Response for Week 2

February 6, 2022

Prompt

Respond to a Web Artwork

Write a 1-2 paragraph detailed response to one of the contemporary web art examples presented in week one. Some possible points to include could be:

What interests you?
What do you like or dislike?
How do you react to the piece?
What do you think it is trying to say?
How do its form and content interrelate?
What does it remind you of? What don't you understand?
What makes you inspired?

Day 15: clean.an.otherti.me

clean.an.otherti.me is an interactive sound piece the artist Raphaël Bastide made as a part of otherti.me, a collection of 30 web-based works he created over one month in 2019.

Many of the otherti.me pieces function as one-liners. They are quick and whimsical.

I like that this piece invites repeat interactions. Even though I know what happens when I click a button, I feel compelled to repeat the task of sweeping (is it work? is it play?) the buttons beyond the video frame and onto the rest of the green page. The radio buttons transform into leaves (an incidental part of nature) or even trash. I really love how the piece plays around with the space of a web page. What becomes foreground and background? The piece turns a drab material into something that feels a little more joyful and surprising.

I can't help notice that even the vertical rectangle of video features a slight tilt. The piece is not responsive to resizing the browser window.

What is cleaning, and what does the labor of cleaning or tidying up look like on a web site? The title makes me think about the repetition of cleaning. I tried clicking on every single button to see what might happen. Nothing happens, although there's something interesting about the buttons changing color and arrangement as they are shoved across the screen.

A feeling of Fluxus?

I got some Fluxus vibes from this artist. There's a gesture toward the quotidian and the use of banal, domestic materials (if the web is a home) in unusual ways. There's also playfulness. I'm reminded of gestures from Yoko Ono, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and Bas Jan Ader. There's the conceptual at play, and it really isn't about the effort or technical difficulty. Perhaps there's a throwaway quality to some forms of web art? It's also ephemeral as the web is always changing.

What role does the browser play?

I noticed that the piece showed variations in color and interaction depending on the browser I used to view the piece.

What is the browser to the web artist? The existence of the browser or even the OS on a device means that as an artist you might not account for what someone's experience of a piece might be. I took screenshots of the radio buttons on the green background for four different browsers:

Brave
Firefox
Chrome
Safari

Brave

Firefox

Chrome

Safari

✨ Inspiration ✨

I'm inspired by the quick sketchiness of the projects in the otherti.me collection. I want to know enough about the web to be able to play in / with it.