Ben Fino-Radin, the Victor Frankenstein of internet art, has just given 20,000 volts to another zombie artwork.
Petra Cortright's VVebcam was removed from YouTube because of her use of spam tags as art.
That's unfortunate because the spam was the least interesting aspect of the work.
(In 2007, before YouTube was bought by Google, it was funny to ironically draw traffic to your post through the use of sexual and other hot-button words. That landscape--the context of the artwork--has changed utterly, and Google's removal of the piece now validates it as a bit of 2007 idealism in need of cleaning up in the new corporate environment where color coded badges for workers are the norm.)
Who'd have guessed this YouTube-based artwork would be "taught in academic curricula" when I linked to it in Mar 2007. That post and a discussion four days later with Paddy Johnson probably doomed this guerrilla effort to a future of respectability but I have no regrets.
Trying to remake a piece that relies on "defaults" (YouTube + dancing webcam graphics that can still be seen in this Make magazine video--still on YouTube) isn't too exciting, though. Better if Fino-Radin just did a little homework, beyond looking at a Vice magazine interview from earlier this year, to document the piece through its contemporaneous accounts on the web. That's what we're doing here.