foundyou.online - Directory for New Media Art
Open Filters

I/O/D represents the coming together of Matthew Fuller, Colin Green, and Simon Pope. The group began their Web activism in 1994, with multimedia presentations via floppy disk. Their work became infamous for engulfing a computer, reducing it to a frustrating series of seemingly random generated dialogue boxes that would often crash the system. Soon after, I/O/D made the Web its target with The Web Stalker. A new type of browser, The Web Stalker offered a completely different interface for moving through pages on the World Wide Web. The user opens a URL, then watches as the "Stalker" blows open the structure and source code for that Web site, stripping the site of all content and design, and leaving only a two-dimensional mnemonic showing a skeletal map of how the Web is linked together. [1]

I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker was a new kind of web browser that decomposed websites into separate sets of entities. The texts of the site were treated as the primary resource, but were stripped of most of their formatting. Links from one file to another were mapped in a network diagram, which allowed users to visualize their path through the clusters, skeins, and aporias of files. This Map built dynamically as a Crawler function gradually moved through the network. We saw the logical structure of websites, established by the links in and between them, as another key resource, and we wanted the software to act in a modular manner, with users calling up functions, each with their own separate window, only when they needed them. [2]

Manfred Mohr is considered a pioneer of digital art based on algorithms. After discovering Prof. Max Bense's information aesthetics in the early 1960's, Mohr's artistic thinking was radically changed. Within a few years, his art transformed from abstract expressionism to computer generated algorithmic geometry. Further encouraged by discussions with the computer music composer Pierre Barbaud whom he met in 1967, Mohr programmed his first computer drawings in 1969. Since then all his artwork is produced exclusively with the computer. Mohr develops and writes algorithms for his visual ideas. Since 1973, he generates 2-D semiotic graphic constructs using multidimensional hypercubes. [1]

References: 1. https://www.emohr.com/

From Wikipedia:

The idea for Line Describing a Cone came to McCall on his voyage from London to New York, where he produced the film in 1973. Though he had already created a number of other 16mm films, Line allowed him to actualize his ideas on the relationship between viewer and film and the medium of film itself. The thirty-minute film begins with a single white dot projected onto a black surface. As time progresses, the dot begins to form a curved line, tracing the circumference of a circle until the end of the line reaches its starting point. Meanwhile, particles in the air reveal the path of light in the space between the projector and the wall, making visible a cone of light. If the artist's display specifications are met, this beam of light projects between thirty and fifty feet. The circle that is projected onto the surface sits approximately twelve inches above the ground, and its diameter spans seven to nine feet. The exhibition space lacks seating, inviting the viewer to interact with the ray of light beaming from the projector to the screen. When multiple spectators view the piece together, these encounters with the light, at once an interruption and component of the piece, become an interaction with other audience members.

Line Describing a Cone reflects McCall's interests in film and sculpture. Line addresses the medium of film by removing the narrative demands and addressing the specific properties of the medium itself such as projection, frames, and light. Moreover, by emphasizing the physical space between the projector and screen McCall calls attention to the sculptural dimensions of projection. In his artists's statement written to judges of the Fifth International Experimental Film Competition, McCall writes:

"It deals with the projected light beam itself, rather than treating the light beam as a mere carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes a flat surface… Line Describing a Cone deals with one of the irreducible, necessary conditions of film: projected light. It deals with this phenomenon directly, independently of any other consideration. It is the first film to exist in real, three-dimensional space."