Jody Zellen, Ghost City (2002) detail. Courtesy of the artist.
Online Exhibition
Maya Kalogera, Valery Grancher, Mark Tribe, and Jody Zellen
Wednesday, 18 Sep 2002 to Friday, 01 Nov 2002
Opening Reception: Thursday, Sep 19, 6-8 pm
Introduction
Day Jobs explores the relationship between international net art and its social and economic context through case studies of individual net artists' day jobs in relation to their art. Rather than take the more common art-historical or museological approach, this exhibition examines the conditions of practice as a way into a genre. In contrast to traditional media artists, digital media artists have less of an economic base in art sales, and often work in the same digital media by day for income as well as by night as an artist. This situates digital artists between art and a relatively new industry, as well as between their eerily similar day and night activities, creating a kind of interference pattern that is largely unexplored. This pattern is reflected in the art works, but also, just as interestingly, in the job-related projects of these daytime curators, programmers, and web-designers -- often quite consciously. Here we take the opportunity to peek behind the scenes and reveal how themes, rebellions, or even subconscious aesthetic decisions about information architecture or programming may seep between an artist's day and night lives. Rather than insist on exhibiting exclusive and "new" net art, here we bypass the hypermedia bias that something should be seen only once, re-examining pre-existing net art projects in a fresh context alongside these artists' other work. In this way, we illuminate not only these artists work in new ways, but also begin to shed light on the influences and conditions in which digital media art is created. This exhibition will look at a few of the more interesting cases from around the world and line up the art next to the day job project as a way of uncovering how these new social, intellectual, or economic patterns are influencing our art and the rest of our lives.
Richard Rinehart, NetWork Curator
August, 2002
Maya Kalogera
ProjectsDay: PhotoPaul http://www.dinosmaps.com/galleries/photopaul
Night: Addiction http://www.wowm.org/addiction/
"Once upon a time there was a girl who worked as web designer" (from Addiction). In Maya Kalogera's net artwork Addiction you are invited to follow the unfolding week in the life of a web designer as it undulates between soothing and crazed. Playful deep blue underwater imagery and easy listening music suggest both the escapist fantasies of a cubicle worker as well as a hint of background music for the home or office. Maya's commercial work as presented in PhotoPaul has obvious visual and thematic parallels to Addiction, and beyond these observable similarities is a shared sense of intimacy produced perhaps by the solitary subject/protagonist or the sense of escape suggested by the maritime themes in each.
-- Richard Rinehart
Artist Statement
Addiction is one of my net pieces which is the most coherent (the story revolves around one working week of one young web designer), yet it opens many external links to it. Piece itself is made that way that if you open links in order as days go by, day by day, you should feel the frenzy of the working in one not always friendly environment where the deadlines are the sacred rule, and nothing else matters, and where the lot of imagination is needed. As for an artist, web design is for me just one of the way to earn the financial means...definitely not the only one. But at the same time it is, with its connection to net art, the very challenging one. And I can't quite distinctively divide those two areas: night and day jobs. The more code I learn for my net art, the more I want to apply them in my day jobs. The more I apply them, the more new ones I want to learn. It's kind of full time job for both brain hemispheres: after working for some time on a difficult problem I can suddenly and unexpectedly find solution to it when I relax myself with playing with scripts for my net art work. An experimental thought creates an answer. And that's what really is the interference pattern between two kinds of jobs: the imagination. And yet, although it is the net art work, Addiction is my personal, very handy assortment of scripts and code which I have used the most frequently in my day job. -- Maya Kalogera
Maya Kalogera is an interdisciplinary artist working in the fields of net art, painting, and installation. She is the creator of Addiction (2002), an intimate cluster of pages featuring the things she misses most in the wake of the digital age. The dreamlike atmosphere, underwater imagery, and oceanic color palette of this piece carry over into many of her job-related projects including PhotoPaul, a web site she designed for a commercial photographer. Her many exhibitions include Le Voyage Imaginaire (2002) at Javamuseum.org and 21st Suffragettes (2002) at Fish Tank in New York. She received her MA from Architecture University in Zagreb, Croatia, and currently works internationally as an independent web designer.
