Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
www.bbc.co.uk/arts/digital
Reviewed by: Andrew Ford
Windows, Michael Atavar's new four-part 'e-say' (an online essay) commissioned for BBCi Arts, is one of a series of web-based artworks that examines "virtual reality, plasticity and a world beyond interface". Earlier e-says in the series include intimacy, thethingasitis and duolc all of which can be found on Atavar's personal website at www.atavar.com. Where much of his previous work has focused predominantly around ideas about how art can exist on the web, windows puts forward a much broader argument. The different sections of the e-say concentrate on ways of seeing, the nature of the computer world, its place in the history of artistic thinking and our place within the web respectively.
Windows is presented in Atavar's characteristically clinical style, with a single line of text occupying the screen at a time. The e-say only progresses once the cursor passes over the last word in the phrase. This forces the viewer to read at an unnatural pace and contemplate each line individually.
Atavar relates our view of the web to that of a fly in the natural world, noting how in an environment so huge a fly is not "able to distinguish between simple objects". A pop-up window work Piece #1 for multiple and colliding windows at the end of the third section echoes this same idea. Small pop-up windows filled with changing shades of blue appear on the screen, each titled as everyday experiences and objects, such as 'sky', '3am' and 'falling'. The changing colours offer the viewer different aspects of the subjects, yet, in format, they all remain identical.
Reading Atavar's work for the first time in a typical internet café surrounded by gamers and general net-heads, windows made me happy to think that someone was out there, staring into the 'digital bonfire' trying to offer a perception of art in a digital landscape.
Writer detail:
ANDREW FORD
is a photographer based in Brighton.
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