How do physical and digital worlds co-exist in the context of contemporary art ?
HISTORY OF ART, MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY
Fall 2015
Eden Tartour
Society has an impact on artists’ inspirations. Since the seventies, society got more and more connected to the digital world that’s constantly growing. Artists started using this meaning to express their creativity - digital involves the use of computer technology. Since the mid-nineties, artists use the net as a material that can be diverted the same way a pen, brush, canvas or piece of wood could have been. Websites, social networks or any digital worlds are being transformed and used by artists to question our daily usage of such services and the representation of our reality.
According to the philosopher and author Emmanuel Guez, “digital is a way of representing the world with conceptual, perceptive and emotional implications that we are only just starting to take the measure of.” Anne Huybrechts would define the digital work of art as “any innovative creation that combine different media (data, animated or static images, sound, texts, videos…) using computer processes and digital technologies in view of offering a ‘usage’ essentially based on ‘interaction’”.1
Digital art can either be published offline (as a digital format) or diffused online (via a network).
Google played an important role in the digital representation of the world. The company was founded in 1998 and achieved to be the dominant search engine in the United States market in a few years. Between 2001 and 2007, Google launched three accessible and free tools online that faithfully represent the world we live in:
Google Earth (a virtual globe, initially named Earth Viewer), Goole Maps (we mapping) and Google Street View (panoramic views of more that 3,000 cities in 43
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1!! countries). Tangible and digital worlds share things back and forth thanks to artists that make this interaction possible.
Many artists use both worlds to create their art pieces. Some start their creation based on physical reality, convert it to digital reality and bring them back to the physical world. Artists make this kind of experimentation can be artists from around the globe; from France (Clement Valla) to the United States (Jenny Odel), to
Germany (Aram Bartholl), to China (Lu Xinjian). And they all do it in different ways, through different techniques; photography, prints, sculptures, or paintings… They share one thing in common: they use Google tools such as Street View, Maps or
Earth to make their art.
Jenny Odel’s work, “Satellite Collection”, is based on categorizing the world humanity created from another point of view which exists because of satellites that have been created by human beings (and for the first time launched in 1957 by the
Soviet Union). She’s used Google Earth to find the images she collected, compiled and displayed by themes (pools, airplanes, stadiums, etc). These everyday simple satellite images are elevated in an aesthetic and organized way by this artist. It might not be a coincidence that Odell was born in the Californian town of Mountain
View, where Google would set its roots. She explains her work with these chosen words:
Art$Piece$1!"!Jenny!Odel!"!125!Swimming!Pools!"!(2009"2011) “In all of these prints, I collect things that I’ve cut out from Google Satellite View– parking lots, silos, landfills, waste ponds. The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that say: people were here. The alienation provided by the satellite perspective reveals the things we take for granted to be strange, even absurd. Banal structures and locations can appear fantastical and newly intricate. Directing curiosity toward our own inimitably human landscape, we may find that those things that are most recognizably human (a tangle of carefully engineered water slides, for example) are also the most bizarre, the most unlikely, the most fragile.”2
Also, she wrote in an email, “they’re things we often overlook or take for granted as part of our environment; but somehow, from a satellite point of view, they reveal themselves to be (somewhat) ubiquitous signs of human civilization, popping up in certain places while the surrounding area may simply be desert or mountains. From this perspective there’s something very fragile and nostalgic about them.”3
“It’s a lot like being in a plane,” she writes, “flying over your own country but not actually being able to tell where you are or exactly what you’re looking at. I like the idea of the Earth as an endlessly readable surface.” 4
Clement Valla, a French artist, started a project called « Postcards from Google !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2!Odell, Jenny. "Jenny Odell • Satellite Collections." Jenny Odell. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2015. 3!4!Habe-Evans, Mito. "'Collecting' Swimming Pools And Stadiums: Art Made From Google Maps." NPR. NPR, 23 May 2012. Web. 08 Dec. 2015.! ! Earth » in 2010, and he’s still updating it.
His idea is based on a simple concept: he collected Google Earth images, looking for strange situations “where the illusion of a seamless representation of the Earth’s surface seems to break down”5, he says. He realized these images weren’t glitches nor errors in the algorithm but the result of the system — an anomaly. “They reveal a new model of representation: not through indexical photographs but through automated data collection from a myriad of different sources constantly updated and endlessly combined to create a seamless illusion; Google Earth is a database disguised as a photographic representation.” !
