Red pixels are real

In a medium in which everything is a referent, the remix has become an essential component of net art. And while this totally rule-based, ultimately dynamic work is certainly "of net," it is also undeniably "of several years ago." I do not mean to say that age is an important factor when considering web-based art, as the concept of the "cutting-edge" has lead to more haphazard, ill-executed and technology-lead vapidity than the motion tween. I mean to state that the network-focused site as remix is a navel-gazing relic of those early, heady days of technognstic utopia. And while the Net.Art remix certainly does not define all of net and web art, it is emblematic of the genre of web-based art that focuses so intensely inwards that it neglects its own context and constructs. Stating proudly that it recontextualizes accepted symbols, meanings, and perspectives of our world, it forgets that it does this because that is what its medium does best. This is analogous to the ruler proclaiming proudly that it measures, and in the process ignoring what it is measuring.

I introduce the Net.Art remix because it is a good example of the decadence of much web-based art that continues to focus on early and obvious constructions of web and net. I introduce the Net.Art remix because it is the perfect plane against which to explore a simpler, more self-contained notion of a web art object: an easier icon of the moment. I am looking for something that scratches at the surface of the medium itself, a work that does not simply use the medium but questions it. The computer-crashing works of JODI and Alex Mclean certainly questioned the tools we use to view these new media, but seem to end at self-destruction rather than truly bridging to their potential as subversion.

So, let me get to the point. This is it. This is the moment, the single violent act that cuts through all of the self-deprecating self-referential words of the web. This is what cuts through the fact that the medium is not the message. Oh no, we're much more shallow than that. The message is the tools we have constructed to view the medium, the constructs we created in its infancy which limit our vision and leave us treating the internet as if it had something to do with a browser.

So, Rafael Rozendaal reminds us to start over, to pare it down to the browser window, that canvas we've forgotten is there, and then kill it. This piece is The Urinal of the web is so many ways.

In this piece, the interface is the aesthetic experience, is the interactive narrative. It is a pure and simple web object: a blank screen that bleeds when the interactor slashes at it with the mouse. If the viewer does not slash, the work does not bleed. In another sense, it does not exist until it bleeds; the interaction, the essential component to its fulfillment of purpose, is a necessarily destructive act. It is user-actuated obviously and immediately. It does nothing unless the user demands it, and that demand is a masochism of sorts. Yet, it displays no emotions, it gives no hints as to its purpose, and a click to the refresh returns us to the clean, white canvas.

It does not have to rely on narrative devices from other media, on words or explanations, nor does it seek its meaning through missapropriations from the Greater Net. This work is a beacon because it has successfully unified interface, interaction, narrative and purpose into a simple, natural web act, rendering the drag as an attack.

Of course, it is, much like Duchamp's Urinal, a gimmick. And after having perused the artists' other web works, I doubt that its significance is intended.

Nonetheless, I feel it is an important web work because of the issues it unwittingly addresses: that the browser window is a "material" we take for granted. It is an essential deconstruction achieved in a simple and experiential manner, and it signifies succinctly an important aspect of a particular movement in web-based art: the Neen.

"Because the Internet is not just another 'media', as the Old Media insists, but a 'space', similar to the American Continent immediately after it was discovered - anything that can be found on the Web, has a physical presence...

'Contemporary Art', the art of the past century, was based mostly on the following principle: 'if you put something in an empty room, it seems strange and significant'... But after 80 years of different combinations for any kind of objects inside the hopelessly empty spaces of our art institutions, very little seems really interesting. Even if the gallery is left empty, the public will search for the label with the name of the artist who did the "work" and it will be satisfied in one way or another.

Balloons, beds, chickens. Real Space has lost its emptiness.

But in the Internet, where space is created by software and random imagination, unpredictable objects can still be invented.

These pieces, which are not considered 'art' yet, they will become art later."

• Miltos Manetas, The Loop of Neen

While I do not share Miltos' lack of enthusiasm for the contemporary art object - I am regularly surprised by what I find in galleries' white walls - this Neen view of web sites as objects extends neatly my thesis of browser as material, and manages to encourage expressive growth within a seemingly retrograde shell. In other words, although tethering the website art object to real space notions of place and thing may initially strike one as stifling and innapropriate, by untangling the web object from the now-hackneyed netspace notions of virtuality (as opposed to reality) and necessary interconnectedness, the web art object if in fact freed. In viewing the web art object as an object in a space rather than focusing on its accepted web-otherness, we free that web art object from our preconceived notions of "web" or "net," and allow it to explore new contexts which Manetas claims the real space object can no longer attain because of its familiarity. By treating the web art object as real we can begin to examine what is unique in this "real" context.

When we accept that recontextualization is an almost inevitable aspect of the searchable recombinable matrix that is the internet, focusing on the remix or network becomes reiterating the obvious. By accepting that red pixels are real, we can become aware of the virtual conceits and materials that we tend to take for granted when experiencing web art works, and can experience web art objects in their own right as they actually exist in a world that is real and tangible and no more divorced from reality than the telephone, microphone or binocular.

Rafael Rozendaal, by scraping the web art object down to its canvas and then cutting through it, is showing us the material we forgot was there, the frame we took for granted, the object that is real and a part of our world.

Actually, he is probably just telling us that flash is cool and he is clever, but anyway, thats not what I have decided to hear.

Other Writing at http://www.grographics.com/writings/