Creating Space: Web Art Practice

In my web-based art practice, I focus on the challenge of creating spaces. These "spaces" are web sites that encourage reflection and response. When a web participant engages my art, I want him or her to be met primarily on an emotional level. I therefore strive to make the technology I use as seamless as possible.

A characteristic of the Internet is the web participant's sense of anonymity. Although we are connected virtually with the larger world, the solitary physicality of our current computer interface paradigm facilitates perceived anonymity. This perception on the part of the web participant can engender a type of intimacy with the web artist.

This intimacy makes possible a unique form of interaction. I term this "emotional interactivity," found not in mouse clicks but in the interrelationship formed between the personal narrative of a web participant and the narrative content of the art.

My content is drawn from what I consider a shared set of human experiences. I also feel it is essential to provide opportunity for content to be added by those who view my Internet-based projects, to encourage an evolution from visitor/consumer to web participant. The on-line result is a collaborative narrative process, one that further advances the possibility of emotional interactivity.

The project the degradation & removal of the/a black male, found at <www.sharemyworld.net> (Fig. 2 and Color Plate D No. 2), exemplifies this approach. I publicly posted images of my face and over the course of 4 years photographed them as they were written on and defaced. On the Internet the still photographs were combined with stories of racism. These are my stories as well as those submitted by people who have visited the web site. While this project begins with issues of race, it soon broadens to encompass the common lived experience of alienation and otherness.

Web participants continue contributing stories to degradation & removal. These stories are the stuff of life, our shared narrative. I weave my interactive spaces from these "human condition" narratives. Web participants are drawn to consider not just their own situations, but those of others as well—and to consider that the stories we each live constitute a larger human narrative. When a web participant awakens to these connections, the possibility of a truly transformative web experience is born.

Part of my role as artist is that of a facilitator for transformations—for web participants to be left considering things in ways they never have before. An authentic re-imagining of the self, others and the world is elemental in the human journey. Without these considerations we can be found lacking in criticality, contented or dulled by our own preoccupations.

It is not enough for me to linger in the fascination with technology. I am interested in the question, "How can technology facilitate a profound connection between people?" For when the power goes out all we are left with is each other.

Fig. 2.

Wayne Dunkley, the degradation & removal of the/a black male, 2000. Book 6 of 6. Visitor-submitted stories integrated with photo documentation of community poster intervention.

© Wayne Dunkley