Web 2.0 And the Future of Art

I have been considering the future of electronic art recently - and how it will be effected by the arrival of what many are calling Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a second generation of Web-based services and tools — which include social networking sites, wiki's, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users, at both the Data level (content), and in some cases, such as with Flickr.com, the programmatic level.

Probably the most important difference between the traditional web system model and what is being called Web 2.0 is the disassociation of content, and form. Meaning that data, be it text, images, pictures, or any other form of digital information, is not presented in a deterministic fashion. This means that whatever the content, it can be displayed or used in virtually any way or context imaginable. Rather than being strictly defined to the frame of a web page, or other delivery vehicle, the content (data) is made available for whatever use the end user might decide to apply it to. This disassociation of content (information) and content (container, context, use, etc...) lets information become completely cooperative, promiscuous, and plastic.

The question is what effect will this have on Art? Clearly it will affect the delivery and context of some forms of artistic expression; it already has on sites likes Youtube, Flickr, and many others. But will it affect the content of artistic expression? Can there be successful Wikiworks, artworks with content and form that are in some way publicly malleable, or guided? How would something like this work? Will it transcend the screen?

I don't have the answers to these questions. While there is a history of collaborative artworks of varying degrees of success in realization, these radically collaborative works often share an uncomfortable disorganization, and unlike more traditional text based information portals - like Wikipedia, they don't tend to coalesce towards either an aesthetic quality or rational content.

It will be fastinating to watch as artist begin to examine these new technologies and tools.

Yang Zhenzhong

Yang Zhenzhong is a Photographer and Video artist who lives in works in Shanghai, China. Naomi and I found a several of his works in the 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art that is currently on in the Queensland Museum of Modern Art in Brisbane.

Tonight I found the artist's website (Chinese Language site here), and I wanted to go ahead and post a link to the set of images from which the image on the left is a part.

The Queensland Gallery has this image listed as Light and easy no.15 - while the artist has it listed as Light as Fuck #15, which serves I think to show that the series has an angry or aggressive edge that the family oriented museum friendly name softens too much. The work is clearly anti establishment, and makes some interesting statements about the society that artist inhabits, but in a way clever and playful enough to make it poetic, and light hearted. I really loved these works and wanted to share links to whoever might be interested. In my experience here in the US we get far too little contemporary Asian art, and it was enlightening to visit a well funded museum, albeit one closer to Asia, that was taking Asian art as seriously as the Queensland Museum of Modern Art has with this show.

The Future of the Internet The Gombe Chimpanzee Blog is Featured in the Economist's The World in 2007 Interview with Eric Schmidt

I started working on the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog (requires Google Earth) in November of 2005. I started playing with the Google Earth API after reading a really striking article in Technology Review on Google Earth, and Microsoft's Virtual Earth (which hadn't been released yet), and knew right away that there were exciting possibilities presented by this relatively new software.

A year and a half later and I am excited to say that the ideas behind the blog have really blossomed. The Google Earth/blog mash-up has gotten a fair amount of Internet coverage over the last year, and last month was cited as an example in an interview with Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt for an article in The Economist magazine's The World in 2007 on the future of the Internet.

The thing that set the Gombe Chimpanzee Blog (GCB) apart from the many other geo-referenced blogs is that rather than just geotagging (place marking) blog content, the the GCB dedicates all blog content to the Google Earth format. This format requires readers to download Google Earth to read the blog, a decision that I felt was important but was not terribly popular when the blog was first published. Both at the Institute, and in the eyes of some who wrote about the blog at the time of its release, the decision to have the blog run its content exclusively in the Google Earth format was criticized. The format at first seemed unwieldy and downloading software asked too much of the reader; ultimately however it was to be what set us apart, and the reason the blog became so successful.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail

I argued that as a developer, both embracing and simultaneously transcending the preconceptions of the format of Google Earth (or Microsoft's Virtual earth, Yahoo's maps etc..) is the key to what lies behind the future of this new medium, and what made the GCB exciting. "I describe it as a browser for the earth," John Hanke, general manager of Google's Keyhole group, says of Google Earth, and this is the key leap that isn't being made with applications that rely solely on "place marking" from traditional web browsers alone. Ultimately these new "earth" browsers are interesting because they promise a means of wedding the web with real space, enhancing physical places with information that can deepen our experiences of them and make computing into a more transparent and "continuous" part of our real lives. How this information is rendered "inside" these new browsers is where the interesting challenge for designers, artists and developers lies.

Ultimately, the GCB was celebrated for providing content in a new way, rather than damned for alienating users of traditional tool sets. An important set of ideas to come to terms with when approaching a new technology like Google Earth, is that someone else's attention, intention, and assumption about how a tool will be used is built into that instrument. Abraham Maslow a twentieth century American psychologist commented on technology, saying that if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail. Overcoming this barrier in thinking is imperative to understanding the broader potential impact of a new instrument. It is the artist's responsibility, if not fate, to pick up a tool and use it in a completely novel way.

Rebuilding Fuse Studios

The Fuse Studios site is being rebuilt now for the sixth time. While the site has been mostly idle for the last several years I am attempting to reinvigorate it - to both post my resume and portfolio, and start posting some information on some of the new projects on which I am working. Naomi and I hope to have some exciting news coming up in the near future. So if you are interested stop by again soon to see where we are headed.

One of the things I am hoping to do with the FuseBlog is to showcase interesting artworks that are web accessible in some format. Sometimes these pieces will be photographic representations of the artworks - but as often as I can find them I would like to include works that are primarily digital - or exist "in between" the digital and "real" worlds.

Today I want to introduce an online interactive artwork by Jared Tarbell, a digital artist from Albuquerque, New Mexico who has done some spectacular work in flash over the last few years - and is a major inspiration to me. I have a couple of Jared's books locked up in my storage locker that I look forward to cracking open again someday.

The piece is called the IChing Poetry Engine and has been on the web for a long time (since 2001) but it is still worth revisiting - offering up something different every time.
Enjoy: http://www.levitated.net/exhibit/iching/index.html
-Bryce