EYES ON CULTURE #015
Discover more from The Lost i
Shop-Art
EYES ON: Jonas Lund’s Paintshop
“The Paintshop is a real-time collaborative painting tool offering you the possibility to sell your artworks and buy great pieces of art for very competitive prices.”
A conceptual art project with an extraordinarily fun and interactive side, Lund’s project offers a common digital canvas for everyone to use. At any point, a painter can sign the communal canvas, selling it as their own on the marketplace. An extremely well-oiled machine, the project takes the digital creations, prints them on a real canvas and then sells them for a price deduced by the Paintshop Rank™ algorithm.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
The Paintshop is a tool that enlists us all in the factory-like production of a commercial art world. As a closed, self-sufficient system that supplies everything from the creation tools to the buyers — the shop is able to set its own abstract rules for how things work, and so how it acquires it 50% commission. With price points dictated by an illusive algorithm and artistic ownership claimed by anyone at any time, The Paintshop’s entire creative economy is very randomly propped up. Work is compensated in nonsensical ways.
And so, with comical marketplace filters like “quality”, the project, in its widest sense, makes clever fun of how we produce and evaluate works of art in the real world.
Love on the Internet
EYES ON: Group Z’s LOVE
In Rhizome’s endlessly engrossing Net Art Anthology, you can find Group Z’s LOVE — a project consisting of HTML files all exploring the theme of love.
Created by Michaël Samyn (the one man show behind the “collective” Group Z), the work stitches images, texts and GIFs into a maze-like experience of love for the Netscape 2 browser. Small red arrows on the corners of the browser allow users to navigate through the slides in a semi-random configuration, giving different story arrangements each time, that much like love, either repeat themselves or come to an end.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
Outside of the weirdly attractive qualities of its janky 90’s web aesthetics, there’s something interesting about LOVE’s browser architecture, formulated to give an experience of the many faces of love. In experiencing the different slides in different orders, each time, images find different contexts just as symbols take on different meanings. In gamifying how we move through the slides of LOVE, we are investigating how we interpret the crudest, packaged images of love on the internet.
As Samyn says, “in some places, love is this intimate thing you share with another person by candlelight, and then in other cases, the candle might be used for whole other purposes, like in de Sade or something.”
Inflated Design
EYES ON: The Humble Masterpieces exhibition in Second Life by Luca Lisci
Jaded by their ubiquitous use, objects like the pencil, the paperclip and the Post-it Note are not properly appreciated as design objects. They are excluded from our mind’s sphere of high design. In 2004, the MoMA put on an exhibition titled Humble Masterpieces which reframed some of these everyday objects as the wonders in design that they are. Snapping us out of the everyday, it encouraged a fresh look on the old by presenting these objects with an emphasis on the design qualities that made them so popular in the first place.
Alongside this exhibition popped up a virtual sister exhibition in the online world of Second Life. With identical way-finding signs from branding to font, the virtual exhibition worked under the same principles as the real one — it too aimed to reveal the extraordinary side of our everyday objects.
But for some reason there’s something going on in the virtual exhibit that’s maybe more interesting than the physical — something weird, something funny, that’s really hard to pinpoint.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
In the Second Life exhibition, which is set in a James Bond-esque modern building in the middle of the ocean, the objects are blown up to a ceiling height. Escaping their glass cases, the objects stand tall. Maybe it’s the dramatic setting, maybe it’s the grand scale, but in the virtual, this exhibit becomes comical.
It’s a funny thing to do to create a digital version of an exhibition which is looking to shed light on the very physical design elements of useful objects. It’s destined to be silly. The goal it sets out for itself is almost absurd.
It’s like if the MoMA curated an exhibition on object-design but instead of choosing to present the selected objects, they replaced them with balloon animals of the objects, inflating every design element beyond recognition.