Skip to main content
russell smith: on culture

In the unregulated Wild West of Internet art, anyone can hang out a shingle declaring himself to be a curator, and their wares - like those of blogs and other unpaid writing projects - can be both astounding and frustrating. I have spent an enjoyable hour looking at some digital art collected and posted by a recent U.S. art-school graduate who put out a call for cool stuff, accepted anything that was submitted and put it up for free. The show is called the 2010 Virtual Art Fair. The curator, a guy called Duncan Alexander, said in a statement that he created it in response to another call for artists he had just heard about - that one from a highly commercial organization that wants to charge galleries up to $20,000 to rent virtual booths in their virtual art fair, and viewers $100 to see close-ups of the JPEGs of the art. Alexander quite reasonably points out that this is silly, as galleries can easily put up their own JPEGs on their own websites for free, and a virtual fair misses the social interaction and serendipitous findings of a real art fair.

His result is an eclectic group of student-quality flash animations, moving wallpaper and one-line visual gags. This is not a collection of reproductions of art that exists in a gallery somewhere, but art made specifically for a computer screen. One piece is just a program that takes anything you write and translates it into its opposite: you write "I like myself," it writes "I hate myself," and so on. Some are just moving op art that creates interesting visual effects and illusions. This kind of work lends itself to YouTube - it's the kind of thing you look at for a few seconds, murmur "Cool," and send on to someone else. It tends not to have the depth of what a gamer might call meatspace art.

A couple of pieces, though, are genuinely exciting. There is an animated video by Thorne Brandt called "Animated GIF of the day July 2010." It is basically a surrealist explosion of images, a screen covered in moving cartoons, a little reminiscent of the acid-trippy animation in the Beatles' movie Yellow Submarine but busier and scarier: trains, buildings, advertising slogans, naked people, skulls and computer parts spin around the screen, overlaying each other the way images do in dreams. The soundtrack is an electronic drone, not unlike the "i-dosing" sounds I discussed here last week, overlaid with screams, squeaks and squawks. It's a nightmarish vision of a brain overdosed on the brightly coloured moving images that popular culture provides.

Another interesting artist in the group is called Michael Manning: his piece "information technology is the gateway to the infinite" consists of a flashing screen (probably dangerous to epileptics) and moving text that can be dragged around and formed into spinning patterns by your cursor. If you look at Manning's work on his own site, you will find a bunch of clever YouTube experiments, including a short video called "Joo Jee Fruits." This film shows two simply drawn characters having an amusingly erudite philosophical conversation about nihilism and free will. Their voices are obviously computer-generated.

It turns out this video was created using a free online program called Xtranormal. This fantastically fun software enables you to create your own short animated film without doing any of the animation yourself. It provides you with pre-drawn characters in a few possible settings. You type in their lines and the computer speaks them. You can select camera angles and cuts, and even add a few different facial expressions and gestures. The basics are free, but if you want to start doing more sophisticated things, like using "premium" actors and sets, you must pay for them. It takes only a few minutes to make your first movie: I experimented just now for exactly 20 minutes and made my first one. I predict this kind of instant comic skit will be a forum not unlike Twitter for people who want to make humorous or satirical comments on things in the news.

And here's the thing I keep coming back to: When the Internet first began, and people started repeating the word "interactive" to refer to an imagined future Garden of Eden, they thought they meant art that viewers could alter. That kind of art turned out not to interest people as much as we thought it would. What fewer people anticipated is that interactive would come to mean art that is made with some kind of template that makes choices for you - like the design templates that blogging sites offer, or the pre-set beats of Fruityloops, or the easy video-editing program that comes with every copy of Windows. Art made with these templates is not only presenting itself as a finished product but also referring to the strictures of the template itself, and it's acknowledging that we're all playing a game, maybe even suggesting that you go and use the same template to make your own statement. It could be said that posting your own successful Xtranormal video is a bit like competing in a multiplayer online game; it's like posting your highest score.

There will be those who say that using a pre-formed template for art is as sophisticated as using a paint-by-numbers kit, and those who answer that any fixed form - the four-minute song, the three-act play - is just such a template.

Interact with The Globe