Monday:
This week we're going to visit web sites by a handful of digital artists. While I'll be checking out some Canadian work, the focus of the exercise is a global surf of digital art. What makes a site great? Who are some of the movers and shakers in the digital realm? And are there any sites or artists that you think deserve special mention?

First stop: Entropy8Zuper! Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn are two of the web's digital darlings. Samyn is a Belgian graphic designer trained in traditional media, but since 1995 he's worked solely in new media. The artist was a founding member of Hell, as well as master of his own domain - Zuper. Auriea Harvey is the brain behind Entropy8 and has consistently created fascinating, interactive cyberspaces for surfers to play in. I've been following her works since 1996. Harvey's digital landscapes are dreamy, demanding, labyrinthine, occasionally harsh and pleasantly addictive. Visiting Harvey's page is reminiscent of taking a sip of virtual absinthe.

In 1999 Harvey and Samyn met on-line, fell in love and in their effort to get to know one another, created "a unique interactive playground that allows them to collaborate and express their affection in rich, real-time multimedia." Well eventually Harvey left New York to live in Belgium (I guess there are some things even real-time hasn't mastered), but the couple was back in San Francisco last week to pick up a Webby. The Webby is the Internet's version of the Oscar. It's awarded for Excellence in Online Art - and comes with a $30,000 cheque attached. Frankly I'm not surprised the couple won. Their collaborative effort, Entropy8Zuper! "contains interactive works like "skinonskinonskin" and "Wirefire," which are complex virtual environments full of visually sophisticated images and evocative sounds."

A visit to Entropy8Zuper! is a passionate combination of two artists at the top of a brand new game -- the frontiers of digital art. We find it challenging to come up with terms to critique this new movement. To me, what makes a site successful is if it contains the essential captivating quality of 3 dimensional art. There's something about it that appeals to the human spirit, a quality which makes you want to just sit and stare at it, until you are able to assign your own meaning to the experience. So what's new? The physically interactive nature of the experience. It can't be a game, yet a successful digital art site should have layers and layers of possible meaning and apparently nonsensical navigation. This is frustrating for impatient viewers/surfers. They want to be given the answer to the digital art they're viewing. Alas, tis not to be, because truly successful digital art (like any art) requires contemplation and intellectual interaction. Add a mouse to the mix and you have the face of the future.

I think Benjamin Weil, SFMOMA's curator of media arts, said it best: "Samyn and Harvey are inventing the vocabulary for creativity in this medium. They're pushing it to become a form that may be to the 21st century what the cinema was to the 20th."

What do you think? How do you define digital art? Or do you think it's even art at all? I'll be back on-line tomorrow with a look at a Canadian writer/artist who's at leading the pack in cyberspace, art race.

Links:
Entropy8Zuper!

The Webby Awards

Tuesday:
Yesterday I promised you a look at some Canadian digital art, and our first stop is going to be at J.R.Carpenter's web site. Carpenter (Jessica if you're curious) works in the net biz. She's webmaster for Discreet Logic and Galamultimedia, writes for HOUR magazine, did a BFA at Concordia as well as constantly working on her own digital art site Luckysoap.com.

Carpenter's page is antithetical to Entropy8Zuper, in that it's really very simple in design, easy to navigate and relies heavily on text to tell a story. The essential difference between the two sites is that while Entropy8 is intensely visual by nature, with text, music, audio and video intertwined to create a cyberscape of sight and sound; Luckysoap is really all about using the new media to tell stories in a non-linear fashion.

In one piece of art, entitled "The Orchard of Innumerable Plans" the surfer clicks on a bullet which follows the story from page to page. Regardless of the order in which you hyperlink, the story still makes sense. In "Notions of the Archival in Memory and Department" you're greeted by a sketch of Nova Scotia, circled by a series of images. You can click on the images and piece together a personal and historical account of the province. Carpenter's essentially a cyber poet who follows the dictates of "less is more" when it comes to cyber design.

Furthermore, she's a poststructuralist who clearly feels that interactivity and non-linear narrative are the way of the future. "For the installation artist's conception of the relationships between elements with in a space, for the collage artist's lust for the hybrid, for the writer's quest for the potential for the presentation of the non-linear narrative - the web provides the ultimate terrain." I encourage you to visit Luckysoap.com. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Entropy8Zuper, but it's a thought provoking, different approach to digital art.

What do you think? How do you define digital art? Or do you think it's even art at all?

Links:
Luckysoap.com

Entropy8Zuper!

Wednesday:
In our third installment on art in the digital age, I surfed on over to Conceptlab.com, which offers an incredible collection of digital art that has a couple of essential ingredients. Number one, Conceptlab is fascinated by the interplay between man and machine, and two, there's something a tad subversive about the whole enterprise.

First stop - the architect of the site - Canadian Garnet Hertz. Hertz has assembled a wide range of installation artists who work mostly in the field of robotics. In fact, there's an interesting discussion of "Coredump" a new work currently in development. Essentially Hertz is building a robot with an Intel chip that can draw, move AND take orders from folks anywhere on the web. Hertz plans to install the robot in a gallery and allow people on-line to send commands to the metal man, who will then draw on the floor or wall of the gallery. Talk about interactive. Not only is there the interaction between the surfer and the machine, there are also the visitors to the museum who can observe this futuristic interplay.

