Alexei Shulgin, born in 1963 in Moscow. Since mid 80’s e has been working in the fields of photography, media and contemporary arts. In the 90’s he was one of the pioneers of Net Art. His cyberpunk rock band, 386 DX has toured extensively all over the world. Alexei has participated in numerous exhibitions, media art and music festivals in Russia and internationally. He was teaching at Proarte Institute in St. Petersburg in 2000-2001 and performed as a guest teacher at a number of art schools in Europe and the US. Alexei has curated several exhibitions; in 2001-2004 he was a co-organizer of Readme software art festival (Moscow-Helsinki-Aarhus-Dortmund). He is a co-admin of Runme.org software art repository on the Internet. In 2004 he has co-founded Electroboutique gallery in Moscow. At present, he teaches at Rodchenko school of Photography and Media Art in Moscow. Alexei Shulgin lives and works in Moscow.[1]

Particularly involved with software art and internet art, he is a part of the readme culture and uses code as a form of art. In 1997, he released his first interactive work, Form Art, in which only minimum factors are programmed in the form of HTML. Shulgin describes this page as a "formalistic" aesthetic art site - a play on words taking into account the clean composition as well as the tools of its creation. Navigating this site requires aimless click-throughs of blank boxes and links, which lead the viewer through 19 pages of "form art" animations. Behavioral expectations are subverted by frequently overriding default functionality of basic form elements such as radio buttons and list boxes.[2]

Many links on his site are now 404, selected online works:

• http://www.c3.hu/collection/form/ - Form Art, 1997
• http://www.easylife.org/netart/ - Introduction to net.art. 1999
• http://www.easylife.org/desktop/ - First international desktop exhibition. 1997-98
• http://www.easylife.org/seefree/index.html - SeeFree©. 2003
• http://www.easylife.org/privatronics/index.html - Privatronics. 2003
• http://www.easylife.org/fufme/ - FuckU-FuckMe. 1999
• http://www.easylife.org/this_morning/ - Desires are tearing me apart. 1997

Internet provocateurs JODI pioneered Web art in the mid-1990s. Based in The Netherlands, JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) were among the first artists to investigate and subvert conventions of the Internet, computer programs, and video and computer games. Radically disrupting the very language of these systems, including interfaces, commands, errors and code, JODI stages extreme digital interventions that destabilize the relationship between computer technology and its users. [1]

JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) was formed in 1994. Joan Heemskerk was born in 1968 in Kaatsheue, The Netherlands. Dirk Paesmans was born in 1965 in Brussels, Belgium. Heemskerk and Paesman both attended Silicon Valley's electronic arts laboratory CADRE at San Jose State University in California; Paesmans also studied with Nam June Paik at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf. JODI's works are typically seen online. Their recent solo exhibitions include INSTALL.EXE at Eyebeam, New York, which toured to [plug-in], Basel, and BuroFriedrich, Berlin; and Computing 101B at FACT Centre, Liverpool, England. Their works have also been exhibited at Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Kunstverein Bonn; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany; Documenta X, Kassel, Germany; Harvard Art Museum, Massachusetts; EAI at ICA, Phillidelphia; and Lisson Gallery, New York, among many others. [1]

Misusing technological tools and languages has been a trademark for Jodi.org (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) since the mid-nineties, when they emerged as the pioneers of a movement which later became internationally known as net.art. Starting by applying this creative strategy to browsers, subverting websurfing logics and hacking the graphic interface, they then moved to videogames and finally to the so-called Web 2.0, deconstructing platforms such as Blogger, Google Maps and now Twitter. [2]

Selected net art pieces [3]

