The central question that the exhibition poses is whether …people.ucalgary.ca/~jparker/art321/L11Advanced/art.pdf · 2 The central question that the exhibition poses is whether

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The central question that the exhibition poses is whether or not artists working with the internet are in fact limited to a “ready-made” color palette, a premise that many artists working with film, photography, and mass produced, standardized paint sets have assumed.

The central question that the exhibition poses is whether or not artists working with the internet are in fact limited to a “ready-made” color palette, a premise that many artists working with film, photography, and mass produced, standardized paint sets have assumed.

The central question that the exhibition poses is whether or not artists working with the internet are in fact limited to a “ready-made” color palette, a premise that many artists working with film, photography, and mass produced, standardized paint sets have assumed.

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JavaScript is set to randomly determine which color will be loaded, but the set of possible colors is determined by the artist. The piece plays on the codification of online color in the context of art history. Morris Louis’ painting "Where" (1960), also consists of a series of multicolored bands that run vertically on the composition, and all of Demers’ color are digitally sampled from this palette. However, where Louis’s composition consists of hand-painted lines, and fluid and continuous brush strokes that gently converge at the bottom, Demers’s color bars are all formed according to the same rectangular dimensions and orientation. They are also animated in time; after all of the bars have appeared, they disappear after ten seconds, making his appropriation of the original a commentary on the grid-like structure of HTML code, and the ephemeral character of internet art.

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thethingasitis™ consists of a single web page full of “blue screen” blue . This is the shade of blue that a video and monitor display when a signal is sent through the circuit, without image content. The blue plays at being pure and unmediated. However, this purity is also undermined by the soft blue text that is animated on top of it. The text varies, but it generally recounts Atavar’s personal accounts of using HTML code for color design.

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Gold signifies something that cannot exist online. Traditionally, gold refers to things like money, jewelry, stardom, awards, a standard, and excess, all things from the “offline” world. Gold’s natural shine and sparkle is here translated into a series of animated gif files, heaped together in a treasure chest assemblage. However, the obvious problem is that this gold’s glitter hardly evokes the same measure of brilliance and shine of “real” gold. Rather, Engblom’s gold is ironic gold, a digital animation with a frame rate that is slow enough to even make the animated “glitter” looks naïve, like a banner advertisement on a website that catches your eye, but is perhaps the least desirable thing to pay attention to on the page.

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Similar to Gold, Elna Frederick’s @ = landscape, takes a humorous look at online representations of nature: sky, clouds, and rain. The rain is hyper-geometric, consisting of thick blue lines, all of equal width, and all falling from right to left consistently. The visual effects of the blue lines appear one after the other, resembling the mechanized movements of an ink-jet printer filling in the lines of a page––far from the painterly style of fluid brush stokes and nuanced colorism that has long esteemed classical landscape painting.

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Colors Combination Tool gives users a visual display of color combinations available online. The composition space is divided into a center sphere and an outer square. The color selection tools on either side of the center image allow users to separately alter the amount of RGB quantities in the space. However because color is, by definition, relational (a color appears differently depending on the context it is in), the Colors Combination Tool visualizes the gap between the range of perceptual phenomena possible with the set of hexadecimal color codes.

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Color Field Television is akin to watching an abstract painting on television, on speed. Animated to 12 frames per second, different color sections appear in each frame. The sections are not homogenous, yet they are all formed in the shapes of rectangles, stripes or squares. They appear in several different bright colors, and due to the high paced animation, they leave little time to absorb each color on its own. Unlike the color field paintings, where a viewer would wander in a gallery and presumably ponder over a single composition before moving on to the next—there is no time for reflection, only stimulus-and-response. Second, unlike traditional television which has classically assumed a passive, narcotic, receptive state of media consumption, Color Field Television, demands a more active response by directly engaging the viewer at a closer proximity and more demanding pace.