Some consider Clement Valla as a ‘net-photographer artist.' He was the first one to discover those anomalies or this new vision of our world through Google Earth and decided to create postcards out of them. Humor is part of this piece, and he makes us think that these places and situations exist when they don’t. It’s a typical digital art piece that he made physical by printing those screenshots. “Because Google
Earth is continuously updating, there’s kind of no archive of these particular moments or situations,” he says. “So I thought it would be interesting to take them and print them as postcards.” He uses real situations that have been converted to digital via Google, and make them physical – or real again – in order to immortalize these moments.
Valla has exhibited his artwork in Sweden, Montreal (Canada) San Francisco (CA),
New York, Berlin (Germany), Sydney (Australia) and others. In 2015, Clement exhibited his work at XPO Gallery where Aram Bartholl exhibited his work too.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 5!Valla, Clement. "Postcards From Google Earth." Postcards From Google Earth. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2015. !
Art!Piece!2!"!Clement!Valla!"!Postcards!from!Google!Earth!2010!"!now ! Aram Bartholl, the Berlin-based conceptual artist known for his works that examine the relationship between the digital and physical world, started the « Map » project in 2006, questioning the red map marker of Google Maps. This graphic icon allows the user to « find local businesses, view maps and get driving direction in Google
Maps.» 6!
The design of this red marker looks closely like a physical map needle. And that seemed to be the aim because this icon used to cast a shadow on the digital map
(the red mark is not casting any shadow anymore – probably since Google changed his logo on September 1st, 2015). The red icon is a simple 20 pixels graphic icon and its size never changes, even though user scan zoom on the map. “In the city center series ‘Map’ is set up at the exact spot where Google Maps assumes to be the city center of the city. Transferred to physical space the map marker questions the relation of the digital information space to every day life public city space. The perception of the city is increasingly influenced by geolocation services”7 writes
Aram Bartholl about his work. Robert Sollis’ project (2007) echoes to Bartholl’s.
Sollis was a student at the Royal College of Art in London, and he displayed individual carpet tiles, of 185mm2 each, which corresponds to one pixel of Google’s satellite imagery, to create the Google Carpet project.
This project came after he sent an email to Google service to whom he asked to add a temporary marker for the 150th-anniversary exhibition for his university. He received an auto-reply message in return that he didn’t appreciate at all. He decided to create his own marker that would be picked up by satellites and visible on Google
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6!https://maps.google.com/! ! 7!Bartholl, Aram. "Map." Aram Bartholl - Datenform.de. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2015.
Art!Piece!3!"!Kasseler!Kunstverein!/!Aram!Bartholl! "!Hello!World!!–!Sept.!2013! !
Art!Piece!4!"!Kasseler!Kunstverein!/!Aram!Bartholl!–!!Hello!World!!–!Sept.!2013!
! Street View. He sent a second email to inform Google that he was planning to make this project, and received a second auto-reply message in return. The work was located in Kensington Gardens by the exit of the show; there was a signpost asking people not to walk on the grass where the carpet tiles were installed. In the end, unfortunately, Robert’s plan didn’t work out since Google Maps hasn’t picked up the physical marker… Robert’s playing with the physical and the digital tools, switching from one world to the other. The artist, Sollis, got inspired to recreate a physical representation of the digital representation of the physical red marker. The digital map influences the territory. This relationship is very complex because one world has impacts on the other.
