While Isabel Saij claims that “State of Confusion” was not directly inspired by any particular artist1, the choice of subject matter is reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s ”Nude Descending a Staircase”. This painting was completed in 1912 and was first exhibited in New York in February of 1913. Like the title suggests, it was meant to depict a nude woman descending a staircase, a subject many traditional artists had visited. The painting was a take on a number of elements including chronophotographic images portraying movement, such as horses galloping and birds flying. One of the most well known chronophotographic artists was Eadweard Muybridge and his colleague Etienne-Jules Marey, whom Duchamp was influenced by. When Duchamp’s rendition of “Nude Descending a Staircase” was first unveiled, it caused a sensation throughout the viewers. Instead of a “sensual and time-honored” (Philadelphia Museum) subject, the audience was presented with an abstract and almost mechanical-like image. It is said that “Nude Descending a Staircase” would eventually become a symbol because of its combination of so many different avant-garde ideals of its time. The image united “the birth of cinema;…the Futurist’s depiction of movement; the chromophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey; and the redefinitions of time and space by scientists and philosophers” (Philadelphia Museum). According to Marcel Duchamp, “If a shadow is a two dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world, then the three-dimensional world as we know it is the projection of the four dimensional universe” (University of Vienna). The fourth dimension, time, was an elusive element to capture using traditional methods of art, but with the advent of Net art, characterizing time is no longer an obstacle.

In “Nude Descending a Staircase”, Marcel Duchamp attempts to capture the motion of a woman descending a staircase, resulting in a Cubist-Futurist image. The Futurist movement between 1909 and 1944 concentrated on capturing the energy, flow and dynamics of modern life. In their paintings, motion is the subject, as seen in “Dog on a Leash” by Giacomo Balla. However, motion can only truly be expressed through a progression of time and therefore, their efforts to capture time on a two dimensional canvas would remain unsuccessful. Time and motion would remain indefinable until recently, when computer technology progressed far enough for mankind to mathematically represent a realistic universe in cyberspace, time included.

Many Net artists have taken advantage of motion and time in their projects. Ed Burton creates three polygonal objects in “Three Forms” which move laterally within a set of boundaries. Viewers can interact with the piece by pulling on the vertices, manipulating the three forms to bounce and warp. By providing the programming script, Ed Burton has successfully captured time mathematically as the three forms will continue their back and forth motion endlessly so long as their encoding allows it. Similarly, John F. Simon began a Net art piece which began January 27, 1997. Titled “Every Icon”, the piece is a grid 32 units by 32 units. A Java applet progressively fills in each row by expressing the units as black or white. In order to completely fill the grid, it would take roughly several hundred trillion years.