(Translated from Portuguese into English by Sabrina Gledhill)

web.artist = a small cyberfish in a big electric pond. [Jessica Loseby - http://www.rssgallery.com/ ]

web.artist = p[erformative.techne.p]lay+curiosity [MEZ - http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker/ ; http://www.livejournal.com/users/netwurker/ ]

Much has been said and debated about the craft of the web.artist, but I have never found a paper that organizes or establishes standards for that craft. Ever since I launched my project, “The Craft of the Web.Artist: Some animated considerations,” I have been trying to gather information on the subject. In a paper titled “The craft of the ethnographer, sociological method” (1902) [1], Mauss informs us that documents, witnesses and authentic facts abound, and that a scientist must be a good observer, separating the wheat from the chaff. This is what I have been trying to do, while using my personal experience as a guide. In this article, I will attempt to give a critical interpretation of what I’ve been feeling, reading and observing, in plain language.

To start with, it’s obvious that a web.artist needs to have skills in several areas in order to single-handedly produce a web production along the lines expected today:

The web artist commands an often-unruly band of internal and external visual artists and photographers, animators of various kinds, musicians and composers, and the techie who ties artistic inspiration to code. (Martha Deed - http://www.sporkworld.org/Deed)

In my case, the craft of the web.artist involves painting with electronic media. Given the kind of support medium I’ve chosen, whether it’s the screen of my laptop or desktop, or the walls or floor of the rooms, my procedure is no different from the one I use in my studio. I don’t design ideas in advance. I let them happen, and they arrange themselves in the forms of support I’ve chosen, then, slowing down, the gestures become deeper, as the creative process increasingly requires a profound dialogue with what is taking place on the screen, whether it is electronic or made from linen, cotton or paper. [Aloysio Novis – http://www.geocities.com/aloysionovis/]

As Giselle Beiguelman (http://www.desvirtual.com/) aptly stated in a conversation in the Rhizome community (09 – 2005), ”a mouse is not a paintbrush...” and although there is a pen-mouse (which I’ve never used) that is different from an ordinary mouse, I don’t believe it’s possible for an artist to work and feel their work in the same way when using such different tools. When painting there is a tangible medium – paint, which makes a sloppy mess in cyan, yellow and magenta. In the case of computers, what we have is light and pixels, and red, green, blue, a clean art and…a certain limitation due to the software. Before I became a web.artist, I did some painting on canvas, and I can’t see the similarity between these two artistic expressions. These processes require completely different reasoning. The only similarities are the creative tension that both of them cause: the pleasure of creation. The same occurs with digital drawings: for me, drawing on a sheet of paper is not the same as drawing on the computer screen.

1.2 - Photography / film

For web.artists, digital cameras and cell phones that take photographs and shoot movies are like painters’ brushes and spatulas. At the moment, these tools of the trade – together with image software, especially “Photoshop,” and, of course, "Google Images" -- are responsible for most of the pictorial creation on the web.

Working with photography and more recently with film on computers is guaranteed entertainment due to the multiple resources available, and for now the possibilities for this activity are boundless. Much has been created and much remains to be done in this area.

In my case, what attracts me are layers, stacking them one after the other, whether working just with images or working with film. I like to think that my work is an archeological process of painting with pixels (often in motion) where, after the work is finished, it is often impossible to identify the deepest layers. And it is also a process of “sacrificing pixels” – because before the image is completed, many pixels are sacrificed. That was the source of the work / narrative that resulted in this article. [http://arteonline.arq.br/web_art_considerations/um.htm - “How many pixels I sacrifice before finishing a work of “web.art’” – is this the web.artist’s craft or a sacrifice?”]

2- Animation skills

It isn’t easy to create a perfect animation like those we see in the animated films produced by studios like Disney and Pixar. It takes a large team of people to create such perfect animations with computers or otherwise. Doubters should take a look at the “making of” movies that accompany some of these animated movies.

Artists creating web animations today generally use one of these three processes: animated gifs, Macromedia Flash, or Macromedia Director. Both kinds of software can be used to create animations frame-by-frame, using the traditional process, or with more advanced techniques, although the more sophisticated methods involve complex programming.

