We all use the internet for different reasons: to check the news, look up funny videos, check the latest in pop culture, listen to music, and other, maybe even personal reasons. However, we usually just use it to see things, I want to explore what it’s like to search the internet by sounds only. I want to create sounds of the internet. What we normally see, will now be heard and you will be taken through a journey by your ears.

After talking in class, the idea of putting these sounds on an iPod or a Cd and just playing them on shuffle parked my interest, so I expanded on that to make it more internet based. At first I was hoping to create a type of webpage where each time you refreshed the page a new sound will be heard, but my coding skills aren’t that great, so hopefully with the help of Wix I can take you through different pages to guide your ears.

Using logic I want to create individual sounds for each main purpose of the internet, a minute or so of each sound and hopefully kind of take you through the history of the internet. starting with the classic dial-up sounds to instant webpages. News, for example, will have similar updates and storyline sounds.Using found sounds, both vocals and general sounds I will mash them into an Audio Internet Guide. I would like to possibly keep doing more of these, I’m not sure for what themes just yet though. Music would be a tough one since we already listen to that. Hopefully these examples will give a good enough idea of what I’m going for.

 sounds of the internet

online exhibition

Text can be a powerful thing. Not only when it’s written on paper, but when it’s posted on someone’s wall, or read from an iPhone. The interesting thing about text, is that when it’s not directly read to us, WE chose how to read it and interpret it. When text is available online, we are able to read how we chose to and when someone texts us, we are able to misread it and misinterpret and quickly get in an argument with someone over nothing. Text is certainly a powerful thing. When we read narratives intentionally made for the internet though, they open up a new nonlinear dimension for interpretation. Text that is made solely for being read online can do both; it can tell you how it wants to be read, or it can let you chose how it should be read. These four net-artists seen in this online exhibition are writers, experimentalists, digital artists, and take you through a world of their own through text.

To have internet art exhibited online can  mean many things; it was made online, it was made to only be viewed online, it was made online for the purpose of others to work off of, or it’s being archived.   That leads us to the difference between net art and art made on the net. Net art, though an ambiguous term and incredibly hard to define, is made specifically for the internet. “We are looking at something that is becoming more hybrid. Pieces often have different manifestations: an application, a net-based piece, an installation,” said adjunct curator Christiane Paul.  There is no privacy or exclusivity like there is with physical art put in physical galleries. While people can still collaborate and be inspired by tangible art, it might not be the purpose of it. It has taken one platform and infinitely subdivides it.

Net art is Futurism, it is new technology, it is universally accessible, it is right now. It can be exhibited through hand-coded web pages, hyperlinks, and archived in a way that people might even curate an online exhibition on that original exhibition.  This archival purpose is the most interesting since the Internet itself isn’t even that old, but that’s the great thing about net art, if it starts to get just a little old or outdated, it can be updated in an instant because it is always looking for improvements and other ways to get work out there. Much like the Futurist movement, net art has no defined style, but is “embracing popular media and new technologies to communicate their ideas,” (The Art Story). In fact, a familiar reading by Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think It” written in 1945, mind you, discusses developmental changes in science as well the arts. “His[man’s] excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important. ” We are always looking for new ways to present our successes and change how we do it for the better. We use our limitations to our advantage. Much like how we used to read on paper, we are now reading on a screen and given multiple options how to read it. We are moving on to bigger and better things to display art to a growing demographic.

Digital Narratives might be compared to experimental writing. They both are innovative in technique and they are more conceptual than normal writing. They both push the limits to how a story can be told. Stories that used to be told from beginning to end now have a nonlinear timeline and jump around from middle to beginning to end. There is no longer a set way to tell a story. Hell, sometimes the reader decides how the story is told. One popular example of experimental writing is Could Atlas by David Mitchell. That storyline breaks narrative laws by combining story lines and transitioning from timeline to timeline to tell one overall story. We see this in more in recent stories actually, writing is breaking loose and experimenting more with how a story can be told to alter an experience. In featured artist Adrienne Eisen’s Six Sex Scenes she takes us through different timelines, all around the same topic, but it is up to us, the reader, to decide how we experience it. Digital narratives have a possible interactive quality that experimental writing can’t give us. Sure, we can read a book in any order we want, but it won’t make sense because that’s not how the author intended it. Digital narrative artists write and create in the hopes that we will read and click in random orders. They aren’t meant to be read and understood just one way like old-fashioned writing might have been. We have the power to chose our story now.

