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Screenfull.net
Dr
Melinda Rackham |
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What it does do though is get slower, allowing gaps and rips to appear in the usual illusory fabric of the seamless internet as the space fills with raucous and chaotic content. Appearing before me is an art work that breaks the daily tedium of grazing over cloned and sanitised blog interface design - those sorts of creepily nice blogs that make me shudder on the inside with their readable, balanced, cutesy, clean, neat, artless, self conscious, logical, and organised versions of blandness. So, okay, I may be a bit cynical after a decade online, but is there anything wrong with wanting to be thrilled? With craving entertainment? With desiring to be jolted from my often near comatose screen behaviours of browse, click, copy, delete, send. And thankfully Screenfull.net does all that. When the net is looking more and more like a corporately fortified instantaneous push media, Screenfull is a timely reminder that the internet is a public space, a theatre of disparate dialogue in multiple and asynchronous formats, dumbed down only by lack of imagination and the unchallenged conventions of HTML. Our protagonists are artists jimpunk and Abe Linkoln -- personas who both draw on iconic associations with disparate and powerful US cultural historic and animated figures. Together their strength is in working across the history of networked art, design, aesthetics and theory in this remix of the phenomenal blogging paradigm. The latest manifestation of Screenfull.net is grounded in psychedelia and code work, with the seedy cycling and stuttering of a background colour change JavaScript, producing an atmosphere akin to flashing broken neon of a 1970's night club. It completely refreshes with mashed media formats -- TV grabs, print posters, Paris Hilton, Flash animation, in-process Photoshop files of art historical imagery, and QuickTimes. Screenfull is completed with a radio blog--Radio Sounds--which in true Dadaesque manner, squishes more random cut-up bytes down the internet pipe to our desktops. But what is really fascinating here is Screenfull.net: THE BOOK--Guns, Duchamp and Magnetic Lassos. This delightfully illogical extension of the blog online diary format (heralded as the liberator of journaling from the page) loops their fulsome screen content back into the usually serene and sedate corporate .pdf-- paper page based print format. At last, with THE BOOK, Abe and jimpunk's promise eventuated and the multimedia content crashed my .pdf viewer. Woohoo!! But it was only alerting me I needed a long overdue upgrade. Downloaded and upgraded I start to explore the work. This formatting tempts me to decode the work into a fixed liner narrative as screen content is hermetically sealed into discrete page packets with page numbers. No hypertextual linking here, just numerical jumps and rapid scrolls. I now very badly need to impose meaning. Will the magnetic lasso draw threads between this work and the Duchampian forfeiture of the Dadaistgame of art for the equally fascinating strategy of chess? The thematic of THE BOOK revolves around the almost blasphemous possibility of shooting our screens, killing our art and our audience, cancelling our connection. I recommend viewing with Auto Scroll . . . however page numbers are very helpful locators. You can catch the artists with guns blazing on pages 20 and 21. The money shot can be viewed on pages 46 and 47. Here the lasso traces an outline of a bullet hole in glass, the glass we have seen in the previous few images of guns represented both on computer screens and in front of computer keyboards. But the magnetic trace renders this image as the memory of an event past, or the faint and unspoken desire of the present which can never be fully realised. This lasso aesthetic, and it continual use thought out the site and book remind me of the lacy translucent outlines present in many paintings of the French Symbolist Gustave Moreau. Moreau's strange fusing of human and inanimate objects, his disregard for the conventions of size and perspective, and his opium dream landscapes of inward sensation and contemplation place him as a forerunner of surrealism. His use of the spidery overlay rendered in the paint technology of the mid to late 19th century, and Screenfull's image processing lasso overlay, give both bodies of work a quality of simultaneous surface and depth, of being at once in creative process and post-operative autopsy. As well there is a lot of smirky-smart doubling and splitting in these portrait/landscape papers/screens. The use of images from a landscape oriented screen, split in half and placed on consecutive portrait oriented .pdf pages, which most likely will never be printed out and read together is intriguing. Print it and you miss Screenfull's competitive soundtracks and QuickTime