However, no matter how well crafted, a perfect animation of a human figure that walks and moves on the screen may lack that special touch that gives us the sense of true artistry – it just gives us the feeling that it’s a well-made animation. On the other hand -- depending on their creator’s ingeniousness -- three colored blotches could be animated with fascinating results. I think that this is the solution for the web.artist who works alone…or perhaps not…as Isabel Aranda Yto.Cl’s statement aptly demonstrates:

The truth is that I use several programs. I made the mosaic backgrounds with Arkaos (http://www.arkaos.net/) and created the texts of the backgrounds with Resolume (http://www.resolume.com/index.php). The figure was born from some small animations that I downloaded from the Internet and converted into a "series of images" that captured the movements frame-by-frame. I then selected some of these “frames" using my own criteria and enlarged them considerably, fixing each one with Photoshop, because the picture was very pixelly and distorted. After that I converted each frame into ASCII using Ascgen software (http://ascgendotnet.jmsoftware.co.uk/ *3). I tested the animation several times with Arkaos. Then I saved it with the highest resolution possible and edited it using Adobe Premiere. I made a video from that animation which is called "Art Dance". From that video I selected the sequences that seemed most interesting to me and exported them in a smaller size. Then I separated them frame-by-frame: a total of 32 sequences altogether. I once again fixed some of these series of images using Photoshop. And then I put each mini-animation together frame-by-frame using Flash. Then I added sound, which is a little hard to synchronize with the image. The results of that last flash can be seen in mini art dance, and after that I put together the final work in HTML.

It’s a little long, but I was obsessed with the idea of what I wanted to create - tiny beings dancing before those moving backgrounds - and I had to think up the best way to achieve this. That is why I worked gradually, bit by bit, because I had no idea what was going to happen next. One idea led to another, like a scientist in a lab. The order is not very precise because often I went back and created other things and started mixing it all up. It was a work of time. Several months of experimentation .

A web artist is some one that dares to try and to occupy his / her time with Internet language and tools”. [Isabel Aranda – YTO.CL - http://www.yto.cl ]

Animations can also be obtained by filming with digital cameras and using software like Adobe Premiere to work with video/film. Here is an example of the craft of web.artist Millie Niss, who produces her artworks this way.

We did the movie using Adobe Premiere video software. We took the still photos on our cameras and got a few of them on the web, and we took most of the video with a video camera and some with the Elph*. We recorded the narration. We used some sounds from the videos we took as well, and also the sound a goose makes from a CD of sound effects. The whole thing was put together in Premiere, where you can arrange sounds and video much more easily than in Flash. (You can also adjust the video images much as in Photoshop and add transitions like dissolves (when one video melts into another), and you can make video on layers with alpha channels.) The main disadvantage of using video software rather than Flash is that the video comes out GIGANTIC in byte size (although the resolution in 728x480 which is better than US television). To put the video on the web, you have to use a compression program -- we used Apple Quicktime Pro which is very, very cheap and works well. [Millie Niss – http://www.sporkworld.org ]

We mustn’t forget that an image in motion – the “time-image” – is what attracts the eye these days. It is the legacy of a previous age, where our eyes became adapted to cinema and television. But “web.art” is neither cinema nor television. Its language shares points in common with both these media, but is different in other ways. These points are part of the craft of the web.artist.

3- Writing skills

Digital Writing is the inscribing of characters on an interface, with the intention of moving concepts from mind to mind, through a network of coded variations of elements once understood as text, image, sound and video, etc. [Marcus Bastos - https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2005-October/msg00008.html]

Today we find three different ways of working with texts on the web. The first involves written texts that may or may not make sense, but are produced by a writer/artist.

My present interest in the web is in making what I call "digital literary art, which are electronic multi-media works in which writing, with various tropes, is central; but include images, animated or not, and sometimes sound. [Joel Weishaus - http://web.pdx.edu/~pdx00282/; http://www.arteonline.arq.br/newsletter/review4/english.htm]

http://www.sporkworld.org/subway/ by Millie Niss is a very interesting hypertext work.

In the second example, text-generating machines create the text. In this case, is the author the machine or the artist/technician who programmed it?

"Epiphanies" was the first Google Art (de)generator.
It was inspired by James Joyce's definition of the epiphany

Type a word or a sentence, and click on "go".
The epiphany generator randomly collects pieces of sentences related to the chosen words on the Internet and reconstitutes the skeleton of a new text.

[Christopher Bruno - http://www.iterature.com/epiphanies/ ]

In the third there is no written text, but there is a narrative obtained through images and/or unique effects – is this a return to the past, to a pictorial culture?

