Art Intercom: Featuring Artist Jaka Železnikar

Jaka Zeleznikar, Changer

My next interview in the series Art Intercom is up on the icommons blog. This week I interview artist Jaka Zeleznikar. Check it out!

Much like Robert Rauchenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing, Jaka Zeleznikar often begins with pre-existing work and then transforms, sometimes even destroys it to make new art. Such studio methods can create a wide range of works, a number of which I discussed with Zeleznikar over the phone last week. The majority of the discussion centres on what he will be making at the iCommons Summit and his online works, though he has an array of excellent offline pieces that can be seen here.

AFC: So you do a lot of on and offline work. To make the interview a little more concise I'm just going to focus on the online work for now, and go through a few pieces on your site. Your most recent piece Letters, that's a Firefox extension right? Now I haven't installed this in my browser - frankly I'm a little fearful to do so...

Jaka: (laughing) It doesn't bite!

AFC: Well, I'm a little worried about adding any additional distractions to the ones I already have to my work... Can you tell me how it works?

Jaka: It's an online visual poem in the form of an extension for the Firefox browser. If you look at the project page there is a rotating letter 'A'. Okay so you've got the whole alphabet - actually a mix of the English and Slovenian alphabet in rotating letters. Regardless of which page you are looking at, it adds this alphabet over the page, and then you can move letters around or if you type, these letters will appear and disappear, and you can make them move around the page by themselves. Plus I made a little button so you can switch it off to surf normally.

AFC: [laughing] How kind of you! So do you work with this Firefox extension regularly?

To read the rest of the interview click here.

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