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The Rainbow Website uses the entire browser window to code a continuous animation of the seven major spectral colors in the rainbow. The colors gently fade between the layers from Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, and back again on a loop. The color selections derive not only from the HTML codes needed for color visualization, but also the standard spectral colors in an iconic, seven-band rainbow. The number seven originates from Newton’s thesis that white light contained seven other primary colors. While engaging the color codes and standards for primary colors, The Rainbow Website also animates these codes to reveal the phenomenal nuances nested in between.

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NumberofManufacturingIndustriesbyNumberofProductClassesinanIndustry is difficult to look at. Not because the material is offensive or rude, but rather, because it increasingly challenges human perception. The background consists of several multi-colored gif animations, on top of which is bright yellow bold face text written down the left hand side of the browser window. Arranged in patterns, the background flashes on and off, as the eye strains to focus and read the text. The words waver between legibility and illegibility, depending on whether or not that particular letter falls on top of a darker or lighter area of the screen. If one can manage to read the text, some of the following phrases can be deciphered: “Rhetoric of Boredom…or maybe an overabundance of information…packing is really better than the thing…being afraid of disaster means listening and taking things in, internally.” The text resembles Jenny Holtzer’s use of run-on text with little to no punctuation, ongoing fragments of thoughts and incomplete sentences. The text’s lack of finitude mirrors the ongoing visual animations behind it, both metaphors for the tension between absorption and boredom experienced in a culture of endless mass-produced commoditities that the work takes its title from.

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"I am not..." prompts users to assert their identities through negation, and uses Perl script to aggregate their responses in a long string of text. served by is a variation on conceptual stabs at making long sentences through online collaborations. Below the conditional conclusion—"but I can take you to Rhizome.org"—follows a record of the visitors' origins, organized by domain extensions. Annie Abrahams, an artist born in the Netherlands and based in France, has been active online since 1996. served by expresses her concern with the potential and limitations of web-based communications that are central to her work.

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Daniel Garcia Andujar's Technologies to the People was a net activism project with a tongue-in-cheek attitude. It purported to bring cutting-edge technology to the homeless and impoverished-a darkly humorous form of social commentary that showed the holes in promises of equality and democracy made by the internet's early boosters by reminding its audience of people who don't have access to or use for the web. Andujar's ironic "sales pitch" for Art Cryptography

Tools, made as a splash page for Rhizome, says: "Encryption is your only weapon when you're living in an armed camp. Get yours now!!!"

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Ben Benjamin's Superbad is like a game without rules. As the user clicks through its labyrinthine ring, some transitions follow narrative logic, while others let the user decide how, if it all, the linked pages are connected. Superbad's visuals mix geometric digital drawings and sampled images. For Benjamin, a web designer, Superbad was both a junkyard and sketchpad of unused or potential ideas for commercial projects. His splash art for Rhizome recreates the texture of Superbad, with abstract patterns and found pictures meeting in dead-end interactivity: click on the bullets, and the content of a square in the upper right changes.

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Mark Daggett lets the user click and drag to distort a textbook diagram of a horizontal root. His splash page illustrates both the botanical oddity that gave Rhizome its name and the interactive, conceptual media that the organization supports. Daggett's facility with Shockwave demonstrated here served him well in his career as a designer and programmer (the name of his company, Flavored Thunder, appears in the splash page's title). He was also a frequent participant in arts festivals and collectives, including the collaborative ensemble Radical Software Group.

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An animation of a lizard hunting and capturing a fly yields to the Rhizome home page automatically. Andrew Forbes' page imitates commercial spash art, a form of light entertainment that leaves the viewer watching and waiting. It is unlike Forbes' work under the handle atty, which focused on multi-user functionality, such as chat applications to provide a forum for feedback about online group exhibitions by collectives www.hell.com and www.no-such.com. He lives in London.

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An animated .gif at the center of a white page flips rapidly through personal pronouns in a distillation of the internet's social dimension. Valery Grancher's minimal animation suggests dissolution of the ego in the collective use of the internet; the "I" is so thin that it becomes indiscernible in the quick succession of group identities. Grancher established nomemory.org as a platform for showing his work in 1995, and has been active as an artist and curator ever since. He conceived this page in 1995 and contributed it to Rhizome's splash project three years later.

