Artists' Statements

Cory Arcangel

Urbandale

As a computer artist, I am concerned with the relationship of computers to the creative process. I find that modern software and hardware configurations often dictate a process of presenting the user with limitless options, thereby eliminating the need for invention. Exponentially growing options do not necessarily represent artistic progress or greater potential. In fact, they might do quite the opposite: mediocrity may stem from user-friendliness.

I write my own software, and my work is often based on obsolete hardware. This way, I try to avoid the oppressive censoring process that modern software and hardware configurations dictate. By writing my own software I can have control over every aesthetic decision, and by writing for computers that are sometimes 15-20 years old, I can be assured that the simplified architecture of these machines will provide me with a freedom for artistic expression that is often concealed in the user-friendly aperitifs of modern computing tools.

Urbandale is a 7.5 minute, extended ASCII computer movie with audio. I composed Urbandale by creating my own software and using ASCII (text) as the only means of display. I made my first experiences with the Internet through Telnet sessions, at a time when the WWW was only text-based. During this time, I began to create Telnet movies, or movies made out of text. Urbandale is a throw-back to this era: in essence, I have "frozen" a certain time and aesthetic in computer culture. This strategy allows me to successfully maximize the potential of that particular moment. The soundtrack for Urbandale was also composed by myself and recorded with 12 electric guitars.

Filmed at Urbandale Plaza in the eastern suburbs of Buffalo, NY, Urbandale is a study of America's suburban sprawl stripped to its barest essentials and void of unnecessary contemporary cultural influence. This film captures the sly, bland smile that strip plazas cast at modern culture. The film, rendered in text, focuses on the repetitive motion of food being cooked in the lobby of a discount department store.

Urbandale is a 2000 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts for their Turbulence Web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

Mark Daggett

Browser Gestures

Browser Gestures is an ongoing series of applications that reinterpret what a browser is. Similar to the way in which IOD's Web-Stalker represents the network outside of the well-accepted page metaphor, my browsers reinterpret how browsers normally display and navigate information for the user. In some cases, the browser abstracts the information that is to be displayed by sending the requested page through a feedback loop. In other cases, the browser takes the form of its own "history": the user must sift through layers of previous pages that have accrued since the browser was opened.

Serban Epuré

Persona 2

Most of my work originates in one simple idea: to create forms as the outcome of a cybernetic interaction. If a structure (system) gets an input from another one, it reacts and moves to a new state, the output. If there is a feedback between the input and the output, they adjust each other and establish a certain level of stability in their interactions, as in real life situations. My concept is to establish these interactions and interplays between geometrical shapes. Most of the images I create are visual descriptions of these interplays. However, I take great care to encapsulate my painting experience in the aesthetics of the symbols I use.

When I place two shapes into an interactive situation, I have no idea what the resulting image may look like since the building protocol has many random parameters. The final images always override any visual prediction I make during the build-up. In the end, they are so unexpected that they rupture the "monotony" of the execution and trigger an exciting state of surprise, sudden inspiration and visual creativity, close to intuition.

As most images describing a mathematical process, Persona 2 is transparent, has no gender and no front or back. The meaning of the image depends on the compositional context it will be placed in later on. In the...