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HTML: Is it Art?
joeljones writes "The New York Times (registration, yeah, yeah, yeah) has an interesting story about two artists who use HTML, Javascript, and other web technologies as their medium. Could be an interesting set of test cases for anyone writing a browser." While we're on the subject of artsy sites, I submit Zombo.com for your perusal. I believe it to be the only web site that claims the infinite is possible.
What did ZOMBO do to annoy CowbowNeal THAT much?
I guess anything, including code can be artistic if it blends something technical with an art in a subtle way.
That's the whole idea behind poetry, at least. And computer code can be poetic.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
reminds me of the internet in its infancy, where we allready had the really big button that doesn't do anything
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
"Click here to get the plugin."
Well canvas isn't considered 'art', nor is paint. HTML is just the tool used by the artists. What they come up with can easily be considered art. Examples.
Deliberately Distorting the Digital Mechanism
.exe," said, "You think you know your computer, but really all you know is a surface on your screen." This state of affairs is based on the foolish hope that our technology, like our cars, will always operate properly, so that we never have to look at the oily, gritty bits under the hood. But Jodi subverts this notion. Visitors to the duo's Web sites, Ms. Schindler said, "immediately have the experience that Jodi wants to give them, which is, `What if everything goes wrong?' "
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
While tinkering recently with one of the first personal computers from the 1980's, the digital artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans took a look at its technical tutorial. As Mr. Paesmans recalled, the on-screen guide delivered a reassuring message: "Remember, don't be scared. You cannot do anything wrong on this computer."
Since 1994 Ms. Heemskerk and Mr. Paesmans, collaborating under the name Jodi, have created a series of Internet-based artworks that deliberately cause computers to do the wrong thing. Viewers of these online works will find their screens filled with meaningless text and needlessly blinking graphics. Web-browser windows spawn smaller windows that race maddeningly around the screen. Links that appear to lead somewhere yield dead ends. Like a sci-fi thriller, this could be delightful, except that the underlying premise is of computers in complete control. A terrifying thought.
Beginning tomorrow Jodi will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition, "install.exe," at Eyebeam, a new-media art center in Manhattan. It was organized at Plug.In, a new-media art center in Basel, Switzerland, where it was shown last fall before it traveled to Berlin. The exhibit, which runs through June 14 at Eyebeam's gallery at 540 West 21st Street, contains nearly two dozen works. Many of them can also be viewed online at www.jodi.org, asdfg.jodi.org, 404.jodi.org, wrongbrowser.com and wwwwwwwww.jodi.org.
Prepare to be disoriented, if not stuck, in a World Wide Web gone awry. The Web is less than a decade old, so it might seem premature to declare that Jodi's works are classics of Internet art. Yet these artists were probably the first to use the Internet's own visual language to create what are in effect paintings of the Internet landscape. They did so by exposing the hidden computer code that makes Web pages do what they do, then altered its odd texts and strange symbols so that they became abstract art. They also took Web features and simulated what would happen if they ran amok. For people who assume that a computer is a benign dictator, these were reminders that the slightest transgression could turn it into a deranged despot.
Like Cezanne's late works in which the raw canvas is often part of the painting, Jodi's sites force viewers to become conscious of the Web's appealing surface and the digital mechanism that lurks below.
Annette Schindler, the director of Plug.In and the co-curator of "install
In questioning the Internet's rules, Jodi has had a huge influence on digital artists.
"They are the only Internet-based artists that have created a truly new aesthetic," said the male half of the anonymous digital-art duo known as 0100101110101101.org in a recent phone call. "They have influenced almost everything on the Internet that is related to art," he said. "It's like trying to find a painter who was not influenced by Michelangelo."
Ms. Heemskerk and Mr. Paesmans were resident artists at San Jose State University in the heart of Silicon Valley in 1994, at the start of the dot-com era. One day while working on a Web project they accidentally omitted a bracket from the computer code, and the resulting Web page was a messy jumble of text and characters. They liked what they saw and began to experiment.
Mr. Paesmans said they initia
Sure, I'll say it's art, in the same way I'll nod my head and agree when someone tries to convince me that it's a programming language. In my experience, if a person doesn't understand why HTML isn't a programming language, it's not worth my while to explain it, I'll just play along and know the truth. I recon if people start saying it's art, I'll adopt the same aproach. I'm sure there are people who'll flame me for this, but that's thier 2 cents, this, on the other hand, is mine. Mod me as a troll if you like, I just can't sell HTML as a programming language or art.
fprintf(stdout, "Of course it's possible...\n"); }
Well, at least until the electricity runs out anyway. Or someone redirects stdout to /tmp. Or, or...
Well, it's nice theory anyway.
Cheers,
Ian
No. Is a pen or a pencil art? No.
