in Aleph Null has a simple structure. There is a central color. It’s the main color. All the other colors are within a certain distance from the central color. That distance is called the color range.

Here’s how to change the central color.

1. Click the Aleph Null logo at top left or press the ‘1’ key to make the controls visible.
2. Press the ‘2’ key or click the input box labelled ‘central color’ to make the central color color-picker visible.
3. Click around in both parts of the color-picker to see how it works. The current central color is displayed in the central color input box.

The colors Aleph Null uses are all random distances from the central color and these distances do not exceed the color range value. The lower the color range value, the closer all the colors are to the central color. The higher the color range value, the greater the range of colors that Aleph Null will use. If the color range is set to 0, Aleph Null only uses one color: the central color. If the color range is 255, any color might be used.

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I’ve just completed my first JavaScript work using the new HTML 5 canvas tag. It’s called Aleph Null. It’s a generative, interactive work of visual art. It launches on turbulence.org from NYC.

Aleph Null is best viewed by the light of a full moon. Or near full moon. Same with the set of stills I made. I mean they do like a bit of darkness.

If you’re using a PC, I’d recommend Chrome to view Aleph Null. At least on my machine, Chrome provides the smoothest performance. Firefox provides a similarly high framerate, but is a bit jerky from time to time. Internet Explorer kind of sucks. On the Mac, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari seem to be fine.

I’ve been seriously trying to learn JavaScript, CSS, the DOM (document object model) and jQuery recently, hopefully toward the production of some HTML 5 art thangs down the road. It’s going fairly well. Anyway, I’ve also been looking at work people are doing with HTML 5. The best site I’ve come across so far that posts links to HTML 5 work is canvasdemos.com. There’s considerable dreck here, of course, but there are a few pieces worth looking at.

HTML 5 has been publicized as an open source replacement for Adobe’s proprietary Flash. In truth, HTML 5 is far less featureful than Flash concerning audio, video, imaging, text and much else. And there are currently no tools available for non-programmers to work comfortably in HTML 5. It will take HTML 6 or 7, which will be some years, perhaps a decade, for HTML to approach the current featurefulness of Flash. But it’s coming along.

The most notable thing about HTML 5 is the <canvas> tag, which provides the ability to do interesting graphical operations. There are various programmerly commands available to draw stuff. HTML 5 also introduces a few audio commands, but nothing with the sophistication of Flash’s audio capabilities.

What we’re going to do is have a look at four recent pieces that use HTML 5 in interesting ways. And that work. Yes, some HTML 5 works. When new programming possibilities are introduced to a mass audience, you can bet there’s going to be more than a few blue screens. I’ve only had one today looking at new HTML 5 work. But not from any of the below pieces. These pieces ran well and were very rewarding to view.

The most interesting one, from an artistic perspective, is Arcade Fire’s interactive music video of their song “We Used to Wait” from their album The Suburbs, which won the Grammy for album of the year in 2011. The HTML 5 piece is called The Wilderness Downtown . This is quite impressive, really, both from a technical and artistic point of view. And it goes along perfectly with the suburbs, if that’s where you’re from. I’ve seen online videos that use multiple browser windows for video before, such as in the work of Peter Horvath, but The Wilderness Downtown is also quite sophisticated in other ways. The programmed birds, for instance, and the way they move between windows. And alight on what you have drawn in the interactive writing piece. And the way they use Google Earth. Very strong work indeed. And, o yes, the music is pretty darn good too. Moreover, the touches I’ve mentioned are not gratuitous wiz bang programming effects, but tie into a vision of the suburban experience that Arcade Fire has developed so very beautifully.

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A dbCinema maundering on the Vancouver riot: http://vispo.com/dbcinema/vanriot

The Club is a moving-image digital collaging of 57 images of selected North American politicians, business men, and psychopaths from the eighties till the present. There’s also a linked slideshow of some stills from the video.

The politicians are conservatives who have blasted away both at home and abroad. Via deregulation, the shock doctrine, and explicitly military means. The business men are CEO’s who are mostly now behind bars, or have been. The psychopaths include (Ex-Colonel) Russell Williams who, until the time of his arrest for two sex murders, headed CFB Trenton, the largest military air-base in Canada.

So it’s a bit of a Dorian Gray piece. But they are each others’ deformities.

