The art that comes off the screen
Advertiser dives into the creation spaces of the Internet
The sequence of the same female face, with her mouth pressed by a hand (http://www.totalmuseum.org/webproject8/muzzle/); pictograms of famous works of art (http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/blind/); exotic and unconventional watches (http://massaclocks.com); long distance sex (http://www.fu-fme.com/). The diversity demonstrates how artists develop the so-called Net-Art on the Internet and the way designers use the web differently as a space for creation. The result of these observations resulted in the master's thesis of publicist Hélia Vannucchi at the Department of Multimedia at the Institute of Arts (IA). “Artists work with 'greater freedom', while designers have a problem to solve, a message to communicate”, summarizes Hélia.
To reach the conclusion, the researcher “surfed” months through websites of artists and designers (see below) chosen from the web. Some of them were indicated by professor Gilberto Prado, from IA, dissertation advisor. Hélia wanted to discover the web as a space for creation and create a counterpoint between websites for artists and designers. To do this, she exchanged emails with her sources and spent hours in front of pages that apparently didn't mean anything. In one of these riddles the following phrase appeared: “Your number is 79. Please wait”. Soon after, the number 77 was highlighted (the numbers are random and change depending on the time of access). Hélia says that the site always leaves the user waiting, until the message comes: “You missed your turn” and the proposal for a new number to wait. The publicist spent an afternoon in front of the computer. “I opened html, cgi, trying to find out if there was something behind it,” explains Vannucchi. This is because in another work, only mentioned in the dissertation, by the duo Jodi – Joan Heemskerk and Dick Paesmanns (http://www.jodi.org)-, there were elements hidden in the source code, in the website's HTML, only visible to those who actually explored the work.
For Russian artist Alexei Shulgin, the hand-to-mouth gesture represents a critique of the censorship that oppresses men and women in different countries. The pictograms by Vuk Cosic, a Slovenian artist, criticize the way in which the history of art, net-art, as well as history in general is told according to the interests of the ruling class. Cosic is an archaeologist by training and says that there is a similarity between what he does now, with art, and what he did as an archaeologist, as he continues to construct narratives. Designer Roger Los created the website for Massa Clocks, which manufactures the watches. Hélia analyzed the visual construction and navigation of the site.
Long distance sex? For Alexei, the author of the work, it is a criticism of people who exchange personal relationships for machine-mediated relationships, making an allusion to the CU-SeeMe videoconferencing program. Publicist Hélia Vannucchi included among her sources a Brazilian, designer Verônica D'Orey, from São Paulo, author of singer Marisa Monte's website. According to Hélia, her work generally has a clean design, with rest areas for the eyes.
From the conclusions of Hélia's work there is information that Alexei Shulgin prints social criticism in his works, that Vulk Cosic updates the ASCII language, while Holger Friese works on the denial of usual navigation elements in his works. The dissertation defended at the Institute of Arts is available at http://www.actualis.com.br/mestrado.
Online gallery
Alexei Shulgin is Russian, lives and works in Moscow. He is an artist and curator of several projects on the Internet and has participated in more than 60 exhibitions and numerous symposiums on photography, contemporary art, new media and communication.
www.easylife.org
Vuk Cosic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Graduated in archaeology, he is also one of the pioneers of online art.
http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk
Verônica D'Orey is a designer and has her own office in São Paulo. At the Design Ritmo exhibition, she presented the work aquipralá delápracá, created in collaboration with Carolina Jabor and with music by Naná Vasconcelos.
www.veronicadorey.com.br
Roger Los is self-taught. In 1992 he began working for Microsoft on multimedia projects. In 1995 he began working with the Internet and in September 1997 he opened his studio, Roger Los Studio, in Seattle.
www.los.com
Holger Friese is German. He studied photography, worked for a jazz record label and studied graphic design from 1993 to 1997 in Aachen, Germany.
www.fuenfnullzwei.de
