Beauty and the Beast

After another consumer saturated holiday month where I am to become enchanted with each charming toy or shiny jewel, stacked high in the monster modern village square, The Mall, I instead set out to find Beauty this season in art on the web.

While the web may be the Mall on everyone’s desktop, a virtual Beast, sublime Beauty can be discovered in the expression of artistic endeavors.

For v.3, I have featured five web projects that are smartly conceptual and lusciously visual.

Enjoy, Didi Dunphy Curator

M. Takeo Magruder
| reconstruction |(http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns004/)

Takeo’s latest work, | reconstruction |, breaks down a captured web page (sampled at a finite moment in time) into 3 primary constituent elements: image, text, and code. The extracted elements are each translated to a single HTML page with an embedded repeating Flash file. The Flash file (which is spectator influenced) cycles through 1/3 of the RGB spectrum (RtoG GtoB BtoR) in a defined manner and will return to black once the spectator’s interaction ceases. The result is a morphing field with an infinite number of visual states. The (image) and (text) components are self explanatory; however, the (code) element is a bit more obscure – it is the web page’s stripped down table structure squeezed into the 'canvas'. This work – like the majority of Takeo’s digital creations – is composed in the tradition of painting. (Text by Jo-Anne Green, Turbulence.org)

Nanette Wylde
Tru ValU (http://Tru-ValU.com/)

Tru ValU is an investigation of beauty and the 216 web safe color palette. The site responds to visitor selection by displaying color relationships based on mathematical determinates. I am thinking about containment and control... the systems and codification of beauty, and how these are sanctioned and internalized in larger social constructs. I am thinking about centralities, the randomness of designations, and the reduction of our global palette to 216 'safe' elements. I am thinking about the need/desire/propensity and willingness to count, and the values we place on numbers however arbitrary their assignments/connections to things meaningful in our lives. I am thinking about the expansion of simple mathematical concepts into metaphors both hidden and inherent in information technologies and the implications there of. I am thinking about individuality, plurality and the singularity of the moment. I am thinking about what is important, what is not, and how we determine what is meaningful, valuable and relevant in our lives.

John F. Simon, Jr.
Every Icon (http://users.rcn.com/jfsjr.interport/appletsoftware/eicon.html)

Can a machine produce every possible image? What are the limits of this kind of automation? Is it possible to practice image making by exploring all of image-space using a computer ratherthan by recording from the world around us? What does it mean that one may discover visual imagery so detached from "nature"? Every Icon progresses by counting. Starting with an image where every grid element is white, the software displays combinations of black and white elements, proceeding toward an image where every element is black. In contrast to presenting a single image as an intentional sign, Every Icon presents all possibilities. The grid contains all possible images. Any change in the starting conditions, such as the size of the grid or the color of the element, determines an entirely different set of possible images. When Every Icon begins, the image changes rapidly. Yet the progression of the elements across the grid seems to take longer and longer. How long until recognizable images appear? Try several hundred trillion years. The total number of black and white icons in a 32 X 32 grid is: 1.8 X 10308(a billion is 109). Though, for example, at a rate of 100 icons per second (on a typical desktop computer), it will take only 1.36 years to display all variations of the first line of the grid, the second line takes an exponentially longer 5.85 billion years to complete.

 

Mark Napier
Shredder (http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/)

Why Shred the Web? The web is not a publication. Web sites are not paper. Yet the current thinking of web design is that of the magazine, newspaper, book, or catalog. Visually, aesthetically, legally, the web is treated as a physical page upon which text and images are written. Web pages are temporary graphic images created when browsing software interprets HTML instructions. As long as all browsers agree (at least somewhat) on the conventions of HTML there is the illusion of solidity or permanence in the web. But behind the graphical illusion is a vast body of text files -- containing HTML code -- that fills hard drives on computers at locations all over the world. Collectively these instructions make up what we call 'the web'. But what if these instructions are interpreted differently than intended? Perhaps radically differently? The web browser is an organ of perception through which we 'see' the web. It filters and organizes a huge mass of structured information that spans continents, is constantly growing, reorganizing itself, shifting its appearance, evolving. The Shredder presents this global structure as a chaotic, irrational, raucous collage. By altering the HTML code before the browser reads it, the Shredder appropriates the data of the web, transforming it into a parallel web. Content become abstraction. Text becomes graphics. Information becomes art.

Ben Benjamin
SuperBad (http://www.SuperBad.com/index.html)

Superbad is an ever-changing fun house of graphic garbage. The creator, Ben Benjamin's day trade is a logo and web designer. After the client's pitch, the rejected materials get filtered in to Superbad in a combination of cute absurdity and disturbing commercialism. As a society we are captivated with collections of random junk store paraphernalia, the shear numbers of porcelain poodles and martini shakers with pink elephants. Superbad is the Internet version of this obsession, so, visit again and again as you will find this project is hyper interactive with a different front page and journey each time you log on.