June 3 was the last day of the Berkeley Big Bang and a celebration of forty years of Leonardo.

Introduction: 40 Years of Leonardo

Stephen Wilson kicked off the event with refections on the 40 years of Leonardo - the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. He wondered “How will the Journal survive?” given the mounting language and production issues.

He then presented a review of computers and art thirty years ago (the time he joined Leonardo and today. I can quibble with facts. He twice mentioned Wired magazine when I believe he intended to say Byte magazine. He talks about the lack of art in the computer field in 1979, yet Melvin Prueitt’s books on computer graphics had already entered their Dover reprints stage of life by 1974. But I cannot dispute his conclusions: the world of art and computers has grown from a smaller and lonelier place to a huge place that nonetheless has issues such as still being marginalized.

Osmosis: What Can Arts Do for the Sciences:

Piero Scaruffi introduced the first panel.

Chris Chafe pointed out that art poses questions that are interesting to science. A clip of a young Chinese virtuoso playing the arhu demonstrated the complexity of motion a human body can generate manipulating a musical instrument. Even a guitar player being monitored using ninety channels of data just begins to provide the data (let alone the computation) needed to synthesize a computer generated simulation

Bronac Ferran reminded us that we live in a world of science but the laymen so often does not understand this. She referred to a range of artists from Gustav Metzger to Isaac Asimov as precursor to scientific events. Then talking about partnerships between Art and Science she showed a lovely clip of prismatic reflections in the Berkeley Hills created by Liliane Lijn in 2007

Melinda Rackham described successes in twenty years of embedding artists in scientific laboratories which she described using terms such as “nimble innovation” and a “playful polygamy”. She showed several projects. A strong requirement is that all artists must keep logs - while respecting IP and confidentiality. A good example was Leah Heis blog at heiss.anat.org.au. She left us with her vision of placing creativity at the center of culture.

Jim Crutchfield covered some of his work in partnership with David Dunn a musician. A quite unanticipated affect was discovered while researching the infestation of pine tree by bark beetles. This is a major out break affecting millions of trees in the American West. It turns out that the beetles may be helped by the trees. Drought causes chemical changes in the resin which generate ultrasounds that may attract the beetles. A discovery made by artists and scientist working together. How can we further facilitate smart people talking?

Brilliant Noise: How data Becomes Experience for Artists and Scientists.

Tami Spector introduced the panel.

Camille Utterback led us through several of her projects of interactive video installations - using these to offer insights into the artistic process. So, for example, “Noise is what frustrates clear interpretation.” and “How to use messiness to create mystery?” and “how to use accidents?”

Laura Peticolas is an astronomer who works with sonifying astronomical data. She worked with Lialine Lijn, providing the soundtrasck for her film shown by Bronac Ferran. With her curerrent project she was trying to 1. data scientist could use. 2 Build a public outreach 2. Generate great music. She found it impossible to do all three so concentrated on 2 - but the concentration seems to have helped 1 asnd 3.

Douglas Kahn ran us through the history of “whistlers” - naturally-occurring very low frequency radio signals. These may have first been heard by mankind in 1876 well before the invention of the radio by Thomas Watson (Alexander Graham Bell’s partner) when they built the first test lines. Ever since they have been used by artists. Sometimes unsuccessfully such as Merce Cunningham’s failed attempt in 1966 but more often to good results such as Alvin Lucier’s Sferics in 1981.

The New Sensuality: Epistemologies of the Very, Very Small

Piero Scaruffi introduced the panel.

Jennifer Frazier described the challenges challenge of presenting nanoscience: “We cannot see it!” It’s very, very, very small. The usual scales are 10 to 1000 nanomaters. DNA molecules is about 2 nm across while a virus is about 1000 nanometers. And things behave differently “down there” for example small particles of gold look red and aluminum may spontaneously combust. The Exploratorium frequently works with artists to come with new ways of visualization.

Wayne Lanier showed his work in micro videography. He pointed out that when we view the unfamiliar we have dificulty seeing what’s there. It is very difficult for the brain to attach meaning to images it cannot identify. Using his images alongside his own musical compoisitions and a colleaague’s he put forward the very provocative thought that there is something in a combined video/musical sequence that may help the brain interpret the unusual.