Here’s what Andy Warhole said about The Club: “they look like some kind of Auschwitz-Chernobyl mutant legacy, and maybe they are — this is like morphing, blocpix, mr. potatohead, and various slice-n-dice technologies… but not them — this is new — and of course i love your politics 🙂 ”

Much of the work I’ve done with dbCinema, the graphic synthesizer I wrote in Adobe Director, has been toward beauty. This is quite different. But The Club was still made with dbCinema. There’s other work I’ve done with dbCinema here.

I’ve been working on version 3 of a JavaScript slideshow program I call Slidvid. I initially developed it to show screenshots of dbCinema in action. All the dbCinema slideshows use an earlier version of the Slidvid software. I’d like to show you Slidvid 3.0 in this post. And if you have a site you’d like to show your graphics on in a slideshow, drop me a line and we’ll put Slidvid on your site with your graphics.

The graphics in the first Slidvid 3 slideshow are old ones; they’re screenshots from a generative, interactive Shockwave piece I wrote called  A Pen.  I’ve had the screenshots on my site for quite a while, but not in a slideshow. The experience of them in a slideshow is more to my liking. Less work for the viewer. More options for the viewer and the presenter. And just a classier presentation.

The graphics in this slideshow were made with a virtual pen that has four nibs. The ‘ink’ of each nib is a lettristic animation that leaves trails as the pen moves the nibs/animations around the screen. Think of the nibs as being attached to the pen by long loose springs. When you click and drag the mouse in the Shockwave piece (not the slideshow), the nibs eventually catch up with you. And you can adjust things like the size and opacity of each nib. Hence the sort of graphics you see in this post. The project A Pen consists of both the interactive Shockwave piece and also the slideshow of screenshots taken from the Shockwave piece in action.

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Gregory Chatonsky is a French/Canadian artist who has created a significant body of net art. Here are a couple of pieces of his I found that still work and are compelling:

The Revolution Took Place in New York (2002)

“The Revolution Took Place in New York is a fictional story generated in real time from an internet source. A text generator gives shape to an infinite novel bearing close resemblance to the work “Projet pour une révolution à New York” written by Robbe-Grillet in 1970: Ben Saïd walks on the streets of the American metropolis and plots something. Some words are associated to video fragments, others to sounds gleaned on the network and others are automatically translated into images using Google. The structured association of these heterogeneous elements generates a narrative flow simultaneous with the network flow.”

Each time I’ve opened this piece, it’s been different. What surprised and charmed me most about this piece was how the narrative made sense, often, and kept me interested in where it was going. That is very unusual indeed in generative works. I’m referring to the text itself. But, also, the way the text goes with the images was also, often, quite interesting.

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Various forms of art lend themselves to adaptation and subsequent mutation via their practice on the web. The graphic novel is obviously an excellent candidate. A computer screen is great for presenting the sorts of images we see in graphic novels. Often the images are developed, at least in part, with programs such as Illustrator and Photoshop.  And, via animation, interactivity, other programming, and audio, there’s great room for interesting mutation.

Whereas some other art forms aren’t going to change much via being practiced to the net. They will be less significant as net art as simply distributed on the net, rather than adapted to the net in more artistically significant ways. They won’t mutate and grow much via their incarnation on the net, whereas art forms such as the ‘graphic novel’ for the computer screen and the net will eventually often be dramatically different from print or film versions of the graphic novel. As different as the horse and carriage from the “horseless carriage,” which is what cars were first called.

Nawlz.com is an interesting graphic novel for the web in its visuals, its occasional animations, and the way it unfolds via clicking on stuff. This site won the webby for net art in 2010. Experiencing it visually and interactively and even sonically is more rewarding than the text itself, I find; the text is somewhat generic or non-descript in voice and character; I find it hard to meditate on the text. And the typeface is often way too small, you gotta want it like 20. But the visuals, and the way they look and move and are arranged on the screen, are very successful. The story seems a bit druggy whacked out but maybe not if I read it more carefully, not sure. Druggy just doesn’t do it anymore.

The granddaddy of this interactive, online approach to comics, as far as I know, is Argon Zark. You can see that Nawlz.com is similar to Argon Zark as a computer graphic novel–but also that Nawlz.com has taken it further.