Josely Carvalho's "Book of Roofs" [Enlarge in New Window]

Hyper-art for a New Era
By Daniel Felsenfeld

The introduction of new technology always changes the face of art, and as the printing press was to writing, recording to music, and cinema to visual perception, now the culture’s newest toy is the Internet. With so many people jacked into this still-infant technology, it is little wonder that for many artists, it has become canvas, studio and gallery.

Some find the Internet to be a great equalizer, others a great isolator—and many worry about the unfettered flow of information available. Does it bring us together, or rend us asunder? One of its most attractive features is its participatory possibilities, and, now participation online is hardly a novelty. Like installations or happenings in the sixties, when some artists discovered that art need not be confined to a theatre, hall, gallery, or atelier, many are now finding cyberspace to be their most potent exhibition platform. Audiences are no longer passive (or merely mentally active) viewers, but are, in some instances, necessary contributors to the work.

One artist capitalizing on the participatory Internet is Josely Carvalho, whose Book of Roofs is, according to the artist, “…an interactive project that allows a multiplicity of voices organized through a database process to collect a non-linear narrative of personal experiences, myths, historic events, images, animations, and sounds on dwelling.” A visit to www.book-of-roofs.net allows the viewer/participant to contribute writings about the idea of “home.” In one of the site’s most captivating sections, these small stories are placed on virtual "tiles” which drift amongst one another, there for the reading. A click onto any of these chunks of cyber-clay reveals for the reader a single person’s perspective. Or, for those who want to join in, it is possible to share your thoughts by creating a tile of your own. In the theatre of the Web, one can easily dip in to hundreds of small, precious stories in a single session.

Artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher designed the Learning to Love You More website [www.learningtoloveyoumore.com] as a participatory event with homework, like a deep, emotional homeschool program or online correspondence course. “Now that you are here,” says the site’s startup page, “you will want to accept an assignment, complete it by following the simple but specific instructions, send in the required report (photograph, CD, video, etc), and see evidence of your work posted online. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments liberates you from creativity and allows you to focus on what you are feeling and experiencing.” The assignments themselves are not simple (“create a lecture,” “defeat Bush,” “make a paper replica of your bed”) but have within them limitless personal gain as a reward. The artists themselves check the site every day, and offer feedback to the contributors: “We spend hours drifting through the site,” they say, “reading your life stories, watching your videos, listening and looking. It is one of our favorite things to do, and we know that thousands of other people feel the same way.” It is like a guided personal tour of oneself—with feedback.

And while Carvalho’s Book of Roofs exists entirely online, with visitors contributing their own musings and digital images to the composite artwork, Learning to Love You More moves freely from the computer to the drawing board (or video camera, or recording studio), back again, and onwards to real-life exhibitions. Crafts and artworks provided by Learning to Love You More participants are collected for shows in museums, galleries, schools, senior citizens centers, radio shows and film festivals. This isn’t amateur-hour—Learning to Love You More creations have been included in shows at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, DiverseWorks, and the Seattle Art Museum.

As July and Fletcher coax you to unleash your inner-artist, ®™ark (pronounced “art-mark”) has more subversive instructions for you to follow. Enticing their site’s visitors to become footsoldiers in a struggle against corporate greed and governmental corruption, ®™ark’s site [www.rtmark.com] is a call to action, a rousing of the rabble that would do both Upton Sinclair and Michael Moore proud. Here you can cast about for anti-corporate performance art pieces in which you participate—not online but in person. They have dozens of muckracking—and frequently hysterically funny—schemes where you can "Add honest labels to food products in supermarkets across the country, stating 'Genetically altered to be tastier,' 'Genetically modified to be redder,' etc.," "Make a marijuana solution by washing residue from pot seeds or rinsing plastic bags that have held weed. Go to a metro station, or other place where drug-sniffing dogs are being used, and spray doors. Spray police officers. Wander past police stations and spray cars. Spray, spray, spray... to cause false 'hits' by the dogs, " or "Make attractive stickers saying 'This war was brought to you by' and place them before appropriate corporate logos." These aren’t projects that can be done during insomniac nights in front of your laptop, but through their website you can learn about all sorts of (likely illegal) activity wherein storms of protest can be stirred. If you think that a corporation or government institution is keeping you down, the gonzo-style art of ®™ark might be for you. And be sure to check out The Yes Men [www.theyesmenmovie.com], a documentary about these very rabble-rousers released nationwide by United Artists.

Also blurring the line between virtual art and physical reality is Marie Sester’s Access, a public art installation that uses a robotic spotlight controlled by web-users to track individuals in public spaces. An acoustic beam system directs sounds onto the same tracked persons, projecting audio that only he/she can hear. The individual does not know who is tracking him/her or why he/she is being tracked. Nor is he/she aware of being the only person among the public hearing the sound. The tracker doesn't know his/her action triggers sound towards the target. In effect, both the tracker and the tracked are in a paradoxical communication loop.” Like ®™ark, she aims to affront a little, to make art that entraps and even scares. She does not aim to document as much as to perform. “Access is all about live, personal, private experiences,” she says. “It’s a private public experience. Documentation is secondary and mainly needed for marketing purposes.”

So far, we have seen examples of traditional forms of art and social-action activities adapted for the Web, art in which communicative aspects are increased by the wide reach of the Internet. Other artists, however, are attempting to harness the power of the Web as an artistic generator. In 0x1 (Zero by One), Mark Napier works with a software engineer to build a program that harvests random Internet data to use as the basis for a mandala computer drawing, According to the artist, “Five networked computers are used to generate the necessary data for the mandala, a complex web of digital imagery and sound that endlessly re-creates itself as viewers at any of the five computers erase it with a single computer command. Inspired by Tibetan mandalas, which are used to understand the human relationship to the physical world, 0x1 interprets the human relationship to the virtual world and explores the way human life and technology influence one another.” A project like this calls into question the entire role of a visual artist: is he or she responsible for the images? Or can they just set up the way in which the images are conceived? Rather than offer an answer for these thorny questions, Napier illustrates the inquiry. His beautiful drawings are made with your help; each completely individual, like a cyber-snowflake, based entirely on who signs on at www.potatoland.org. If new technology mandates certain socio-aesthetic changes, it also creates new grey areas, out of which new queries arise. A project like Ox1 could exist nowhere else than the Web, and could never have been conceived before the advent of this technology.

Not only is this spate of “new” artists redefining the use of a particular technology, but they define the way in which we look at things—or the very manner of our looking. Perhaps years from now our culture, the “information” age, will be regarded as a mass of voyeurs, able to peek without repercussion, without been spotted. This isolation-cum-togetherness in and of itself is—and no doubt will be in years to come—the subject of much speculation, much thought… and artists, when they are at their best, help guide us through our thinking.

Daniel Felsenfeld is a composer who makes his living as a writer. He has contributed articles, reviews and interviews to Newsday, Playbill, Time Out New York, Strings Magazine, Billboard, NewMusicBox, ClassicsToday.com and Full Score, and has written seven books about classical composers, most recently Ives & Copland: Portrait of Two American Composers and Britten & Barber: A Listener's Guide, both for Amadeus Press.