A Feast for Your Eyezz
By Marisa Olson on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 1:44 pm.
One of the hallmarks of the current era of net art is the exhibitory display of one’s consumption. While a lot of early net art was self-reflexively directed at the traits of networked environments, newer work seems to be largely about running around and exploring those environments, then generating responses. The output of the pseudonymous artists behind Triptych.tv (Jimpunk, Abe Linkoln, and Mr. Tamale) forms a bridge between these two eras. It incubated in the hour of the first boom’s waning and waxed ahead of the current surf blog curve. As a result, Triptych.tv (which, readers are forewarned, could very much hijack its predecessor Screenfull.net’s motto, “We Crash Your Browser With Content”) marries the best qualities of these two eras. The site simultaneously evades initial detection as a blog while exploiting (in the true hacker sense of the word) all of the default structural conditions that make blogs such a performative space. The artists post heavily and skillfully manipulated videos, sound clips, images, and animations, to the order of optical poptitude; and while their individual posts stand on their own, the degree to which they harmonize with each other could finally–after so many decades–stand to illustrate the truly exquisite nature of the exquisite corpse. This is net art decadence at its richest. Now if the site sounds familiar to you, we’ll admit to having covered it before, but the group’s current summer marathon inspired us to remind you of its presence. This, afterall, is another trait of current net art blogs. There are no one-hit-wonders, and despite the “.tv” in the site’s URL, there are no reruns here. To truly take in this collaborative artwork’s beauty, one needs to resign themselves to the compulsion to repeat. – Marisa Olson
via rhizome.org