Belated Entry: Internet Art - Chapter 3

I was particularly bemused by the Toywar. etoy vs. eToys. The concept of the infowar, warring states in cyberspace is fascinating. Though no casualties resulted from the war besides the bankruptcy of the eToys entity, it showed that big companies can't just waltz into a given territory and take it over with fancy concepts such as the law. This silly online battle showed that online territory should still be treated with sovereign attitudes. It's quite impresseive that members of the etoy community were able to come up with such strategy to villainize the corporation suing them in order to raze their web domain.

Hackers and crackers on the internet are both awesome and deplorable, depending who is being cracked. Piracy is a great and terrible, when you consider the amount of media being distributed without cost - the internet is a place you can get any-digital-thing if you know where to go. Today's pirates are perhaps youths desensitised to the damage that piracy deals to the markets as it is so easy to acquire anything you like if you know where to look online. The future probably holds punishments severe enough to outlaw online piracy to the point it actually demonstrates on traditional maritime piracy seen today - legendary and terrible.

Final

Theseus vs. Minotaur

Resubmission - Digital Self Portrait

Digital Art - Chapter 3

These interactive art pieces incorporating "Artificial Intelligence" are all-too familiar to me, as I have seen similar innovations in many video games - how is this new? I must admit that the works I've encountered as commercialized games are more aesthetic, creative, and entertaining than the examples labeled in the chapter. I wonder if to be considered art, a work must be produced by one person alone who identifies themselves as an artist, one who is not contributed to a company or business in any way. My interaction with the art world has always eluded to this notion that movies, music, games, comics, and anything not displayable in a museum is not art, though I have not found a reason why or even encountered someone asking the same question - why aren't these things considered works of art? Comics are the only thing that do in fact fall into the category of art as I have seen original inkings of old comics displayed in museums and regarded as Art.

Flash

Internet Art - Chapter 4

There is no firm definition of art thus far - the mention of the first person to sell their old socks on Ebay doesn't seem like art to me. Additionally, the person selling their "blackness" does not seem like a work of art rather a statement. Setting cameras up for surveillance is not a means to create art either, hoping you catch something good. You could simply look outside your window and proclaim what you're viewing is art. Simply because the surveillance is displayed in a museum does not qualify it as art. I've seen commercialized art fail to reach so-called artist's standards of definition, yet they accept certain oddities simply for their quizzical nature it seems.

Dungeon Crawl

Internet Art - Chapter 2

Vuk Cosic's Deep ASCII was the most interesting piece out of Chapter 2 in my opinion. The fact that the "first ASCII film" was made from a pornographic movie for Vuk's own reasons is faciniting. He admits that porn has the best qualities to convert into ASCII information - the closeups, 75% of which make up the porno. The fact that the film is based on a program that makes up the old Pong video game and the porno Deep Throat were released in the same month and year provided a good excuse as to why that particular movie was chosen to represent the first ASCII film. I remain cynical and consider that it was made from a porno for the sheer indecency. If the film created was of anything else it probably wouldn't have had as much impact.

Cosic mentions in his interview that pornography makes up 50% of internet traffic, using this as a reason as to why the porn was chosen for it. I enjoy how he defends the video game industry, how it has surpassed Hollywood in terms of money-making for years on end. He compares Porn and Video Games, pointing out that Porn is decent while Games are not, Porn is more underground, while Games are out in the open, yet games are not immoral and do not garner attention as art, while it is a serious medium in terms of art. I agree that video games should receive more attention from the art community.

Digital Self Portrait

Internet Art - Introduction & Chapter 1

In the introduction, the author points out that today's museums and galleries will distance themselves from today's "net.art" because it "lacks the craft and direct impact" of traditional mediums such as painting and sculpture. Internet Art is viewed as created by immature and derivative artists. The art-form becomes much too like graphic design and commercial work.

To me, the difference between Art and Graphic Design does not exist. In fact, I consider many of the contemporary works I come across to be much closer to how this author suggests commercial design to be exploitative of cheap and flashy tricks. How one artist may incorporate shock factor into their work is cheap and trashy to me.

Out of any of the examples present in chapter one, which details Early Internet Art, none of them had any of this "craft and direct impact," so vitally described in the introduction to make art Art (visually anyway.) Without detailed explanations accompanying these examples in the text, they have little to no impact or value. If the art needs to be explained in such detail, I cannot consider it to be art as it should speak for itself.

Digital Art - Chapter 2

I found the section on Film, video, and animation (page 96) with its statement that "Film is grounded in the concept of 'recording reality'." - which also goes on to suggest Films to one day be made entirely from digital worlds - to be incorrect. First, I consider Films, from the early past to recent memory, to only ever capture the imitation of life. Recording reality is left to CC security cameras as even documentaries are edited to emphasize particular aspects, which are victim to the whims of the director and are thus Art. Second, films have already been produced, years before the publication of this book, entirely out of digital medium. Virtual worlds have been present in Film for decades, nearly a century, as Animation.

Fruit and Vegetable Monster

Digital Art - Introduction & Chapter One

The chapter touches on the concept of Realism and Naturalism. I am subject to the understanding that Realism refers to the representation of life in the artwork that works to reflect sheer reality - to show things they way they really are. Naturalism on the other hand is what people commonly call "realistic" when they describe a work of art that looks close to what it is representing from "real life." The chapter establishes a good separation of the two terms with examples and introduces "hyperrealism" by "facilitating the creation of alternative or simulated forms of reality," thanks to the photo-realistic capabilities of the computer and digital media accessible today.

Naturalism also receives a boost from the digital media, particularly with the insects scanned in via scanner, producing images of much higher resolution and thus detail than can be produced with the camera. These two inflated states of Realism and Naturalism fall victim to the same scrutiny that the art of Photography has gone through, being able to capture what the artist sees with perfect representation demands that the artist show his compositional skills in order to set what the digital artist produces apart from what is seen everyday.