Date: 1.30.98
From: alex galloway (alex@rhizome.org)
Subject: browser.art
Amid the current proliferation of hi-tech graphic design, browser
plug-ins and special media applications, a growing number of web
sites are concentrating on making a new kind of web-specific art
that focuses on the interface as art object and receptacle. Call
it browser.art. It is a new merging of art and technology that
may be the most formative advancement in online art to date.
Instead of scanning offline art and lugging it over to the
web with a few links here and there, or digitizing some film and
putting it on a server, art sites like jodi.org are making art
specifically for, and of, the web.
Forget web art buzzwords like "immersion" and "interactivity."
We don't care, they don't care. It's not about community, nor
about space, nor identity. It's not about realaudio, and it's
not about shockwave. If anything, this loosly-knit group of net
artists focuses on the interface.
And that's a smart thing too. Before, we just had representation.
Now we have to *browse* information, right? Before, as the semioticians
are keen to remind us, the world was a complex interplay of images.
As users we would simply need to *read* those images. Now it is
clear that the filter is king. Interface, it's that thing that
looks back at us from the content's point-of-view, always a veneer
for information yet always a bad manipulator of that very information.
It's the detail that's always there, it's the protocol, the go-between.
It's the browser.
The net.art duo jodi, high fashion in today's new media art
world, are rightly thought to embody a certain new style of interface
art. They love the look of raw code and use it in their work;
they love snapshots of computer desktops; they love those little
Macintosh icons. Most importantly, they love to crash your browser
with meta html tags and javascript.
With emphasis on a more degraded and simplified aesthetic, Jodi's
project entitled day66 (www.jodi.org/day66) typifies browser art.
With illegible images stacking up in the background and prominent
use of the javascript "scroll" feature, the piece skids
into view. Just as the page loads, it begins to frantically move,
scrolling diagonally across the screen as if your OS had been
replaced by some massive conveyor belt.
While it may be easy for some to write off jodi as a bunch
of hostile nonsense, a certain type of technological aesthetic
present in their work is worth a second look. Past the full-screen
blink tags, and past the wild animated gifs, there is a keen interest
in the browser itself as focal point and structuring framework
for artistic production. No other style of net.art reflects so
directly on the nature of the web as a medium.
Immitators of the Jodi style abound. From Hotwired's recent RGB
feature (www.hotwired.com/rgb/opp/++++++++++++++++++/) to the
design group e13 (www.e13.com), from San Francisco's superbad.com
to Brooklyn's experimental performance space Fakeshop (www.fakeshop.com),
net art these days is taking a giant step away from print-oriented
graphic design and toward an aesthetic of the machine, of code,
of the crash.
The coordination of art and technology is also seen in Alexei
Shulgin's recent Form Art competition and exhibition (www.c3.hu/hyper3/form/).
Form art means any web art piece that uses only the radio buttons,
pull-down menus and textboxes found in html forms. Self-consciously
simplistic and technically restrained, form art uses html to explore
and exploit new arenas. Shulgin's aesthetic is spur-of-the-moment,
ephemeral; it dwells in the feeling of the already dated.
Browser.art is not simply the acceptance of a tech *aesthetic*
(like an ASCII picture would be), but a focus on technology itself
as an object. It's not quicktime (video, but redirected to the
web) and it's not realaudio (sound, but redirected to the web).
In this mini-genre of net.art, the web itself is the object.
There is no depth to this work, rather there is an aesthetic
of relationality, of machines talking to machines. Browser.art
seems easily overlooked, irritating or dumb, not-art. But it is
here that web producers are thinking within the confines of the
web, rather than simply repurposing offline material. By starting
to think *about* the web we start to see new media art taking
better shape.
http://www.jodi.org/day66
http://www.hotwired.com/rgb/opp/++++++++++++++++++/
http://www.e13.com
http://superbad.com
http://www.fakeshop.com
http://www.c3.hu/hyper3/form/
Référence: http://www.rhizome.org/cgi-local/query.cgi?action=grab_object&kt=kt1040