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<>about Natural Process Japanese >> Reality Turns "Virtual" in Real-Time!? "Natural Process" is an installation that consists of exonemo's first-ever pictorial work, "A web page," and a surrounding system. "A web page," the work at the center of this installation, is a conversion of a well-known webpage (*1) into painted form. Simply put, the painting depicts an entire webpage along with the window that frames it! Yet, at the same time, it's not just a painting, but also "an analogization of a digital object" or "a landscape painting of the Internet." (After all, we see it through a "window"!) The NP system is constructed so that a webcam captures the painting in the museum and transmits its image onto the Internet. Here's how it works: [The webpage is converted into analog form (i.e. a painting)] >> [installed in the museum] >> [filtered through the medium of the exhibition space] >> [converted back into digital form] >> [and transmitted onto the Internet] In short, it originates from the Web and returns back to it through what is probably the world's most-roundabout process ever!! And by filtering through the medium of the museum, will the "data" deteriorate? Or will it mature into something else!!!!!!? Will you come see the "real" webpage painting at the museum? Or will you see it "virtual" through the Web?
-- Natural Process system chart--
Webpage
+-------+
| |
| | museum
+-------+ +---------------------------------+
| | |
| | +--------------+ |
+-------+->| | |
convert | | | | +-------+
| | | | | | | |
| | | <----- * ---+---| |---> | |
| | painting | camera | | | +-------+
| +--------------+ | internet PC(home)
| |
+---------------------------------+
*1 We chose the Google.com website as the subject of our painting. Google is a revolutionary search engine that burst onto the world of the Internet in 1998 when it was still finding its way, bringing a definitive change to the nature of the Internet thereafter. We chose it as the quintessential landscape of the Web as our way of paying tribute to the site. Google Rocks!! * Neither "Natural Process" nor "A web page" has any affiliations with Google Inc. - In the Beginning... It all began last year, when we came up with the idea of creating a drawing of a webpage for an exhibition that was coming up in Hiroshima. One reason we wanted to do this was very simple: we wanted to give a physical reality to a digital object. Another was that we thought the medium of drawing - which has a very close association to art, an established position in it, to the extent that it is used as a measure of an artist's skill - was a perfect match with such a "dubious" medium as digital imagery. We were also interested in how someone skilled at drawing would deal with computer images. For example, how would they give dimensionality to the buttons? In the end, that idea was never realized, but when we were asked to participate in this exhibition at the Mori Art Museum, we thought about what we could do with a limited production budget, and decided that by changing the medium from drawing to oil painting, this idea would be just right in terms of scale and exhibition space, and so we went ahead and put our idea into action. In the creation of this work, we had the help of artist Mr. Masayuki Inagaki, who painted A web page for us. - The Web Broadcast The Web broadcast of the painting can be seen from here. (expired) You'll see not only the painting, but also the museum visitors. Throughout the exhibition period, we'll be transmitting the image of the website painting with real people breaking into it!! (Or, should we say, "melting" into it?) We'll continue to broadcast even late at night when the museum is closed! - Process Flow - Credit |