I have just spent another perfectly good hour wandering around Jim Andrew’s vispo.com. Jim takes visuals, poetry, music, writing, gaming, criticism, coding and much more very seriously. No, on the contrary, he is very playful with all of the above.

Jim builds Web Art Instruments such as the splendid Nio and Jig Sound. These look good, sound good and are fun to play with.

I have been to Jim’s site a number of times. There’s a lot to read and interact with. For the moment I don’t have any great insight into Jim and his work - other than it’s great and very much a part of where I think the Art of the Net is heading towards and very much worth exploring. I hope to come back to the site and talk about individual works.

vispo.com

I found Jason Nelson because was the 2006 Web Art award winner of the Drunken Boat Panliterary Competition. His prize-winning entry, This is how you Will Die is quite a fun little Flash applet available from his bio page. Note: It takes quite a while to load. Click on “Death Spin” to get things started.

Also on the bio page were links to his own web sites. I have wandered around secrettechnology.com and found quite a few web art files. I didn’t really like his main 2007 work, Between Treacherous Objects. The ten or so pages seemed repetitive - the same algorithms with just differences in the bitmaps and music. And I could not really see a thematic link other than the usual diatribe against a retro modern life. But Evil Flying Mascots and several other works I played with were quite amusing.

His own web pages are offer a limited background, but you you can find out a bit more on his profile at Griffith University in Brisbane Australia.

Jason’s skills cover a lot of areas from coding to interface design, from music to literature. In other words he has all the skills and interests that being a Web Artist requires. I do think though that his greatest work is still in front of him. I say that only having seen a small portion of his rather large body of work, but do feel that he could really double-click into the themes and symbology that he is trying to express. Right now he is good at making tools for art and at making comments about art. Maybe one day Jason will simply make art.

secrettechnology.com [via Drunken Boat]

NETworking is an excellent introduction to early 21st century Web Art. Each work is well-designed, interactive and original.

Originality is the key element. Think of walking through a gallery of recent paintings. If you know art history, as you look at each painting, a little voice in your brain is saying - “Derivative of Warhol.” “Follows Picasso in the 50’s.” “Really bad Rauchenberg.” “Fontana did it better.” And so on.

The Haifa Museum exhibits of fourteen works of Web Art. Although all the works are presented on-screen via your monitor and are thus 2D (though they may represent 3D), you feel the freshness of a contemporary sculpture garden.

Each piece takes you into a unique environment - it’s own little world. Ultimately the viewing experience is more complex, more nuanced and more rewarding than any equivalent show of static canvasses.

Link [Through Rhizome.org]

NETworking is an excellent introduction to early 21st century Web Art. Each work is well-designed, interactive and original.

Originality is the key element. Think of walking through a gallery of recent paintings. If you know art history, as you look at each painting, a little voice in your brain is saying - “Derivative of Warhol.” “Follows Picasso in the 50’s.” “Really bad Rauchenberg.” “Fontana did it better.” And so on.

The Haifa Museum exhibits of fourteen works of Web Art. Although all the works are presented on-screen via your monitor and are thus 2D (though they may represent 3D), you feel the freshness of a contemporary sculpture garden.

Each piece takes you into a unique environment - it’s own little world. Ultimately the viewing experience is more complex, more nuanced and more rewarding than any equivalent show of static canvasses.

Link [Through Rhizome.org]

glyf: construct is the work of Duncan Holby, a designer /developer working in Richmond Virginia. His personal web site is at glyfdesign.com. The name glyf probably relates to the word “glyph” which is “A displayed or printed image. In typography, a glyph may be a single letter, an accent mark or a ligature.”

glyf:construct is a gallery with (as of this writing) fifteen individual works. Each work is a Flash file that allows you to control the movement of shapes in 3D by moving the cursor. The first work support very limited motion - horizontal mouse movement only while the later works support X and Y as well as mouse down events.

Each of the works is an example of Web Art. Each is a stand-alone work which allows some user interaction to control the display of the site. My favorite work is ge(o)m.v1. I really like the way this highly symmetrical form occasionally appears to be asymetric. Is this due to the eye playing tricks or the actual lag times in generating the lines. Who knows or who cares? The effect is captivating.

This site was sourced through the Rhizome ArtBase.

Michiel Knaven is a Dutch artist living in Zwolle, Netherlands with a web site at michaelmedia.org. He seems happy working with images, electronics, mechanical engineering, music, coding and so on. He’s a also techie.

He has been exhibiting works since 1993 so his education and early development occurred well before the Internet came into wide usage. But if somebody is an artist and a techie is it not natural and perhaps almost inevitable that such a person might want to produce web-art?

In Michiel’s case, his output flows fluidly from installations to photography to web-art. His web site moves seamlessly from depicting his traditional media to engaging you in little on-line interactions. He’s seems at his happiest working in Flash but works with JavaScript as well. My favorite work (of the things viewed so far) is Leonardo’s Flight which references both the inventor and a legendary “Flying Dutchman”.

One part of Michael’s web site is quite special. It is a web-art-portal with over a hundred links last updated in 2004. It lists many early web-art sites. If you want a good and quick overview of what web-artists were doing during the dot com boom Michel’s *** Net Guide is a great place to start.

Bodytag is a series of thought experiments or “web programming explorations” by Glen Murphy, a computer scientist. He describes himself this way:

Glen is an English-born Australian (Melbourne) who works as a UI Software Engineer at Google. At night he produces installation software artwork and human-computer interaction ’stuff’ for fun. When curators looking for an artist statement threaten him with pokes in the eye, he usually just says that he likes to “computationally connect wonder and reality”.

Bodytag is a gallery that displays the work by an artist/scientist. The Bodytag home page is an array of data boxes that resembles the periodic table. Each box links to a demo. Some are interactive such as smoke2 or gravity2 others are just videos - albeit programmatically generated. Every demo has been built with great care and with much consideration to visual appeal and a high graphic design standard. Of particular relevance is that this is a public exhibit or gallery of a series of works created over a number of years and yet presented and accessile from a single web page with its own URL.