HTML is a Hypertext Markup Language. :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
I remember very similar pictures when my zx-spectrum hanged...:)
Maybe someday BSOD will be considered as an art?
to me art = communication,
just often experimental and two-way in what's usually seen one-way; i.e. painting. (because the viewer acts, sometime with WTF?! which is perfectly fine, artist may not care what message is seen as anyway)
got any impressive links for me?
A blog I run for the wealth
Future artists are advised to take a look at This Site for direction... Enjoy.
I'm not Seth.
How about an example of "why HTML could be considered to be art" which actually uses some HTML?
zomba.com only uses it to embed a flash movie - "Click here to get the plugin". This one belongs in the "post-html" gallery.
Sorry, I meant This Site instead. The first link contains alot of crap.
'Webpages that suck' Shows that webpages CAN be art - bad art.
I'm not Seth.
Just in the same way that you can take a piece of paper and paint a masterpiece onto it, or you can print a pizza leaflet onto it. The existence of pizza leaflets doesn't mean that paper can never be used for art. Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Is this a joke? I just get some flashing blobs and nothing happens. Am I missing something?
I still prefer old school. ASCII as Art.
The Female Form
Cinema
www.bannination.com Two things float to the top he
You need to get some sound dude...it came out in the eighties...man...you're way behind.
(sorry for double post, should have previewed first, here they are linked)
http://www.once-upon-a-forest.com/
http://www.snarg.net/
http://www.entropy8zuper.org/
http://www.redsmoke.com/
http://www.absurd.org/
http://www.fakeshop.com/
http://snudd.sil.at/
http://www.jodi.org/
http://www.superbad.com/
http://www.d2b.org/
http://www.silverserver.co.at/lia/
-Rabbit
I am from Denmark as well.
Christian Lemmerz is the guy who did the dead pigs. I forgot what the other guy was called.
Anyway, calling somebody a moron simply because you do not believe something to be art is a pretty cheap ad hominem. It's art because some people think it is. And he's not the only one to think of it as art, I reckon it's art as well.
The piece in question (with the dead pigs), called 'Scene', was about decay and the temporarity of life. Sure, the pigs are not art, but neither is a canvas and a bucket of paint. I personally find pieces like these very interesting. I really liked his Todesfigur and Gebeine.
But I digress, my point is, you can always find someone who don't think that a particular piece is art, so you can't write something off as not-art just because you think it's disgusting/irrelevant/stupid/insert term here.
Check out Dadaism, found art, and other kinds of offstream ways of expression.
There's a frequent poster here (forgot who) that has superbad as his website URL. I kinda like it. Infinite clicks. Good with a beer om a late lonesome friday night.
The Bigger The Headache The Bigger the Pill
Can I borrow your aesthetics and ethics meter?
That objective absolute scale that you found, where did you find it?
The point I am really trying to make is better explained by the following neo-constructivist abstract post modernist expresion: bullshit.
Have a nice day.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Checkout www.thebestdesigns.com for some of the latest web art - ok so a lot of it is Flash based but there's some cool html/js stuff there too.
As for html being used in art, that's what the second show at http://art.by.arena.ne.jp/ (1995) was all about. Plus some art shows have featured websites as part of their exhibitions for a while - nothing major that i can think of, but groups like http://entity.ummu.umich.edu/. Then there were (are? can't find link) the minimalist competitions - designing in under 5k pages - and the like. If you want pictures made from html then maybe my http://www.blackant.net/code/oth/img-html-src.html will suffice.
I'm sure i'm missing plenty of other sites and competitions but it's only 7am in my TZ.
-f
www.blackant.net
I would suggest http://www.themanwhofellasleep.com
Kind of abstract, but very good.
I honestly don't understand why people assign so much value to calling something art. It's as if calling something art assigns it to a higher plane where it can't be questioned.
I guess I wasn't all that impressed by the sites mentioned in the NYT article. IMO superbad.com is far more cool than the jodi sites. Futhermore superbad has been around for years, so I don't see how these people have created anything all that original or special. For those of you who don't know, superbad is a... surrealistic website where you don't really feel in control of the website since it's never really very apparent just how each page works. I'm sure there's many other people that've created strange websites like this as well.
As far as the "you're not in control of your computer" theme goes, there's lots of sites (mostly porn) that have all kinds of annoying javascript tricks to open up new windows when you try to kill the old window. Seems like that's the same idea as this. Sure, I guess the sites the NYT talks about are "art", but so is the tracing of my hand I did when I was 5. I think the NYT has missed the boat on this one, and perhaps should have done a bit more homework on what other people have done in this field.
AccountKiller
Its Art.
--- Stop the world! I want to get off!
