Artist Entry: Niko Princen

Values Questionare

Art has a very long and textured history of commenting on commercialism and capitalism. Princen is making no exception here. But rather than making assumptions on how people feel about commercialism  and its connection with art. What he has done is scanned through the statements of several prominent companies picking out key words about what they believe. He then put them all in survey and asks the user to choose at least one that they feel best describes the word art.

He then provides the user with the companies whose philosophies best match your answers. He is trying to gather as much information as possible and analyze the results. Eventually he hopes to draw conclusions from the results and considers the entire piece a work in progress.

I find the project to be very interesting. It covers very rich subject matter, but in a very different way from anything I have seen. It isn't trying to teach you an opinion, but it asks you to draw your own conclusions based on information others have provided you. I'm very curious to see what conclusions the artist draws.

Artist Entry:Cody Trepte

Binary cross-stitch

This goes hand in hand with my previous artists entry for me. Binary is a very simple concept of 1's and 0's. Or when it comes down to computing machinery, on and off. But rather than approaching binary mathematically or mechanically like most people usually do, he approaches it with a drastically different material.

By using cross-stitching he creates a juxtaposition that forces the viewer to consider why he chose such an old-fashioned way of expression and communication. But rather than taking as strong of a philosophical stance as the Open Source Embroidery, Terpte applies pure humor to the collection. Each piece is a literal binary translation of the title. But the titles are all references to Computer Science and are progressively more humorous. The Ghost of Alan Turing and Can technology be understood outside itself? are both humorous, but also thought provoking or require some digging to find out who they reference.

I find this collection extremely funny. I like the cross-stitching and the titles are very engaging. They could easily loose an audience that isn't familiar with the terms, but it makes people want to look up the information as well.

Artist Entry: Ele Carpenter

Open Source Embroidery

At first coding and embroidery seem like they have absolutely nothing to do with eachother. Code is processed by machine. It is strict, it is functional, and it is very new. Embroidery is very old, it is an oral tradition, and it is purely decorative. But code and embroidery have very interesting similarities, as well and juxtapositions. Programming is a male dominated activity in which one produces hundreds and thousands of tiny snippets of code to build a larger program. Embroidery is dominated by women and is constructed by hundreds and thousands of tiny stitches to build a larger image. The principles of Open Source coding also resonate with embroidery - "principles of 'freedom' to create, modify and distribute, within the cultural and economic constraints of capitalism".

What the Open Source Embroidery project does is to shed light on the unique connections between the two ideas. They exhibit dozens of textile works of art that depict open source software and ideas that resonate with their materials. Knitted telnet lines on a knit computer, woven network diagrams, quilted HTML color charts, cross-stiched code, and more line their exhibit halls prompting discussion and further exploration of just how similar embroidery and open source really are.

I think that these exhibits are extraordinarily successful. Both really do rely on very similar principles. Even if you look at the very simplest example they provide the connection is clear: the first programmer, and the first program. Lady Ada Lovelace wrote the first program for Charles Babbage's theoretical Analytical Machine, and as he said: "the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jaquard Loom weaves flowers and leaves." The Jaquard Loom was the first device that used punch card programming - a similar system to the cards that FORTRAN used that still exist today.

Artist Entry: Sebastian Schmieg

The Last Midi Background

The 1990s were an impressive decade for technology. The personal computer was finally a reality, and with the internet becoming faster and more impressive each month, every wanted one. And with the internet came advances in web browsers and HTML. In the mid to late 1990s HTML code was growing faster than standards could control them, and each and every browser had new flashier tags like marquee, blink, and the dreaded embedded MIDI files. Any amateur could make a webpage now, and odds are it would be painful on your eyes and ears.

Fortunately people have begun to realize that if a user can't stand to look at your page, no one will visit it. Sleek, modern, and easy to use are the keys to a successful website today. Unfortunately, there are remnants of the old internet still floating around. Scmieg has found several webpages that still engage in the horrific practice of subjecting their visitors to embedded MIDIs. He has taken these webpages and engaged in a good bit of appropriation to create a webpage that embodies these old practices. He has taken the music and several images directly from his sources then, on a familiarly awkward background, scrolls the images across the page, plays the music, and provides the information on the webpage it was all taken from in appropriately painful to read text.

