Finding Art In Online Junk

The Web is full of content that only its creator could love. Witness the office-party photos, blogs about people's pets and bad lip-synched videos that turn up in a few minutes of Google-fueled procrastination.

To Guthrie Lonergan, however, Web junk is the basis of his most popular online art. 'I'm sort of interested in that boringness,' he says.

'Internet Group Shot' is one example. The collage, cobbled from dozens of group portraits, shows how people adopt the same huddle when they're saying 'cheese.' For 'MySpace Intro Playlist,' Mr. Lonergan looked for the self-made videos that young people post to their personal pages, then strung them together to show how teenagers tend to act similarly and say the same things when they're introducing themselves.

'There are defaults in our culture,' Mr. Lonergan adds. 'MySpace doesn't set up something for you to create an introduction video, but kind of like a telephone answering machine, you assume a certain kind of voice and say certain things.'

The 23-year-old, who lives in L.A., is one of many artists mining Internet culture for creative inspiration. They make videos out of email spam and multimedia projects from MySpace profiles, and make a case for Web surfing as an art form in itself.

Marcin Ramocki is another. He got the idea for his portrait series 'Blogger Skins' when a documentary film he made was being shown world-wide. After setting up search-engine alerts to notify him whenever '8 Bit' was mentioned, he was struck by the unrelated images that came up.

For 'Blogger Skins,' he Googled a handful of bloggers who write about art, then assembled a virtual mosaic of the images that resulted. 'The idea is that a Google search for people who are very active in this community changes every day, so I wanted to capture one specific search,' he says.

The image reflects the original order of the search results, he says, 'and that creates, sort of accidentally, this beautiful shape, but that shape also reflects the popularity of different images.' Subjects with common names had wildly random images associated with them. The artists, though, exerted control over their search results by filling them with their work.

Some of these Web-inspired works have been included in the recently reopened New Museum's 'Unmonumental' exhibition, parts of which are on view at its New York location and others of which can be seen on the site for Rhizome, its new-media affiliate. 'This generation really knows the Net,' says Lauren Cornell, Rhizome's executive director. 'They grew up with it and are, for lack of a better word, native to it.'

'Art is just going to be what's going on in the world around you. It makes sense to do work about this thing that's changing our life so much,' adds Paul Slocum, a 33-year-old Dallas artist whose day job is in systems programming. His video 'Time-Lapse Homepage,' part of the New Museum exhibit online, is intended to follow the development of the digital aesthetic: in 1,200 screenshots and at 20 frames a second, it chronicles the evolution of a single personal page's look.

He also created a functioning replica of MySpace's log-in page. 'I was interested in how you go to these pages all the time that are constantly in flux, changing all the things they show you,' he says.

One of the best-known artists in this medium, Cory Arcangel, has 'performed' the deletion of his Friendster account in front of an audience at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, N.Y. 'People kind of cringed and then cheered when it was all over,' he says. He published on his personal site Kurt Cobain's suicide note alongside Google AdWords that served up ads to social-anxiety treatment and spiritual-growth classes.

'Surfing so much, I get ideas of things that I would like to see that don't yet exist,' Mr. Arcangel explains. 'This is when I make a project.'

This year, Rhizome organized an online group show called 'Professional Surfer' that took the prosaic idea of bookmarking Web pages and posited it as art.

On other Web sites, such as Nasty Nets, Supercentral and Yahoo's bookmarking service Del.icio.us, artists link to videos, photos and other digital ephemera they've come across.

'They're like sketchbooks,' says Paddy Johnson, a Brooklyn art blogger. 'Your ability to spot the best stuff speaks to your eye as an artist . . . . The better your quoting ability, the better artist you seem to be.'

Even some 'offline' works are inspired by Internet culture. For a series called 'Monitor Tracings,' Marisa Olson searched Google Images for headphones, radios and other devices, then drew the results on paper.

One thing most of these artists haven't solved is how to make money off work that is available to anyone online. Ms. Olson says she sells her drawings and editioned copies of video pieces, but never an Internet-based work. 'You would think that the contemporary, hip art world is ahead of the curve on this,' she says, 'and it's not -- yet.'

