Review a New Media Artist

StarryNight

Image found here.

                StarryNight is an interface created by Alex Galloway and Martin Wattenberg for a website called Rhizome.org. The interface is reminiscent of Vincent Van Gogh’s 19^th century oil painting, Starry Night, with its bright white and yellow stars popping out against the dark blue sky (StarryNight). StarryNight as a whole represents the text archive on Rhizome.org. Each star represents one piece of text. The more a text is read, the brighter its star becomes. The brightest stars represent the most read texts (StarryNight). Every star, or text, you click on is recorded and it forms what looks like a constellation on the interface. You can search for key words and a constellation forms with a bunch of articles that contain that key word (StarryNight).

StarryNight is an example of net art, which basically means art that is created with the use of the Internet. The website net-art.org gives a great definition for what net art is: “Net art, net.art, Internet art, Web art, online art... whatever you call it, the concept remains the same: Net art is art that uses the Internet as an artistic medium, and which could not exist without it. The latter characteristic distinguishes it from art that merely appears on a web page. Net artists engage with the Internet as a medium in the same way that painters use paint and musicians use music. And like the fields of painting and music, net art can be as creative, as personal, as political, as forceful or as playful as the artist desires (Koster).”

I think that the creators of StarryNight wanted to create a tool that is not only function but serves as a piece of artwork as well. The star trails aide Rhizome users in their web browsing yet also makes a really cool night sky image (Rhizomer). As stated by blogger Rhizomer, “As you surf the site, your click-trail helps illuminate the night sky (Rhizomer).” This project is a great form of net art that helps people sort through information.

Works Cited

Koster, Dan. The beginners guide to researching internet art. 2 February 2012. 27 October 2012 <http://net-art.org/node/646>.

Rhizomer. RHIZOME launches new STARRYNIGHT interface. 3 June 1999. 27 October 2012 <http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/28615/#c1467>.

StarryNight. 27 October 2012 <http://www.marktribe.net/starrynight/>.

Case Study: Facebook

Facebook came to life in 2004 when it was created by now Hardvard graduate, Mark Zuckerberg (Stone). The social networking site was started as a way for high-school and college students to communicate with each other but quickly grew to point where almost everyone, from young to old, has a Facebook page. Facebook is now owned by Microsoft and is a billion dollar company (Stone).

2012 is almost over, and by this point, we can find almost any information about anybody via Facebook. People can find email addresses, phone numbers, and occasionally addresses in seconds. People often post about what they are doing and who they are with at any given time. We share our personal information which can be viewed by anyone (there are privacy measures but these only go so far). It has become customary for us to share our business with the rest of the world.

Many people might say that Facebook killed MySpace, another social networking site that was extremely popular in the early 2000’s. Now MySpace is mainly used as a media site where people can listen and download music and watch music videos (Hartung). It isn’t really used as its original purpose as a social networking site anymore. Facebook has an endless amount of games and applications and advertisements that MySpace did not, which drew the attention of millions of people (Hartung). Financially speaking, Facebook is the top dog of all social networking sites. In 2010, MySpace lost $350 million and laid of half of its staff because it could not compete with Facebook anymore (Hartung).

Works Cited

Hartung, Adam. How Facebook Beat MySpace. 14 January 2011. 13 October 2012 <http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2011/01/14/why-facebook-beat-myspace/>.

Stone, Brad. Facebook. 7 December 2007. 13 December 2012 <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/>.