Jim Punk

            The artist assigned to me is Jim Punk.  He is an anonymous net. Artist thought to be from France.  Not only are his works non-linear and discombobulating but there are next to no interviews from him or articles.  The interviews or emails he sends are distorted and skewed much like his artwork.  It seems that every interaction Punk has on the internet is to send some sort of message.  The main message I gather from his work is distortion on basic human expectations. A lot of Punk’s work follows the “remix culture.”  One example is screenfull.net in which Abe Linkoln and Jim Punk remix the blogosphere.  It is interesting that we expect everything on the internet to be well organized and follow some sort of rules, but the internet is free territory (less and less so now though) and Punk and Lincoln show that they can present their content in any way that they choose.  A review hidden away on the site behind several links and text states, “Screenfull is a media mashup, a collision of borrowed (stolen) images, video, and audio that have been cut and torn and jammed back together.”  Screenfull does do this and to the extreme, past what is apparent from the quote.  There’s picture after picture mixed in with gifs, audio and video.  Links rarely lead to where you would expect them to and none even have a coherent identifier.  Punk doesn’t want to viewer to find everything accessible, in fact the slogan of the site is “we want to crash your browser.”  The natural “order” of the internet is challenged thoroughly through this work, it challenges the user to think differently. 

            A project similar to Screenfull is another collaboration by Punk and Antonio Mendoza called dysleksic.  The sort of remix or…distortion is apparent already right from the title of the work, “dysleksic” dyslexic spelled wrong (ironic…).  Although it may be as shallow as that, I think it does point to the idea of subtle changing content and creating something new from it.  Although this work is anything but subtle…although the meaning may be as such.  http://dysleksic.tumblr.com/ Dysleksic features a scrollable tumblr page with video after video, each one remixed in some sort of way.  Mendoza states in an interview that both artist would not know what the other was doing and most of the time wouldn’t even understand what the other would be saying in an email or other communication.  What was born from that is a page that is absolutely mesmerizing.  At first it seems overwhelming and an average consumer may immediately close the tab.  However, after pausing and looking at the videos a sort of cohesiveness begins to take place.  The videos express the internet and media in a way that isn’t organized and understandable.  Much like how we perceive things within our mind the site videos are nonlinear and again, much like screenfull question the organization of the internet.

            Another main theme of Punk’s work is using the internet as the medium rather than as a place to display a medium. He employs browser windows, code and the webpages themselves to create a lot of work.  Punk will even use other people to create work.  Social media is often one of the most understandable things on the internet.  They try to create something that is at the top of its game for user friendliness, organization and accessibility.  Twitter is Punk’s main focus when it comes to creating art out of social media.  The site is known for its short “status” snippets of text, people talking about going about their day or artists stating when a new work will be coming out.  For Punk, that new work is daily, or by the minute depending on how active others are.  Punk created a keyboard with glyphs and figures that most people wouldn’t use in their daily lives and then allows anyone to type a message with it and post it to twitter.  The result is a collection of tweets that in most senses make no sense. Others create pictures out of the symbols.  Punk hands the tools over to the public.  As such, it isn’t the tweets that are his work but rather the internet itself.  The twitter account is the piece of art.  Punk takes something understandable and mundane and turns it into something unknown and strange.  He seems to be an all encapsulating force sitting back behind the code, watching as people strive to make sense out of something that cannot be made sense of.  It is this that is his main message, not everything can make sense, and especially not the internet.  People want to create an organized medium out of something that is inherently disorganized. 

Internet Art

            I really like the first sentence of Anne Marie Schleiner’s “Fluidities and Oppositions among Curators, Filter Feeders, and Future Artists” which is “Artists of the future may not know that they are artists.”  Which I think is already the case of our present day and art forms.  A gamer (as she mentions) may not know that they are an artist in a sense but they are, they can upload game clips or record interactions and display them much like a painting in a gallery.  It is something they created and take pride in.  This also makes me think of the film Professor Phil Solomon here at CU.  He has several films that use only footage from the Grand Theft Auto series.  He isn’t necessarily a gamer, but it shows that incredible art can be created from something not usually associated with art.  With the introduction of the new gaming systems (“next gen”) they have recording software built in that will automatically record clips, this takes Schleiner’s sentence to the extreme in that the person playing literally does not know they are creating art.  It is almost accidental art which is an interesting concept to think about, if the person doesn’t know they are creating art are they still creating it?  They are creating it yes but can it be identified as art if it was intended.  Something to think about.

            I also find the idea of collaboration in Schleiner’s writing interesting.  It seems like it is something that has become more and more prominent with the advent of internet art.  You don’t see collaboration between baroque painters (as far as I know) but now you can find works pretty commonly that have been contributed to by several people.  It even is becoming pretty common in the music industry, it was usually just rap and hip hop that featured large amounts of collaboration but now other bands of different genres are doing it more as well.  I think it has to do with the ease of being able to share, send and work on projects between people with the internet.  It just keeps getting easier as well with google drive sharing and cloud storage. 

Digital Narrative

My Body works in the way of an autobiography but it is very introspective, at the same time there is a use of illustration and several branch offs within the main narrative. The Six Sex Scenes seem to be simply stories in different pages, the titles vary in placement but for the most part it seems uniform and familiar. Distance, is a sort of photo-book or link story in an abstract way, each click only gives a bit of information but manages to tell a narrative. Red Riding Hood, to me is like those click adventure games, it depends on what you click and if you can find the thing you are looking on for the story to progress.

            These net artists blur the distinction between autobiography and fiction by being incredibly detailed so much so that it seems as if they are creating a new story and a new identity.  Also, the addition of illustrations, sound or pictures creates more of a fiction feel rather than a drab autobiography that skims the details and simply tells it how it is.

            The link strategy, the most closed was distance the other three works however seems to branch in several directions.  To me, the links are distracting, I think it may almost be a tired medium.  When it comes to games people want several options and narratives however when I was reading these stories I didn’t like the feeling I got that I would have to click through everything go backwards and click again, I felt like I was missing some things which I did not like.

            I cannot think of any specific other narratives that do similar things however I do remember when the youtube choose your own adventure type deals began to pop up.  Which, are pretty similar to the redridinghood work.

            In each of these narratives, in Jacksons piece, when she recalls very fine details about her childhood I began to doubt the authenticity of the memories, I felt them to be more fictional than real. In Distance, it seems that Laporta is playing a character however I felt none of it felt all that real, simply because each picture was of a different person, it didn't give off the sense that it was a cohesive story about one person but rather several people. The frame story of redridinghood gives a good look at how over time things may have changed but it also is a familiar story that most everyone knows.  It creates a common interest foundation that anyone can interact with to learn the new story.

            I think that the distinction of literature vs visual becomes arbitrary in electronic environments.  When these sort of things just began at the advent of the style of link stories and what not, it could be split into categories.  However, the term mixed media came around and that is how I see these works, I no longer view them as one distinct genre.   Now, I see them as a conglomerate, a lot of parts working together towards the whole.