如今，互联网上到处充斥着那些除了制作者本人之外谁都不喜欢的东西：在谷歌(Google)搜索引擎上晃悠几分钟，你就能看到无聊的公司派对照片、对宠物津津乐道的博客，以及拙劣无比的假唱视频节目。

然而在哥斯利•隆格(Guthrie Lonergan)眼里，网络垃圾恰恰是其备受欢迎的网络艺术的创作源泉。“我对这些无聊的东西很感兴趣，”他说。

“网络集体照”(Internet Group Shot)就是个例子。这幅抽象派拼贴画来源于许多集体照，显示了人们在说“cheese”的时候都摆出了相同的姿态。在“自我介绍启示录”(MySpace Intro Playlist)里，隆格先把年轻人自己制作的放在MySpace网站上的自我介绍录像挑选出来，然后把它们排列到一起，以展示青年人在介绍自己时的言行是多么相似。

“我们的文化中有约定俗成的部分，”隆格补充说。“MySpace网站上没有什么设置能让用户创建自我介绍视频内容，它就像一个电话语音应答机，用户用某种类型的声音说某些套话。”

现年23岁的隆格住在加州洛杉矶，像其他许多艺术家一样，他也从互联网文化中汲取养份，激发创作灵感。这些艺术家从垃圾电子邮件和MySpace网站的多媒体介绍内容中提取创作元素，制造视频节目。他们把网上冲浪本身当成一种艺术形式。

马辛•瑞马基(Marcin Ramocki)也是其中之一。由他本人拍摄的一部记录片在全球公映时给他带来了创作灵感，于是后来创作了肖像系列“Blogger Skins”。当时他建立了一个搜索引擎提示设置，每当“8 Bit”这个词语在网上出现时，他就会收到提示。结果是他被网上出现的毫不相关的图象惊呆了。

至于“Blogger Skins”，瑞马基在谷歌上搜索了一些谈论艺术的博客作者，然后把搜索出来的图象像马赛克那样拼凑起来。“如果在谷歌上搜索这些热衷于艺术的博客作者，你会发现搜索结果每天都在变，因此我想把一次特定搜索的结果捕捉下来，”他表示。

瑞马基指出，图象反映了搜索结果的原始顺序，“这些图象碰巧组成了一幅美丽的图形，而这一图形也反映出了各个图象的知名度。”如果搜索那些普通的名字，显示出来的图象可谓五花八门。不过艺术家会进行筛选，把名字与作品结合起来搜索。

纽约新当代艺术博物馆(New Museum of Contemporary Art)最近举办了一场别开生面的展览，收录了由网络给予灵感而创作出来的一些作品，其中一部分陈列在博物馆内，另一部分放在下属的新媒体网站根茎网(Rhizome)上。“这一代人精通网络，”根茎网(Rhizome)的执行董事劳伦•康奈尔(Lauren Cornell)表示。“他们与网络一同成长，可谓与网络连成一体，我实在找不出更好的词来形容了。”

“艺术是关注人们身边的这个世界的，关注网络这个彻底改变我们生活的事物是很有意义的，”保罗•斯克姆(Paul Slocum)说。这位现年33岁的达拉斯艺术家的全职工作是系统程序设计师。作为上述展览的一部分，他的视频节目“时光流逝”(Time-Lapse Homepage)被陈列在根茎网上，旨在展现数码美学的发展：1,200幅电脑照片以每秒20幅的速度显示，按照时间顺序显示了个人网页的演变。

斯克姆还创建了MySpace的登陆网页的复制品。“网页无时无刻不在变化，你眼前所呈现的东西也在变，人们如何进入这些不断变化的网页呢？对此我非常感兴趣，”他说。

在纽约皇后区的P.S.1当代艺术中心里，知名网络艺术家科里•阿肯格尔(Cory Arcangel)在观众面前把他在社交网站Friendster的账户删掉了。“人们开始有些迷惑，成功删除后欢呼了起来，”他说。阿肯格尔还在个人网站上把科特•柯本(Kurt Cobain)的自杀留言与治疗社会焦虑以及灵性成长课程的广告放在一起，这些广告都是Google AdWords提供的。

“由于经常在网上冲浪，我会对那些原以为不存在的事物有所领悟，”阿肯格尔解释说。“于是我开始了创作。”

今年，根茎网组织了一个名为“职业冲浪者”(Professional Surfer)的网上团体展览，取材于平常的网页书签功能，把它作为一项艺术加以展示。

在其他网站上，如Nasty Nets、Supercentral以及雅虎的书签类网站Del.icio.us等，艺术家们则把视频节目、照片以及他们遇到的其他数字作品作为书签。

“它们就像写生集，”纽约布鲁克林的一位艺术博客作者帕蒂•约翰逊(Paddy Johnson)说。“作为艺术家，你要能捕捉眼前最美的东西。你的展示能力越强，你的艺术才华就越高。”

即使一些“网下”作品也受到了互联网文化的启发。为了创作系列作品“Monitor Tracings”，玛利莎•奥尔森(Marisa Olson)在Google Images上搜索耳机、收音机等设备，然后在纸上描绘结果。

不过，有个问题大多数网络艺术家还无法解决，那就是如何从人人都可以欣赏到的网络艺术作品上赚钱。奥尔森表示，她出售自己的画作，还编辑视频节目杂志，但从来没有出售过网络作品。“人们也许认为这种当代流行艺术已经能赚钱了，而实际上不是这么回事。”

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