Concerning Lu Xinjian, he decided to bring his vision of the cities to the physical world by working on a series of paintings that represent « City DNA ,» as he named his piece. In 2010, Chinese painter Lu Xinjian created an abstracted representation of cities “based on aerial photos sourced from Google Earth software.”8 Suman Gupta, a Professor of Literature and Cultural History, The Open
University, wrote an article about this series of paintings and he writes that « the paintings are not simply based on aerial images of cities; the paintings are more a transformation of those images into artefacts. » 9
They might look like a compilation of abstract shapes and colors, but they are indeed a coherent view of the cities that are being treated by the artist. The first exhibition of this project took place at ART LABOR Gallery in Shanghai, in 2010, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 8!9!Gupta, Suman. "Lu Xinjian's City DNA: Beijing CBD and the Universal Metropolis." iStyle (2013): 1-5. 11 Sept. 2013. Web. 12 Nov. 2015.! ! right before it was showed at Fabien Fryns Fine Art in Beijing and Los Angeles. Lu
Xinjian is internationally acclaimed for translating these Google Earth captures from all around the world to large-scale canvases. This work questions the relationship between physical and digital world, and how the artist has something to bring to the world. Starting from the digital representations of the cities, Lu creates non-digital
Art!Piece!5!"!Lu!Xianjian!"!The!Triumph!Of!New!York!"!2010!(acrylic!on!canvas,!120x150cm)
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Art!Piece!6!–!Piet!Mondrian!–!New!York!City!1!–!1942!!Art!Piece!7!–Broadway!Boogie!Woogie!–!1943
abstracted representations of them. This is how he processes; he first sketches a design while looking at the map before turning these patterns into stencils using
Adobe Illustrator. Again, the transition from the physical to the digital world. Then, he paints those pattern with acrylic on canvas. The colors of each piece are meticulously chosen depending on the official city and national flags. Lu’s series echoes to Keith Haring’s painting, visually speaking. They both use acrylic on canvas to create their graphics. The painting « The Triumph of New York » can be related to Piet Mondrian’s paintings, « Broadway Boogie Woogie » (1943) and « New
York City, 1 » (1942). Mondrian and Xinjian used the similar blues, yellows, whites and reds, but one chose a white background, and the other a black one – which makes all the difference!
As the artworks presented before demonstrate, artists can decide to make their work in the physical world, some others prefer to create their art pieces digitally. Techniques, methods, and support vary from an artist to another – which highlight the large range of digital tools that are available today.
The Wilderness Downtown, created in 2010by music video director Chris Milk and a group of Google employees led by Aaron Koblin, is an interactive multimedia video coded in HTML5 (a language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web). This project has been created to show off the capabilities of the new Google Chrome browser (as HTML5 works best with this browser) by taking the user back to their childhood on an interactive journey. The digital production company B-Reel features the We Used To Wait song from the Arcade Fire albumThe Suburbs. The technology used in this system include JavaScript (is a high-level programming language), HTML5, Canvas, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), Google
Street View & Maps.
The Wilderness Downtown won one of the three Grand Prix winners at the 2011
Cannes advertising awards in the Cyber category. This masterpiece shows a range of interactive possibilities of the Internet, and how it is possible to «tell stories in new ways using technology »10 - said Chris Milk during a TED talk. He adds, « My biggest concern though was finding something that would emotionally resonate with people, without getting them bogged down in that technology. It’s easy to lose the humanity when you start showcasing tech. Google Maps and Street View embody that contradiction, though. It’s cold high-tech that can be incredibly emotional when used in the right context. The whole piece is full of contradictions. It’s essentially human nostalgia produced by the most advanced technology available today.»11
Mixing two medias, video and programming technology, Chris Milk has been able to deliver a message to individuals, and he touch them directly on their hurt, directly to their emotions.
Still dealing with emotion, feeling, and poetry, Tom Jenkin’s short film has been watched more than 3.6 millions times within three years on Vimeo. The UK- based film director shot for six nights and worked on post-production for a month. It is a stop motion film that echoes to Pixar animation in the way the characters live, feel and act. The director Jenkins used Google Street View and simple stop-motion
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10!6How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine. Perf. Chris Milk. TED Talks, Mar. 2015. Web. 27 Nov. 2015. !
Art!Piece!8!–!Chris!Milk!"!The!Wilderness!Downtown!"!2010! !
Art!Piece!9!–!Tom!Jenkins!–!Address!is!Approximate!"!2012
! animation, named “Address is Approximate”, to make a desk toy travel virtually through a road trip to the West Coast. He’s helped by other toys and especially by this miniature car that comes from the seventies to “drive” to the Pacific Coast…
He’ll arrive at destination safely and blessed. These three minutes are a succession of ideas, of beautiful moments and emotions.
It raises the question of the place technology takes on humanity and the world.
