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.

In the meantime let’s begin to look at three of his works of web art: Ouija 2000, Demonstrate and Memento Mori.

Ouija 2000

Ouija 2000 is an on-line Ouija board. Up to twenty people collectively manipulate an on-line planchette. Once the application is loaded, questions appear at the bottom of the screen. If you are the only spiritualist participant online, you can move the planchette anywhere over the virtual Ouija board. If you stay in a single location for a length of time, Ouija 2000 recognizes and informs you that the planchette is over the desired response. The interesting thing happens when multiple participants are on-line. In this case the planchette moves according to a specially-designed voting or averaging algorithm.

When I think of Quija 2000 lots of ideas pop up:

• As far as I am concerned, I will never again need to purchase another physical-world Ouija board. My guess is that most spiritualists are Luddite enough so that Ken has not singlehandedly wiped Ouija factories off the board (so to speak).
• In the next revision, it would be nice if we could create our own private groups and ask our own questions. How about a custom Ouija board question generator? The we could consult it to help us decide whether our next project should be built with Python or Ruby on Rails, for example.
• It would be great to have a Ouija Widget (say this out loud please) for chat rooms and blogs and other social networks with numbers of online lurkers. As a supplement or enhancer to online polling widgets or plug-ins. I feel that such a toy could lead to some freaky crowd-sourcing responses.
• Could one replace the Diebold voting machines with Ouija 2000?
• One could have lots of fun with the positioning algorithm. In corporate environment, you could start off with the low paid employees having one vote while the CEO has 1023. The number of votes would readjust according to who has the best guess of the quarterly sales figures or earnings whatever.
• Perhaps Ouija 2000 is some way of capturing the collective subconscious. See also Demonstrate just below.

Demonstrate

Quoting from Demonstrate web site:

Demonstrate set up…a web camera over UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement. For six weeks, the camera was made accessible to anyone on the Internet. Online participants shared remote control of the robot camera, allowing them to zoom in to frame and photograph activity in the Plaza at any time of day or night.

The project, timed to coincide with the 40th Anniversary of the Free Speech Movement attracted over 4000 online participants from around the world. The resulting archive of 1200 photos and textual comments offers a portrait of public space as viewed from the public in cyberspace.

Arising from the same root as demon and monster, the Demonstrate project set out to visualize the concept of public space. The camera and archive illustrate new imaging technology and human behavior in the public zones of both plaza and cyberspace.

So here was a surveillance camera whose images were open to viewing by the public with access to the Internet – which could be the vast panoply of angels, the KGB or you. A place to see and be seen.

Was this another first step towards the state in which all that can be known is knowable by all?[1] Certainly here is an early draft of the answer to the question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Responding to this question, in the 17th century Bishop George Berkeley said “esse est percipi” which translates as “to be [exist] is to be perceived”. Berkeley invoked God and said that God can observe everything. Thus everything we humans perceive or do not perceive must nonetheless exist because God perceives everything.

Fast forward three hundred years or so, go from Berkeley to the webcam in Berkeley (the California city named after Bishop George Berkeley), progress from God being the omniscient observer to you, me and all the rest of us being the collective observancy. Then, according to this Berkeley mashup, are you God?

And thus we have a nice neat and tidy curatorial statement about Demonstrate without ever once mentioning the word “gaze”, semiotics, the Patriot Act or other complicated stuff.

Mori

Or Memento Mori – is a Latin phrase that may be freely translated as “Remember that you are mortal,” “Remember you will die,” or “Remember your death”.

Paraphrasing the Memento Mori site:

Minute movements of the Hayward Fault (above the above University of California at Berkeley) are detected by a Streckeisen STS-1 seismometer that measures vertical ground velocity. The up and down motion reflects the up and down movement of the Earth’s surface and is converted to digital signals, and transmitted continuously via the Internet to a server at UC Berkeley where it is further processed by a Java application and then made available in a continuously sites scrolling visual display.

Apart from the intrinsic frisson you may have when observing Memento Mori, the very interesting thing about this work is its age. Memento Mori was first brought into operation in 1998! This was before the DotCom era. The first popular web browser, Gopher, was just five years old. The latest browser was Internet Explorer 4. Google, NetFlix and PayPal were started in 1998.

There were something like 40 million hosts online (an order of magnitude fewer than today), but how many of these were streaming to end users data gathered from a remote source in near real time for free? And then how many of these sites have been ticking over for ten years. And then how many of these sites were doing this for the art of it? Memento Mori is a rare treasure, perhaps, even of earthshaking proportion.

Bravo Ken!

Link

[1] See Vannevar Bush’s article: “As We May Think” in Atlantic Monthly of July *1945* that established the idea that a person could record everything they do and have this data readily accessible forever.

“Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush

See also Gorden Bell’s MyLifeBits and JustinTV.

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.