“Expanding Net Art to Mobile Art” presented by Zellen
Symposium:
Presentation Title:
- Expanding Net Art to Mobile Art
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
In the presentation entitled “Expanding Net Art to Mobile Art ” I will explore the relationship between net art and mobile apps as both a means to an end and as the finished product. This presentation will include a discussion of the tablet (iPad) as a creative/artistic/poetic medium. I will touch on an exhibition I curated entitled “Poetic Codings” as in the exhibition I brought together the work of eight artists who are making apps as art. These include: Scott Snibbe, Erik Loyer, Lia, Rafael Rozendaal, John Baldessari, Jeremy Rotsztain, Jason Lewis and myself. Poetic Codings was one of the first exhibitions to juxtapose a table with iPads loaded with interactive artworks and interactive installations/projections. While some of the apps in the exhibition are not text based they all take advantage of the narrative opportunities of the app interface, scrolling, tapping, pinching as a way to unfold layers of content. In this presentation I will touch on apps that are content generators like “Visual Poetry” and discuss how those differ from apps intended to be finished artworks. Embedded within this talk will be the relationship between the web and an app.
The second part of this presentation will focus on my net art, apps and interactive installations and the difference between those experiences. The projects I will discuss include my latest interactive installation “Time Jitters,” my web projects “Spine Sonnet” and “Without A Trace,” and my mobile apps “Time Jitters,” “Episodic,” “4 Square,” “Urban Rhythms” and “Spine Sonnet.”
“Spine Sonnet” began a website that randomly juxtaposes 14 books from my library. Each time the page is refreshed a new stack of 14 books is created. As the titles are read they create a poem. I thought this project would work nicely as an iPhone app and transformed it into my first app also entitled “Spine Sonnet.” “Spine Sonnet” (free in the app store) is an automatic poem generator in the tradition of found poetry that randomly composes 14 line sonnets derived from an archive of over 2500 art and architectural theory and criticism book titles. “4 Square” is a project that divides the screen into 4 equal squares. Upon a tap the elements change, and with a swipe they can be repositioned. The elements in “4 Square” are the texts from a comic strip, the 256 web colors, pen and ink drawings and digital collages that reduce news images to grids of pixels. It is a modification of the website “Without A Trace” for this new platform. Both Spine Sonnet and 4 Square also have a parallel website. These apps explore the medium in creative and innovative ways and are designed to be poetic meditations that engage with ideas of remix culture, mash-up and appropriation. Lastly I will discuss my latest app “Time Jitters” and its relationship to a similarly named interactive installation presented at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC in January 2014 and a 40 page artists book. In this app twelve short video clips can be scaled and repositioned making new and different narratives from the fragments. “Time Jitters” is my first app to include sound as it repurposed some of the sounds created for the installation.
In my work I explore how a viewer can choreograph their own experience and how that experience differs from hand held to immersive media.
Video:
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iPad app from jody zellen on Vimeo.