toughest read yet
I admit like armaan that I had a hard time getting through the article in one sitting. I had to get back to it a few times, but I feel like I understood most of what the author was trying to say about the fascinating emerging field of “net art”
It speaks to me in a way because I’ve been making “mashup” art of my own using found images in both the pratt dropbox (be careful what you leave in there…), and various linked images online, for years. My laptop has a folder simply marked “IMG” in which I have thousands of images I’ve seen and saved from the internet. Ranging from Lolcats, to bizarre “found” photos, to anything I think would be good source material for both legitimate and experimental or humorous projects. I have stock photos and textures, photos of people doing stupid things or caught at an odd moment, and I add new images every day.
I often attempt to make photoshop comps of these images that are intentionally awful, just for my own amusement. I’m considering putting them into some kind of hosted collection, though I’m not sure I’m ready to put my “awfulshops” out there yet.
As far as the deeper questions the article (or is it more of an essay?) posed about the “legitimacy” of art based on found images, I enjoyed the refencing of the media of film, and how it is in a sense as much a process of assembling found images as a collage. The question of “is this art?” begs the larger question of “is the arrangement or editing of images to form a new percieved meaning, context, or commentary, art?”
I believe it is.
I also enjoyed the refernce links to the artists. Some of their work didn’t really appeal to me, others really fascinated me. Being able to see the range of work that’s out there was fun.
An interesting parallel that immediatelyt came to mind in the idea of “found” source material, is a phenomenon which began in the era of Napster, in which users of the music sharing service would inadvertenly share their entire computer hard drive’s contents, thus allowing anyone with the know-how to find and download that person’s private audio recordings. Simple audio recoding programs would often name the output of their files as “Mic In 001, Mic In 002…” and anyone searching for “mic in ***” (* denotes the wildcard search character) would be able to find and download these files. The results would range from intimate conversations, to rehersals for presentations, to amateur musician demo tracks.
This site is dedicated to the practice of collecting and remixing these found tracks. Some of them are funny, some are embarassing, and some of the remixes are quite good!
-Tom
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