Ruth West told us that Charles Darwin faced a visual problem: how to illustrate evolution? In our modern world we face many issues with rendering the many abstractions we deal with in high-density samplings of complex phenomena - with things that are multi-scale and multi-modal such as metagenomics. She turned perception inside out “how you think you see determines what you see “. And she left us witrh a difficult question “Is the an alternative to the zoom?” Is the another way to negotiate multi-scalar data especially when there are gaps in the data?

Finally Tami Spector presented the winners of the first Leonardo Art/Science Student Contest.

All in all the Berkeley Big Bang was a fascinating three day experience. The presentations were more artistic than the usual academic presentations. The talks were more erudite than the usual museum talks. The combination of the two styles made for a very riuch and nuanced symposium. Bravo and thanks to Rick Rinehart, DMAX and BAM/PFA!

Rick Rinehart kicked off by reminding us that this a symposium on new media and the body. This is an event sponsored by DMAX which is chartered to provide exhibits, educational opportunities, support the art community (with a blog) and build a collection in an open museum. Throughout the day Rick was the somebody who reminded us of the embodiments of the talks.

Ken Goldberg limped to the podium - his foot in a cast as a reminder of the frailty of human embodiment. And he reminded us about about the Berkeley Center for New Media and the ways that media can be made real - even ideas can be media or as McLuhan pointing out that a light bulb is a medium. But Ken’s principle objective was to introduce our keynote and plenary speakers which he did with great warmth and pleasure.

Did you ever have a moment when you thought “Ah, this is why I went to University”? Hubert Dreyfus is an embodiment of such a notion. Fifty minutes of fast talking on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger et al but all in a followable and clear manner supported by understandable examples. The thrust was to examine the possibility of whether an authentic or valid existence could be pursued with a virtual world such as Second Life (SL). In other words could there be a valid human embodiment there. Dreyfus posited that we need to have meaningful events - from family meals to weddings and funerals - where there are are intercorporeality, moods to be shared, a sharing of the sharing and a sense that one’s own contribution has affected the mood. Perhaps he did not feel that the current Second Life enabled the required communication of moods, but it was apparent his snooping in SL had provided him with so much food for thought (if not on the actual table) that he was excited to listen to the next speaker.

With that, BAM/PFA Board member Jane Metcalfe, introduced Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Labs and creator of Second Life. Philip never once talked about Intelligent Design. He didn’t need to. He was so happy to be talking with Dreyfus, so enthusiastic about SL, so charming with the audience that you want to to call it Happy Design or something. Anyway he raptured us by pointing out that the new web-cams will have certain depth-perceptions aspects worked out. In tern this will allow separation of foreground and background which in tern will vastly speed up processing of gestures. The avatar of the future will be an embodiment of algorithms and human gestures. Given the ten year lag between what we see in computer generated movies and what us available in games, the emotions and moods you saw in Lord of the Rings wil be available in SL in eight or so years. Well with Dreyfus’ challenge and Rosedale’s resolution, if you listened carefully, you could hear Martin Heidegger up in heaven popping a Champagne cork.

Two more speakers before lunch:

Chris Fallon compared the embodiment of crowds in say, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will to the computer generated multitudes in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings - and asked us to ponder if these bodies have a political element.

Brooke Belisle prepared us for viewing Jim Campbell’s Home Movies. She told us that we would feel before we see. That we would understand before we recognize.

After lunch:

Eric Paulos told us about his efforts to design mobile sensing devices that could measure gas concentrations accurately in a small form factor. The goal being to get them inexpensive enough so that they would be readily available for ordinary human beings to measure air quality in their own neighborhoods.

Nancy Van House provided fascinating insights regarding imagery on the web. For example: some people prefer looking at other people’s Flickr images because there’s less whining then on the blogs. She proposes that there is an autobiographical impulse, a need to say “I was there!”

Kimiko Ryokai showed her Spyn System: a project that captured the images voices of eight knitters as well as data points obtained by impregnating the wool with inks visible under special lighting conditions. She could tell when the knitter had said a story by looking for signs in the scarf or sweater. Then she showed the I/O Brush which pulled images off an object and pushed them onto the screen. Delightful steampunk-like alternative futures.

Yehuda Kalay walked us down 7th Street. The 7th Street of the 1950s. A street that was ‘Downtown’ for black people from all over the Bay area and then taken away from them by the construction of BART and the Post Office. All this was developed using a game engine. So many issues were in the process ranging from the feelings of the people who had worked or lived in the neighborhood to establishing the best date to be represented.

