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.