Posts Tagged ‘virtual’

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Constant Dullaart’s suggesteddomain.com is a looped series of 15 unique, link-generator websites parked on “empty” Web domains – domains that have no content other than whatever advertising is temporarily parked there.

These 15 automatically-looping Web domains are themselves each composed of two words separated by a period (or “dot”) which complete (in a close paraphrase anyway) a quote which is attributed to Marcel Duchamp.

It reads:

He(dot)took

An(dot)article

Of(dot)life

Placed(dot)it

So(dot)that

Its(dot)useful

Significance(dot)disappeared

Under(dot)the

New(dot)title

And(dot)Point

Of(dot)View

Created(dot)anew

Thought(dot)for

That(dot)object

Per(dot)iod

“He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”

By gradually unveiling Duchamp’s conceptualization of the readymade, Dullaart gives new life to the concept of the readymade itself.

The readymade is interesting not so much as a theoretical default, but more as a necessarily shifting ideal.

One way to read the readymade is to say that it shifts an ordinary object into a different context and, by doing so, allows the viewer of the work to see it for itself – divorced from any use value.

If the term were to be confined to physical commodities like snow shovels, then it might not be relevant in a world of both physical and virtual commodities – snow shovels and snow shovel websites.

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Harm van den Dorpel’s Texture Mapping works are minimal, starkly-outlined cube sculptures whose high-gloss surfaces each depict abstract images reading to the viewer as “painterly.”

The “painterly-ness” of each image, though, is mutated by the de-texturing (or mapping of texture) accompanying one’s view of their subject matter through the glossy “screen” of transparent acrylic which functions as the surface of each cube.

The result is less the experience of viewing a painting first-hand (as in, say, a museum) and more the experience of viewing a painting remotely (as through, say, the screen of a computer).

In the process of describing the experience of textural remoteness, however, van den Dorpel creates a short-circuit to a whole new type of texture:

That of virtual space.

He does so in at least two ways:

1. Van den Dorpel’s technique in these works is to paint on the surface of the acrylic which – in the final product – will be viewed as the inside (as opposed to the, more traditional, outside) of the cube sculpture.

One’s view of the painting process is, thus, reversed.

The first layers of paint applied to the surface are the most visible and everything else is masked through, not overpainting, but underpainting.

The virtual presence of this painting’s absence is, thus, activated.

2. Similarly, the mobility of the relatively very light cubes and their subsequent malleability into almost instantaneous re-arrangement nudge the viewer’s understanding of the work’s physical “presence” away from, say, the mass and volume of Minimalist cubes and closer to the virtual 3D space of Second Life.