The problem with net art however, is there is a fine line between remixing & collaborating and copyright laws. Yes, it’s much easier now to post art online and that makes it even easier for people to see it and possibly rip it off. Copyright infringement seems to be a heavy topic in the recent years because technology is developing at such a fast pace that it is exceeding our lawmaking process.We have managed to categorize content into “open source” that allows us to use at will, and private content that requires a purchase or some form of donation usually. One person may see it as remixing while another will see it as stealing. There are, however, benefits to creating art work specifically for the Internet. Some artists find it less stressful or a creative outlet to be inspired and collaborate with other artists. They don’t all see it as someone else’s property, it’s more of an online community of collective work to them.  “We’re in a brave new world here, artists have always been inventors, and today’s digital lifestyle invites us to be just as inventive in determining not only what constitutes an artwork, but what constitutes its delivery system,” is one way featured artist Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries put it. Where most people see limits, net artists see a new way to create something. Much lie the limits on storytelling, digital narratives were creating as well as hyperlinks for a new storytelling experience.

Shelley Jackson – My Body (1997)

“My Body” is an interactive hypertext autobiography connecting different parts of Jackson’s body with different stories, both fiction and non-fiction, from her life. This is a nonlinear narrative with no clear ending meant for you to explore at your own pace and understand Jackson’s background and some-what dark personality.  We are lucky to experience this on the net because we are able to interact with it and participate in her story, in any other case this would just be a regular book with a chronological story that only changes when you turn the pages she intended you to turn. My Body is an excellent addition to this exhibition because it demonstrates the new technology used to push the limits of linear storytelling.

http://www.altx.com/thebody/

Adrienne Eisen – Six Sex Scenes (1996)

Six Sex Scenes is a documentation that uses hypertext. Eisen’s oddly humorous personality shines through in each story you click through. It’s important that this particular work of hers be put on the internet because she writes nonlinear stories. The fact that this is distributed on the internet will allow her to reach new audiences that haven’t yet experienced anything other than linear.

http://www.altx.com/hyperx/sss/socfun.htm

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries – Dakota (2002)

Dakota is one of many alike digital narratives created by Young-Hae Change Heavy Industries out of Korea. This may be a non-interactive piece lacking hyperlinks, but the sound, varying size and speed of text flashed before your eyes leads you through a story unlike any other. This narrative pushes the limits of storytelling and modernizes not only what you read, but how you feel when you read it. It fits our short attention spans what we web browsers are accustomed to.

http://www.yhchang.com/DAKOTA.html

http://www.yhchang.com

Olia Lialina – My Boyfriend Came Back From War (1996)

A classic use of hypertext, My Boyfriend Came Back from War is a digital narrative that unveils itself click after click. Originally created around the context of “slower technologies” this narrative is almost an archival of itself. When it was first created, the longer loading time between hyperlinks created a more tense feeling for the storyline and as we watch it today with a quicker loading time, it is a different experience. This online presence allows us to experience a new feeling each time we watch it. The fact that it was made for the net and still remains there will allow us to gain a new experience for years to come.

http://www.teleportacia.org/war/

Remix has become a cultural phenomena over the years due to our short attention span and innate need for change. We see remixes in all types of mediums and especially and most importantly in music. DJ Spooky has built his career around remixing and changing this digital language we call music. In his book, Rhythmic Science,  this concept of language and emotion really stood out to me.

The technology we have in our lives today is not just an asset anymore, it’s a part of our DNA and our language. We are no longer learning to use digital technology because it’s already in us. By taking what we already know and recontextualizing and remixing we create our own language and ultimately an emotion. Our memories are represented by what we chose to remix and how we combine them creates a brand new experience for the listener. By playing with different perceptions of time it allows people to recall on their own memories. We have so many memories, they usually get mixed with other memories or stories you’ve heard, so by remixing them they become fragmented anyways. The order of a track can influence a particular emotion as well. How you lineup tracks on a CD creates a particular mood for the listener.