If someone can call the Virgin Mary covered in elephant shit 'art', I don't see any reason why HTML can't be.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
Any method used by humans to express themselves can be a vehicle for art. How good that method is for conveying artistic talent is another matter entirely.
Something that has always fascinated me - can ayone provide a definition of "art". I mean the type of art that hangs in galleries and modern art museums and people argue endlessly about whether it really is art or is just plain stupid. The type of art that this is trying to classify HTML under?
The best one I've found is "the products of human creativity", but that still seems way too broad. Personally I feel that art should have no functional purpose, so something that has a purpose (a building say) can be beautiful, but I don't think it is art.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
Well, the problem with "art" is that it's notoriously difficult to define.
Let's try something else - can we prove that code can be poetry?
Poetry also tends to avoid definition; however, I think the best definition I've heard is that poetry is succinct use of language.
Since, say, C++ affords an enormous economy of expression, and a vast number of ways to accomplish a given task, then performing a given task in an elegant, succint way is surely perfectly valid poetry.
You can also argue the case with dictionary.com's definition of poetry: "a quality that suggests poetry, as in grace, beauty, or harmony: the poetry of the dancer's movements."
coldcity
code, life, art
The artist makes the medium viable for art, not the other way around. If you can make something creative with popsicle sticks and glue, then that's art. It's the same with anything.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Did no one else try that? the NYTimes article points to http://0100101110101101.org/, which annoyed me right away with it's javascript alert popup, and then I just threw it into HEX, and the numbers changed into 4BAD...I wonder what the means. There is no 4BAD website, perhaps it's just a complete coinscidense (sp).
:)
anyway, the site is rather interesting, though I haven't figured out what it is. On could probably spend hours going through all of the "private" email on that computer...
As for ZOMBO, I have no idea what anyone is talking about, I don't have flash installed (probably for this reason)
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
Wood is not art. Paint is not art. Iron is not art. String is not art. HTML is not art.
What someone produces after deliberately arranging them in a design intended to provoke a reaction... that product is art. (I'm not arguing good versus bad. I'm just saying that it's art.)
Head over to netdiver and you'll see dozens of artists who use HTML, Javascript, etc. as their medium and have done so for years.
Perhaps back in 1998, this was a new art form. Today, there are more "my site is my art" web sites than you can shake a stick at.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Don't click here Is it art if it makes you laugh and nauseous at the same time? I expect Salvidor Dali and Picasso thought so.
This Alien Shore by CS Friedman, featured a lot of stuff about code as art, including the interesting idea of "charting a program" to see if it made a "pretty picture".
I think there may have been some similar concepts in "Crytonomicon", and definitely "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson.
BTW my very first instructions for a computer were pencil on something that looked like a punched card but used pencil marks instead of punch holes, to generate calendars with ascii art pictures. We all wanted the picture of the horse, but mostly we got wizard of id, or Einstein. Ie the picture was selected randomly or sequentially or something but we didn't get to choose it.
And I'd been playing with the shapes you could make out of lcd numbers on calculators before that. 3838383;8383838 then x / y them etc.
I always seek "elegance" in mathematical equations and programming code, but I'm not sure that makes it "art".
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
I work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in the New Media dept, the largest of any museum in the country. We're responsible for all the digital artwork here, including "net.art".
This is certainly not "news" since net.art has been around for well over 8 years now. jodi.org and 01.org (meantioned in the article) could probably be considered the "grandfathers" of net.art, though I suppose there could be some debate on that, depending on whom you talk to.
And while it's been around for a while it's only been in the last few years that more museums have been taking it seriously. The Walker, the Whitney and the SF MOMA are the big three that come to mind when thinking about museums with a large new media collections. More and more museums are understanding the significance of it as well.
And just with any digital medium there are some ethical questions when it comes to the artwork, such as copyright, and if it's ok to make digital copies of artwork, or does that dilute it? How many is too many? Some artwork is based off of other artwork, so it is ok to "steal" (copy) someone else's work (art or not) to make into my own art? There are parallels here with traditional artwork (like found object art), but also issues that are specific to this medium as well.
Then there's the issue of archiving. If a project runs off a DB and is only usable in Netscape 4, how do we archive it so that in 50 years we can view it? Do we archive just the software? What if future hardware can't run it? Do we archive the hardware as well? What if it relies on some form of online connection, but that online setup changes in the future (think security, etc) so that it cannot be reproduced 100 years from now? Have we then lost this piece forever? Obvioulsy there are a lot of questions that need to be answered in this area.
I think the real question though isn't "is it art", the question is how much impact will it have in the future. When Picaso made his paintings some people said he was crazy, or didn't think it was art, but in hindsight we know the outcome. The same is true for art in new media. Only time will really tell how much lasting impact it has on the way we think and approach art.