Another cool place to visit at Conceptlab is The Simulator, which allows the surfer to simulate a day in the life of some poor schmo flipping burgers at a McJob. You get up, choose what you're going to wear, eat, pick the temperature of your shower and the speed at which you drive to work. Then you arrive at your work station and start dressing burgers. It's interesting, interactive and you get a major dose of how mundane a typical "day in the life" can really be.

Now let's look at the subversive element I mentioned. There's another area of Conceptlab called "Escape Velocity." It "explores the digital subcultures that both celebrate and critique our wired world…Renegade roboticists Survival Research Laboratories enact their techno-politics literally, reanimating castoff military-industrial machinery in the service of cyberpunk performance art. Others, such as the postmodern primitives who sport "biomechanical" tattoos of microcircuitry, stage a symbolic rebellion, appropriating the myths and metaphors of cyberculture. But whether literal or figurative…fringe computer culture poses the fundamental question of our time: Will technology be used as an engine of repression or a tool of empowerment in the coming millennium?

Thursday:
This week we've visited a number a number of disparate digital art web sites and today we're going to surf over to meet Kate Baggott at Kiss My Freckled Ass Goodbye. This is a portal for discombobulated employees to rant about their wretched work life. Baggott is using the site as a research tool for a new book by the same name. Talk about an innovative way of getting interactive, gather material for a book, plus blow off some steam.

Baggott's book is intended to provide an "honest study of what makes workers unhappy in the workplace." In terms of design, the site is easy to navigate and provides a number of entertainment avenues. You can take the "Should You Quit?" quiz. Submit a letter. Read up on Baggott's credentials, which by the way are pretty impressive. The author "managed the research team that created the book Growing Up Digital: the Rise of the Net Generation and later acted as producer for a website that was designed by a team of teenagers." But for me the funniest part of the site was reading the letter of the week. Here's a sample:

"Well now. It's time for the final tally. I have decided to abandon this joke shop run, not managed, by your incompetent naysaying hacks whose primary concern is persecution of the innocent and praise for the uninvolved.

You have singularly driven the morale of an entire company to a low point that defies measurement. You are petty, cheap and lazy. You have crawled to this pinnacle of your career on the backs of the unsuspecting newbies that had no idea what they were letting themselves in for by coming to work here.

You disgust me, and I'm starting my own company to compete with this one.

I have already received the commitment of your biggest account the minute I leave here for the last time. Have a wonderful time explaining that to your boss."

Hah! Now that should provide your laugh for the day. Tomorrow's our final installment of Digital Art on the Net. We'll be looking at how larger institutions are dealing with the challenge of digital art. Are museums and universities leaping into the fray, or merely slapping up some scanned images from their permanent collections?

Friday:
Over the last week we've looked at some robotic installations, talked about the winners of a Webby, as well as surfed through some thoughtful non-linear fiction and visited a woman who just wants to be her own boss. But these are all independent affairs. What are the institutions up to? As you know, many universities and museums are currently on-line, yet many of them don't have the money or the cyber foresight to be truly interactive. I chose Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, as a good victim for a surprise cyber raid. I wanted to see what, if anything Dal was up to.

Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon Engaging the Virtual, an exhibit designed expressly for bringing together some of Canada's foremost artists in the area of new media. The exhibition surveys the last 10 years of new media work produced in Canada and features the work of nine artists.

While the exhibit isn't all interactive, it's been designed to address the impact of technology on today and tomorrow's social, economic and cultural climates. "Of the nine artists included in this exhibition, seven are represented by physical installations. Doug Back, Juan Geuer, Laiwan, Jacques Perron, Catherine Richards, David Rokeby, and Norman White employ a range of technologies, from the relative simplicity of film and video to complex installations using image recognition, laser beam, or customized cathode ray tube. Some of these works are highly interactive, and depend on viewer participation to engage their 'virtual' properties; others present visions to contemplate, some hauntingly beautiful, others amusing or disturbing."

What I found amusing was Laiwan's work and Bob Rogers' personal history tour. What I found problematic was the presence of incredibly lengthy artist's statements. I realize that this is certainly the zeitgeist at the galleries, but was hoping that in the brave new world, artists wouldn't have to explain ad nauseum what they were trying to articulate. What ever happened to letting the work speak for itself? Especially in the interactive arena, a place where the viewer literally digitally manipulates the work themselves, why do we need these endless sermons?

According to a colleague who sells art over the net, buyers feel the need for this kind of handholding. Without the opportunity to meet the artist and see the work in all of its glorious 3D, this affords purchasers some kind of panacea. But it still doesn't explain why all that blather was spewed over Dalhousie's exhibition. Oh well, I guess rather than complain I should applaud Dal's efforts to engage in digital art. And anyway this is the information age, a place where there seems to be no such thing as too MUCH information.

I hope you've enjoyed this week's digital art tour. Let's hear some more feedback

Link:
Engaging the Virtual