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?

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.

The Museum Of Online Museums is portal to many web sites that are themselves museum or gallery web sites for collections of (sniff-sniff) old stuff. Often the main sites are quite well known. What is special is that MOOM takes you to a page on that site that you might not have yet considered visiting. For example the link for the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art goes to their fascinating Timeline of Art History. As you double-click around the site you end up in more out-of-the-way locations. A fun place to look around is in the Annex.

Somehow in all of this, as you click back and forth between MOOM and other sites you begin to understand that you are wandering in a space or frame of reference that could occur only on the Internet.

After a while, you may step back a bit and ask yourself “Where am I actually?” It turns out that MOOM is “edited by Coudal Partners, a design, advertising and interactive studio in Chicago, as an ongoing experiment in web publishing, design and commerce”.

As you begin exploring the other pages Coudal site, you will come across much more stuff that as a totality becomes web-art. For example Layer Tennis is a delightful mash up of graphic destruction design and crowd-sourcing.

As we so often see, the web-art parts are portrayed as portfolio demos or presentations of skill sets. But deep down you can can hear, coming out from the web pages you are visiting, that primal scream: “I am an artist“.

It’s on the Internet, doh! The work is digital. Sourced through Google, manipulated in PhotoShop, hosted on LAMP servers. It’s the modern way of mixing pigments with oils and solvents and layering them on various media. It’s the Art of This Century.

Here’s one dilemma: Do we let this art unroll quietly, un-self consciously? Or do we double-click on it for a closer inspection. How much will we change it by measuring it so early in its development?

Taking the lead from Marinetti’s traveling exhibit of the Italian Futurists in 1913: the more artists see the revolution the they will produce revolting stuff revolutionary works. (Just as before, bad artists produce crap. So do good artists, but much less so.)

There so many cool aspects of this new digital work:

For example it does not deteriorate. In all likelihood digital works could last until the end of time. Unlike Leonardo’s stalcoes frescoes. And innumerable paper works.

The next part is starting to be interesting. It’s interactive. The viewer owns the presentation. The viewer decides what is going to be seen and when and by which route. Compare this to boring contemporary videos where it is the artists that controls exactly what the viewer sees and for too how long.

And then the new stuff is almost all open source. Being built on HTML, JPG image files and MP3 sounds, the tools to recreate the work are available to all who can view the work. Instead being locked up in a rich old fart’s house, the work is as accessible to a youngster in a remote African village as it is the slickest silicon valley web guru. The work is accessible for many purposes not applicable to traditional art viewing, improving, scratching, embedding, whatever.

And the freakiest thing of all: what benefits do ownership confer? If you own something everybody can access easily and for free, what is it that you really own? It is simply your pleasure to own it. Perhaps it’s not about ownership it may be more like a marriage. You and this work are in partnership. You put a work of art on the web and its reward to you is the number of visitors that to whom it gives pleasure.

One of the great sites for art on the Internet is deviantART.com. In operation since 2000, the site provides free access to over 41 million works of art. In comparison the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art which started in 1870 has a collection of just over two million works.

deviantART hosts works that are drawings and paintings either scanned or digital, comics, photography (motion and still). The web site enables artists to display, sell, discuss and comment on a wide variety of styles and media. It’s well organized, easy to use and well-loved by its many members - over thirty-five thousand were on when I looked.
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In 1912 Marcel Duchamp (1886-1968) painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. When exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an art critic for the New York Times describes the work as “an explosion in a shingle factory”. This canvas was controversial, provocative and, for many people, simply upsetting. Today, hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the painting is called an ‘iconic holding’. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1912 Marcel Duchamp (1886-1968) painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. When exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an art critic for the New York Times describes the work as “an explosion in a shingle factory”. This canvas was controversial, provocative and, for many people, simply upsetting. Today, hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the painting is called an ‘iconic holding’. Read the rest of this entry »

The DMF web pageallows you to create music by clicking on a board. Each click causes a peg to pop up and be played. It’s very similar to the mechanical mechanism of a music box. As the music is being played a visual presentation of the music is displated that swirls around the position of the mouse.

If you like the piece of music that you have composed, you can copy and paste the score into a text file and replay it again later.

The delight of this page is that is is a combination of visual, aural and interactive elements. You control the sound and the display and both are pleasing.

The DMF page is not a masterpiece of the art world or in any way a great work of art, but very much a nice work to bring up every once and a while for a few minutes of play and relaxation.

If you know of examples of works of Web Art that might be available for sale please contact theo at artofthenet dot com.

The other evening I was at a wine bar thinking about my next post here. What started running through my mind were two web sites - one from 2004 and one quite recent site - where a number of people came together to create works of art. It soon dawned on me that the question I was asking was “Can social networks produce art?” and, if so, could a social network actually produce high art. I became quite excited. Wow, I’ve invented something new here: social networks producing art. And then I continued: is the art that social networks produce inevitably banal or low art? Is low art bad? Wow, this is going to be big, etc. It’s amazing how a glass of Prosecco will boost your confidence. Read the rest of this entry »