The Whitney Artport Idea Line is a Java applet that categorizes and visualizes works created in multiple disciplines over a timeline dating from pre-1995 to 2002. It acts as a resource for finding groundbreaking or experimental work that emerged with the emergence of new technologies and new applications of those technologies. Our assignment for class was to fish around the Idea Line and pick out a few pieces we found interesting. Here’s what I found:
“Face Value” by Nino Rodriguez, 1996 (http://www.mindspring.com/~ninor/)
In the early days of hypertext and the exploration of what it really means to ‘interact’ online, Nino created a website that utilizes unique features of hypertext to generate curiosity for and create a commentary of media’s role in forming our desires and vice versa, and how the internet may play a new role in this. On the site, as users sift through the pages they are invited to “fill in the blanks” and complete sentences/statements dealing with this topic. As they do so, they interact directly with the ideas and shape their conclusions; and it forces them to take time to be self-reflective and decide how they really feel about the matter. Below is an example of one of the pages:
This piece is over 10 years old, so obviously it is quite simple considering all the capabilities that the Web has now. But for the ideas being explored here, I think the execution was well-implemented. While playing around with the statements. I constantly found myself going back and changing the words I had chosen and reconsidering the statement’s meaning. What’s being said here still has relevance today. Looking at this project, I am reminded of a much more recent work by Michael Wesch on YouTube entitled “The Machine is Us/ing Us” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g). This video also explores and provides commentary on the idea of how hypertext affects people and how people affect hypertext. Interacting with this idea and discovering the relationships embedded within the medium of the Web is very complex, and I am fascinated by it. Many projects I work on also involve this interplay of people vs. “Machine” and I enjoy seeing how other people approach the topic.
“PDA Art” by Joss Deutsch, 2001(http://www.geocities.com/immjoss/PDAart)
Though not the most innovative of pieces, I really enjoy the nature behind this sort of work. In this work, Joss Deutsch quite simply downloaded a drawing/painting application onto his PDA and used his PDA as a sketch book rather than carrying an actual sketchbook around with him. His reason for this was that a lot of the detail would be lost in his sketches if he drew them by hand and tried to scan them in to make them digital. So instead he began exploring how he could sketch directly in digital form. Below are some examples of sketches he created on his PDA:
It’s true that these sketches aren’t anything fantastic, but I don’t feel that’s even the point of this project. The reason I like this work is because I am constantly intrigued by how people will take an existing technology and find a new use for it. The people who made PDA’s probably never thought of using it as an art tool. Instead, Joss Deutsch became a sort of “prosumer” who found ways on his own to apply a technology to his needs. And now, 6 years later, take a look at all the technology we now have that are related (if not direct descendants) from projects like these. Today we now work with Whacom Tablets, tablet PC’s, and many other haptic tools that allow us to create otherwise ‘analog’ work into a direct digital form. I’m really interested in seeing how these things evolve.
“Anemone” by Ben Fry, 2001 (http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/anemone/applet/)
As many of us know, Ben Fry is pretty much one of the ‘fathers’ of Processing. In this earlier project of his, Fry created an applet that generated an animated data visualization that portrays the growth, life, and death of web pages in real time and the way people navigate between them. With this work, Fry was able to show all at once how pages are used and changed along with how people relate them to one another. For me this type of project is important for several reasons. First, it explores a new element of data visualization: real time. Portraying things in real time gives life to the information we’re looking at. We are able to observe the changes as they are happening and see the entire life cycle that the data takes. In doing this, we can better understand how the behaviors of people affect something. Secondly, it provides a new way for us to observe the behaviors of people online and the relationships they assign to the webpages they are viewing. From this vantage point we get to see how people directly affect how the web is used and what they desire from it. Lastly, the visualization is interactive. We can isolate certain elements of the visualization to take a closer look at it and interact with the information we are seeing. Below is a snapshot of how this visualization works:
This type of work is very similar to projects that I’ve been trying to create. Last semester I worked on trying to find a way to portray the idea of collective intelligence by creating a desktop widget that grew a ‘garden’ in real time based on the data it received from Wikipedia’s RSS feed. It was an interactive way to engage people in observing how users affect the Web and see how users can ‘grow’ something together – in this case, a huge bank of information that the entire world has access to. Fry’s project is similar to mine both in aesthetics and the type of information he’s trying to portray. This type of work makes great precedence for the work I have done and will continue to pursue.
