Internet Art by Tegan Bristow

Posted on 29. Jul, 2009 by admin in Headlines and Opinions

Why is there Internet Art? My answer: it’s networked, it’s social and code is beautiful. The Internet is a medium as much as paint or marble and more significantly it is a public medium.

In April 2009, I curated a collection of Internet Art for the Joburg Art Fair (http://jafnetart.wits.ac.za). This project was more an uncovering than pure curating. I had no idea what I would find. And what I found was good.

Internet Art is a complex beast, it bit streams genre and has terabytes of themes. It’s only unifying factor is that it is online and coded. Ismail Farouke and Jaco Spies are two artists who reflect this disparity in a uniquely South African way.

Farouke is social media with a radical agenda. J-Walk (http://j-walk.co.za/s/) built with Babak Fakhamzadeh, highlights culture in the inner city. Anyone with a networked cell can navigate ‘tours’ of the city. Some tours added by Farouke feature cultural groups and their lives, from unique buildings to Ethiopian coffee-shops. Anyone can add ‘tours’ making it a unique socially developed cultural tool. (Also see Soweto Uprisings (http://www.sowetouprisings.com) & Trolley Works (http://www.trolleyworks.net))

Jaco Spies is pure aesthetics on a political edge…

Two works Palimpsist Koppie (http://www.jacospies.co.za/pal.htm) and Dissemination (http://www.jacospies.co.za/dis.htm) follow each other in Spies exploration of land politics. Both use flash in a subtle and beautiful way. While the first is pure animated code the second encourages multiple user interaction.

PS: Code refers to the typed program instructions that programmers write. The written code is then interpreted into a language that a system can read and execute.

Read more about the author: Tegan Bristow