ART & INTERNET

SPECIAL REPORT: CONTEMPORARY ART
At Last, Artists Harness the Internet
By ALICE PFEIFFER
PARIS — In an era when even kitchen appliances connect to the Internet, and cellphones have more memory and data processing power than a 10-year-old PC, artists are engaging ever more creatively with computers — or maybe vice versa.
As with video art in the 1960s and early digital work in the ’80s and ’90s, technological progress is providing not only an array of new tools for artistic creation, but also new sources of reflection and new subjects for social commentary. Out of it is emerging a new aesthetic inspired by YouTube and Google.
A global movement is hacking, subverting and critiquing the hardware, software, content, visuals — even the philosophy of the wired world.
Take Beige. A four-member U.S. computer programming art collective, Beige has built a reputation in the past few years by breaking into the code of old Nintendo game cartridges, and transforming them into animation artworks. Hijacked from its original purpose the famous, now-retro game platform becomes an abstract space where fluorescent squares float and bounce to the rhythms of electronic music.
Since 2000, when it first elaborated its basic technique, the collective has shown more durability than some of the technology it uses. Members have shown at prestigious events and galleries, including the Whitney Biennial for contemporary art in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Guggenheim, New York.
Among Beige’s innovations is the exploitation of programming faults that cause a lapse in data transfer, leaving a pixellated effect known as a “residue” on the screen; this fault is used, and intentionally replicated, in several works.
“This is known as ‘glitch art,”’ said Paul Pieroni, co-curator of SEVENTEEN, a gallery in east London that has been a pioneer in showing technology-driven work in Britain. “It is essentially the aesthetization of a computer fault.”
In 2007, the gallery gave Paul B. Davis, one of Beige’s members, his first solo show. It has since held several shows for Mr. Davis as well as for other technology artists, including the New York duo John Michael Boling and Javier Morales and the Californian Eric Fensler.
“There is a new regime of aesthetics emerging out of technological practice,” Mr. Pieroni said. Datamoshing, also know as compression aesthetics, is an example: a recently developed form of glitch art, it manipulates compression frames, giving an overly pixellated appearance, he said.
Datamoshing was pioneered by Mr. Davis and two other artists, Sven Koenig and Takeshi Murata, in collaboration with Paper Rad, another influential new media collective. It has since been adopted by video directors including Nabil Elderkin, who used it in “Welcome To Heartbreak” by the rapper Kanye West.
The ubiquity of the Internet has radically changed the way we do the most basic things, Mr. Pieroni said: “Call it the ‘googlification’ of everything — YouTube is the perfect example: the sort of cultural content now readily available is simply mind-blowing and without precedent.”
Aleksansdra Domanovic, a Berlin artist, uses the Web to create on-line picture frames: On each site that she builds, she displays a single piece of conceptual art; her fellow Berliner Oliver Laric constructs pastiches of YouTube videos, mixing collages of YouTube footage that he then posts back to the site, as well as to his own. Mr. Boling and Mr. Morales, the New Yorkers, have brought the stretch-limo concept to Google, with a tongue-in-cheek pastiche — http://www.gooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ogle.com/.
“It’s comforting — in addition to seeing them provide a rigorous critique of the Internet age — to see artists catching on to these regimes in order to engage with the Internet on a purely visual level,” Mr. Pieroni said.
Technology-driven work often aims at social commentary as much as it aims at aesthetic effect, said Ceci Moss, senior editor of Rhizome, a nonprofit arts organization focused on information technology and affiliated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York: “For some artists, their interest stems from an engagement with social or cultural questions linked to new technologies.”
One example is a Danish collective, Superflex, that has taken many of its ideas from the Open Source movement, Ms. Moss said. Open Source relies on programmers around the world who work collectively to improve and share software code like the Linux operating system.
Superflex’s 2005 project, “Copyshop,” designed like a real copy shop, allowed the free duplication and also the modification of texts and images in what the artists described as a calculated challenge to the idea of intellectual property.
“By encouraging the distribution of information in physical form, the artists hope to bring to light intellectual property issues that have become a major topic due to new technologies,” Ms. Moss said.
Collectif 1.0.3., a French artists’ group, explores the conservation of art works and knowledge through digital technology. Its computer system “Misma” — a French acronym meaning “intervention module for saving artistic methodologies” — generates digital maps.
The result is an abstract image that resembles Futuristic word art and that represents a coded record of its subject, which may be anything from a painting or a song to an entire library.
“The type of artwork being produced through technology can’t be compared to anything else, because, in many cases, it acts as a paradigm shift,” said Nils Aziosmanoff, director of Cube, a new media exhibition space in south-west Paris: “Some new piece of equipment comes by and it presents an entire new way of ‘telling a story.”’