Overall I find this piece to be a hilarious commentary on how far we have come in terms of web development. Everything we see in his piece was (unfortunately) once a standard online, and is now (fortunately) virtually extinct from most common webpages. Templates, styling, and an appreciation of standards have reined in the wild days of awkwardly positioned neon headers, but Schmieg's piece reminds us how far we have come, and why we never want to go back.

Artist Entry: Luc Courchesne

Landscape 1

In 1997 virtual reality still seemed like pure science fiction. Even if you could find a virtual environment somewhere, it was usually very expensive, and this has been true up until very recently. But while most people were daydreaming about virtual reality through Star Trek's holodecks, Luc Courchesne was creating art from them. He took four screens, four touch screen computers (also extremely impressive at that point),  microphones, motion detectors, and video disk players and made a virtual room.

The room displays video taken from a park, events, and virtual characters that the user can interact with. The goal of this piece is to explore a landscape not simply as the image and feel of the space, but to push the understanding of the space and its personality. He wants the user to fully explore the environment, the stories, the people, and the movement by pushing the envelope of the experience.

I find this piece to be personally fascinating. Virtual environments are not easy to program, and despite the fact that the technology is cheaper and better now than it was 12 years ago it's still very difficult. And yet Courschesne did an excellent job exploring this idea of a landscape. What I would love to see is an updated version of this. With modern technology, he could project the landscape onto a circular, multi-touch paneled room, then by using technology similar to the Wii Fit Balance Board he could allow the user to physically explore the room by walking from one end to the other. Fitted with strategic speakers, mics, and even fans or heat sources, he could take the idea of exploring space to a whole new level of interaction.

Artist Entry: Marcos Weskamp

social circles

One of the most useful, if not obnoxious, social networking tools on the internet is the mailing list. Through these we get helpful technical support, free stuff people are looking to get rid of, information on the whereabouts of old classmates, and of course massive quantities of spam. What's interesting about all of these is that certain people are much more vocal or noticeable than others. Either they're involved in almost every thread that pops up, or they're just obnoxiously vocal. Whichever one, you're bound to notice and recognize them above most other participants and lurkers in the list.

What Weskamp has done is to map several mailing list that he has encountered. He has written a program that visually represents each member of the list and how many posts they have made, with whom they have interacted, and which threads they have been involved in. The result is that each mailing list creates unique patterns. You start to pick out which lists are moderated, who is the driving force on the list, and what kind of subjects are being discussed without having to filter through hundreds ore even thousands of e-mails.

Overall I find the piece to be fairly successful. While most lists have online archives, it is really difficult to know how active or useful a mailing list is to you without extensive digging. Weskamp's work succeeds spectacularly at being somewhat useful to a user, as well as being thought provoking and interesting. Looking at one map in a single view may not be so interesting, but the dynamic aspect of the piece brings out its strengths. By allowing the user to browse through various lists and explore the information in several different views he is providing the user a more complete and intriguing perspective to the behavior of mailing lists.

Artist Entry: Alexei Shulgin

"Form"

A significant portion of how we interact with the web is through forms. We click buttons, we fill out text boxes, we take polls, we select, deselect, fill in, and move on. What Alexei Shulgin has done is break these forms out of any context beyond the object itself and a few prompts. He lets the buttons and text fields take on a life of their own - almost like building blocks for the new structure.

At first glance the work seems haphazard and pointless. But the object of the piece becomes clear about two clicks into the page. It's addicting. You keep following each button, jumping around the page to find something new, then trying to find your way back to where you were to try and find an unexplored branch of the page. This one page manages to sum up the addictiveness of our web browsing habits - we follow one link, one form and keep clicking and backtracking until we have to go, get ourselves stuck in a corner, get bored, or occasionally leave by choice.

I really enjoyed this piece, I found that the more I navigated through the site the more I thought about what exactly I was doing and how similar this was to my usual habits on the web. I was also really entertained and impressed by how the forms we've come to think of as insignificant and purely functional pieces of a web browser were turned into such whimsical creations. He turned tick boxes, radio boxes, text fields, and buttons into animations, games, geometric designs, and words. The reveal of what he has done is quite impressive as well - you have no idea what you've gotten into when you click that first button.