391.org is an on-line magazine styled on dada principles
first published in the year 2000. 391 owes its origins
to the physical periodical 391 "first published
by the poet/artist Francis Picabia in 1917 and was a
bridge between the Zurich Dadaists, French Surrealists,
Marcel Duchamp and others" ("391:information").
391.org, collaborators and contributors are able, unlike
their earlier predecessors, to connect through new media
technologies and explore current and archived works
through the online platform.
Dada was an international art and anti-art revolution
that included both visual and performing artists. The
movement took rook in the Cabaret Voltaire, Switzerland
in 1916 where young people sought for independence and
protested against World War I and "the tools of
western enlightenment - rationality and the belief in
technological progress" (Joseph). Dada seemed as
"an artistic revolt against art" where for
example, in 1917, Marcel Duchamp "[put] a moustache
and beard in black crayon on a colored reproduction
of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa" ("Dada"),
creating a shock that public viewers did not appreciate.
Although Dada had no formal aesthetic, Hans Richter,
one of the early Dadaist at the turn of the century
described it as consisting of the following elements:
simultaneous poetry, manifestos, abstract painting,
collage/photomontage, chance, carbaret/exhibitions,
use of the audience, and collaboration (Richter). In
this instance, the artists of 391.org find that through
the delivery of new media programming, interactivity,
kineticism, and dimensionality, they too are able to
use the internet to explore the expression of of Dada
some eighty years later. They termed the extension of
Dada into new media as MADA (MultimediA-DAda). In the
article "Looking for Art in all the Wrong Places",
the author Jon Ippolito suggests that with the current
overlap of technology into the field of creativity,
we are experiencing "a seismic instability along
the edge between art and non-art". Perhaps these
ruptures further paralleled the relationship of Dadaism
to the Internet both belonging to art and anti art at
the same time, both being misunderstood in their day.
The Dada movement may parallel the net's structure
but the related movements too , like Constructivism,
Surrealism, and Futurism, also meet with MADA's mandates
and ideologies.
In the piece "Access Points", the concept
artist and editor, "Hooshla Fox" of 391.org,
sees that "in the digital age production is cheap
and easy. The bottleneck is not so much in recording
an album or printing a book, as it is getting your album
or book 'out there'" (Babel). The opportunity to
work together with little overhead led Hooshla, Babel
- contributor and collaborator of 391.org- and other
artists to contribute to the proposed work. The price
of assemble of different artworks, as noted in the title
of the work, also represent of different notions of
"access points" in society and those that
control these access points of information. An access
point, as noted by Babel, is the telephone company that
controls a city's communication of a city and can be
described to its operation:
On September 11th, the phone companies limited
the number of circuits available that people could use
to contact people in New York so that emergency workers
would have reliable communication. In that situation,
the action was justified, but it demonstrates the unbelievable
power of the person who flipped the switch to cut one
of the world's biggest cities off from the outside world.
(Babel)
This idea of representing critical access points via
the net artwork "Access Points", by draws
the viewers' attention to each point of and also mirrors
the concepts and ideologies of both Dada and MADA.
When an audience arrives at this net art piece, a map
is placed at the viewer's disposal, allowing the viewer
to locate himself/herself in the city through the function
of links on the map. The map itself possesses an amateur
aesthetic, like images created in MS Paint. The map
is enhanced with pop-up logos and signs which appear
when the cursor is passed on top of the buildings on
the map. Different links link to different critical
points of access composed by images, texts, and sounds,
some leading to a dead end, some sending the viewer
through a loop. All critical access points are reliant
on user interactivity. The viewer can reach three other
alternative maps each appearing similar to the first
map, however the latter consists of more links and other
access points, which further define the true need to
fully comprehend one's space.
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