Valery Grancher
ProjectsDay: Roland Barthes au College de France http://212.180.64.237/
Night: 24h00 http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/24h00/index.html
Valery Grancher's net artwork 24h00 makes a return from this curator's own day job when, in 1999, I helped him implement this project at the UC Berkeley Art Museum in my role as digital media director there. This project is a collaboration between the artist and college art students and bridges the space between performance and net art. Hidden from many viewers, however, was a performance equally as fascinating as the project itself. That performance took place when Grancher sold this work to the Berkeley Art Museum and developed his first-of-a-kind contract for selling net art. This contract and sale helped qualify the artist for his current position at a large French publisher, where he is in charge of acquisition and development of internet projects. Cementing the seamless continuity of what can only be seen as Valery's ongoing career/performance/life, he has carried many of the same sensibilities from 24h00 into a project for his employer to create a web resource around the archive of Roland Barthes, both projects structured around ideas of temporality and community.
-- Rick Rinehart
Artist Statement
When I produced 24h00 with Rick Rinehart at the Berkeley Art Museum I
was at the same time starting a project dedicated to electronic publishing in one of the most important and prestigious publishing companies in France, Editions du Seuil. In this company, as the Hypermedia project manager, I started to think about a platform and a way to publish online the lectures delivered by Roland Barthes at the College de France from 1976 to 1980. Working with sound archives and manuscripts I got the opportunity to know better Roland Barthes through this production and document -- especially regarding the concept of 'idiorythmie', or 'acédia'. These concepts focus on the relationships among monks in Athos Mount in Greece, which is a very small community dealing with same time and space; they are isolated within. 24h00 defines portraiture in a new way, as the relationships between 24 persons during the same day at the same place. The point I gather from Barthes' documents is a feeling about what may happen between new media and the elementary behavior regarding humans as exemplified by the monks. This is exactly the focus of 24h00.
-- Valery Grancher
Valery Grancher's performance-based net artwork explores synthetic digital realities and related realms. His net art piece 24h00 (1999) addresses temporality and community concepts also present in his various job-related Internet projects. He has exhibited works worldwide including Multiple Personalities (2001) at Haines Gallery in San Francisco and Webpaintings (2002) at Incognito in Paris. Grancher lives in Paris, France.
Mark Tribe
ProjectsDay: Rhizome.org http://www.rhizome.org
Night: Rhizome.org http://www.rhizome.org
Mark Tribe's art work featured in this exhibition can be seen as performance as much as media art. Rhizome.org is an online community that Mark describes as "social sculpture" in the tradition of Bueys. Here, product is not as important as process, though it would be a disservice to abstract Rhizome.org to the level of a conceptual art prank when, in fact, it has had a very real effect on the social lives of many new media artists and offers many practical services. This close-knit integration of a conceptual social work combined, inextricably, with practical real-world services is exemplary of how new media artists are sometimes able to play and work in the same media. Since media is the built environment that we now live in full-time (as opposed to a weekend leisure destination), artists find it possible to move into the "main house" -- sometimes without anyone noticing them sneak in.
-- Richard Rinehart
Artist Statement
In the 1970s Joseph Beuys used the term social sculpture to describe a kind of participatory art work in which speech and ideas are raw materials in creating a transformative social space. Beuys' notion of art as a social practice--even more radically expansive than Alan Kaprow's interest in blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life--remains largely a theoretical construct, a goal many artists strive for but rarely attain. It is nonetheless a useful lens through which to look at things...
In 1996 I was living in Berlin, Germany. I had a day job as a web designer and was making net art in my spare time. Those were heady days and Berlin was teeming with people like me--young artists who were fascinated by the Internet and its potential to liberate art from the bounds of real space and the old school institutions that existed there. I also knew from my trips to Ars Electronica and other new media art festivals that we were not alone: the net art meme had replicated globally. So I started an email list for the discussion of new media art and called it Rhizome, a term Deleuze and Guattari use to describe horizontally distributed, non-hierarchical networks. The list grew quickly, and soon took on a life of its own. Running Rhizome became my day job, my night job, my only job.
Today, Rhizome.org is a nonprofit organization based in New York City. Through our web site, email lists, commissioning program and events, we support the creation, presentation, discussion and preservation of new media art. We have five people on staff and 15,000 members in 118 countries. We get funding from various private foundations and government agencies and from hundreds of individuals around the world. Although writing grants and doing budgets doesn't feel like art making, I have come increasingly to see Rhizome.org as a social sculpture and the work I do there as art work.
-- Mark Tribe
Mark Tribe is an artist and curator whose interests lie at the intersection of emerging technologies and contemporary art. He is founder and executive director of Rhizome.org, a New York-based online platform for the international new media art community. Unlike the other featured artists, there is no delineation between his day job and art practice, as Rhizome.org is both a social sculpture and a non-profit community space, and almost every "job-related" decision about the site is also an artistic one.
Jody Zellen
ProjectsDay: Alt-X Press E-Books http://www.altx.com/ebooks/
Night: Ghost City http://ghostcity.com/roll/index.html
Jody Zellen's work Ghost City shares some obvious visual elements with many of her commercial web design projects. Perhaps this is the modern day equivalent of stealing pens and paper clips from the office supply cabinet for home, but more important than the act of efficiency is the act of appropriation, or the suggestion that more than graphics are being transposed between Jody's work and art. Perhaps elements of meaning are created in these conscious choices as well. If one looks under the surface, bits of code are also re-used in Jody's day and nighttime activities. Her job acts as a laboratory for her art, and clearly vice versa. Ghost City itself evokes an urban commuters dream-state, personal poetry takes the form of office towers in this site as you explore the city.
-- Richard Rinehart
Artist Statement
In my web work I am trying to expand the boundaries of what is possible. In My personal work, work for clients, and teaching I gravitate toward the experimental, nonlinear and more obtuse aspects of web design. Often what I learn or do, while working for a client is later applied to an avenue in Ghost City. Ghost City functions as an archive of my entire personal web projects. Each of the animated squares on the anonymous home page (no where on the site does it clearly say who made it or provide contact information) takes you down a different path. Some squares take you to hyper linked narratives, others to Flash animations, and some trigger a bombardment of windows. While my commercial work is less invasive, I am still interested in exploring unconventional navigation and creating graphically complex web pages.
The use of the grid is apparent in both my personal and commercial work. Stylistically and conceptually the work is similar the use of roll-overs, horizontal rather than vertical scrolling and as much movement as possible. Luckily, I have been able to work with clients who are looking for image rather than text based web sites. I find making work for the web a challenge because the options are so limited. I constantly search for technologies and new ways of conveying information on the screen, eager to apply what I find to my art as well as to my day job.
-- Jody Zellen
Jody Zellen's net artwork Ghost City (2002) is a fast paced, ever changing, poetic meditation on urban space. It was featured in the XXV Bienal de Sao Paulo and at the Urban Festval in Zagreb, Croatia in 2002. Since 1997 it has been presented in numerous international festivals and exhibitions. Based in Los Angeles, Zellen works as an independent web designer and teacher and has taught at UCLA, among other institutions. She is currently an assis tant professor a Cal Poly, Pomona. Zellen has had numerous exhibitions at venues worldwide including recent solo shows at Suzanne Veilmetter, Los Angeles Projects; Sesnon Gallery, University of Calfornia Santa Cruz (2002); Deep River, Los Angeles; and The Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum, San Bernardino (2001). She received her MFA from the California Institute for the Arts.
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