Internet Art: Chapter 4

             While reading Chapter 4 of Internet Art, the first net artist that jumped at my attention was Adam Chodzko.  Born in London in 1965, Adam grew up to graduate with a degree in the History of Art from the University of Manchester, and then went on to Goldsmith's College where he received his MA in Fine Art.  The book cites Adams main contribution to internet art as piece titled Product Recall.  I found this piece extremely interest because he actually used a product recall to assemble the owners of a Vivienne Westwood jacket that had been sold ten years before.  Although this work impacted net art, Adam is an artist that has worked with mediums such as video, installation, photography, drawing, and even performance.  His work is said to explore the interactions and possibilities of human behavior, which clearly relates to his Product Recall piece, which was released in 1994.  Adam has been exhibiting his work since 1991, and I feel that the messages he gets across are truly beautiful.  The things that could occur when ten random strangers, with only the purchase of a jacket in common, are endless.  His art is daring and unique, and it is really interesting to see how it challenges and explores relationships and anthropology.
              A second artist that I felt the need to look into further was Olia Lialina, who actually had two of her pieces featured in this chapter.  The first was Zombie and Mummy, which showcases digital graphics of two monsters in a fantasy world.  Her second piece is titled IDENTITYSWAPDATABASE and is a multilingual database where users basically share and look for identities using images, questions, and text posts.  Olia was born in Moscow and originally studied film and journalism at Moscow State University, and then went on to study art in Budapest and Germany.  Her most famous net artwork is "My Boyfriend Came Back From the War," and it is featured on Art Teleportacia, a web gallery that she founded to display her work.  "My Boyfriend Came Back From the War" is a piece that allows the user to almost become a first person in the story.  Click by click it tells the tale of a young couple dealing with the situation mentioned in the title, and the user can change the story's path depending on where they click.  Sentences and phrases form via the hypertext, but it is a bit choppy, and therefore the piece is sort of an abstract representation of what this experience is like.  Olia's work is extremely interesting and very diverse, and today a great portion of it can be found in the computerfinearts collection at Cornell University.