The Term of Network Art

Network art is all about Identity. Modern sources of data are used as infographics which is a new way of visually showing statistics. Through infographics, we can now show information in a simpler form, to help more people understand statistics and data in a graphic image instead of reading vast amount of text and not making sense of it. Open source is giving the code to everyone, the ability to transfer information or software onto other types of technology, which is how Arcade Fire was able to make that music video by allowing people to openly share data to view different browers of information. For example our tutor brought in a DELL notebook but had the setting and programming of a Apple Mackintosh which was then given the name ‘Hackintosh’. This just shows how easy it is to use open source to transfer even programming to different forms of technology like the DELL notebook which proves that everyone can be open to use these codes for personal use. Finally our tutor gave the class an experiment to see how we would react in certain situation and for us to give our thoughts and views on the matter since we use our lives as a open source via. Facebook because we were given an example of an artist who wrote a novel written entirely by tweets called ‘The Black Box’. So to start off we were asked a question of: revealing a secret monogamy by tweeting a women with two lovers, one poor and one rich, who should she chose if she had a choice? I personally stated that if the poor man shows you more affection than the rich man, then its a decision between fortune or affection. Then we were asked to think of a secret that we wouldn’t share publicly, not even to our closest friends, write on a slip of paper and anonymously post it up on the board. After our lecturer would read out each secret to reveal what kind of people we had among us in the class room. This shows that if we can’t reveal our secrets to the classroom because we may feel ashamed or embarrassed then why post our feelings and situations up on a public network? The Network art, is a rapidly changing system. There is a term called ‘The New Aesthetic’ which means: the physical world/ the digital world is different compared to marking your territory or sharing information physically or digitally by using phones etc. There is a video of youtube called ‘Mark your territory’ which is of a man who experiments with connecting pink coloured paper to a mobile phone and then applying it to either a wall or a certain place on the ground and simple urinating on it to see if it would pick up the data, which it did. This acted like a GPS. How this worked, was that seeds were planted within these slips of paper and whenever the urine hit it, it would release these seeds to grow over. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRdfeb7vDWg#t=15 Arcade Fire was the name of the company who came up with this inventive idea to create a music video using the data of a GPS reading and Google maps to show you the location of where you are. This particular video lets a story constantly flow throughout the song whilst a man is running down a street, but, with the GPS data showing where you live, this information transfers to the video making it look like this animated man is running near to where you are, with different browers of animations opening up to add a range of amusement and involvement of sharing data. I find this use of method very interesting and creative with being able to use your own data to tell a story and create something entertaining.