Gregor Muir, a curator writing for the New York Digital
Salon Tenth Anniversary Exhibition, discusses nine digital artists/groups over
the span of forty years beginning with Nam June Paik. Paik’s Magnet
TV (1965) produces abstract images by running a magnet shaped like a horse
shoe on a tube set. After Googling what sort of images this created, I was
fascinated by the variety of forms this installation produced depending on how
the magnet was situated. Nicolas Schöffer, a Hungarian sculptor, produced
installations including the ambitious 170-foot tall tower Muir described that
it, “consisted of 66 revolving mirrors, 120 colored projectors, photoelectric
cells, and microphones” (499). Muir also wrote of the works from
telecommunication artist, Robert Adrian; the Net artist Vuk Cosi; Gebhard
Sengmüller, who developed VinylVideo™;
and Pierre Huyghe, who produced a film of French housing towers; as well as
groups BIT, whose agents developed Suicide
Box (1997); The Web Stalker
software (1997) produced by I/O/D; and JODI, who has developed a series of
webpages that do not conform to the user-friendly ideal.
The most interesting element from this article was that
of the JODI web projects. Wondering what the article was referring to, I found
links too many of their web pages on Wikipedia. Even though I knew from reading
the article that these pages are designed to instill a mode of terror in the
user causing many people to panic in belief that they have a virus and, I
accessed http://jodi.org/archive/ and,
for a fraction of a second, thought, “Seriously?” as my browser background went
suddenly read with the bright bold code “404 Error” flashing at me. “You get
these short, direct reactions from panicking people” because it questions the
idea that “the Net [is] a user-friendly environment” (500).
LEONARDO, Vol. 35, No. 5, pp.499-508, 2002
LEONARDO, Vol. 35, No. 5, pp.499-508, 2002
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