People are traveling, checking their roads, hotels, neighborhood, and absolutely anything that comes to mind before going anywhere. No more surprise, no more mistake, no more life. And that’s the dark side of the technology’s evolution, but another voice would say how amazing it is to able to discover virtually some places where people would never go. Traveling for free, without physically moving, people can discover some places in a few seconds when it could take a 12-hour-flight to reach that point in reality. This desk toy is like these people; he’s stuck in this working area of which he cannot take a day off to travel and discover the world around him. The book On the Road was written in 1957 by Jack Kerouac echoes to that toy’s story. Kerouac relates his travels across America through different characters based on his real surrounding including himself (as Sal Paradise). Both the animation and the book deliver this will to discover the world by traveling either physically (by using different meanings such as a car — a Cadillac to be precise in that context) or digitally (by using Google Street View tool). Jack Kerouac wrote in this book “The road must eventually lead to the whole world”12, which gives another and deeper dimension to the notion of traveling. In other words, the road is the key to access the whole world. And the digital helps humanity to access it.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12!Kerouac, Jack. "Part Three." On the Road. N.p.: n.p., 1957. 134. Web. 6 Dec. 2015! The Color Project is an ongoing art exhibition using Google Earth that highlights the psychedelic beauty of the device itself. With this project, the New-York based artist
Thompson Harrell wanted “to tell stories through the power, emotion and language of color”13. He teamed up with the Moving Picture Company (who worked for the
Amazing Spiderman 2 and World War Z for example) who helped to execute the concept. The Color Project is currently one of five permanent installations at the IFP
Media Center. The project is a “kaleidoscopic moving quilt weaved from the geometric abstractions of grassy lawns, narrow roads and swimming pools”. His video installation transforms Google Earth imagery of exotic places around the world like India, Vietnam, Ohio, into a mosaic of dynamic triangles. “MPC’s efforts were sponsored by the Independent Filmmaker Project, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the art of indie cinema that commissioned the multi-colored mosaic to honor the opening of their new Transmedia Center in New York City.” Thompson compiled 324 triangular segments of Google Earth captured videos into a group of
27 HD screens arrayed in a three by nine grid. After a few seconds, the satellite imagery video transforms itself into an abstract kaleidoscope. The video can run for eight hours until it plays again. Estis says, « The amount of labor that went into the data mining for the piece is not obvious .» He adds, « The process of hand-selecting hundreds of colors at each of the locations made us pretty familiar with the cities, albeit from the strange perspective of around 100 feet. […] The transitional animation was an important element for us, not only in the use of the native Google
Earth tool kit but in creating
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 13!Harrell, Thompson. "Artist Statement." Interview. Honeymoon Projects. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Dec. 2015. !
Art!Piece!10!–!Thompson!Harrell!–!The!Color!Project!"!ongoing
!
visual context for the color tiles as actual locations. » They worked on defining specific colors to specific locations which refer to Lu Xinjian’s series « City DNA »
(see page 6). The final installation is established in New York City, but the team of workers ‘has released an add-on for openFrameworks that makes Awesomium easier to use.' “We hope that viewers walk away from the installation with the curiosity to watch these films through a new lens,” says Estis. “In which location and color are not only evident in, but help define, the narrative.” They brought this installation to the internet and made them an open source for any user. From satellite imagery of real places, they digitally transformed it into abstract representation, made a video installation out of it, and made it public on the net.
Michael Wolf is a German photographer who lives in Hong Kong. He collected odd scenarios incidentally captured from Google’s service: Street View. He won for this project an honorable mention in “Daily Life” in the 2011 World Press Photo competition (he won two other honorable mentions in 2010 and 2005). This project includes sub-collections as “fuck you,” with a bunch of people giving the finger while the street car captures them in Google Earth’s temporary record, or “portraits” that contains twenty-nine attract and blurred portraits of random people over the world. Michael Wolf does not focus on the architecture, the gardens nor the streets but the people. His work is comparable to Jon Rafman‘s. He found unexpected, unplanned and inadvertent examples of human activity on Street View as well.
