these are links I collected from 1994 to about 1995 or 1996. So if they actually work, well, woah!
Eye Candy
One of the primary features of the web is its graphical capabilities. I tend to eschew graphics for a more straightforward textual presentation, but that don't mean I ain't got an eye for purty things. Here they are, candy for the eyes.Table o' Contents:
- Interactive Art
- People Putting their Art Online
- Dead People's Art Digitized
- Art Spaces - Online Galleries
- Scientific Art
- Comix/Comics/Cartoons
- General Online Art References
I have put a
next to all the art sites that are disturbing. I like art that jars me. Ain't that the point?
People Putting their Art Online
The Web is a great opportunity for artists, virtually unlimited gallery space. These are some people taking advantage of this new medium.
- Cyborganite and Sconnie Mister 3D has a three dimensional tattoo, and some other crosseyed weirdness up at his site.
- Explore the role of Lou the world over at Angel's Lair. Lou with Bill, Lou having sex in the water, Lou and Abe, Lou signing the constitution, Lou looking eagerly at a half naked woman, Lou rockin'. Lots and loads of Lou. Quite a habit! Some of these are skilled, some are utterly cheesy - the whole thing is absurd. Most of the images are no more than 30k, so they load quickly, but sometimes too small to make out.
- Matiu Carr
- Paint examinations of one woman's Appalachian roots makes for a good art web site. Check out Ancestry: Religion Death and Culture by Belinda Di Leo. This main page consists of a number of inline images that link to larger versions. The art is primarily object studies, paintings of objects meaningful to the painter. Fortunately, she is able to transmit an eerie, old world quality to the things she paints, capturing, I'm sure, the spirit of the world of her grandparents. A nice jaunt into history, and personal historical tribute, on a web that is usually disassociated from such things.
- A complete personal art show awaits you at Enfolding Perspectives by Simran Singh Gleason contains an eclectic mix of media manipulated by this sometime artist, sometime computer software developer. Features his ethereal work with photocollage, some of his poems, and personal information.
- Potsdam University has put up Through Lover's Eyes an online art exhibition by Linda Strauss. Her pictures, combinations of drawings and photographs are definitely haunting, with a definite ethereal quality to them.
- Artist David Lebow has put some of his digital art online. I like his digital stuff - it's jarring. Also online is some animation stuff, as well as some pretty traditionalist "fine art" stuff online - oils and etc.
Existing Artists Digitized
- Ron English
- Surrealist badass Rene Magritte is online. I love his stuff. Look at his pictures, read the titles, absorb the brilliance. The text of this site is in French (like the artist), I must warn you, but the pictures are language-less. My favourite piece of his, Le viol, or The rape, is a great example of this (at 590k from Europe, its a doozy).
- Master of the Moebius - the Maurits Cornelis MC Escher page took down all their stuff to avoid copyright trouble. In place of pictures, this page will point you towards other Escher exhibitions. (6/24/95)
- An exhibit of nature photographer extrordinaire Ansel Adams is online
- Entitled "pleasureware" the WebMuseum brings fine art online. Special exhibtions, like Cezanne, and Gothic Art, as well as French medieval art, a collection of well-known paintings by various artists (from the Louvre I believe), and a tour around the touristy parts of Paris. What used to be the Louvre online is now an independent venture, quite popular at that! Let's hear it for pleasureware!
Art Spaces
The web offers the potential for fantastic online galleries. These are some of the forerunners in that field.
- Bird Spirit Land
- Tons of artists and their online studios at www.art.net.
- This may be the most professional site I have seen to date. This Virtual Gallery has a number of high-quality photographs of a number of portfolios, framed by some nice buttons and frames.
- OTIS - the Operative Term is Stimulate - an online art community proving the beauty in collaborative art by using computers to bring creative minds together. Some of the first people to harness the power of the web to do cool art shit.
- There is a growing body of existing art that has been digitized and posted on the Web. Much of it is pedestrian, or simply covers popular, established, even cliched pieces of Western art. No so of the Horror, Fantasy, and the Grotesque in Art exhibit. Andrew Tong has digitized a number of disturbing pieces in the following subjects: fear, religion, paranoia, madness, torture, sex, death, war. Some of the artists I had heard of: William Blake, Edward Munch, H.R. Giger, but many of the pieces are by lesser knowns. The online exhibit covers a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, photographs, and photo manipulation.
- As it is with many great sites on the web, much of it is still under construction (specifically the sex section, sorry), but the remaining categories are filled with one to five truly disconcerting pictures. Among my favourites is a violent photo manipulation, a modern version of the Scream that sends chills down my spine. Tong definitely has an eye for the macbre, the jarring, and upsetting in art, and has put it online in a powerful package.
- Billed as "the newest and largest virtual art gallery on the Internet" (in late September), Access Art boasts a commercially viable roster - with artists who have appeared in Penthouse and Wired, no less. My favourite artist I know of on there is Jean-Giraud Moebius, an intriguing comic-esque artist with a flair for creating engaging futurescapes. When I went to his page, I found a passable bio, and a table of contents with eight or so of his works, nothing newer than 1992. Each of the pictures has its own page, with several viewing size options available, and an accompanying order form. As for the rest of the site, the styles with the most number of artists are "Glamour" and "Pin-Up" - need I say more?
- If you are looking for digital art, look no further than Pixel Pushers - the Gallery of Collectable Digital Fine Art. They have gotten many of the best and brightest in digital art to put their stuff online for viewing. Includes just one picture each from such digital luminaries as Kai Krause, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Diane Fenster. It don't move me.
