July 2010

Brian Droitcour's Rhizome article about Jstchillin.org provides some grist for Duncan Alexander's broad generalizations regarding two types of net artists.

Alexander's argument in sketch form:

Camp 1: "The net is their vehicle for dissemination, and they stand out from the online flow"; "design heavy" pages that look like art pages and are a final destination for the surfer (I added the non-quoted part). Examples: Computers Club, Oliver Laric

Camp 2: "This camp makes art for the net on the net, and blends in to the net-social fabric." Examples: Various Dumpers and Tumblrers

To the extent Droitcour describes Jstchillin as having a "top-down organization and meticulous calendar" that sounds like Camp 1. To the extent Droitcour describes Nasty Nets and dump.fm as "touching the issue of chill time by adapting its form" that sounds like Camp 2.

Good summation of various internet-aesthetic projects and their relation to "chill time," written by Brian Droitcour on Rhizome.org.

Discussed in the article is Guthrie Lonergan's page for jstchillin.org called 3D Warehouse. As Droitcour describes it, it's

a collection of Google Sketchup drawings of objects seen in dreams, accompanied by verbal accounts of those dreams. The sharing of dreams is an odd kind of small talk, as meaningless as discussions of weather but more intimate, something you'd only do with a close friend. But the Google Sketchup users in Lonergan's collection put their dreams out there for anyone. The discomfort you feel from this distortion of social convention is reflected in the images, which -- for all the modeling skills of the artists who drew them -- are awkward and cartoonish, thin shadows of a stranger's dreams.

That said, many of the drawings are quite seductive, especially with the full screen space Lonergan allots to them. Some have the feel of De Chirico's lonely, impossible plazas, made even lonelier by the clean, sterile outlines of the Sketchup program. These are the dreams of the modern techno-state. An especially eerie one (about halfway down this page) shows crab creatures surfacing in a vast swimming pool, with the innocuous caption:

I had a weird dream a couple nights ago that there were lobsters and crabs (by Wario Ware Inc.) inside the pool! HELP ME! lol