Artist Focus: Bunting and Brandon

The work of Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon is another dramatic change of pace from that of my previous two New Media Artists; it seems that, after this much investigation, there is little thematic or formal that unites this art form as a whole. Bunting and Brandon, both in collaboration and working separately on different projects, assert themselves as highly confrontational and rebellious. Using the internet as the main means, these “artivists” (to use their self-introduced moniker) make websites to present statements about specific governmental restraints and introduce ways for the visitor to thwart them. The project mentioned most exclusively is "BorderXing" (2002), a site introducing methods one could use to cross European borders covertly, since such unauthorized travel is assumed to be illegal.

The website opens as a simple grid (so simple I could likely identify the HTML used for it: it seems to be nothing more than a table with links). This grid includes abbreviations for a series of European nations along the X and Y axis, and where any two tangential countries converge via X and Y in the body grid, a link indicates if these borders have been crossed or not. When either sort of link is clicked, a new site opens, curtly informing the user that this information is for authorized “clients” only, then proceeds to list the users that would be authorized to see this sort of information. The list of eligible viewers was curious to me, as it did not present them alphabetically, but in a jumble of obscure and familiar nations. I was unable to access any information about crossing any sort of border, although clients from Qatar, Antarctica, or Bahrain (to name the first 3) would have been; thus, I have to take the Mark Tribe wiki-site’s word for it when I say that the presented information on border crossing, like the grid and list of eligible visitors, is simple and unadorned. This simplicity and matter-of-fact attitude, this subtlety in presentation begs the viewer to dig more deeply into the presented site and to actually consider it a work of art with a meaning behind it. It would almost seem that this work attempts to make a statement about the internet on a whole: the information made potentially available to any viewer is a potent means of connecting physical places (a rather obvious interpretation of the title "BorderXing"), but the inaccessibility promised to almost every visitor is crippling, making the web experience almost oxymoronic.

It is clear, however, that Bunting and Brandon intend to convey something more. Bunting’s collaborative project with Rachel Baker, the website “SuperWeed,” introduces information about pesticide-resistant plants that can be cultivated at home and released into the wild to prevent further success of GM-products. This work is much more overt in its political intentions (“By releasing SuperWeed 1.0 into the environment long before biotech companies have a suitable fix, you will contribute to large losses in [GM products'] profitability”). If this serves as a definitive example of the intended attitude behind Bunting (and his collaborator’s) work, then one can assume that BorderXing is a similar attempt to use cyberspace to infiltrate (and comment on) the physical world and the restraints around it. the wiki-site made an interesting comparison of works like these to "hacking," web-introduced methods to disrupt the typical functioning of the interconnected physical world-- perhaps to start a chain-reaction change for the betterment of rebels or for the worse of the administrative parties.

Considering all this, I can’t help but think that BorderXing is somewhat oxymoronic itself in its attempts to belligerently react against border control. The site is stated to be endorsed by famous, one might even say bigwig organizations like the Tate Gallery in London and Fondation Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg; this certainly does not support the anticipated attitude of defying social constructions to make a statement. How can this work be truly combative if it is supported by government-endorsed museums? Are Bunting and Brandon simply trying to assert themselves as artists and not as terrorists?

Artist Focus 2: Alexei Shurgin

Strange, nostalgic and humorous, Alexei Shurgin's work is unlike that of many other new media artists. The Russian-born artist is best known for his creation of digitized music on a now-outdated operating system, which upon first glance does not seem particularly like fine art. His sound files consist of both digitized, popular American songs and Russian ones, either self-composed or covering an existing but unfamiliar one. The culmination of these efforts culminated in its most popularized form, the cyber-punk "rock band" called "386 DX" (1998). The songs are collected on a CD, sold through his website, and are downloadable in various forms. Shurgin has played these sound files live, experimenting with the music media in ways varying from playing them in British pubs to orchestrating the sounds in san Diego and stationing speakers to play in Tijuana, and so on. Shurgin also had a habit of collecting websites and deeming them "art" by his own award system, on WWWArt Award. Although most of the websites aren't any longer accessible, the introduction in the website and the taglines in the various link give visitors to the site a good idea of Shurgin's perspective on this new art. One should approach this medium of computers playfully, monopolizing on the availability of communication and image and their blurry art / non-art line to deem creations "art" upon personal persuasion.

To what extent is 386 DX art, except in the sense that Shurgin deems it so? It is an interesting identity game he plays with the audience by calling his personal productions those of a "band:" is he trying to make a statement on the interaction between man and computer as an exchange, like what humans have? Maybe. I don't know how far that line of thinking would take me. More immediately appealing is a statement the Mark Tribe website made about his work: that there is "evidence of the distinct Pop art sensibility" in his work. Hearing an early-video-game-esque version of Smells Like Teen Spirit is, when I think about it, somewhat reminiscent of Lichenstein's cartoon paintings: the subject matter is unavoidably familiar, but the kicker (if you will) in terms of its artistic merit is the substance behind the product, the process of creation. Making a comic book panel into a large oil painting blurs the lines between fine and low art, and transforming gritty Nirvana songs into silly mechanized sounds composed of complex codes writted for the operating system diminished the emphasis placed on a computer's left-brained information processing importance for its elusive right-brained creative potentials. Covering a Nirvana song in the same musical media as Kurt Cobain and his band chose would have significantly less thematic interest.

Thinking of our exploration of HTML, it seems amazing that the cold feel of writing codes for the computer can be translated into something that not only makes sense, but can be aesthetically pleasing and maybe (with enough experience) clever, ironic, or playful. My experience also made me realize how difficult the coding would have been to create these songs, matching tone to beat, synthesizing, and so on. I imagine it almost like weaving a blanket out of threads by hand: we take for granted the craftsmanship of blankets when we can buy them and come by them so easily. When presented in an art context, however, we become immediately aware of the concert of laying threads strand by strand, the intricacy, the care behind it. Perhaps that's what Shurgin is trying to do in the art aspect of 386 DX: to make us realize a common thing's complexity when placed in an art context.