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.

Artist Entry: Jessica Ivins

Retrotype

It is a major stereotype that video games are the domain of adolescent boys and young men. Up until very recently this is a stereotype that has been very solidly based in fact. Only in the last few years and with the introduction of Nintendo's Wii system have major game developers realized that the market for video games went much further than this demographic. And not only is the primary market for video games young men, but those developing the games are also primarily men. This may seem like a broad generalization, but Computer Science and game development are both very dominantly male workplaces, and unfortunately, the games produced in this kind of stereotype ruled world produced very skewed female characters.

What Ivins has done in her work is to very pointedly show the user how women have been portrayed in mainstream video games over the last forty years. On the main page there is a timeline with a graphical representation of the prototype female character from that block of time. When you enter the program, she has you type in your birth year, then allows you to "customize" your character by changing the basic colors of the image. Finally she show the character in its video game environment, and gives you a summary of how she chose that character based on popular video games of the time, as well as a short history of the character's role in the game.

Overall I find her work very successful. Perhaps I am biased because of my major, but as the only woman in the game design course offered on campus I completely relate to this. And while the entire work is a commentary on women in games, it isn't so overtly feminist that it looses its impact to all but the fringes. It's very personalized, and very easily and effectively opens up the discussion about video games and how they have and haven't changed since the 1970s. My only critical comments about the piece would be that she could have pushed the history and context of the pieces more, or pushed for the user to be more attached to the prototype so that when her role in the game was revealed it would feel more personal. Another choice I don't necessarily agree with is showing the timeline at the beginning of the user's interaction, rather than the end. The way it's laid out the user knows what is ahead and nothing other than the text at the end is really unveiled.

Artist Entry: Brian Piana

"Ellsworth Kelly Hacked My Twitter"

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Piana, like many other digital artists, is commenting on micro-blogging and specifically the popular site Twitter. What he has done is to take the icons and reduced them to their dominant color, then used code to automatically update the artwork in real time. Much like the work of Ellsworth Kelly that the title references, there is a distinct set of rules to how the squares are placed on the page. The most recent post is in the top left corner, while the oldest is in the top right. And the size is not static, but also based on rules. The margins always stay the same, no matter what the size of the window is, and the number of squares adjusts to obey this rule.

This makes Pina's piece interesting on several levels. The most obvious is the commentary on micro-blogging, and to me it almost seems like the tweets themselves have no material meaning in his work, but that as a collective whole they create something that is truly interesting. Another less immediate commentary to me is the link to Kelly. Much like Ethan Ham's work that I discussed in my last post, the title creates and interesting link to art history and immediately associates the work with rules, order, and minimalism.

Over all I feel that it is a very successful merging of both the social and historical commentary. I feel like this is also a very successful bridge between traditional mediums and digital art as being a legitimate artistic medium. By bringing in a strong historical reference that can't be ignored, this piece distinguishes itself from the one-dimensional digital creations that are ubiquitous around the web today.