When I was a web artist
Once upon a time I was a web artist, when it was a new frontier and I was cited as a pioneer in a big catalogue for an ambitious exhibition called Future Cinema. At that time websites were in their infancy. We were struggling to understand how we could use this new medium of cyberspace to convey ideas and art.
I’d been dreaming of combining photos and music and story somehow for years and suddenly it was possible, with a click here and there tying loose ends together. I learned how to code html from scratch and taught a few workshops for Webgrrls (a new movement for empowering women to use the internet) and Studio XX. My enthusiastic students enjoyed solving the puzzle of fixing code I’d deliberately broken so their pages would load properly. I created one of the first online journals, a dream journal no less, filled with drawings and photos and audio and was surprised when an internet audience followed my tangled subconscious and even surprised me with an award. I’ve found the journal back recently and will post some of the funnier entries here soon.
Museums all over the world had calls for submissions and so I submitted. The first of these was in Japan and I animated digital drawings I’d made that could tile all over the screen and combined them with sounds I’d collected from SoHo in New York for my piece One Night in Greenwich Village. I scrambled to understand code, browser issues, colour palettes and video encoding.
It was freeing, this ability to join in the art world, to make art for the sake of making art. There was no economic drive behind any of it, no monetizing, just my drawings, my sounds, there for the clicking, an offering to the gods and goddesses, in keeping with what I think art should be. I was awarded some funding for more ambitious projects I invented, my project Sunset on St-Viateur, a tribute to a street I loved, and Where Are You From? a small networked cinema project (how’s that for a cool term?) that expressed my thoughts on my ever elusive cultural identity or lackthereof.
The technology changed, ideas grew into companies, (Youtube! Blogger! WordPress!) and so those initial bright ideas were gobbled up and made redundant, automated out of existence. Thankfully Rhizome in NY still works tirelessly to archive much of the work but so much was so ephemeral even then.
The videos look small and fuzzy now in this universe where even my phone can shoot in 4k. But low tech has never phased me so now, here on my old-fashioned blog where I have set out to explain myself, I present two types of low tech – from 8 mm film to fuzzy digital video, some art I made with our home movies. It still is miraculous to me to have these images, fading but bright, so much like memory itself. To pull the best out of the past, to bring it forward with the tools of the day, that’s what I still find so remarkable. Change happens at such a remarkable pace and it seems people don’t even realize what crazy change is still ahead of us thanks to technology. Maybe by taking a minute to glance backwards every now and then we’ll be able to cope.