The reading for today explores the in-depth development of new media art, starting with the beginning of the internet, also known as the "dot com boom." It moves through the advancement of digital art, mostly focusing on the realm of internet art. The internet, although we take advantage of it and rely upon it heavily today, was a new concept for many different people during its emergence. For entrepreneurs, it meant a new venue for sale; for media sources, it was another outlet, etc. For artists, it quickly became a way to share images and works and made remixing works even easier. An artist could easily find a well-known image from decades before and mix it into his work, creating something new while incorporating something from art's history. The internet also made the inclusion of sound and video possible.
One artist I found in the reading that I wanted to learn more about was McKenzie Wark. He is the author of "A Hacker Manifesto" and several other books and has completely changed today's view of "hacking." Hacking, by his definition, is knowing and understanding computers - having programming as a hobby and believing in the sharing of information with many people. Hacking is really just "getting a computer to do anything." This is not the traditional view of a hacker, but the understood definition within the hacking world. (Tribe) Wark continues on and includes other domains in his definition. He says, "Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world.... In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world are produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old" (Tribe).
While Wark, as an artist fascinates me, I could not find many visual works that he had done. He most compares and theorizes about hacking and its ultimate relation to art and the rest of the world. His main goal is to enlighten people about the true nature of hacking and to change the name that many perceive it having. For my visual artist, I picked Cornelia Sollfrank. She is know for her hacktivism (Tribe) which combines art, hacking and political activism. She has written about cultural development through hacking and worked on creating a program that mixes images from different sites, making new artworks in the process. She believes that sexism runs rampant in the art world and, through her hacking, tested her theory. Tribe says, "To expose the sexism that she believes pervades contemporary curatorial practices, she then submitted ... 200 works to an international Net art competition under false female names, thus ensuring that a majority of the entrants were women. When the jury announced the three winners, all of whom were men, Sollfrank revealed her intervention."
Although Sollfrank's specialty is not visual arts, per se, she is an artist, nonetheless and is inspiring women and revealing sexism in the art world today. She exemplifies how the internet makes a grassroots movement through the internet possible. My only critique of her work would be the scope. If not for this class, I would not have heard of her or her work. In my opinion, she raises several valid points about sexism in the digital art world and her work needs to reach a wider audience.
https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/New+Media+Art+-+Introduction
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warkbio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelia_Sollfrank
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/sollfrank/biography/
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/sollfrank.html
Due to the nature of my artist, there are not any photographs or images to post on this blog besides the one shown above.
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