About web art
What I'm trying to do on this website:
- Process, not product.
Everything on this website is evolving,
not fixed in some "finished" form.
It's a "living" site.
I'm not sure yet about the archival implications.
Do I really want to archive every move I make
(maybe when disk media get really, really cheap)?
Imagine a Photoshop image saved with its complete history palette,
so that the observer can "undo" to any step in its development
and take a different branch.
Artists traditionally
conceal the developmental steps
that lead to the final product.
The artist distills, edits, experiments, discards,
and shows (like "magic") only the finished painting or composition.
Or the artist practices and hones performance skills
to the point where they become magical or inconceivable.
What are the implications of revealing everything?
- Collaborative development, not individual expression.
I welcome suggestions about materials on this site.
Please use the site
Contact form,
referring to materials by their URLs.
- A place for shared projects
involving contributions from other artists.
For example, a project might involve a category of photographs
that meet certain technical specifications
(e.g., JPGs of a certain size and color palette).
More generally, we could have modular works
where modules (conforming to a specification)
are contributed by different people.
The materials could be either physically on one site
or virtually linked across many sites.
The copyright implications will need to be figured out.
- Interactive works
using Java or database back-ends.
For example, perceptual experiments
implemented as video games,
or other interactive art works.
- Personal history
in digital form, for example,
journals (activities, dreams), lists (favorites, facts, bibliographies),
works, essays, etc.
An online "avatar" of the "person".
I'm still working on this idea,
but eventually people will be able to display
online "personalities" in elaborate multimedia form.
This isn't intended as an "ego thing"
or an "immortality thing",
but rather as a way to open up the borders between people,
across space and time.
It would be fascinating to be able to look
at an online archive of materials about a grandparent, for example.
But what is the boundary between "public" and "private",
in terms of what one is willing to put up on the web?
- Mining and digitizing
of preexisting "physical" materials
such as sound recordings
and works on paper.
Also mining
of preexisting digital materials.
- Treasure hunt
involving secret passageways, clues, treasure maps.
- Exploring how ideas and images
have a life of their own
apart from their "owner" or "creator".
Most of the ideas and concepts we work with
have been around for a long time,
having been passed from culture to culture
and person to person
(at a pace that has been vastly accelerated
by the development of
books, magazines, movies, radio, television,
and now the Internet).
In what way does the web provide a new environment
or "ecology" for ideas and images
in the collective consciousness?
A copyright-free image, if useful enough,
might function as a "virus" and "infect" websites around the world.
No, I'm not talking about illegal computer viruses,
just materials that people could voluntarily pick up and reuse.
- Disseminating the material
in terms of getting it picked up by major search engines, etc.
Even if something is available on the web,
it's not necessarily going to be found by most people.
A related question is how to support such work financially.
Revised 11/22/98, KN
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