Some of My Favourite Web Sites Are Art
http://www.alberta.com/unfamiliarart/

Project #10:

CANDY FACTORY
Takuji Kogo and Kazunari Horiguchi
http://www.bekkoame.or.jp/i/ga2750/
http://www.bekkoame.or.jp/i/ina-1744/

Japanese artists Takuji Kogo and Kazunari Horiguchi aim to use the Web
as an open sketchbook; they keep their art work loose and messy to
provoke communication and participation. They write that their art space
Candy Factory features projects meant to "protect art from art lovers."
Their projects induce alienation and confusion. They rely on fetishism,
morbidity and subversiveness.

Candy Factory projects offer slices of insane domestic and family life.
One asks the user to rename his/her father; another to suggest and name
new familial relationships. There is also a collaborative piece, raw and
messy, with Mouchette, a 13 year old Dutch girl who is plotting her
suicide and invites visitors to her Web site for help with planning.

Some projects not to be missed at Candy Factory: the weird Chinese vase
(which takes a traditional art object and tops it off with a subversive
QTVR top), the "do it yourself" minimalism composition pallette, and the
hallucinatory Japanscapes in "Terminal Care."

Like artist Olia Lialina (see "Last Will and Testament"), Takuji Kogo
and Kazunari Horiguchi explore the idea of internet art as financial
commodity. Several projects are open for commercial evaluation and some
are available for purchase.

We chose Candy Factory for its distinctive look and feel, and because
its projects consistently take disturbing, subversive positions. The
artists indict "art" as a Western concept, made necessary because of the
West's commercial, social, and historical imperatives:

"This media is lying another homemaker's ward again. Wage earners have
to make a link to homemakers. Is this our new labor? Do you want to make
a baby for this home again? If you want, you can get a work for labor…
for product. Then ideas of product or 'sweet home' obsess poor
hardworking pimps. If you stop this game, you must escape from their
purge. But now we can become a pimps for ourselves. We start making home
and againsting a sense of home as hidden homeless or start working and
againsting a sense of product as hidden prostitute. ….againsting
Shadow Work

"This gallery is in the prostitution area. It was a small factory for
making brown sugar candy. As usual they are safe, they can only touch
using their terminal,

"We will inviting many artists through this project. This is
collabolative works for using Web." - Takuji Kogo