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In Matt Hoessli's splash page, layers of jagged, moving gray and white lines form a dense screen. The animation uses similar shapes of slightly differing dimensions to produce optical friction, like in the domain name of Hoessli's defunct web site, o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o.org. In addition to net art projects, Hoessli performed electronic music and was involved with the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University.

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A stylized, stylish image of a baseball diamond, dominated by shades of red perches on four iterations of a partial view of a mitt catching a ball. A soundtrack of a sportscaster's announcement in Spanish confirms the ballpark setting. Fork does Rhizome. is an eye-catching intervention into the user's contact with Rhizome's home page. Founded by David Lindeman, an American living in Berlin, Fork Unstable Media is a design studio specializing in interactive technologies that markets its products with the vocabulary of experimental art.

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The art of JODI simulates dead ends and errors, with additional tweaks of the interface to further frustrate the viewer. In %20wrong (RHIZOME--

splash%20_%20JODI%20%_), a black strobe prevents users from even attempting to read cryptic lines of code on a gray field. The only constantly legible element is the spinning, quartered black-and-white disk that signified a delay on old Macintoshes. It functions as a piece of bait, since clicking on the rectangle around the disk sends users to Rhizome. Splash art is a natural medium for JODI, a collaboration by artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, who have never framed their work with texts and statements. Their projects consistently occupy the entire browser window.

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An outline of the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe in a white dress from The

Seven Year Itch flips and blinks, as a giant fan flickers at the opposite edge of the pageÑpresumably the source of the breeze that disturbs MonroeÕs outfit. The images are superimposed on pastel backgrounds—shades of orange, pink, and yellow are selected randomly whenever the page loads—and a junky, distorted sample makes an awkward soundtrack. Pavu stands for Popular Arts Value Upgrade, a French collective active since 1999 known for the irreverent, cryptic humor that characterizes this splash page.

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Four doodles of vaguely feline figures recline on a red field. Roll the cursor over one, and another changes its pose. Reinis' splash page plays with cause-and-effect relationships to frustrate viewer expectations. There is no clear connection between the movement of the mouse and the actions of the cats. Reinis is a common Latvian name, but attempts to further determine the identity of this artist have unfortunately fallen short.

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R's and h's in a cluster of computer keys allude to Rhizome's logo. The keys shift fluidly in color across a palette of blue and gray. Cross-hatch lines that fade from black to white and back add dynamism to the surface as they flicker across the screen. The moving elements and changing colors force the viewer's eye to constantly recalibrate its perception of foreground and background, of positive and negative space. All the action distracts from a blue square button tucked at the lower left corner—the only gateway to Rhizome's home page. Satellite01.net is a defunct artists' collective, unrelated to the T-shirt company that now occupies www.satellite01.com.

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On this website, viewers are invited to explore a labyrinth of recourses composed by the artist, each pathway accessed through forms and hyperlinks. Forms lead to other larger combinations of forms, some coalescing into text while others compose abstract designs. The work's appearance relies largely on whichever operating system the viewer is using to access it, resulting in a morphing aesthetic that updates itself over time.

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Wisniewski designed an applet that transforms a series of scroll bars into a unified generative / interactive visual instrument. Note: this work will appear quite different depending on the viewer's operating system.

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This work presents a series of images that resulted from the artist's collaboration with Photoshop, with the goal of highlighting the software's color dithering algorithm.

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This video by Małgosia Woźnica aka v5mt presents a galcieal style of glitch. Rich in colorful flowing video distortions, the visuals unfold slowly in a vertically scanning stream of eerie helenistic imagrey, pop culture, and cryptographic typography, complimented by a subtle soundtrack of droning oscilations.

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These drawings are the result of a collaboration between an artist, Jim Johnson, a faculty member in the Department of Fine Arts, and a group of scientists from the Department of Computer Science in the School of Engineering of the University of Colorado.

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The Secret Lives of Numbers is an interactive data visualization and online net artwork. The artists conducted an exhaustive empirical study to determine the relative popularity of every integer between zero and one million. The resulting information exhibits an extraordinary variety of patterns which reflect our culture, our minds, and our bodies.

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