Shannon Jackson gave a talk that was as much of a performance as a talk. Rapidfire, charged with bullet points. The new media performance is 1. performing body. 2. one who experiences. 3. The one who produces. Each has its peculiarities. Each has, as Walter Benjamin points out, things it usually does not want to show. For example we think of new media as being computer-generated but in reality it’s multitudes of engineers, technicians and programmers running the computers that make new media.

Kris Paulsen brought the body back into new media. Looking at Medium Cool filmed in Chicago in 1968 with actors intermingled in actual protests or Chris Burden getting himself shot in 1971 as a work of performance art or Vafaa Bilal in Domestic Tension 2007 getting web site visitors to sheet him with paint balls. All these are examples of putting themselves in harm’s way in the name of art and adding touch as well as vision in dealing with handling distance.

And at last we had three artists talks. These remarks are a bit shorter because it is 1:30 am and I must get ready for Day 3.

Bruce Charlesworth talked about making even himself uncomfortable - but was very happy later meeting up with curator Marcia Tanner at the reception.

Lian Sifuentes delighted in being a professor talking about a film maker filming a performance where the creator of the piece was herself.

Scott Snibbe was perhaps the most disembodied of all. He asked us mysterious questions such as “where is the end of the hand?” and pointed out that in certain circumstances the shadow is more real than the person.

And with those thoughts in mind Rick Rinehart closed the session and asked us all to go out and enjoy viewing Scott’s new work Falling as well as enjoying our bodies’ call for food and wine as well as music from DJ Kid Kameleon.

And so was it a thrilling day? Well not really. But there were plenty of thrilling moments when I heard somebody say something that really rang true. And I think I am beginning to see that a museum that is connected to a university may be quite a different thing than a standalone museum. But enough for now. Let’s start thinking about BBB Day 3…

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

2007-12-31. This post has been copied to the Art of the Net Wiki. All further updates and edits will occur on the Wiki. Link

What is audience-sourcing?

Audience-sourcing is the act of people, while in the process of observing a work of art, transmitting some aspect of their observation process to others in some durable manner.

Putting it more simply, audience-sourcing occurs when:

• A young lady Twitters that she is listening to a beautiful song while attending a concert.
• A young man IMs his friends that the movie he is watching “kinda sucks”.
• A geek posts by e-mail to his blog a description of the robot wars games is currently observing.
• A small group of people all raise their hands simultaneously having been alerted to do so through the Bluetooth telephones.
• A casual visitor’s comment is entered into a fresh blog post.
• You update your “is” on Facebook from your mobile phone just before the curtain goes up.

What are some examples of the results of on-line audience-sourcing?

The customer reviews on amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, the comments on http://flickr.com and http://deviantart.com, the reviews on newegg.com and bestbuy.com are all audience-sourcing. The interesting thing here is that the audience or customers appear to be just as happy making comments commercial products as they are about works of art. It appears that anything that has been “designed” ranging from “The Pirates of the Caribbean” to the iPhone is available for audience-sourcing. Reviews of all kind appeared to be equally insightful (or have similar lack of insight). In other words almost anything cast upon the public eye could be subject to audience-sourcing.

Audience-sourcing is popping up everywhere. The audience is talking back.

Is there a link to the book “The Wisdom of Crowds”?

It seems highly likely. Hopefully, this matter will be covered in depth in a later addition of this post.

Are there historical precedents for audience-sourcing?

College cheers, warpaint, the wave are all examples of audience participation. Perhaps so are lynch mobs. These are in some sort of way precursors to the current trend of audience sourcing. There are examples where the audience, of its own volition, were communicating to each other, not necessarily to the performers themselves, some aspects of their appreciation of the performance.

A significant difference between audience participation and audience-sourcing is that audience participation is transient and unrecorded.

How does audience-sourcing impact the work or the performance itself?

Audience-sourcing probably has very little impact on the work with the performance itself. Considering books, art and sculpture, the audience arrives well after the work has been produced. If we are talking about a “live” performance of a piece of music or a play, then one must look at Philip Auslander’s book Liveness (http://www.amazon.com/Liveness-Performance-Mediatized-P-Auslander/dp/0415196906) to see that a live performance is very often not very alive at all. What audience-sourcing may do is influence the sale of the product and its general reception by the community, but it is not very likely to affect the work of art itself. On the other hand, audience sourcing may have a long term effect on the artist, composer or author and somehow alter the way that person creates their next work.

What about art critics, reviewers, reporters, courtroom artists and photographers? Are they part of the phenomena of audience-sourcing?