Regina Célia Pinto - http://arteonline.arq.br/via_lactea/

Jessica Loseby - http://www.rssgallery.com/im_mobile.html

This means that even if a work of “web.art” does not contain a text in the strict sense of the term, it will always contain a visual narrative – a text that can be read or interpreted or understood by those who decipher its signs. Art is language.

Images remain in memory, sound is more secret and insidious. You can make a picture mean anything just by changing its soundtrack. Any music fits any picture, but the meaning might radically change, and it's my role to control it and to propose the right one. I use sound as a counterpoint, trying never to be illustrative unless it is needed. I often use it to widen the scene with stereo or to materialize things you don't need to show, with off-screen. It might be cheaper by the way. I've found a few nice things like rising up the volume when you approach to the right place to click on, calling you on one side or another, avoiding repetitive feeling by using three almost similar sounds for the same action, letting you know that the gestures you've made are efficient, and so on. [Jean-Jacques Birgé (FR) – http://arteonline.arq.br/Paris/birgeenglish.htm]

I fully agree with this statement, which comes from an experienced professional who is highly regarded in his field. He has made me think that working with audio may be one of the hardest parts of a work of web.art. Can an artist who knows nothing of music or can’t play a musical instrument create an excellent audiovisual production for the Web by using sophisticated software like “Sound Forge,” for example?

5- Interactive skills

Interactivity in art is not unique to “web.art.” For example, artists had already discovered it long before “web.art” came into existence. Here in Brazil, since 1959 it has appeared in the works of artists who are now known around the world: Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica.

The web (which has done so much to facilitate communications) and web.artists have made interactivity a virtually essential characteristic of any work of “web.art”. When visiting a “web.art” work for the first time, we always want to discover what it can offer us and find the surprises awaiting us when we click on certain areas or buttons with a mouse. I believe that interactivity is a very important characteristic of this kind of artwork. When I see a conventional video created for the web, even if it is of the highest quality, it somehow disappoints me because I can’t make something different happen, and I always wonder if I’m seeing “web.art” or watching a film in miniature. But I must admit that this may not be true for everyone watching the same work, and I’m sure that it suffices to achieve interactivity through the cognitive dialogue with the work that arises from the flow of eye>screen>brain.

Another question has to do with what interactivity really is, and if it truly exists, because the changes we make by clicking with a mouse are never permanent. Anyone else who visits the same interactive page will find the work just as it was when we found it, and not as the last visitor left it – in other words, it always starts out in the form designed by the artist who created that work.

I see a future in which a multitude of victorious unknowns will step over the artist’s dead body. This is not about me but about all of us. This dissolution of the artist in life, letting unknowns create, is our own death, and how many of us will withstand this dissection, this identification with the collective whole? (Lygia Clark)

Can such complete interactivity be achieved? Would it be good for artists, or would it mean their death?

There are projects like the “Big Sheep”, by Regina Célia Pinto and Isabel Saij (http://bigsheep.blogspot.com ), which is related to the problem of copyright on the web, where the works really are changed by anyone who wants to, but the original file is always preserved, no matter how many other files are generated from it.

6- Programming skills

The web artist is the artist that creates and produce art utilizing the 3 lobes of his brain.[Clemente Padín - http://www.iis.com.br/~regvampi/spams_trashes/ ]

Does a web.artist have to be a programming whiz?

Not all artists working on the web today are good programmers, but programming is part of the set of necessary skills and makes a work of “web.art” function at its best. Anyone who can create a program and make it work exactly as they’d visualized it is an artist too – an artist of the programming language or code. I believe that the act of creating new programming code produces the same creative tension as any other act of creation, such as painting, drawing, writing poetry or literature or composing music… Well-crafted code is a work of art. If it is art, is it to be shown?

Showing the code of my programmed artworks is something that I never do. If I was a painter, I would not show my studio, my paint and my paintbrushes: I would show my paintings. I believe that in programmed art, the produced artwork is the execution of the program, not the text (the code) that it is made out of.

Of course, an artist-programmer can show his code alongside his artwork; it is the artist's choice, just like showing the scenario and the script notes alongside a finished movie can be an artistic posture in itself. This is what Alex McLean did with forkbomb.pl: it was confrontation of the simplicity of the program to its dramatic results that was the artwork. If the code had not been shown, it would not have been interesting at all. This is also what Alex Galloway did in CODeDOC I: it was showing the dangerous code and *not* executing it that created the artwork.

