browser.art

Amid the current proliferation of hi-tech graphic design, browser
plug-ins and special media applications, a growing number of web sites
are concentrating on making a new kind of web-specific art that focuses
on the interface as art object and receptacle. Call it browser.art. It
is a new merging of art and technology that may be the most formative
advancement in online art to date.

Instead of scanning offline art and lugging it over to the web with a
few links here and there, or digitizing some film and putting it on a
server, art sites like jodi.org are making art specifically for, and of,
the web.

Forget web art buzzwords like "immersion" and "interactivity." We don't
care, they don't care. It's not about community, nor about space, nor
identity. It's not about realaudio, and it's not about shockwave. If
anything, this loosly-knit group of net artists focuses on the
interface.

And that's a smart thing too. Before, we just had representation. Now we
have to *browse* information, right? Before, as the semioticians are
keen to remind us, the world was a complex interplay of images. As users
we would simply need to *read* those images. Now it is clear that the
filter is king. Interface, it's that thing that looks back at us from
the content's point-of-view, always a veneer for information yet always
a bad manipulator of that very information. It's the detail that's
always there, it's the protocol, the go-between. It's the browser.

The net.art duo jodi, high fashion in today's new media art world, are
rightly thought to embody a certain new style of interface art. They
love the look of raw code and use it in their work; they love snapshots
of computer desktops; they love those little Macintosh icons. Most
importantly, they love to crash your browser with meta html tags and
javascript.

With emphasis on a more degraded and simplified aesthetic, Jodi's
project entitled day66 (www.jodi.org/day66) typifies browser art. With
illegible images stacking up in the background and prominent use of the
javascript "scroll" feature, the piece skids into view. Just as the page
loads, it begins to frantically move, scrolling diagonally across the
screen as if your OS had been replaced by some massive conveyor belt.

While it may be easy for some to write off jodi as a bunch of hostile
nonsense, a certain type of technological aesthetic present in their
work is worth a second look. Past the full-screen blink tags, and past
the wild animated gifs, there is a keen interest in the browser itself
as focal point and structuring framework for artistic production. No
other style of net.art reflects so directly on the nature of the web as
a medium.

Immitators of the Jodi style abound. From Hotwired's recent RGB feature
(www.hotwired.com/rgb/opp/++++++++++++++++++/) to the design group e13
(www.e13.com), from San Francisco's superbad.com to Brooklyn's
experimental performance space Fakeshop (www.fakeshop.com), net art
these days is taking a giant step away from print-oriented graphic
design and toward an aesthetic of the machine, of code, of the crash.

The coordination of art and technology is also seen in Alexei Shulgin's
recent Form Art competition and exhibition (www.c3.hu/hyper3/form/).
Form art means any web art piece that uses only the radio buttons,
pull-down menus and textboxes found in html forms. Self-consciously
simplistic and technically restrained, form art uses html to explore and
exploit new arenas. Shulgin's aesthetic is spur-of-the-moment,
ephemeral; it dwells in the feeling of the already dated.

Browser.art is not simply the acceptance of a tech *aesthetic* (like an
ASCII picture would be), but a focus on technology itself as an object.
It's not quicktime (video, but redirected to the web) and it's not
realaudio (sound, but redirected to the web). In this mini-genre of
net.art, the web itself is the object.

There is no depth to this work, rather there is an aesthetic of
relationality, of machines talking to machines. Browser.art seems easily
overlooked, irritating or dumb, not-art. But it is here that web
producers are thinking within the confines of the web, rather than
simply repurposing offline material. By starting to think *about* the
web we start to see new media art taking better shape.