prosthetic knowledge

25 Internet Artists You Need to Know

Complex has produced a list of 25 online artists worth checking out - a good primer for newcomers:

Whether you believe that art imitates life or that life imitates art (or both), there’s one thing we can all agree on—the advent of the Internet has changed the process of art-making and art’s reception forever. In many cases, artists use their work to critique the aesthetic and impact of the digital age, using screenshots, collage, and an extreme combination of mediums to comment on the way we relate to the Internet. While many are skeptical about the place of this art beyond the world wide web, it’s undoubtedly an important new lane in art history. Make sure you remember these 25 Internet Artists You Need to Know and their work next time you’re thinking about your own Internet consumption.

See the whole list here

Flat Earth Society

Sound art project from Art of Failure places geophysical-scale grooves onto a vinyl record:

FLAT EARTH SOCIETY proposes a transposition of the earth elevation at the scale of a microgroove record. This engraving of elevation’s data on the surface of the disk generates in consequence a subtle image of the earth. When played on a turntable, the chain of elevation data crossed by the needle can be heard.

More Here

Artist Rob Sherwood

Rob Sherwood’s work is about finding a depth of perception, literally and metaphorically, in a flat-screened world. He considers himself a painter but his practice has always allowed some time for conducting experiments with various lens based media.

Attracted by the way digital technology blurs boundaries between physical and virtual space, his paintings can be seen as taking the grid for a visual metaphor of human cognition. Whether each square is interpreted as a pixel, cell, bit or atom is consequential to it being first and foremost just a painted mark.

Recently he has begun translating his aesthetic sensibilities and theoretical interests into objects. As with his grid paintings, these works tamper with an apparently rigid system and find creative space in a subjective interference. The suggestion is that models which appear strict or sterile can combine meaningfully with subjective fields of feeling, whether in the algorithms of the internet or those of a painted pattern.

[text taken from Frederica Schiavo Gallery]

The artist also has a Tumblr blog here

Datamoshing the Land of Ooo: A Conversation with David OReilly

Interview with the great animator David O’Reilly about his Adventure Time episode:

DR: Were there any restrictions and/or stipulations on what you could do with the show?

DO: Creatively, Pen really wanted me to do my own thing. The writers on the show are really good, and I would have been happy to animate one of their storyboards—but he really wanted me to do all that stuff myself. I can’t think of a precedent for that. It may be the only animated show in history to let a total outsider write and direct an episode. As far as restrictions, there were a few because ultimately it’s for children’s TV. A few jokes were cut or toned down, which was frustrating at the time, but I’m proud of what made it to air. 

Worth reading, which can be seen here

Digital Merzbau

Chinese project combines art, 3D printing, geometry and recursion:

Merzbau is a project by a German artist Kurt Schwitters began in 1923 in Hanover for a series of room transformation of his house. With art of collage, restructuring process, he re-used the discarded building materials from which made into furniture, walls to ceiling, creating a form of decorative and structural integration, basically following a certain design rules. Today, in the computational context, we tried to create a series of our own logic from the prototype “Merzbau”.

More Here

for(){}; - projection mapped video game on canvas

Playable art by Brent Watanabe features acrylic hand-painted canvases mounted on wall, with sprites projected on surface - video embedded below:

In for( ){ };, there is no beginning or end to the game, just collecting and wandering, birthing and consuming, an arbitrary point system rising until your inevitable death and the birth of another generation. It is a game mechanism without the game. An addictive but essentially aimless experience.
The piece is a triptych of playable acrylic paintings, controlled by the viewer using a NES controller.

Link

NOTE: It has come to my attention that the paintings were put together by Seattle-based artist Cable Griffith, and was shown in his solo exhibition at Kittredge Gallery in Tacoma, called, “Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start.”

You can check out more of Cable’s work here

bit.code

Mechanical installation from 2009 is a physical 1-bit glitch display - video embedded below:

BIT.CODE plays with the re-encoding of information and the recognizability of signs. It works with the infinite possibilities for combination of a finite number of bits, the smallest units of information.
The bits appear as black and white elements on the individual segments of the string. Each string is coded with the same bit pattern, which is reminiscent of Morse code. If the strings are moved in parallel, words seemingly appear (for a certain period of time) from ‘out of nowhere’ and disappear again. The perceived information causes a short opportunity for pause, a moment of serenity, of clarity – before the incessant flow of constellations, motions and changes starts anew.

Link

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: Arrays and Matrices

A collection of examples from the Prosthetic Knowledge Tumblr archive on installation artworks which can be characterized by geometric or networked arrangement.

You can read more at Rhizome here

Manfred Mohr’s Youtube Channel

A collection of videos featuring works by pioneering computer artist Manfred Mohr, many dating back to the early 70’s. Also includes interviews and lectures:

Manfred Mohr is considered a pioneer of digital art. After discovering Prof. Max Bense’s information aesthetics in the early 1960’s, Mohr’s artistic thinking was radically changed. Within a few years, his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer generated algorithmic geometry. Encouraged by the computer music composer Pierre Barbaud whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969.

You can go to the Youtube channel here

Angles Mirror by Daniel Rozin

Interactive installation using a triangular method of representation with a motorized array:

The “Angles Mirror” rejects the idea of building a picture based on relative lightness and darkness. Instead, it explores a system of linear rotation that indicates the direction of an object’s contour. A wall-mounted sculpture, the “Angles Mirror” is a sharp triangular block of steel, dotted with yellow indicator arms that pivot. Based on the isometric grid, its structure favors the patterns and angles found in an equilateral triangle. The arms, which do not have the ability to change brightness or luminosity, use input from a camera and reconstruct the view with areas of varying angles. The negative space surrounding a viewer is translated into horizontal lines on the picture plane. Rather than creating a photorealistic image, the three-dimensional movement of a figure is represented, visualizing optical flow as viewer’s proximity to the sculpture changes. A nuanced contour results, as the viewer shifts back and forth, altering how the structure of space is perceived. Similar to “Fan Mirror”, in the “Angles Mirror”, the sequence of movement across the picture plane is directed in part by its audience. When the viewer walks away from the work, or chooses to view the sculpture from a distance, a series of predefined images and transitions cover the object’s surface.

There are more examples of Daniel’s interactive and alternative ‘mirrors’ at the Bitform Gallery’s Vimeo page here

Golden Parachutes by James Bills

Collection of abstract isometric mathematical artworks designed with rolling dice data - via Data Is Nature:

James Bills series of projection drawings, Golden Parachutes, are generated by random numbers obtained from a series of of polyhedral dice throws. Each aleotoric drawing uses a different system, indicated by its title (such as 1xRxR or 8x8xR), to translate those numbers into indeterminate isometric lattices characterised by spectrographic elevation columns. Gold leaf gilding punctuates the upper parts of these columns resulting in illuminated grids of squares that hover above the main architectural structures.

More at Data Is Nature Here

More works by James Bills Here

4D Video

Online browser-based slitscan experiment distorts your webcam input:

This experiment allows you to explore 4-dimensional space using your webcam … try slowly waving your arm before undertaking more radical experimentation in the 4th dimension.

Try it out here

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks - WebGL

In this submission, I take a look at a web technology that brings impressive 3D projects into the browser.

Read it here