NetNarr
From Memes to Net Art: #NetNarr Week 8
Net Art Explore and Tweet
Put on your Digital Alchemy goggles and spend some time finding works of Net Art that (a) grab your interest and/or (b) might be making statements, suggestions related to the state of the internet in 2019.
Take some notes (or maybe use your Hypothes.is tools), make screenshots, and as you go, tweet out links to what you find (please include the #netnarr hashtag). Learn as much as you can about the artist behind the work. What messages are they trying to communicate? Share at least two interesting pieces.
- Artport (a lot of things to explore) https://whitney.org/artport/douglas-davis
Artport is the Whitney Museum’s portal to Internet art and an online gallery space for commissions of net art and new media art. e.g. The World’s Longest Sentence - Indirect Flights http://indirect.flights/ a new online work by Joe Hamilton with sound by J.G. Biberkopf and supported by The Moving Museum, is a sprawling landscape of layered images. Raw materials, satellite images, organic textures, brush strokes and architectural fragments are all blended together into a dense panorama extending in all directions. As you pan across the terrain like Google Maps the layers move at different speeds giving the illusion of depth, constantly changing what is hidden and exposed. This shifting composition is an attempt to depict contemporary landscape, in a moment defined by the proliferation of digital technologies and the global transportation of bodies, commodities and goods.
- Emilio Vavarella http://emiliovavarella.com/ “is an artist whose work blends interdisciplinary art practice and theoretical research and is centered around the study of the relationship between humans and technological power. His works present a combination of using new technologies with alternative (non-productive, poetic, dysfunctional) goals in mind, imagining technology’s future effects through the use of speculative fiction, and decontextualizing and misusing technology to reveal its hidden mechanisms.” See especially Animal Cinema, Re:Animation, Mnemograofo, or The Google Trilogy
- Alex Saum http://www.alexsaum.com/ Our studio guest tonight! Explore her E-Poetry and other projects.
- Moth Generator https://twitter.com/mothgenerator
This twitter account posts gorgeous imaginary moths of all shapes, sizes, and colors, and each arrives with a fantastical, scientific-sounding name derived from thousands of English and Latin moth names (like woolly-woolly gigantellerae aecedens). To introduce more fun, its creators, Loren Schmidt and Katie Rose Pipkin have also programmed it to interact with any user on Twitter: if you tweet a random word or even phrase at the account, you’ll receive a mention with your very own, custom moth (might not be working?) - Cameron’s World https://www.cameronsworld.net/
a frenetic web-collage created as “a love letter to the internet of old.” Divided into thematic rows of over 700 images Askin sourced from archived pages, the website is a well-organized gallery exploding with decades-old browser detritus composed of blinking texts, animated pictorial cursors, MIDI files, and cheesy GIFs. Meanwhile, music fitting to soundtrack a video game, created by Robin Hughes with only a mouse, loops in the background so scrolling through “Cameron’s World” truly feels like entering a time machine. - The One Million Masterpiece http://www.millionmasterpiece.com/ “As a community we are creating a piece of artwork that will provide a unique snapshot of modern society through the eyes of one million people scattered across the world. To do this we are asking artists and non-artists alike to complete one small square of a giant digital canvas. The project is supported by the largest online arts communities and is an official world record holder.”
- My Boyfriend Came Back From the War http://myboyfriendcamebackfromth.ewar.ru/
A work that first appeared in 1996 and has since made its way into university syllabi, and has been remade, remixed, and rethought by countless digital artists. In other words this work has already entered the canon of Art History. My boyfriend came back from war uses the web and the tools it provides to tell a story of a couple that is trying to reconnect after he comes home from war. As you click at the images and gif their story unravels. - Mouchette http://mouchette.org/
toys with and explores the issues of identity online. Mouchette persona is loosely based on Robert Bresson’s 1967 film ‘Moucgette’ - ifnoyes.com http://www.ifnoyes.com/ A surprisingly addictive, and very colourful website. One of the interesting things about it is that, though available for view to the public, the site is owned by a collector. It was successfully sold for $3,500 at Phillips auction.
- This Exquisite Forest http://www.exquisiteforest.com/ “From 2012 – 2014, visitors to this site could use an online drawing tool to create a short animation. Other visitors could then build off of that animation, resulting in branching, ever-evolving narratives resembling trees.”
- Ryan Seslow https://www.ryanseslow.com/ “I’m an artist, a graphic designer, web designer, and a professor of art & design living and working in New York. As a visual artist I’m often working with a synthesis of applied arts, new media, digital and Internet-art. I like to show my work both on and off the web. I share a lot of my current projects, exhibitions and collaborations here on the blog section of this website. I’m the curator of Concrete to Data & the Co-Curator of Encrypted Fills & Animating Transit.”
- The Tate Intermedia Art Archive http://www2.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/archive/
Tate’s Intermedia Art programme focussed on art that engages the use of new media, sound and performance. The featured artworks may be created with newer or older networked and time-based media such as video, radio, computer technologies or the internet. They may involve performance or discussion, straddle a variety of media, or even fuse media in the creation of new hybrid, intermedia forms. The programme also addressed art that comments on the social and political implications of new technology and practices that challenge traditional ideas of the art object; including work that is process-driven, participatory or interactive. - The Johnny Cash Project http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/ (old required Flash) Through this interactive website, participants may draw their own portrait of Johnny Cash to be integrated into a collective whole. As people all over the world contribute, the project will continue to evolve and grow, one frame at a time. Submit your drawing to become a part of the new music video for the song “Ain’t No Grave”. Strung together and relayed in sequence your art, paired with Johnny’s haunting song, will become a living, moving, and ever changing portrait of the legendary Man in Black.
- Body Anxiety http://bodyanxiety.com/ shares the varied perspectives of artists who examine gendered embodiment, performance and self-representation on the internet. Throughout art and film history, the female body and nude has been an ongoing subject in male-authored work. More often than not, the woman’s body is capitalized on in these works while their voice is muted. From the Seventies onwards, female artists employed video and performance to reclaim their bodies from this art historical trajectory. Today, artists use the internet as a platform to create and share their own imagery. While appropriation might be a common practice in contemporary art, using the internet as gender-queer performative space allows artists to question contemporary attitudes towards femininity.
Learn More About Net Art
- CUNY Net art resources https://netart.commons.gc.cuny.edu/course-resources/
- Communities of practice: