Want a little ambient music with that URL? Next time you're streaming Internet radio while online, consider opening the webPlayer instead. Created by Pete Everett, webPlayer is an application that translates HTML data into musical compositions. You set this audio experience in motion by supplying it URLs. The webPlayer turns the HTML data into numbers via an ASCII-based filter. To generate music out of the numbers, webPlayer utilizes mathematical formulae
Think a piece of art totally sucks? Don't just verbally criticize it, physically destroy it! 'Art Crime: A Journal of Modern Iconoclasm' objectively documents 17 notable instances of art vandalism. Crimes range from teenagers attacking Serrano's "Piss Christ" with a hammer to conceptual artists making practical use of Duchamp's famed urinal. Some of the crimes actually prove more interesting than the conceptual works they deface (although I could have done without the projectile vomit on the Mondrian). --Curt Cloninger
Finding money to make art has always been tricky business. When the medium is new, materials are pricy, and granting institutions just getting up to speed--as with new media art--funding challenges can be even tougher. A floatational device for those drifting in the technoart/grant waters, Pamela Jennings' report, New Media Art/ New Funding Models, commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, investigates money sources for new media art internationally. Jennings interviewed 23 individual artists, organizers, directors, and foundation program officers. The final analysis includes definitions of new media art, innovative new business models for artists, profiles of artists and organizations, and recommendations for action. The report reads like a map, charting the new media art waters -- a helpful tool for technoartists.
Harvey Loves Harvey Takes online courtship to a new level. The site archives and hosts the ideas, projects, boredoms, and fascinations of Matthew Nash and Jason Dean, long distance friends for nine years. Underwriting the WWF spoofs, the album consisting of songs recorded solely via email, the mail art projects and theorizing, are the desires to sustain personal connection and to play with the structures and tools of the technology-obsessed. Who needs Match.com when you can keep up with Harvey Loves Harvey?
Since the low-bandwidth infancy of the web, creating pictures from ASCII text has been a hallmark of the net.art scene. Popularized by Vuk Cosic and jodi.org, such ASCII-art still surfaces in recent works by entropy8zuper and Eryk Salvaggio. Now you can join the lo-res ranks with the ASCII-O-Matic, online software that translates any jpeg image into ASCII-art. Just upload your image, and the ASCII-O-Matic transforms it into a text-only masterpiece. You can even copy the resultant "text code" for display on your own web site. Now who's retro? - Curt Cloninger
Would you rather that digital type was not anti-aliased (smoothed out) for better visual consumption? Are you tired of slick, vector graphics? Do you want some typographic realism back on your monitor? Then pixelhugger.com, an altar to the digital square, an homage to the building block of raster images, a respite from Flash, is the site for you. At PixelHugger you can play pixel games, like pixelInvaders, or download pixel desktops, icons, and fonts. There is even an application that converts pixel-based images to ASCII text. Check out the online gallery of uploaded images. If Mondrian were a digital artist, PixelHugger would be in his browser's bookmarks. --Brooke Singer
