John Klima

John Klima is a new media artist with a background in photography as well as programming. He went to school at SUNY Purchase. His piece Glasbead, an interface that "exemplifies the convergent nature of new media art." Klima was inspired by Herman Hesse's novel "The Glass Bead Game"which has been described by some as a sort of "metaphor for the internet."

Klima's piece "enables up to 20 simealtanous participants to make music collaboratively." Users can pull the stems of this flower like orb to create sound.

I find this piece interesting because it combines visual and auditory tools to provide an interactive place where music can be created. Klima approaches his work from both an art as well as a technological background, which is true of many new media artists.

Vuk Cosic

Vuk Cosic is a Slovenian artist first trained as a archaeologist whose ASCII History of Moving Images depicts scenes from popular films using letters, numbers, and computer symbols to create the images. This project is seen as a "critique of the utilitarian that underlies new media development and a celebration of the purposeless." The article calls this a "retro futuristic" aesthetic. I like that this art is sort of a critique of itself but that it does not dismiss the idea of art for art's sake. Not everything needs a purpose; sometimes it's just about expression.

I found it interesting that they discuss the fact that this artist created the term "net.art" after seeing the two words put together in an email by mistake. There is a lot of analysis about how this term was created and it is compared to Marcel Duchamp's readymades.

MTAA

MTAA "exemplifies the processual nature of most Net art." MTAA is most famous what they call art historical "updates" in which they recreate art done in the 1960s and 70s with a modern take on techniques and processes. Famously, they do a digital recreation of Sam Hsheigh's One Year performance (Cage Piece), which originally was a collection of photographs documenting a year that the artist confined himself in a cage. In the update, MTAA artists took videos of themselves in identical 10x10x10 rooms eating, sleeping, reading, and doing other activities. On first look, it would be easy to assume that you were seeing it live, however, because it is an online video, there's no way to know where it comes from. As it turns out, in this project the artists just have the same images on a loop.

The idea of updating previous works of art is interesting to me as an art history student. You wouldn't necessarily think of art works as needing updates even as the techniques with which they were created become obsolete. Art represents more than just its subject; art is also representative of the moment during which it was created. When it comes to MTAA's update of One year performance, it kind of just seems to cheat. And maybe that's the point, but it doesn't really do it for me.