Web Racket:
Contemporary Interactive Web Art
Media Space @ DeCordova/Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Gallery
June 8 – September 1, 2002
Among the thousands of interactive Web art sites on the Internet—in ASCII, HTML, VRML, and Flash—each tries to define the interactive artistic experience. What form of Web interactivity will most engage the audience and provide a lasting aesthetic experience that is emotional, rich, and satisfying?
Web Racket looks at five works of interactive art created for the World Wide Web. Each of the works approaches interactivity in a different way and demonstrates how audiences "converse" with a work of art. While the idea of interactivity is one of the most seductive draws for digital artists, its structure takes many forms. Some derive from popular existing digital or real world interactive activities. The five works are The New War by Michael Mittelman, Help by Dane, The Jew's Daughter by Judd Morrissey, Red Riding Hood by Donna Leishman, and Memory Mapping by Megan Hurst and Michael Mittelman. Web Racket is organized by George Fifield, Curator of New Media.
George Fifield, Curator of New Media, has also written an essay on Web Racket.
The New War
by Michael Mittelman
Internet, laser, aluminum, wood
www.expandedfield.com/thenewwar/
2001
The dominent interactive medium in our culture is the video/computer game. Michael Mittelman's The New War is structured like a simple video game, but with a difference; there is no winning and no way to lose.
Michael Mittelman is a Boston based artist who was born in New York City. He received an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and a BA from Wesleyan University. His work includes interactive installations and Internet art and has been shown at the List Visual Arts Center, Boston Center for the Arts and the Oni Gallery.
Memory Mapping
by Megan Hurst & Michael Mittelman
www.expandedfield.com/memorymapping/
2000/2001
Megan Hurst says of Memory Mapping that she is "trying to catalogue that which is impossible to catalogue." Person by person, Memory Mapping is building a great database of memories. In this case the memories are in the form of maps. Think of the first place you remember living. Think of the streets, pathways, and bodies of water, train tracks and intersections that you remember. Try to remember the relationships of each. Find the farthest edges of each in your mind. Then come here and draw it.
Megan Hurst's art is about the intersection of lives, shared and subjective experiences, and the ways that we and our environments shape each other's memories. She says that Memorymapping.com fulfills part of her secret wishes to be a private investigator and a librarian.
Help
by Dane
www.eastgate.com/Help.html
2000
Dane brings a cinematic sensibility to the web. His Flash animations work as interactive short films. He uses appropriated images and words from advertising and popular media and weaves them into a fast paced video that changes as you explore it. The first part of this work is not interactve. Stay with it and you will be in control.
Dane is a multi-media artist based in Somerset, England.He was born in Australia, and grew up in England, studying animation at Liverpool. Recent works include an interactive installation for the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital.
The Jew's Daughter
by Judd Morrissey
www.thejewsdaughter.com/
2000
The question of interactivity is essentially a narrative question. The multimedia aspects of web art; the images; the video and the sound are the muscle and skin that cover the interactive skeleton of the work.
Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter is an all-text piece of new digital literature, but unlike traditional hypertext literature, the links do not take the reader to a different location. Rather, clicking on the single hyperlink on each page changes significant chunks of the text on that same page. The page is now the same, only different. In this way, Morrissey has redefined narrative flow to be something other than the traditional linear march of words.
Judd Morrissey is a writer and developer of digital literature. He received his MFA from Brown University. His work has been widely and internationally exhibited and it has been reviewed in The New York Times and The New Republic. He presently lives in Austin, Texas.
Red Riding Hood
by Donna Leishman
www.6amhoover.com
2001
This hip edgy retelling of Little Red Riding Hood is constructed as an interactive comic book. Here, the flow of the narrative must be discovered by the viewer through experimental rollovers and clickings. Some of the links are obvious and some are hidden. Look for the Red's Diary. Hint: it is in her basket.
Donna Leishman is a Ph.D candidate at the Glasgow School of Art in interactive storytelling. She is the creator of 6amhoover, an interactive web collection.
