"Head For The Stoic," wood,veneer, jeans, concrete, streamed video loop "emo blowjob" 2009

Ben Schumacher creates art in many traditional and non tradition forms, whether it be through drawings or exploring new ways to conceptualize and present art via and about the internet with an ironic sense of humor that could only have been developed by long hours mulling over the way we use and relate to the tools specific to our cyberspace generation. Ahh, the day I’m tired of it is the day I’m dead!

"Transform>Skew,"

"untitled,"

"Home Computer 2,"

"Immaterial Labour 2,"

In self-described “experientialist” artist Lee Walton’s most recent project (though on his Vimeo, it seems the last upload was 9 months ago…), he will perform what his Friends on facebook are doing. This online project will only be viewable to those listed as Friends on the web site. The man is hilarious and ridiculously clever- I’ve added him as a friend, so should you!

Founded by artist Ryder Ripps, Internet Archaeology is a project that “seeks to explore, recover, archive and showcase the graphic artifacts found within earlier Internet Culture.” It’s essentially a repository of imagery from old Geocities and Angelfire sites, including a full few mirrors of some old homepages. This is an important service because, as their mission statement points out, Yahoo will be taking down Geocities in October 2009. I miss the pre-Web 2.0 internet!

The embedded video above comes from the latest project by Montreal-based media artist Jon Rafman. Kool-Aid Man in Second Life offers to give Internet users free guided tours of Second Life by Rafman’s avatar, the Kool-Aid Man. The aforementioned video is a promotional video showing scenes of the tour (by the way, apparently some of this may not be NSFW, though I watched the first minute or two and didn’t really notice anything bad). The subtlety of the video, and the entire project, is what makes it so engaging. There are all sorts of questions raised here: about the role of crafted pop culture icons in the new era of user generated content, about the nature of scenic beauty, about our interaction with kitsch. Someone take the tour and let us know how it is!

PS: Check out this essay Rafman wrote on Google Street View. Very compelling stuff.

Andreas Pihlström is an extremely talented Swedish designer working in the arenas of graphic design, typography, web, and interactive work. You might know him as the creator of Dropular (pictured above), an extremely slick and well engineered image sharing and tagging website. I assumed based on these credentials he was more of a coder than a designer, but really he is equally strong in both disciplines, as you can see after the jump.

PS: Mr. Pihlström, if you read this, can I get a dropular invite? Please?

"Spring is colder than winter"

Anton Gerasimenko‘s single paged web-works uses functionalities and traits of the internet browser in surprising ways. He turns the aesthetically mundane objects which are essential to any sort of online activity, tool bars and radio buttons, into subjects of these small sites. Each page has few to no links- when there are links, they transform the screen into a maze of pop ups, and when there are none the window seems to become a movie screen.

"Waterfall"

"Button Wrap"

"The Webweb"

(Via Rhizome)

"Goals"

Daniel Everett embodies the current technological zeitgeist shared by post dot-com kids, the kids of the dot-com kids, and the relationship we have to our interconnectivity (the internet). His work is jaded, earnest, and self mocking at the same time.

"Journal 2008"

307 page document presenting my entire web history from 2008.

"Conversations with a Computer"

“Contained within the operating system of Mac computers is a rudimentary electronic psychotherapist program. Meant to simulate a Rogerian therapist, it engages the participant in a cyclical conversation by taking his or her statements and roughly reconfiguring them into questions. I met with this program three times a week for a month in order to discuss my fear that I was disappearing completely. These are three stills from our conversations.”

I saw Jacob (one part of the trio? I think who makes up Paper Rad, and half of hip-hop-mashing/electro/idkwhat Extreme Animals) Tuesday night at Wildness and yesterday night at the Family bookstore, two stops on his “2 Blessed 2 B Stressed” tour.

I made a list of the things he “live blogged” about: how he was a fan of the Christian band Paramour’s positive messages, the Eddie Murphy and MJ duet “What’s Up With You“. I also grabbed one of the attitude bracelets that he’s so into right now. David of Extreme Animals also showed a synchronized guitar riff + head banging video piece during the Family show which was painful yet ecstatic everlasting repetition.

More of Jacob’s work:

& Videos from Paper Rad:

Problem Solvers Episode #1220: “My Script”:

Problem Solvers: “Dewey’s Bike Ride”