Artist Statement #45,730,944
Young-Hae Chang
and Marc Voge

Links
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

http://portal.unesco.org
http://www.totalmuseum.org
http://rhizome.org
http://www.uiowa.edu

Smart people wondering if this is net art
Young-hae Chang, a translator who lives in Seoul, uses Flash, a popular Web animation format, to create fast-moving text movies set to jazz sound tracks. Of the dozen works included on this site, my favorite is Rain on the Sea (now accessible here). Most Net art employs various modes of interactivity--from clicking to typing--to engage you as a collaborator in the making of the work. Chang eschews interactivity, but the result is hardly a passive experience. By accelerating the pace at which the text appears on screen to a rate just within the threshold of human cognition, Chang coaxes you into a state of rapt concentration. Her work offers a glimpse of what Net art might be like in the coming era of broadband Internet connections.

(7) It\'s pretty obvious that the \"tone\" or \"voice\" of Internet literature is more distant and difficult to \"locate\" than traditional writing. Mere book packaging tells a lot about the book and the author; browser packaging is generic. Internet writers can either see this as a problem or welcome it as a relief from the critical fashion of reading biography into every aspect of literature. As for the look of our work, we do what we can. We\'ve never been interested in graphic design (a lot of Web artists--and even writers-- start out or double as graphic artists). There are hundreds of fonts, millions of colors, and we don\'t know what to do about that. So to answer your question, no, we can\'t and won\'t help readers to \"locate\" us. Distance, homelessness, anonymity, and insignificance are all part of the Internet literary voice, and we welcome them.

(8) It\'s essential to break rules and do things \"wrong\" in art. But it\'s seemingly necessary to follow rules and do things \"right\" in making Web art. This is the big problem confronting the Web artist, for the technique --and not the art -- of making Web art necessitates obeying strict rules the flouting of which is punished by absolute failure to create image and sound. One HTML misstep, and nothing works, nothing happens on the screen. With this in mind my Web art project tries to break as many rules as possible. In my work there is: no interactivity; no graphics or graphic design; no photos; no banners; no millions-of-colors; no playful fonts; no pyrotechnics. I have a special dislike for interactivity. To me it\'s a paltry, laughable thing, like getting a kick out of pulling the trigger of a gun: click: bang. I don\'t get it. When I click on interactive art, I get the feeling I\'m the rat in the Skinner box, except there\'s only the miserable reward, not the shock. Art isn\'t reward, it\'s shock, or something approaching it, something I would call beauty. My Web art tries to express the essence of the Internet: information. Strip away the interactiviy, the graphics, the design, the photos, the banners, the colors, the fonts and the rest, and what\'s left? The text.(9)


Submitted by
Guillermo Acevedo

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