It’s not just how we create the sound either, by adding visuals you can create a completely different emotion or language, even a narrative. A “musical sculpture” as Miller puts it, can put a thousand words into your mind. It can tell a story on its own. Changing things up and combining different techniques can create different dimensions to a musical story.

It’s important to remember too that this is the 21st century. We’ve heard just about everything. Miller was right to say that we need to keep doing different shit. Whatever we remix it has to be wild and interesting for us to connect and remember it. Always be coining new terms and creating something new. Our creativity is infinite! “Rhythmic science is a new way to present the past.” We now have this freedom to break from pre made loops, cut, mix, remix again, record, and basically do anything! We can take the familiar and make it unfamiliar. One of the best parts is collaboration. People can contribute to the familiar and each put their own unique language into it. People who are fluent in hip-hop can collaborate with a swing speaking person and they both can create a musical hip-swing story! Or swing-hop! I’m just spitballin’ here, but hopefully you  catch my drift.

There are a lot of different languages and today with all the abreves (abbreviations) and #hashtags and short hand, etc. people are combining anything and everything to create something new. Each genre has their own unique language and combining it with another genre only makes it more unique and fitting for our digital era. We want the weird remixes because we want to remember them. This is the 21st century remember? We’ve heard it all by now. Give us something new and crazy and we’ll just keep remixing it!

Net art seems to be a self-made medium to communicate, share, and collaborate, and a spontaneous way to present work. What is interesting about net art, is that it’s killing off original authors and making anyone an author or an artist. It’s a popular topic of discussion of what happens to an artist’s original artwork when it gets remixed online, or when someone incorporates it into their own online gallery if they lose any of they ownership. And it’s a good question, because it seems like they do lose a little bit of authorship. They tend to get lost in the regeneration. The older they are, the more it applies too. 

My Body & Six Sex Scenes seem to be based more around the concept of a diary. The way Shelley Jackson speaks about her body is like a young child, self-conscious about each parts of her body and how she compares herself to others. It’s very juvenile, I guess.  A “coming of age” story. Her use of hypertexts within each description of a body part is a little confusing to me. I can’t quite figure out how she chose the particular links to different stories other than that they are just unusually detailed descriptions of that particular part. “I might be able to do things no one else could” takes you to her erogenous zones. Six Sex Scenes would be another “coming of age” diary-like framework. Eisen documents her sexual encounters with her boyfriend Andy and her sexual feelings. Eisen’s choice of hypertext is more of a short story of related events, where as Jackson’s is a continuous loop of details and descriptions and memories and feelings that link to each body part. The loop meets kind of a dead end between her butt, eyelid, and ears which is a little interesting. Not quite sure what that connection might be.

In terms of Bush’s concept, they are using the computer to represent themselves. They are visualizing their data and expressing themselves through various links. For Laporta’s narrative, she is using other people’s videos to represent the story told. Leischman’s  story is told through a modernized old children’s story. In relation to a contemporary relationship, we make our own choices in relationships. Through interactivity, we as a reader chose if she stays dreaming or wake her up to face the reality of the relationship and world where her grandmother has just been eaten by the boy she just met.

The use of hypertext in a narrative is an inventive technique. While you may already have a story typed up on your computer, adding hypertext and and links to your story and make it a completely new story. One example off the top of my head is The Jew’s Daughter by Judd Morrissey. While reading through the story it appears to be only one set story, but once you scroll over a single word, the story changes instantly. I still haven’t made it through the whole story because I can’t stay focused long enough to read and fully understand the quickly changing storyline. As a reader, I think I enjoy the endless links in e-lit, Jackson’s and Eisen’s, a little more. I like discovering the different ways to tell a story, as long as my attention span will last that is. Set link are a little , bot boring, but mundane? It’s definitely a lot easier to read for me. Maybe I just wish there were both options in each piece of e-lit. Like you could read it the way you wanted to, choose your links in an order of your choosing and after you’ve done that they would have the whole story available to read and the author initially wrote it.

I think he distinctions between e-lit and performing art are a bit arbitrary. When you put a digital narrative like these online, it’s not just literature anymore. When you read a book, you are reading it the way the author intended you to, authors of e-lit do that too, but they also allow you to read it the way you want to read it. It’s no longer a set story, but something that you can participate in too.  Maybe not necessarily a performing art, but an interactive art as well? You definitely get a virtual experience of a performing artist.

In Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction discusses many themes of authenticity and of the main topic of growth in art and art techniques over the years. There are many reasons why technologies grow and grow so quickly. Whether it’s because of war and our need to use so many  is increased or it’s because as humans we have an innate sense for things to be close to us. As Benjamin said, “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly.” We have this constant need for new things and little patience when it comes to it. We have this urge to get a hold of the things we like and as soon as we can. As writing turned into print, that into engraving, then to etching, lithography, followed by photography, we can see a patter of wanting and creating things quicker. This also means that we are able to reproduce things much quicker now and as that gets quicker, we lose the initial authenticity of a product that we once had. True, there weren’t as many reproduction capabilities in the early years, but even with lithography and reproducing onto other materials and once photography was prominent, we had the mass, but it seemed to loose the uniqueness. 

Today, film and photography are the biggest mediums in our lives. When they first began, it was questioned if they were actually art. Not only are they art, but there are many different artistic qualities that go into it. For photography it may be the scenes created by the photographers, the lighting they use, the effects. All they are doing is bring what we see to life and doing so in a way that can be reproduced. “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.” In film, we also have the art of the directors, the actors. It was the “function of the art that turned into film.” Benjamin discusses the acting vs. filming, which is interesting because if you think about it, we mostly think of just the film as an art form, but the actors bring their own artistic presence to the film, as do the directors. The way camera are used to cut and show scenes from different angles, the cinematography is an art all alone. It can change the whole mood of a film just by switching cameras. The issue of authenticity comes up again. Is it still authentic if a movie is reproduced or remade by a new director? If the “aura” is lost? Reproducing photos and films the authority is lost. You don’t know the true author anymore, but that’s ok. With this issue, it brings the opportunity for more artists to come forward and change this unique image or film. Yes, some of the “aura” may be lost, but a new one is introduced.

Bush’e essay is incredibly forward thinking it’s hard to believe it was written so long ago. One  of his thoughts about science is that is has not only given us an easier form of communication, but ” enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.” This is definitely an important concept because our knowledge shouldn’t be specified to one particular thing. We should know the inner workings of things so that we can use that knowledge to continue to create. If we only had knowledge that endured an individual’s lifetime, we would quickly stop advancing. This also reminds me a lot of the shredder piece we looked at in class. even though the archive websites we looked at were no longer working, our scientific advances had moved us forward to other more user-friendly websites, but this knowledge we have still outlives an individual and exceeds for a lifetime. While the beginning of the World Wide Web may have been so so, the knowledge we have outlives the beginning of it all and we can evolve  and continue to work off of it as a platform for new advancements. Bush states, “all we need to do is take advantage of existing mechanisms and to alter the language.” The language we use must keep advancing. The proof is already there, we wouldn’t be where we are now if we weren’t constantly evolving.

http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2013/09/26/one-mans-loss/

My final video/sound project is a continuation from “Endless Cigarette .” I changed the video because it didn’t quite say what I was wanting the sound to say. After creating the particular sound, I was extremely happy with it, but couldn’t quite fit it into a theme or concept. Further listening and playing around with it lead me to an interesting conclusion.

By combining MRIs of a heart and a brain and adding sounds that I created, I wanted to make a sort of life vs. death soundscape. The video represents the form of life while the sounds go back and forth from a lighter tone to a more morbid/death tone. There are hints of technology in the sound which go along with the life and death theme. It’s a bit of a reach, but technology in life can mean many things including life and death. Technology brings life and can ultimately and inadvertently lead to our death and the sounds I created have a combination of them all.

I want the viewer to listen and really reflect on the sound. I want the video to be the only visual in a completely dark room with no other distractions. When you lose senses while listening to any sound, you are more likely to feel more connected and get more out of it, which I really enjoy when I listen to soundscapes and anything really.

For this final project I’m going to redo/continue off of my last project. I would like to add on to the sound but redo the video paired with it. I was really happy with the sound but the visual didn’t quite match what I was going for.

I would like to actually film either people smoking, smoke, myself smoking or a little bit of everyone and mess with the footage in final cut. I will continue to record sounds and work with those in logic.