• http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org - the website that caused Jodi's uproar in popularity with contemporary art.
• http://globalmove.us/ - another website using Google Maps, this time creating artistic patterns with the map signs.
• http://geogeo.jodi.org/ - a site using Google Maps to show supposed 'Cityfonts'.
• http://map.jodi.org/ - Jodi's personal map of the Web.
• http://404.jodi.org/ - playing with the "404 - File not Found" premise.
• http://sod.jodi.org/ - an art game modification of Wolfenstein 3D.
• http://asdfg.jodi.org/ - an experimental website, using randomly generated ASCII art and Javascript.
• http://yt-rtyuiop.org/ - an experimental website, very similar to asdfg.jodi.org, YouTube related.
• http://text.jodi.org/ - a website similar to wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, containing jumbled graphics.
• http://jetsetwilly.jodi.org/ - an edit of the game Jet Set Willy.
• http://www.wrongbrowser.com/ - absurd artistic interpretation of a browser (Alt-F4 to exit on Windows, CMD-Q on Mac).
• http://g33con.com/ - a web archive containing many websites, including the redirect experiment "you-talking-to-me-you-talking-to-me-you-talking-to-me.com".
• http://www.untitled-game.org/ - also on CD-ROM, twelve modifications of Quake.
• http://maxpaynecheatsonly.jodi.org/ - cheats on built-in functions of the video game Max Payne 2 - new work released in May 2006.
• http://tatatataa.cn/ - an experimental website with a grey background, along with the voice of Duke Nukem saying the Textedit options.
• http://zyx-app.com/ - an art project, experimenting with iPhones and human movement.
• http://compositeclub.cc/ - a web archive, each containing various clips from PlayStation 2 Eyetoy games like EyeToy: Monkey Mania, and Sega Superstars, being "played" by movies.
• http://audioswap5.com/ - redirects to a YouTube channel showing videos of internet-themed songs recorded onto vinyl.
• http://oss.jodi.org - another Javascript site, famous for containing malicious code.
• http://x20xx.com/ - slightly related to zyx-app.com, contains various visual experiments.
• http://folksomy.net/ - a web archive containing randomly selected clips from YouTube, all by tag.
• http://mboxjodi.org/ - another web archive, this time containing lists of various files, ordered by file extension.

One of the most important collectives to emerge in the last decade, Paper Rad exploded at the edge of a cultural time zone—before the social web—when subculture was still palpable and also clearly becoming impossible to sustain. They emerged in the early ’00s within a community dedicated to DIY art practice that had strong roots in Providence, Rhode Island, as well as cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, and towns in Western Massachusetts became known for a cartoon cosmos that felt like a psychedelic, subversive response to American pop culture that was hatched out of a sincere and deep engagement to it. Their work began with ’zines and music, and eventually grew to encompass digital animation, videos, installations, and their website—paperrad.org—which became an increasingly central part of their work as it drew attention and followers. [1]

… the page was changed daily, continually layered with new content or reorganized spatially. Amid this constant development, there are a few distinguishing elements to the website that endured throughout its seven-year life. First, it carried over the DIY ethos and aesthetics from the culture from which it emerged—paperrad.org was not an easy-to-navigate online artist’s CV but existed more like a maze of found, remixed, and original content. Visitors were only able to track the identities of participating members through deep research, which lent the site a mysterious and open feel, as if Paper Rad could be as small as one person or as large as a thriving subculture. A second distinguishing factor was that Paper Rad created their own discreet world that blended influences from both analog and digital culture. In the Paper Rad cosmos, hacked and re-versioned My Little Ponies mingled with animated gifs and characters originally rendered in printed ’zines, like Tux Dog, which were digitized and made open source. This straddling of different pop cultural realms—television and the internet, mass media and amateur media—became a trademark of Paper Rad, as did a disregard for medium specificity. The Paper Rad website, presenting recycled cartoon characters like Gumby in Flash animation sagas, was evidence of the eroding boundaries between media we are so familiar with today. [1]

Paper Rad's visual projects often employ bright fluorescent palettes juxtaposed with primary colors to create a distinctive "lo-fi" look. It adopts a variety of techniques and elements to achieve this look, including pop art, collage, punk art, as well as imagery from popular culture. The multimedia projects incorporate MIDI audio, poor recordings of original sound effects and voices, pixelization, and other crude audio and visual components. Paper Rad recycled or appropriated obscure sounds and images from a variety of sources, including old cartoons, commercials, and late-night television. [2]

