Too Many Internets

The internet, Our collective subconscious reproduced in copper and silicon, readily offers the banal and the disgusting for your mindless consumption (if you want to remain stomach-full, don’t click on any of Pintsize’s links). My mind immediately drifted to the plethora of webcomics when coming up with examples for those adjectives, but I don’t think it’s a controversial point. The evidence abounds for other areas as well.

Its archives for the profound, however, are populated at a far less rapid clip. A large part of my motivation for starting this blog is to help bring attention to the richness that already exists, or is being added. To that end, I am pleased to offer you this link:

Today I Die, a little web-based game by Daniel Benmergui.

I don’t want to say too much, since it’s a brilliant, beautiful experience that will take up only 15-20 minutes of your day, but hopefully leave you much enriched. Suffice it to say that this is a ‘game’ inasmuch as there is interaction and a defined sequence of events, but that’s not really the point. The real stuff of wonder is the subtle poetry; the source of both mechanic and narrative in this piece.

If you enjoy it, but you’re looking for more of a game, be sure to try the melancholy I Wish I Were the Moon, by the same creator.

steven Interact art, games, pixels, webapps

"Self-Erasing Drawing"

[Image from here, originally located via a google image search.]

This is a kinetic sculpture by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum. Its current incarnation, housed in the MoMA, is a larger version of the 1979 original. When I first visited the museum a few years ago, I was completely captivated by the piece, which occupies the center of a moderately-sized space.

If I read that it was entitled, “Self-Erasing Drawing” at the time, I don’t remember that now. What I did commit to memory was that a rake was continuously making lines in sand, while simultaneously smoothing the sand 180 degrees away. I did not conceive that the machine was drawing, but took it as some reflection on meditation; a mechanized zen exercise. Rather than contemplate while performing the simple, impermanent action ourselves, we robotized the task. To my mind, however, the sweeping was just as mesmerizing, and I was not the only patron completely captivated.

As I think about it now, I am less satisfied by the paradigm that this machine is drawing, than if it is some mindless meditation object. This is perhaps to be expected, but still, it’s not like it’s making a very interesting drawing. If it had even one more degree of freedom, and a simple, random algorithm for determining the angle between rake and sweep, it could produce a variety of drawings while remaining self-erasing. It would even be deceptively autonomous.

But perhaps I’ve missed the point. After all, it is the simplicity of the arrangement that most powerfully evokes the dualities of, “building and destroying, existence and disappearance, displacement and migration,” as the source post says.

I’ve also found the following video, which is the natural medium for relating moving artwork:

[Source unknown, as I found it via google video search.]

steven Studies in Repetition art, sculpture

If you click on this link: I can be Jackson Pollock too! and then click on “Enter JacksonPollock.org” (”I thought that’s what I was doing  before!” I know, right?) you’ll be taken to a pretty delightful little browser application.

Move your mouse around the blank white canvas, and suddenly you’re slopping about digital paint. Go ahead, get all of your abstract expressionist feelings onto the screen! Click the left mouse button (only mouse button for the Macs amongst us) to change color at random. Press space if you need a new sheet of paper.

I think it’s a pretty entertaining distraction, and my current desktop image is a product of the fusion of webcode and my artistic vision:

It took me a while to be happy with the color progression

Enjoy! And please point towards your own awesome creations in the comments!

[Thanks to my friend Mike for pointing me to this months ago.]

steven Digital Playpen art, webapps

I’m positive that I first saw this video many months ago, but if it’s resurfaced on boingboing, I feel that I’m justified in bringing it some attention here as well:

Machines that Almost Fall Over from Michael Kontopoulos on Vimeo.

Plus, it’s a video that nicely fits into one of my meta-titles. I didn’t imagine there would be many of those.

As a minor note of criticism, I find myself wishing that the machines would knock themselves a bit more frequently. Perhaps the anticipation is key, and this was an aspect that was deeply considered by the artist, but I get a certain sense of rush from watching the near-topplings. There’s probably something zen to maximizing the length of time between experiencing those rushes, limited by the possibility of the viewer getting bored waiting for the next occurrence.

steven Studies in Repetition art