content; don't print it and the images are cut in half, forcing you to recombine the split images in your head. It's almost like an anaglyph--a 3d red/blue overlapping split image. Different right eye image + left eye image + glasses = let the brain do the interpretation work. Except they are not like that at all, they are consecutive rather than overlapping. However the associations are flowing freely, and isn't that what successful art is all about? It gives you an immediate hit, as well as leaving you to ponder afterwards. Linkoln's previous art curatorial works certainly do that with their rigorous mix of simplicity and humour. A Thousand Plateaus re-examines the mountainous graphical stats for net art sites; Net.art: Those that Can't Teach Do is a cheeky listing of well know artist/educators' course outlines. His linear blog remix of Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back From the War turns Manovich's prime example of a new media logic of addition and co-existence replacing the cinematic logic of replacement (p 324), back into a logic of temporal replacement plus (rather than instead of) co-existence. Recently Linkoln's curation of Pop Up at Turbulence.org, complete with a Pop Up Manifesto exuding self-evident gems like: "4. Pop up windows neither pop, nor up.", displays an intelligent and maturing engagement with the unique qualities of net worked art. Our co-author, jimpunk, is a talented and elegant artist who capitalises on the Rococo potentialities of HTML, JavaScript and Flash to create sites of infinite variability, detail and unending surprise. His works have been perfectly described by Tricia Fragnito as "a web version of a roller coaster ride: scary and fun and at the end you want to go again." In true networked style, jimpunk often works collaboratively across geographical space, and produces sites which exploit the unique experience of net browsing. He embraces the pixel and what some would call "bad web design" using web safe colour, pop up and flashing graphics in works like www.-reverse.-flash-.-.back-; and in one of my favourites the now offline www.nowar.nogame.org. Although his breed of network art may have had an early Jodi-esque influence, we can see from the intimate and poetic musing of 1n-0ut [meditation], it has grown up to be distinctively "jimpunk." Scrolling around the Screenfull site, with Radio Sounds open in another window, I am reminded that even though THE BOOK is a tightly thematic curatorial collection, the bastard space of the network from which it is comes is a chaotic, asynchronous, competitive, market place. It babbles with recombinant, disjunctive, atmospheric content - designed not to be seen not from a single authoritative cinematic perspective, but to be engaged with at many levels. It is for this reason web will emerge as the dominant media of the 21st century, and as cinema did in the 20th century, it both builds upon and differs from all that has come before. Networked space's most immediate lineage is in what Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark call "Distance Art." The activities of telecommunication art--from mail art, sound and radio art, telematic art, assemblings and Fluxus as well as distributed textual authorship. Artists and authors working in these distance fields challenged the stability of the art production and distribution models of the 1960's and 1970s, so that when the net emerged, new aesthetics were already in process. Authoring art in symbiosis with an evolving electronic communications systems, means working with an as yet largely unknown language. Right now artists are connecting half visible dots to form a rapidly shifting template of the future. In less than a decade aesthetic sensibility has radically altered--7 years ago, in 1998, when net.artist's were universally obsessed with making tiny fast clean files and web pages with no more than 4 text lines of text on screen, the now deceased Estonian web artist Tiia Johannson was making massive web works of sometimes single images. Puzzled, I asked her why, and her reply (made even more dramatic by her fabulous Marlene Dietrich accent) was the foretelling "I like to make them wait." If jimpunk & Linkoln want to make us wait while
they stuff our browsers with
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Abe Linkoln: http://www.linkoln.net Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark (eds), At a Distance:
Precursors to Art 1n-0ut [meditation]: http://www.jimpunk.com/1n-0ut/ Jimpunk: http://www.jimpunk.com Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press,
2001: Pop up: http://turbulence.org/curators/popup Radio Sounds: Screenfull.net: http://www.screenfull.net Tiia Johannson: http://artun.ee/~tiia/netproject/ THE BOOK: http://www.screenfull.net/THE_BOOK_2.pdf Tricia Fragnito, This is your Browser on ):mpun<,
BlackFlash mag,
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