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netarts.org 2005

     

    ■ "onewordmovie"
    ■ http://www.onewordmovie.com/
    ■ Philippe Zimmermann, Beat Brogle (Swiss)

    ■ Mark Amerika's comment

    How strange that a very self-explanatory one-word movie device, built for
    the web, will now win the top award for the 2005 Project net.art event
    held annually at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts. But is it really
    that odd, or is just the right pick for its time? If a particularly loaded
    word can launch a thousand-plus images in a flickering frame-by-frame
    remix of what the web is dreaming in asynchronous realtime (and how is
    that for personification?), then who is to say that we are not entering
    yet another phase of net art, perhaps a more folksy and fibrillating
    phase, a phase that is at once simple to interact with, essentialist in
    its bare bones VJ aesthetic, while also projecting the mandatory
    cleverness and catchiness that all decent and upstanding net art phases go
    through.

    Fads come and go: hypertext, Gifbuilder animations, Shockwave-this /
    Flash-that, data visualizations, JavaScript performance art, alternative
    web browsers, sneaky hactivist interventions, mp3 concept albums with
    hyperlinernotes, ebooks, philosophically disposed online art games, as
    well as forays into web-based cinema that trick the user into thinking
    they are in total remote control.

    Nowadays what feels really worth my time can be found on blogs, like
    Screenfull.net, or some of the experimental image sets permeating sites
    like Flickr. One of this year's nominated entries, confluence.org, though
    not the top award winner, caught everyone's attention as a kind of
    cyberpsychogeographical matrix of location based art. Still another work,
    one that did not make it into the final round, located at
    http://www.availableonthursday.com, creates an opportunity for the user to
    have the artist "perform the actions and events scheduled for him" by us,
    at his web site. Very folksy and in a familial kind of way, if not a
    little masochistic, but who is to say that all of us "web users" are not a
    little sadistic in our addicted, push-button, make-me-happy, networked
    lives. Early net artists, and dot.com types too, were obsessed with the
    idea of web presence, and knew that the only way to keep the attention
    coming was to create sticky art and business sites (as in "stick around
    and see what happens"). Now web presence is a given and what matters most
    is not whether or not you are online creating sticky sites, but how what
    you do with your web presence turns me on enough to keep me coming back
    for more. It's less about duration and more about constantly hooking up.
    If I push a button, just one button, and it links me directly to you, or
    what passes as you in this continually expansive, rhizomatic space of
    flows, what will you do for me, how far will you go, and will it be good
    enough that I will become a regular customer, a loyal fan? Here I am now,
    entertain me.

    There were many supercool works of net art nominated this year and now I
    am a fan of sites I had not heard of but got introduced to via the jury
    process, including the wonderful work of Nicolas Clauss, Pleix, and Marina
    Zerbarini
    . And the finalists for this year were all worthy of the
    attention they will receive as a result of our virtual jury process.
    Template Cinema is an excellent introduction to the by now prolific net
    art work of Thompson and Craig. Google Will Eat Itself proves once again
    that conceptual net art is alive and well. And The Fragile Circus is the
    kind of work that I hope to see more of in the future, perhaps in expanded
    cinematic versions that are easily delivered over the net and invite us to
    co-create the "narrative experience" (loose term) as any good conspirator
    would want us to.

    But this year the top award goes to One Word Movie, a simple yet precise
    work that taps into the collective unconscious of the imagistic web. Pick
    a word, any word. When I first came across the site, and eventually
    nominated it for the award (with no idea it would eventually win), I
    intuitively plugged in the word "Warhol" and was impressed with what I
    saw, what I experienced. And OK, vanity being what it is, I also then
    plugged in "Amerika" and was shocked at the disturbing flick that played
    on my screen. Other words came into the picture and even overlapped with
    previous flicks, just like my VJ sets. Now I go back and plug in a word
    every now and then just to meditate on the history of Mosaic and all the
    other GUI browsers that came tumbling after. Because, truth be told, I am
    a User. A graphical User (who takes things at interface value). Even today
    I plugged in a word that's been on my mind since I recently began
    post-production on my first feature-length film. The word was "Salma."