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.
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