Monday, September 28, 2009

Tetrasomia by Stephen Vitiello



Tetrasomia by Stephen Vitiello (2001)

When you first go to the Tetrasomia website it looks like the first picture above. After you move your cursor around on the page, you will notice that you can click on something. When you click on the page in certain places, pictures show up and different sounds are played. The sounds will continue to play all at once and if you click on everything that you can on the screen, the screen will look like the second picture above. When you click on the little circle, square, triangle, and smile, the pictures go away. I enjoyed this website and found all of the sounds very stimulating because it was fun finding out what I would discover next. I think that Tetrasomia has its place in net.art history because it shows the use of random sounds and pictures that make for an interesting website that is more of an online installation than a typical website used to gather information or shop.

For years Stephen Vitiello has focused on sounds that might be called ambient, environmental or incidental. His work has combined field recordings with digital processing to create slowly evolving, sonically-rich soundscapes. Vitiello named his project after the ancient Western notion of four elements. The term Tetrasomia refers to the Doctrine of Four Elements written by Empedocles, the fifth-century BC philosopher, who first postulated that all matter is comprised of four "roots," or basic elements. A contemporary notion of "the fifth element" is also present in Tetrasomia: its content and context exist in the ether(net).

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

wwwwwwwww.jodi.org


wwwwwwwww.jodi.org


The website, wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, was made in 1995 by a group called JODI. "Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskerk work together in the Net under the common name of JODI. They come from the world of photography, video and performance and transform the processes that normally occur in the background onto the surface of their Web pages at jodi.org: crashes, log-in files, software liability conditions, refusal of guarantee services. Jodi has exhibited and lectured internationally."

This website created by JODI is relevant to net.art history because it uses HTML code and turns it into art. How clever it was to use the HTML that the viewer would see when viewing the page source as art itself. It is fun trying to find different areas on the webpage to click on and then the surprise of finding out where the link is going to take you. I was surprised when researching this website that it was fairly well known and was even on YouTube as the Weirdest Website Ever. Also, when viewing the other pages on this site, the viewer gets to see web art that resembles what people would see when using a computer prior to Microsoft's Windows. The computer has definitely changed since then. It is kind of like looking the computer's cave paintings.


Thursday, September 17, 2009


Shredder 1.0 by Mark Napier 1998

Mark Napier has been a web design artist since 1995. "He combines his training as a painter with 15 years of expertise as a software developer to create 'art interfaces', software that addresses issues of authority, ownership and territory in the virtual world."

Shredder 1.0 is a website that creates art out of pages from the World Wide Web. Mark Napier takes "the current thinking of web design...that of the magazine, newspaper, book, or catalog" and "shreds" it into art. Mark Napier wants to change the way people "see" web pages. He takes the way we "see" the web and "presents this global structure as a chaotic, irrational, raucous collage. By altering the HTML code before the browser reads it, the Shredder appropriates the data of the web, transforming it into a parallel web. Content become abstraction. Text becomes graphics. Information becomes art." I like the Shredder 1.0 program that Mark Napier created. Before using his program, I never thought of a normal webpage as possibly be made into some sort of abstract art. I have tried different webpages in his program and some pages do turn out better than others. I would definitely recommend people to try Shredder 1.0, especially if that person is interested in any type of digital art.