The collective–which consisted of siblings Jessica and Jacob Ciocci, Ben Jones, and other collaborators–cultivated a unique interest in exploring artistic strategies from other media, especially comics and zines, through web-based and multimedia works. Serially updated during the group’s most active period (2001-2008), paperrad.org was both an archive and a artwork, a riot of brightly colored compositions featuring graphics and a mazelike compilation of characters from otherwise overlooked aspects of ’70s and ’80s pop culture. [3]

Paper Rad Homepages 01-08 Collected by Rhizome

• Welcome to my Homey Page

Selected Webpages

• http://www.paperrad.org/newindex.html
• http://www.paperrad.org/january2007.html
• Puffy Smalls
• Comics Gallery
• http://www.paperrad.org/ben/mb.html

From Hackers of Resistance:

The Hackers of Resistance (HORs) is a queer transfeminist hacker collective of artists, activists, researchers, cyborgs, witches, and technologists, of color. Co-conspirators, we build tools to defend our community, educate people to be secure, to demand and make ourselves heard, to fight back and hack tools of oppression. H0Rh0use is 0ur imm3rsive mUltim3dia heisT.

From Ada Gender New Media & Technology:

Hackers of Resistance (HORs) is a hyperreal-multimedia-installation-performance-video-game reimagining feminist activism. It’s immersive theater, video installation, and game design—but mostly, it’s a universe. A power fantasy of the oppressed, we subvert traditionally-white-American-centered dystopian narratives by placing WoC hackers as superheroes willing to risk it all for solidarity (our vision of utopia). Our stylized hyperreality uses shimmery-neon aesthetics, socially-aware comedy, and DIY charm to address serious concerns like the fate of minorities in the hands of the current administration. Some of the projects the HORs are developing and tinkering with are cybersecurity labs, anti-facial recognition, counter-surveillance, social engineering, bio-hacking, dildo-hacking, and DIWO 3D printable abortion kits in collaboration with our incarcerated sister organization Marias Clandestinas.

From Wikipedia:

VNS Matrix was an artist collective founded in Adelaide, Australia, in 1991, by Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt. Their work included installations, events, and posters distributed through the Internet, magazines, and billboards. Taking their point of departure in a sexualised and socially provocative relationship between women and technology the works subversively questioned discourses of domination and control in the expanding cyber space. They are credited as being amongst the first artists to use the term cyberfeminism to describe their practice.

From VNS Matrix:

The first of their works (a large scale billboard), inspired by such theorists as Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant, featured their seminal text “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century”. It was in this manifesto that the term “cyberfeminism” first appeared, and this work was widely distributed. In the manifesto, VNS Matrix stated that, “we are the modern cunt/positive anti reason/unbounded unleashed unforgiving” and that, “we are the virus of the new world disorder/rupturing the symbolic from within/saboteurs of big daddy mainframe/the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix/the VNS Matrix”. The group disbanded in 1997, but occasionally work together on selected projects and presentations. Their parting manifesto “Bitch Mutant Manifesto” gave the finger to all technopatriarchies and capitalist infospheres with the words “suck my code” amongst other blasphemous exhortations.

From Wikipedia:

James Turrell (born May 6, 1943) is an American artist primarily concerned with Light and Space. Turrell was a MacArthur Fellow in 1984. Turrell is best known for his work in progress, Roden Crater, a natural cinder cone crater located outside Flagstaff, Arizona that he is turning into a massive naked-eye observatory.

Access to Roden Crater is limited to friends, though devoted fans can gain access by completing the "Turrell Tour", which involves seeing a Turrell in 23 countries worldwide. During May 2015, Roden Crater was open to a select group of 80 people, as part of a fund raiser, by allowing visits of 20 people per day during the course of four days, at a cost of $6,500 per person. As Roden Crater has been long shrouded in secrecy, fans have attempted to sneak in without the artist's permission. Some have succeeded.