The common link between all of these disciplines is that they have all been paid or will be paid because of their attendance at the performance. Therefore they have some vested interests in the performance apart from besides just being there. So the quite specific aspect of audience-sourcing is that the communication is for free, most likely without any digital rights management or copyright encumbrance and the author is unlikely to be well-known or famous.

Where are some places where there is a lack of audience-sourcing?

The surprisingly major empty space for audience-sourcing is in online museum websites. As far as we know there is not one museum that allows commenting or feedback on individual works of art in their online collections or exhibitions. Thus for the time being art and sculpture produced in the traditional manner have very little audience-sourcing. On the other hand the newer Internet-oriented artists collaborations do very much support audience sourcing. Examples include event deviantart.org and rhizome.org.

Will there be a confluence of audience-sourcing and Web Art?

Most certainly. It is a basic tenet of this site that Web Art must have audience comments. We predict that significant works a Web Art will last forever. And so should their comments. It will be just as important for members of the future beings to read what the audience thinks of a work through the ages as it will be looking upon the work itself. The effect of audience-sourcing on works of Web Art will be to add provenance, to intervene with the work, to add liaisons with other works, to amplify the emotions and simply to add depth to the original work.

What is the connection with crowd-sourcing?

Wikipedia defines crowdsourcing as “the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people.”

The moment a work of art is published, displayed or performed, to a certain extent it becomes an act of crowdsourcing. The artist, composer, or author outsources the appreciation of the work to an undefined, generally large group of people.

With audience-sourcing, there was always been by definition an audience which is a large group of people. Be the work of art a concert, a poem, a painting, a book or whatever there is a community of people for whom the work will bring pleasure, or displeasure or perhaps even no pleasure. For one reason or another, members of that audience decide to record these emotions so that others who follow in the same footsteps may see them.

Audience-sourcing is the reverse of crowdsourcing. Or what occurs after the audience has been crowdsourced. Certain members of the audience self-select themselves to be spokesman for that audience. The audience is “in-sourcing” a special talent.

What is the connection with audience participation?

Audience participation typically involves spontaneous acts or outbursts. When people applaud, boo or laugh, it is a moment of spontaneity that occurs and then disappears forever. When a reader cries upon reading a poem, poignant as that moment may be the tears soon dry and are lost. The comments written on the margin of a book, disappear when that book is trashed.

With audience-sourcing, those moments of inspiration or emotion are recorded and have a duration that may extend into eternity.

When was the neologism audience-sourcing actually coined?

At approximately 5:30 am on 8 December 2007 in San Francisco.

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

Progressing from 8-bit/pixel art projects, we are moving onto re-hash work from the dot-come era. Triptych is data overload. Triptych is too much of a bad thing is a good thing. Triptych is de-construction with neither instruction nor construction. Triptych is your Triple-A journey to nowhere.

Tryptych just fits in to my definition of web art. There are links and they do take you to different pages. Three of the pages are empty profile pages for the authors and two other pages bring you to archived pages that re-hash the hash that the other pages had already re-hashed. Therefore the site is not just a digital video piece. It is interactive. It is built upon a Blogger account bludgeoned into submission to be outrageous.

Do I like it? Not really. Does it make a statement about this time period? Only time will tell. Will it cause furor/consternation and intellectual discourse. Probably not.

But it is Web Art. And any and all such experiments are to be applauded. One day there will be artists that will find the wormholes into new dimensions of art through the Internet. Triptych.tv is one of those first halting steps.

triptych.tv [via rhizome]

Gerard Ferrandez continues to turn out some of the most amazing JavaScript demos on the Internet. His latest work, Autumn II, combines superb fluidity of motion, subtle transparency and great mouse-over responsiveness. As always, this technology is set against an evocative selection of images and a very pleasant musical riff.

A new feature on the site is a very extensive selection of links. To get to the links, move your mouse over the orange arrow at the bottom of the page until the workd “Links” appears then click. Any link recommended by Gerrard is certainly going to somewhere worth investigating. An on-going feature - very rare with most artist’s sites - is a forum where you can ask Gerard questions or (as most people do) sing his praise.

I visit Gerrard’s site frequently. He is one of the most talented artists working on Web Art. He is also one of the most open. All the source code, images and music he writes or uses are available with a click of a button under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.

Learning to navigate through the site has a tiny learning curve. But all your efforts will be extremely rewarding.

Link

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]