FINAL POST

VISITOR'S GUIDE TO LONDON by Heath Bunting 1995

Group Project by Christopher Delee, Brendan Abel, Justin Marking, & Kimberly Spann 2009

I really liked Christopher's, Brendan's, Justin's and Kimberly's group project. There's mostly appears to be inspired by Visitor's Guide to London by Heath Bunting 1995. All of their individual parts of the group project have the black and white backgrounds that are changed in some way so that they are not exactly realistic. Like Heath Bunting's website, each of their parts of the project take you to different places within what looks like one particular city. Heath Bunting's has people in it, but not main characters throughout like each of theirs has. I like the fact that theirs has main characters. I was attracted to that website even though I would normally find something with more color to be more appealing. I have pondered for a while to try to figure out what makes me like Heath Bunting's website so much out of the net.art history websites that I have looked at and I cannot quite put my finger on it. I liked their group project even more.



I enjoyed Christopher Delee's part with the little red Pac-Man ghost. The background photos look great and I like how his character stands out in red.



I liked how the wolf jumped around on this part of Brendan Abel's part of the project. I liked how it flipped back and forth going from small to large.
I liked how Justin Marking's fox seemed to fit into each scene so well. This one with the fox sleeping on the car was my favorite. I liked the slight movement of the fox's tail in the other scenes also. I just found the fox scenes very pleasing to look at.
I think that Kimberly Spann's flying bird is incredible. The bird's flapping wings move so smoothly. You can definitely tell that she put a lot of work into it. I also like how each time the bird stops, the feathers on the top of its head moves as if blown by a little wind. I also like how some of her backgrounds actually look drawn instead of just manipulated by PhotoShop.




I think that the way that this group got all of their characters together was very creative. I LOVE the thought bubbles with each of the characters thinking about where they had been and what they had done. I really did not notice any other websites from our history of Web-Based Art blogs besides the "Visitor's Guide to London" by Heath Bunting 1995 that this group project emulated. The only other websites that I looked at that had to do with Web-Based Art History that I could compare this group project to would be any that were mostly in black and white and that is the only comparison that I could make. I feel like that would not be a good aspect to base my comparison on. I knew that I would not be able to make the required three comparisons when choosing this group's project, but theirs in particular made me feel good when I explored it. It's not harsh, strange or scary. It is creative while still managing to be pleasant.

"Color Balance" by John F. Simon, Jr. 1997

"Color Balance" by John F. Simon, Jr. 1997 is a fun interactive website to play with that allows you to find out which color is heavier. You can determine the size of the color. You can place different and numerous colors on either side of the scale. You can manipulate the color by sliding the red, green or blue bar back and forth. If you click on a particular color, you can make it disappear by clicking on square with the "do not" symbol on it. If you click on the square to the right of that button, you can totally clear it and start over again. This could help someone determine which color was bolder in a piece of art that they were creating no matter what type of medium they were using.

John F. Simon, Jr. was born in Louisiana in 1963 and now lives and works in New York. "Simon's background (he studied geology, cartography, he worked on the mapping of Mars for NASA) has certainly had an impact in fostering his on-going interest for the creation of systems which, translated into the artistic experience, outline the personality of an explorer of the complexity of human experiences." He has "been producing art professionally for almost 20 years beginning with hand and pen plotter drawings and progressing through Internet Art to finally arrive at my own practice of 'coding as creative writing'. The main way that I show my Software Art is through sculptural wall hangings with LCD screens that I call 'art appliances' and have made and sold since 1999." He was also one of the first Net artists to have a gallery according to Carly Berwick, senior editor on ARTnews.com. He "believes the code he writes is as personal as a painterly gesture on canvas, and he tries to make it as accessible to collectors."

ARTificial ART: Lines by Kurt Baumann 2001

ARTificial ART: Lines by Kurt Baumann 2001 "is made by the computer. It is a collection of programs. These programs use random numbers and generative art principles to make "art" automatically. There is often surprising contrast between the simplicity of the algorithms and the complexity of the resulting patterns." This is a fun website that makes pretty interesting abstract computer art. There are different links at the bottom of the page that takes the viewer to different types of ARTificial ART. If the viewer clicks on "exercise", they can view different exercises that different people did. When you click on the artist's name, a separate window pops up with their exercise that is interactive. There are other links at the bottom of the page that are worth checking out. The "alphabet" link takes you to different photos that have been uploaded by various people. The photos are of different letters of the alphabet that are noticeable as an alphabet by the way the photo was taken of an object. The "images" link has pretty images of computer abstract art.

Kurt Baumann was born in Switzerland in 1946. He studied Math, Statistics, Physics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Neurobiology and Art. He has developed software for small companies and international corporations. "Currently he is specializing in supporting artists, galleries and related organizations with computer and internet applications."

Fair e-Tales by Joline Blais, Keith Frank & Jon Ippolito 2000

Fair e-Tales by Joline Blais, Keith Frank & Jon Ippolito is a fun website that allows the viewer to change up three popular fairy tales. The original date their e-Tales were created was September 2000, but the website states that this is the 2005 version. The viewer can change up Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel by choosing two of the story's main characters. It is fun because the viewer gets to see how the stories would be if they were tweaked just a little bit instead of the way they were told to them as a child.

Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito founded a New Media program of the University of Maine at Orono called Still Water. "Still Water" connotes the values electronic and cultural networks need to thrive. These include transparency, open access to ideas and code; variability, the capacity to morph into new configurations as the need arises; and stillness, a rare quality in today's frenetic culture but one demanded by any creative endeavor. Still Water is not a center--for a successful network has none--but a medium primed for the transmission of multiple waves of culture. Jon Ippolito was trained as an astrophysicist that later became interested in art, "particularly in the parallel between digital art and Minimalist and Conceptual art, a parallel that led him to propose a new paradigm for preserving art called the Variable Media Network."

MY BOYFRIEND CAME BACK FROM THE WAR by Olia Lialina 1996

MY BOYFRIEND CAME BACK FROM THE WAR by Olia Lialina1996

Olia Lianlina's website, MY BOYFRIEND CAME BACK FROM THE WAR, is a fun interactive website. It is totally in black and white, but it holds my attention because I cannot stop clicking on the messages that appear. I have to know what is going to be said next.
I think that it is important to net.art history because it shows a different way of telling a story or an event in a person's life. It is about 50% words and 50% pictures. When you click on some of the pictures and all of the words, you are guided through some sort of conversation between a girl and her boyfriend. He ends up wanting to get married right away, but they decide that it would be better to wait.

"The Russian artist Olia Lialina launched the first gallery for internet art, which is actually aiming at selling the pieces, "Art.Teleportacia"."

"Olia Lialina (born May 4, 1971 in Moscow) is a pioneer Internet artist and theorist as well as an experimental film and video critic and curator. Lialina studied film criticism and journalism at Moscow State University, graduating in 1993, then followed with art residencies at C3 (Budapest, 1997) and Villa Walderta (Munich, 1998).^[1]

She founded Art Teleportacia, a web gallery of her work, which also features links to remakes of her most famous work "My boyfriend came back from the war" ^[2] and was one of the organisers and later, director of Cine Fantom, an experimental cinema club in Moscow co-founded in 1995 by Lialina with Gleb Aleinikov, Andrej Silvestrov, Boris Ukhananov, Inna Kolosova and others."

In developing my character in Project II, I am somewhat influenced by My Boyfriend Came Back From the War by Olia Lialina. I like the use of the black background, plus I want to give tidbits of information about my character, the Wicked Witch of the West. Instead of her having conversations with someone else, she is kind of having a conversation with herself to try to tell her side of the events. I want to try to explain why she is showing up at the same place the other characters are, especially since she is definitely not a friend of theirs.

When I start to develop the place for my character, I would like to use some aspects of Heath Bunting's A Visitor's Guide to London. I like how it is in black and white and how the buttons that take you to different places, are not in the same place on the different pages that they take you to. I may and may not have the places that I put in Project II in black and white. I have not decided yet, but I may do similar things with some of my buttons like Heath Bunting does in A Visitor's Guide to London. Out of all of the websites that showed places, this is the one that I liked the most.

Siberian Deal by Kathy Rae Huffman and Eva Wohlgemuth, 1995

In the "Siberian Deal" website, places are shown in snapshots taken of people and places where they went to buy items for trade with people in Siberia. "My idea was to buy things not for myself, but to trade them in Siberia. Thus it was actually more fun to shop - I was completly free to choose, it was just the appeal of the object, I could follow - I didn`t have to matter about sizes or how things would match with others. I bought 10 objects in 2 hours - and felt really good after that -" In the snapshot above, the woman on the left is holding two porcelain figurines that she took in trade for her straw broom. They about the person that they traded with and their experiences that they had with the person that they traded with. The way that they represent the different countries, to me, feels more like a log or record taken of their experiences and who they experienced them with. On one page they show a few movies of the item that they bought morphing into the one that they traded for. I believe that the Quicktime movies of the one object morphing into another is very specific to the medium of the Internet. Except for the morphing objects, the website is not all that technically fancy or difficult to make, but the information that they gathered and put on their website is strangely interesting.

Visitor's Guide to London by Heath Bunting

Visitor's Guide to London by Heath Bunting 1995

Heath Bunting represents London or different well known areas of London with black and white drawings. He uses different directional signs as buttons in the bottom right hand corner of the page to lead you to different places in London. The use of buttons is a characteristic that is specific to the medium of the Internet. By being able to use buttons, Heath Bunting is able to bounce the viewer from place to place depending on which button the viewer chooses to use. This would not be possible if the viewer was viewing his Visitor's Guide to London in book or magazine form. The total control of the viewing would be in the hands of the viewer instead of by some manipulation of Heath Bunting. I feel that by viewing it on the Internet and having Heath Bunting take you to different places according to which button you choose, gives it some fun element of surprise.

"Heath Bunting emerged from the 1980s committed to building open/ democratic communication systems and social contexts. He came from the street up, passing through and often revisiting graphity, performance, intervention, pirate radio, fax/ mail art and BBS systems to become an active participant in the explosion of the Internet.
Between 1994 and 1997 Bunting produced many Internet projects, which can be accessed at the server «www.irational.org» set-up by himself. Recently, he has moved into the field of genetics proclaiming it to be the next ‹new media›, and is also developing work in the area of physical network performance."