Week 7 responses

Since I'm interested in visual design and images, I'm taking on this question for this week's blog post:

How does online art differ from other online content? Consider the digital art spaces we visited in class. Are they all art? Who is the audience for these pieces?

One idea I picked up on in the "Practices of Looking" piece by Turkmen and Cartwright is the notion of value in art. Using the example of Van Gogh's Irises, which sold for $53.8 million in 1991, they discuss reasons why this piece and others like it are worth so much:

• Its being one of relatively few works by the artist
• Its authenticity
• The fame and notoriety of the artist
• Its uniqueness
• Its ability to be reproduced and marketed as a commodity

I see one of the primary differences between online art and regular art (which I realize is not the exact question you asked, but I' m getting there) is its value. A work that lives online can't hold a value like a Van Gogh because the original work and the reproductions are essentially the same thing--authenticity and reproduction are essentially out the window. Furthermore, fame and notoriety are difficult to achieve in a space where so many artists can produce so many works--the best shot at fame in today's Internet culture is having a cute kid that can describe Spartacus in more or less coherent terms, which isn't exactly high art. Here lies the difficulty in creating an art space that gets attention.

Online art also faces challenges because I still think relatively few people use the Internet for anything more than information gathering and social networking. Most online activities can probably be boiled down to Google searches, Facebook, news sites, and possibly Wikipedia and WebMD. Although a lot of that use is recreational--particularly social networking--part of the fun of it is communicating with (or just talking to) other people that the user knows. Online art spaces face the challenge of getting people to enjoy what they are reading simply for what it's worth.

With that thought in mind, I'll turn now to the spaces we're to discuss today.

The Nikki Lee piece is limited because it includes only three images; I would argue that were the whole series of photographs posted in a slideshow online, it would have a much stronger impact, especially if it were accompanied by voiceover or sidebar text describing the author's experience in the community. I don't think this site's purpose is to act as an art space, though--it seems to me more of an announcement or a "trailer" for the show itself.

I've seen the Dakota piece before and I think the interplay between text, motion, music, and the story itself are really interesting. However, I have never watched the whole thing (despite my original thought, it does come to an end eventually) because it is such an assault to my eyes and ears that it becomes overwhelming and I just give up on it. The only reason I know it ends is I let it keep running in another tab while I wrote this, and it stopped. For all their good intentions, pieces like this may lose their audience before they end, and--because the site redirects to the full list of contents at the end of the film--they lose audiences for the rest of the works on the site as well.

Another piece that relies almost too much on the reader's patience is Carl's Head. The purpose of this piece is essentially to show that it's possible to deliver a lot of information in only a few frames of action; as we keep adding frame after frame after frame, the work dissolves into minute, often insignificant details that don't really help us understand the arc of the narrative. I didn't have the patience to add one frame at a time to see what happened (at least not after adding 10 or so frames), but clicking ahead to 52 frames illustrated that nothing else of much importance happened to Carl before his untimely death. Knowing Scott McCloud's work, I assume this piece is targeted toward readers interested in visual narrative.

Beautiful Portrait is a good example of new media as art because it takes advantage of the possibilities new media affords in assigning new meaning to an existing text--in this case, a poem, a text that would usually be written. I dug up Thomas Swiss' website--he's the poem's author and a university professor--and found this statement about his artistic collaborations:

Collaborative work redefines artistic labor in what is for me new and complicated ways: what is the relationship, for example, between my language and the images and sounds others create, even if under my "direction"? How do the images and sound "change" the meaning of the language (and vice versa) and in what ways can the piece be said to still be a "poem"? Collaboration allows writers and artists -- like myself and those I compose with -- to reconsider both our work and our identities, to literally see them anew, as we move from individual to composite subjectivity.

This statement does a good job of summing up the possibilities of new media, but it also raises questions about our responsibilities as editors. If juxtaposing one text with another changes the meaning of both texts, then how can we juxtapose works submitted to us without altering the author's intentions?