But this is not my artistic position. I am interested in this very specific feature of programmed artworks: they act on the world. As an artist-programmer, this is what I do: I create actions and I show them. I don't show the material that helped me create them. I dont think that it is of artistic interest”. [fragment of message from Antoine Schmitt - http://www.aec.at/de/festival2003/programm/codedoc/schmitt/comments.html to the community http://www.rhizome.org/]

Also see: http://www.arteonline.arq.br/Paris/schmittenglish.htm

...

I would like to make the code of http://vispo.com/kearns available. why?
Well, with the exception of one part of it, the logic is not circuitous; it is readable to a relatively casual reader programmer. also, parts of the code do interesting things fairly simply. and it is a literary work; if possible and the code is conceivably of interest--and use—to some people, It would be nice to make the source code available. and there are some code ideas in it. and some code themes and techniques that run through it.

There's one part of the code, though, that presents several problems inmaking it public. it contains behaviors that i wrote and sell. it also contains programming work of other people. and it is client server oriented; there's PHP involved also, besides the Lingo. so i can't really make that particular little part of the code public. it won't be difficult to take that part out. the code written by other people is code that was publicly available, but if I release it as part of a work by me, then they need to be properly credited (as they have been in the credits) and I would need their
permission to release it publicly . [fragment of message from Jim Andrews – http://vispo.com to the community http://www.rhizome.org/ ]

Artists who are good programmers as well as experts in all the other skills are privileged members of the “web.art” world. They often do their work exactly as they want to and often produce high-quality art.

However, many artists have not mastered this science. For them there are other solutions, such as using software that does the programming, using ready-made programs found in books or the web, paying someone to do the programming for your art works, or working as a team. I believe that the last solution is the best – a collaborative effort with a tightly knit team where each person gives the best possible performance in his or her area. Nevertheless, there are other ways, and they often result in excellent artworks.

7- Web skills

Web artists create art (combining visual images, animation, sound, video, and interactivity) which are viewed on the web, most often in a standard web browser window. [Millie Niss – http://www.sporkworld.org/]

After web.artists have either mastered all these skills or joined a team of experts in each field, they also need web skills, because their work will be viewed in a browser. They have to know how to take part in chat lists and discussion groups – after all, the web is all about communication! They need to know how to present their works in those groups, how to register them for festivals and submit them to organizations, academic or otherwise.

And if by some chance the artist manages to get feedback from their peers, a critique is something to celebrate…and having a web.art work accepted by a festival or a major organization will send them wild with joy! But if that doesn’t happen, the artist can also frequently visit the hit counter for their website to have the glorious feeling that the work they strove so hard to create is being appreciated – that feeling is only surpassed by the moment of creation.

Web.artist: A human or a machine that pours out his/her/its soul on the internet. [David Daniels – http://www.thegatesofparadise.com ]

And only then will the question so frequently discussed on the web today arise for most – how can a web.artist make money from their craft? That is a question that is still unanswered…

Conclusion?...

Deleuze [2] has said that the great film directors are like the great painters and musicians: they are the best at talking about what they do. But when talking about it, they become something else – philosophers or theoreticians…

I have written this as a web.artist, and at no time have I intended to theorize or philosophize. I am still a web.artist, and the thing that most enchants me about my craft are the following poems:

Weaver of particles, he tightens to Time an optical trap around the Earth. [Patrick-Henri Burgaud - http://www.aquoisarime.net/index.htm]

Web artists reach into the ether toward a dream of global sharing and understanding” [Jim Andrews – http://vispo.com]

And it is precisely because of this that I keep thinking that creating a work of web.art does not require all the skills I’ve described here. All the “web.artwork” has to do is move the people who visit it.

In conclusion, to parody Deleuze’s observation on film [3]:

Web.art is a new practice of images and signs whose philosophy must turn theory into conceptual practice. For neither a technical, nor an applied (in psychoanalysis or linguistics), nor a reflexive determination suffices to constitute the concepts of web.art itself.

My most special thanks to everyone who has sent me their definitions for the expression “web.artist.” All of them will be an animated page of my e.book “The Web.artist’s Craft, some animated considerations” at: http://arteonline.arq.br/web_art_considerations/

References:

[1] MAUSS, Marcel, O ofício do etnógrafo. In: OLIVEIRA, Roberto Cardoso de. Mauss, Antropologia. São Paulo, Ática, 1976, pp. 53-59.,

[2-3] Deleuze, Gilles. Imagem Tempo (“L’ Image-temps”). São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1990, p. 332