These scenes are real and natural – they do not try to act in a certain way because of the cameras. Wolf and Rafman come from different backgrounds, and both ended up doing a similar artwork through Google Street View in 2009 and 2011. The
Art!Piece!11–!Jon!Rafman!–The!Nine!Eyes!of!Google!Street!View–!2009
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Art!Piece!12–!Michael!Wolf!–Stret!Views–!2011
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Art!Piece!13!–!Aaron!Hubson!–!«!Google!Stret!View!»!Saint"Nicolas"de"la"Grave!France!–!2012 ! works aren’t only about digital art, nor photography but about the society
itself and its social issues.“Google’s map becomes the door of real-world
perception.” This kind of pieces reveal the question of privacy (I bet you want to be
ridiculous on the face of the world!) and they also give an idea of what the world
look like above the city we live in. By showing these screenshots, they keep
happening. They won’t be deleted or erased. They are alive and present forever.
That’s what’s most scary about it.
Aaron Hobson is a photographer, born in Rochester, NY and now lives in a remote town in the Adirondack mountains. For his projects “Google Street
View“(2012) and “My Street View“(2013), he didn’t use his camera to take these beautiful pictures, he didn’t travel around the world with his suitcase, but traveled through Google Street View, and screen captured the images he loved. Once he found the scene he wanted, he would add some fantasy to it to make the capture more interesting, more personal – artistic. In his own words, “Google Street View is a fantasy world. Most of the images beg for a narrative or a folk tale. Storytelling is my favorite form of art.” (The Wired, March 2014) His work can be related to Jon
Rafman’s one (click here to see the previous article)
Robert Frank has done an iconoclast project in post-war American photography. He spent three years with his family doing road trips across America, where he took 28,000 shots. He selected and edited his photographs to 1,000 work prints, spread them on the floor of his studio and did the final edits. This project, financed by Guggenheim Grant, ended up being a book that contained only 83 black-and-white photographs. First published in Paris, on May 1958 by Robert
Deplore, it was published in the United States one year later by Grove Press. He was born and raised in Swiss, so he came to America with an outsider point of view, which make the project even more interesting. He doesn’t only talk about love in his portraits (essentially), but also about racism, mass consumerism and the different between the rich and poor. He highlights the darkest side of America in the context of post-war.
In 2004, Frank said, “The kind of photography I did is gone. It’s old”14 without any regrets, according to Sean O’Hagan (a writer and photography journalist for the
Guardian and the Observer). Many photographers have been inspired by his work.
We could compare some of his shots with screenshots of Doug Rickard. He wanted to shoot a forgotten America, a side of the society that none looks at. He spent four years exploring the streets through Google Street View (as a road trip) and captured those scenes, situations and people that are devastated. It was first published in
2010 as a limited edition monograph of “A New American Picture“ by White
Press/Schaden. He also this important work called “BOOM CALIFORNIA: Screen
Captures – Americans on Google Street“ (2012), for which he spent thousands of hours traveling through Google Street View. This artwork shows how we are overexposed to digital information that’s why he says “we are on a road to “know” more but experience less.”15
“The only difference [between this work and traditional street photography] is that the world’s frozen, so you’re limited to that surrounding,”16 says Rickard. “You’ve
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14!O'Hagan, Sean. "Robert Frank at 90: The Photographer Who Revealed America Won't Look Back." The Guardian. TheGuardian.com, 7 Nov. 2014. Web. 6 Dec. 2015. 15!Warren, Spring. "Screen Captures: Americans on Google Street." Boom A Journal of California. University of California Regents, n.d. Web. 06 Dec. 2015 16!!Moakley, Paul. "Street View and Beyond: Google's Influence on Photography." Time. Time, 24 Oct. 2014. Web. 06 Dec. 2015. !
Art!Piece!14!–!Robert!Frank!–!The!Americans–!1958
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Art!Piece!15!–!Doug!Rickard!–!A!New!American!Picture!(Baltimore)!–!2012!
! got a fixed lens and your distance is determined by the width of the street, not where you walk. But there’s a lot in kinship with traditional photography that was really partly responsible for me being able to embed 1,000 hours into this in four years.”17 Net photographers are replacing traditional photographers because technology allows to captures views that human’s eyes cannot perceive or reach.
