Ken Goldberg is an artist. Ken Goldberg is a professor of engineering.

So what defines who is an “artist”? What enables a professor at a major university have an alter ego that can encompass whimsy, caprice and felicity? Do his two sides have an irrational connection or a rational disconnection?

Many facets of Ken’s development and output are reported in a 2005 biographical article from the East Bay Express. But there’s more and new data waiting to be explored. In 2008 I hope to be in contact with Ken via a project or two. While doing so I hope to research and report back to you at a later date what Ken is looking into these days and where he is setting his sights.

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MBCBFTW is an abbreviation of “My boyfriend came back from the war” – which is the name of a web site built in 1996 by Olia Lialina et al. More details regarding the background of the site are available at the Last Real Net Art Museum.

Christiane Paul in her seminal work Digital Art says “Early net art produced some classics of the genre, among them Olia Lialina’s [MBCBFTW]…”

As Ms Paul points out, Lialina:

“expanded the piece into the Last Real Net Art Museum, which used the original MBCBFTW as a starting point and then developed an archive of variations on the work by other artists. The project points to the possibilities for creation and presentation offered by digital networks, such as the infinite reconfiguration of information in an open system, but not accommodated by traditional museums.”

Today, we often call this sort of endeavor a “remix”. Almost immediately upon exploring the site and understanding its openness to the possibilities remixing, I began to build re-mixes myself. As of this writing I have created six variations ranging from Advent calendar to Web 2.0 versions. Most of them are not yet complete. I seem to start yet another new remix before quite finishing the prior remix.

I have created a page on the Art of the Net wiki (Click on the link below) where you can find links to all the remixes as well as much, more more about my thoughts on Lialina’s work.

MBCBFTW

The Fire Escape is a a crowd-sourced example of web art. A number of artists have been asked to doctor a given image of a fire escape. As you scroll down, you see each artist’s interpretation of the fire escape. One is two men descending an image of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. And there are Simpsons, Spiderman, Pixel Art, PhotoShop effects and much more, more. One could do a whole study on the symbology of this project.

The whole effect is similar to a project I’ve written about before: zoomquilt. You will spend a happy few minutes smiling at the visual puns and another period of time wondering just what on earth does THAT mean.

An unfortunate aspect is that image are being sourced from a number of sites and some of those images are no longer available. Thus the site does not complete loading and there are occasional blank images as you scroll down.

This work and other works like it would really benefit from a bit more technology. For example, it would be nice to walk down passageways and be able to branch in alternate directions while seeing such images.

The Fire Escape

The Surveys

Scroll around the pixel graphics landscape and as you mouseover icons the answer to questions about happiness appear as pop-ups. Do jokes make you happy? 65.3% said “Yes” while 34.7% said “No”. The survey questions are fun. As you mouse around you begin to anticipate what the questions will be but the percentages always seem to be surprising.  It turns that the the thing the least likely to make you happy is a Stephen King novel. The most likely thing to bring happiness is sleep!  I learned all this from the delightful conclusions. If youwant you can take the survey yourself.

This Flash application was built by Chris Joseph and David Hume.

The source was www.babel.ca.

Eisenstein’s Monster 

Create your own Frankenstein monster as easily as clothing a paper doll or building a Mr Potato Head. The end product is kind of creepy to watch as lips move and eyes glance and nose twitches all in a manner that is realistic and unreal at the same time.

This Flash web application is by Chris Joseph who is a writer and artist currently in Leicester, England. You can find out more about him at www.chrisjoseph.org.

One nice thing is that you can design faces or you can let the computer make up its own designs. Thus the application runs unattended.

Sourced from the Rhizome Artbase.

Eisenstein’s Monster 

Create your own Frankenstein monster as easily as clothing a paper doll or building a Mr Potato Head. The end product is kind of creepy to watch as lips move and eyes glance and nose twitches all in a manner that is realistic and unreal at the same time.

This Flash web application is by Chris Joseph who is a writer and artist currently in Leicester, England. You can find out more about him at www.chrisjoseph.org.

One nice thing is that you can design faces or you can let the computer make up its own designs. Thus the application runs unattended.

Sourced from the Rhizome Artbase.

Forest Grove is a web site built around a Flash video that’s built over a short story by John Cheever. Details and story line available at Wikipedia’s entry on Maya Churi. The piece one first place at the Seoul Net Fest 2005 – which is where we first noticed the work.

The video is quite the largest portion of the project but unlike the videos we normally see, this one makes good use Flash technology and allows for good user interaction. You can select scenes, pause and skip. There is good use of the multimedia effects available with flash in combining text, sound with image movement and transitions.

Here is the interesting question: Is Forest Grove a web site that has a lot of movie footage or is Forest Grove a DVD that has a very interactive menu? The good answer is both. Forest Grove was shown at the Sundace Film Festival and it won a price in a web site competition.

If we project the current DVD menu interaction into the future and take that DVD data and make it freely available over the Internet for all time and allow people to add their comments then does the work become Web-Art?

See the Wikipedia entry for Superbad, one of the very early web art sites, created in 1997 by San Francisco artist Ben Benjamin.

The site involves dozens of web pages. You must discover where to click to get to the next page.

The more you zoom in or out the more you see. A very simple concept. zoomquilt.

It is interactive. It goes just as fast or slow as you, the viewer, want it to go. The artists is no longer in control. The artist has handed the work over to you.

You’ve left the paper world, the photography world, the video world, even the real world and you are in something that can only be done on a computer.

The graphics are rather more illustrations than high art. It would be nice if you could branch off and travel down different paths. And so and so forth. zoomquilt stands as a simple very straightforward (pun intended) example of the beginnings of art on the net.