final blog post.

The piece that I chose to look at for a final blog post is the work of Heather Delacruz Stevens, Danielle Johnson,Nathaniel Johnston, and Caitlin Peacher. In their work in the final project they explore retelling the story of The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and W.W. Denslow. The quartet engage in updating the tired tale through the use of newer mediums such as digital mixed media and flash movie animations. The use of a time line by heather was something I found particularly interesting and stood out against the rest of the group. By interjecting a time line and allowing ore interaction with the audience the piece becomes more successful and has a few ore corelations to the history of web based art such as Olia Lialina's 1996 piece "My boyfriend came back from the war" a certain ammount of exploration is required to reach the full breadth of this website as well link

Ezra Johnson's Wrestling the blob Beast (1995-2009) link
holds a spot of recognition with works like Danielle's "dorothy"
the bold colors and distortion of shape (almost mannerist in nature) have a sort of kinship in the idea process as well as jeanne Dunning's Tom Thumb, Notes toward a case history link

this project I think relates to the Oz project as far as it's interaction and devices of narrative are concerned.


All in all the "Oz Project captured mt attention and was well executed. it engaged the viewer what more could you ask for in the field of vidual arts , a field where clutter is our biggest competitor.

The website
All my life for sale
is a website devoted to the exploration of material possessions and the role they play in shaping who we are. the man in this particular scenario, John Freyer, invited fifty different people to his home in order to categorize and catalog every material possession in his life. The resulting list of artifacts was put on sale on ebay and thus integrated on the world wide web. All fo the items in John Freyer's life were dispensed with and sold online. The beginning idea was to liberate Freyer and to assist in his mobility. Over time the idea mutated into traveling the world reconnecting with the lost artifacts of his former life. The implication is that somehow we are shaped by our interaction with the inanimate and evolve into the people we are because of the interactions set up for us with our chance encounters with things that don't truly exist ( at least on a level of existence that equals our own.) The website is set up simply with the colors resembling the color schemes of the almighty Ebay. The site is set up much like various online shopping sites of today, except in this case the person question didn't just do some spring cleaning he got rid of everything and still held onto a modicum of his fomrer life through the visititation of the objects .

history of the nike e-mails.

shey.net takes an unusual approach to the task of internet based art. the website follows the storyline of a series of emails sent from Jonah H. Peretti to a part of the huge corporation, Nike. Apparently at some point in 2001, Nike made available a series of shoes that could be personalized by individuals by letting people print their own slogans on the shoes they ordered. Jonah H. Peretti, in the true spirit of rebellion, tried to have a series of Nike shoes processed that had the word "sweatshop" written on the side of them. The website is a series of emails resulting from Jonah H. Peretti being refused. The fact that an email could cause a global sensation is in a sense art itself. The website is a showcase for what transpired when one man told a joke. Jonah H. Peretti was refused an order and Nike politely refused is a simple and bland story on the outside but when a company is faced with a truth about it's immoral policies and is forced to bury it's head in the sand to avoid it's own follies a simple email transcends the mundane and in a fashion, becomes art.

Institute for Applied Autonomy

The Iaa, or institute for applied autonomy conducts a website devoted to usurping
the control of engineering power from the overbearing right wing community to a decidedly more anarchisit type of society. They work from grants to patent machinery of a revolutionary nature such as vans that can spraypaint subversive text straight on the street as it is driving or designing robots to handout subversive literature that would generally not be taken from a hippie. The website is presented in a decidedly corporate way, as if it was promoting the new line of super car from the automotive giant general motors. The underlying sarcasm of the group is only thinly veiled and shows a contempt for the trappings of a post-patriot act society. The rational behind the site seems to be take the power from those who abuse it and give it to those who oppose them thus leveling the playing field. The group hands technology to the ones oppressed by it like a modern day Robin Hood. The somber blue and white layout and grayed text taglines are easily recognizable as the layouts and colors of institutions everywhere. It makes you both relieved and uncomfortable to think of the information and technology being handed to Joe Schmo on the street corner, but relly is it that much worse than where it lies now?