Videos As Art
AGOD from Thorne Brandt on Vimeo.
AGOD, by Thorne Brandt, comments on the vastness and the overwhelming nature of information age. The never-ending layers of gifs, video, and audio condensed into a 5-minute piece exemplifies this idea. His video piece draws from pop-culture and other sources to bombard the audience with disorienting visuals and harsh audio.
His video is listed here because exists primarily as a digital object and less as a physical piece. This complements the digital nature of the other two entries on this page that are more-clearly classified as hyper-text narratives.
HTML as Art: Hypertext Narratives
"My Boyfriend Came Back from the War" by Olia Lialina (1996).
The first hyper-text narrative is by Olia Lialina, named "My Boyfriend Came Back from the War". Hypertext narratives, as their names imply, tell a story using multimedia that can be embedded into a webpage and are often accompanied by text. In Lialina's piece, the user clicks on various linked images and text that generate more panels with images and text. The order that those objects appear unravels an unchanging narrative that is driven by user actions.
This is the first page on jodi.org.
Jodi.org, by Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, is less like a direct hypertext narrative and more like an abstract digital painting. Many pages on their site seem to be assembled using colored fragments of information. This can be text that creates unintelligible words, letterforms that look more like a texture across a page, colorful lines, broken up images, and gifs that tile and loop across the page. Their webpages, if narrative in nature, are very abstract. The pages read differently from Lialina's piece, but both are executed using hypertext. Both are also referred to as net.art by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana in their book New Media Art.