I briefly made my way by On and Off over at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery tonight (would be better if the url for this exhibition were not the homepage of the gallery as we’ll lose the link to the show’s content in the future).

Actually, I liked the show and wanted to stay longer but was not feeling well.

The online newspaper series by Olia Lialina and Dragan Esperschied was an interesting idea – take real newspapers, digitize them and run animated characters ontop of the digital newspaper.   The works are satisfying to look at if you don’t ask anything more than what you see.

My problem with Online Newspapers are not how it’s done but the lack of a clear relationship between the animated figures and the theme of the  newspaper behind it.   Sure, the newspaper above is in Chinese (I think – or is it Japanese – I can’t tell since the lettering is horizontal and vertical).  At best, the animated oriental fighting figures are boxing with the appliances and lettering of the newspaper – so what? 

Here is a good idea that does not go anywhere.   In fact, my idea of painting my life as a homepage would be perfect for an approach like the Online Newspaper – this pair of artists had good ideas but don’t know where to go with it.

Lisa Jevbratt’s Informe Imager is an interesting idea too …. though the abstraction might dilute the idea.  I think Lisa’s idea is to deplict a telnet session or web traffic that happens at a specific moment in time as a printout.  

 

The work itself is much better in person than online (strange that I say it since the painting deplicts an online experience – like the handshaking telnet / tcpip protocol) as the color printout has textures missing from the online picture.

Same problem – this printout is a good idea, but stop and think about it for a second.  Take any digital image and blow it up – limit the color and you get a image much like what’s above.  So what’s the relationship between the squares and what she’s deplicting …nothing – except in her title of the work.

I’d be the first one to say this work is great if the artist did their homework a little better and made the pictorial elements do something more than just sit there.  For example, if your going to paint TCPIP telnet session happening on a website – do something to show “handshaking” and make the colors connect somehow with something meaningful on the site – use the composition and structure of the 2D printout to reinforce a real computer experience that happened in a moment of time.  The artist did not do that – both did not do that – this one just illustrated a telnet session and the other one just put a newspaper on a flat panal screen and ran some figures over it – both totally missed the greater opportunities their work afford them.

My point – if your going to use the computer and internet – don’t just reference the internet, as the other artist who listed all their MySpace “Friends” on a projected movie on one of the walls, do the internet in your work – be the internet.

My overall impression -good ideas that were wasted.  There are so many things you could do with the Online Newspaper idea – way beyond what was done – same with the rest of the work – they actually played it safe – this show could have been a 100% better if the artists just went a bit futher – used more imagination, more daring. 

What would have been more daring …… create your own network in the gallery where the show is taking place (no big deal) and make the online newspapers take snapshots of the visitors and have them overlayed over the digitized newspapers….how’s that for something more interesting?   Or how about taking the printout of a telnet session (or whatever it was) and create some subtle overlays that connect the website with the printout…again…be the Internet.

These artists played it safe, like I said, settling for pretty pictures when they could have actually done something meaningful.  Let’s hope they improve the ideas as there’s a lot of unrealized potential here.