The net artist Emilio Vavarella, created a net-photography series, « Report a
Problem » that is part of the project “The Google Trilogy” (2012). He is exploring the relationship “between humans, power, and technological errors”18 — he wrote on his official website. Report a Problem is a collection of a hundred screenshots from
Google Street View, he also made a five-minute video projection that includes all the digital photographs. He was the first one to observe these program errors and report them through the option “report a problem” that appears at the bottom right corner of the GSV (Google Street View) screen. Emilio was looking for “photographing” (or
“screen shooting”) the “wrong landscapes” as he calls them to alert the company to adjust these images. He made these shots public and transformed them into a piece of art by simply showing what unexpected technical errors could create. Sometimes errors lead to beauty, to art. Even non-human errors, but technical ones. The program converted some real places to something virtual that translates this reality, and that sometimes reinvents it. Abstract, magic, misconstructed, or glitchy. In a personal conversation, I asked Emilio how he came up with such an idea, and he
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 17!Moakley, Paul. "Street View and Beyond: Google's Influence on Photography." Time. Time, 24 Oct. 2014. Web. 06 Dec. 2015.! 18!Vavarella, Emilio. "REPORT A PROBLEM." Web log post. EmiloVavarella. N.p., 18 Apr. 2013. Web. 27 Nov. 2015 !
Art!Piece!15!–!Emilio!Vavarella!–!Report!A!Problem–!2012 ! replied « It would be difficult to describe the genesis of an idea in a clear way.
Methodology and inspiration often play an equally important role », and added that « it's very important to know who's paying attention to the mechanisms that are quickly changing our world. » Which is true, such a combination of technology, digital and art lead to great changes in this world.
I also want to share my personal creative response that I’ve been working on for a month. This work, called « worldviews » questions the relationship between the reality of the world and the impact humans have on it. The code is a link between what exists, what’s real and physical and what can be created from it, by human intervention, graphically and digitally. We’ve been given a world full of surprises, full of beauty with darker sides that we want to get rid of to live in a better world. We invade this world, and we appropriate it the way we want it to. Earth is complex, huge and tiny at the same time, paradoxical, incredible and terrible. We have a power that we need to exploit. This creative code is an open tool that is based on Google Earth captures and allows to sublime them in infinite ways, depending on how people feel about the images. It’s a bridge between photography, graphic design, programming linked together with a touch of poesy and positivity. It’s a tribute to the planet that welcome us. The book is a collection of fifty saved shots from the code that was chosen for aesthetic reasons. It gives the code a physical existence.
Art!Piece!16!–!Tartourette!–!Worldviews–!2015
! ! "Digital worlds and physical worlds will co-exist and are able to share things back and forth between them. I think it's going to change the way we look at what's real and what isn't."19 said Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus Rift (a virtual reality head-mounted display headset).
Artists adapt their work to the existant technology. In this digital era, artists either decide to keep their creations digital or make them tangible. Clement Valla, Aram
Bartholl or Lu Xianjia, for instance, bring the digital to physical – while Jon Rafman,
Chris Milk or Aaron Hubson kept their creations for online diffusion exclusively.
It seems like we’re moving to an era where art is turning to be digital and graphic.
Will paintings and sculptures survive to this new medium? As the boundaries are disappearing and everything is getting accessible to everyone – today, everyone equipped with a smartphone is a photographer. Following this idea, everybody who has an internet connection can become a net/digital artist as we have all the tools in our possession.
Jeanette Hayes is a young artist who uses the internet and social media to diffuse her art. In April 2012, she said on a video posted on youtube named ‘Jeanette's
Internet | VFILES TMI': « Whatever it’s the internet, I don’t care, everything is everyone’s. When you put something on the internet, it’s mine. And this goes for images, tweets, videos, anything, I’ll take it. And make it mine. Thank you. »20
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 19!Lamkin, Paul. "Oculus Rift Boss Says VR Will Become Bigger than Smartphones." Wareable. N.p., 3 Nov. 2015. Web. 10 Nov. 2015. 20!"Jeanette's Internet | VFILES TMI." YouTube. YouTube, 25 Apr. 2012. Web. 23 Nov. 2015.!
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Kerouac, Jack. "Part Three." On the Road. N.p.: n.p., 1957. 134. Web. 6 Dec. 2015.
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Bartholl, Aram. "Map." Aram Bartholl - Datenform.de. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2015.
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Lamkin, Paul. "Oculus Rift Boss Says VR Will Become Bigger than Smartphones." Wareable. N.p., 3 Nov. 2015. Web. 10 Nov. 2015.