In the 1970s, Turrell began his series of "skyspaces" enclosed spaces open to the sky through an aperture in the roof. A Skyspace is an enclosed room large enough for roughly 15 people. Inside, the viewers sit on benches along the edge to view the sky through an opening in the roof.

From Wikipedia:

Jenny Holzer (born July 29, 1950, Gallipolis, Ohio) is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick Falls, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces.

Holzer belongs to the feminist branch of a generation of artists that emerged around 1980, looking for new ways to make narrative or commentary an implicit part of visual objects. Her contemporaries include Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Charlesworth, and Louise Lawler.

The public dimension is integral to Holzer's work. Her large-scale installations have included advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other architectural structures, and illuminated electronic displays. LED signs have become her most visible medium, although her diverse practice incorporates a wide array of media including street posters, painted signs, stone benches, paintings, photographs, sound, video, projections, the Internet, and a race car for BMW. Text-based light projections have been central to Holzer’s practice since 1996. As of 2010, her LED signs have become more sculptural. Holzer is no longer the author of her texts, and in the ensuing years, she returned to her roots by painting.

From Wikipedia:

Lozano-Hemmer is best known for creating and presenting theatrical interactive installations in public spaces across Europe, Asia and America. Using robotics, real-time computer graphics, film projections, positional sound, internet links, cell phone interfaces, video and ultrasonic sensors, LED screens and other devices, his installations seek to interrupt the increasingly homogenized urban condition by providing critical platforms for participation. Lozano-Hemmer’s smaller-scaled sculptural and video installations explore themes of perception, deception and surveillance. As an outgrowth of these various large scale and performance-based projects Lozano-Hemmer documents the works in photography editions that are also exhibited.

Cory Arcangel (born May 25, 1978) is a Brooklyn, New York post-conceptual artist who makes work in many different media, including drawing, music, video, performance art, and video game modifications, for which he is perhaps best known.

Arcangel often uses the artistic strategy of appropriation, creatively reusing existing materials such as dancing stands, Photoshop gradients and YouTube videos to create new works of art. His work explores the relationship between digital technology and pop culture. He is a recipient of a 2006 Creative Capital Emerging Fields Award. [1]

Notable Works:

Super Mario Clouds Arcangel's best known works are his Nintendo game cartridge hacks and reworkings of obsolete computer systems of the 1970s and 80s. One example is Super Mario Clouds (2002), a modified version of the video game Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo's NES game console in which all of the game's graphics have been removed, leaving a blue background with white clouds scrolling slowly from right to left. [1]

Pizza Party Pizza Party (2004) was a free, functional software package that could be used to order Domino's Pizza through a command-line interface. The program allowed users to order pizza by typing in commands such as pizza_party -pmx 2 medium regular, which - according to the artist - would order two medium crust pizzas with pepperoni, mushrooms and extra cheese. The piece was commissioned by Eyebeam and implemented by Mike Frumin. [1]

Punk Rock 101 Punk Rock 101 (2006) is an example of Arcangel's work with the web as an artistic medium. For this piece, he re-published Kurt Cobain's alleged suicide letter alongside a series of Google Ads. The ads are tailored to the content of any given page, and the piece juxtaposed Cobain's angst with ads selling social anxiety treatment and motivational speaking. Art critic Paddy Johnson wrote of the work, "This is quite possibly the most brilliant subversion of the medium I have seen." [1]

From Wikipedia:

Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with an early usage (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" in application to telecommunications.

From Theartstory.org:

Nam June Paik, known as "the father of video art," surfed the forefront of cutting edge technologies and utilized them to realize artworks, the likes the world had never yet seen. His various experiments positioned video as a viable art form, and a tool toward accomplishing widespread, global connectivity - an oeuvre eerily prophetic to our contemporary information age. His revolutionary practice laid the groundwork for today's artists working in new media art.