- For a taste of something decidedly non-Western in both origin and subject matter, try from Ritual to Romance: Paintings Inspired by Bali. Some nice impressionistic colourful paintings here, dealing with subjects basic to the Balinese. Definitely no cyber-wank art here.
- There is beautiful art of the American Southwest up at the Pearl St. Online Gallery
- Kaleidospace offers a place for artists to show and sell their stuff online. There is not a whole lot of stuff here, but the structure is in place for a solid future of publishing artists.
- Out of San Francisco, the Gate Gallery has only one exhibit online as of September 9
Scientific Art
Art derived from computers, visualization, manipulation of natural forms, mathematics, etc.
- As much as the technicians try, there are still a lot of bugs on the Internet. There is a page coordinating entomology resources. There's a lot of stuff here - insect related resources, but my favourites are the photos - fun for eye popping detail of spectacular looking creatures, like the hercules beetle, a gypsy moth larva, and the spectacular coneheaded grasshopper. There's some creepy stuff online as well, imagine havin' one of these suckers on your arm! This page has everything entomological, from degree programs, to movies, so if it bugs you online, it should be here.
- Really Virtual!
- I'm diggin' the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center at GeorgiaTech. These people are doing incredible, cutting edge graphics, Virtual Reality, animation stuff. They have set up a project there to use Virtual Reality to treat Phobias, specifically fear of heights. This page has information about the program, and a 400k mpeg of a VR simulation of riding up in a glass elevator of a large hotel lobby atrium. Very cool. These people are also developing Surgery Simulation Interactive Environment - virtual surgery. Watch an animation of zooming around someone's gallbladder. They are also working on a Dynamic Simulation of Diving Humans which sports an couple of animations that are incredible renderings of a guy doing different dives and the resulting splashing water. Look for cool reality-based VR stuff at their site.
- There's a great visual list of computer graphics sites with icons that give you hints as to what lies on the other end of the links. A lot of visualization stuff here.
- The Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota has a trove of mathematical visualization stuff online. The Picture Archive Visual Index, a document with megahuge inline mapped images, allows you to inspect their online offerings visually.
- Using computers to generate surreal art is the product of the virtual photography of (Art)^n Laboratory (pronounced Art to the enth). If you watched Liquid TV on MTV, their stuff is that truly twisted piece where that guy's eyes and ears are mounted on whisks as he is bombarded by television noise.
- Fractal animations - Howard Rheingold says "Visual proof that the universe is more like a mind than a machine."
- The Internet resource center from the Fractal Images Company, FractalNet is now online with fractal advertisers, fractal icons, fractal museums, fractal databases, and fractals.
- The MATLAB Gallery has some cool renderings of three-dimensional manifolds, Kleinian groups, and hyperbolic geometry. Math stuff - the beauty of pure forms.
Comix/Comics/Cartoons
- Activists about teenagers with causes.
- There is a page that is devoted solely to coverage of Marvel's mega-popular characters, Mutants. Their are a slew of Mutant titles: New Mutants, Excalibur, X-Factor, but this site focuses primarily on the X-men, a personal favourite of mine. When I was about 13, I began collecting X-Men comics. Great stories, substantive characters, intruiging storylines, identification with the outsider, adult themes, this comic had it all, ahead of its time. Other comic books have simply been catching up since. I have all the issues from 125 to 210, someday that will put my kid through college.
- Marvel comics company is distributing a comic, Generation X over this FTP site. Part of the future of comic book distribution?
- For some comic-esque psychedelic art, check out Christopher Y. Blosser Online Gallery
- Comix online - featuring single panels by many of the greats of the modern alternative comix scene (comix are to comics what ezines are to magazines), such as Will Eisner and Jaime Hernandez
- Broadcasting out of Reed College in Oregon, the page called simply Comics will provide you with links to just that. This guy keeps track of all the comics, comic archives, and comic related materials out on the web.
- Samples of different types of Comic Art featuring cover art and pics from different periods of comic art
- The WELL presents the online, month old version of the cartoon This Modern World
- Something I've found to be a real UbiquiLink, Doctor Fun's posted daily cartoon (or try just a thumbnail sketch of the daily cartoon)
- More net.humour is to be found at NetBoy, by Stafford Huyler. These black and white stick figures poke fun at the net.world through their net related misadventures.
General Art References
- FineArt Forum Directory of Art Related Web Resources - a useful, comprehensive guide to art online and online art
- Australian National University's absolutely huge Art History ArtServe
- Who knows what awaits you at Rob's Multimedia Lab? Well, I finally do. A huge online multimedia dumping ground - why there's even a .gif of Colonel Hiram Sanders (of KFC fame)! If you are looking for a sound, or a .gif, or an Mpeg that you have reason to believe would be on the net, check here. Guaranteed you'll find somethin' for your trouble.
- Some guy at University of California Santa Cruz has collected together Thant's Animations Index which has links and descriptions to everything moving and pictorial out there on the web. From the Married with Children page (with mpegs) to NASA's F-16 information server, he's assembled over a hundred and ten very moving sites.
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Links from the Underground
This page and all its contents Copyright 1994, 1995 Justin Hall. All rights reserved. Contact me with any questions you might think of, permissions you might want, or problems you may have.
Yer Mama Net Productions / Justin Hall / <justin@cyborgasmic.com>