works updated

draft #2, please comment/email me.

GOING FOR ADS

In this group of work I have used only internet advertisements to create pieces concerned with how internet users navigate, perceive, and conceive of the medium of the web site and the internet as a whole. The title of the series is a reference to the phrase “going for adds” used by music distributors in reference to the date the new album of the artist they are promoting can be first played on the radio. In seeking out internet advertisements I am doing the opposite of what internet users have trained themselves to do since the inception of internet advertising which is to ignore such ads. As fast as advertisers devise new ways of making “impressions” on users, users adapt to these tactics and become immune to them just as quickly. The term “banner blindness” has been used to describe the phenomenon of users instinctively ignoring the advertisements that frame the content of web pages, thus eliminating the use value of these areas to both advertisers and users alike. In the same way that going to see the Great Pacific Garbage Patch seems to be the only way to believe in and understand it, I have sought out internet ads, in a sense the visual refuse of the internet, and appropriated, reconfigured, recycled, and collaged them so as to finally acknowledge their existence, examine how internet users orient themselves online through sight, and perhaps create beautiful images out of compositional elements that are otherwise intuitively ignored by the eyes of internet users.

Average Impression

This is a collage of 66 nearly-transparent vertical-format banner ads (approximately 160 x 600 pixels) that, when layered on top of each other, create something of an average of composition and color for this size banner ad. I see it as something like the ocular impression made from years of seeing-without-consciously-registering innumerable instances of ads of this shape. Light emanates out of the computer screen through ads like this from the edge of web pages into the edges of the users’ retinas but is rarely if ever the focus of its vision. Here it is both brought in an out of focus – an abstract form representing something of a template for all ads of its kind. While the true intensity of a star in the night sky is often clearest when seen through one’s periphery, this piece instead confronts the eyes with a record of what they have simultaneously seen and not seen on almost every web page they have ever explored.

Depth of Field: Ad Pool 118

This piece combines 118 internet ads of all different shapes and sizes. Ultimately, no one ad is completely visible or legible, and the viewer has the choice of either attempting to make out individual ads or allowing the composition to visually wash over them as a whole. I see this as a revisiting of the moment of the decision made by the internet user’s mind, manifested through its use of eyesight, each time it is confronted with a new advertising strategy. It can be simultaneously appear a depthless two-dimensional surface of ads and a deep pool of colors and imagery which combine to create a greater combined image (or illusion).

Deductive Structure: Army Chasm

This piece was inspired by Frank Stella’s early paintings made with concentric black brushstrokes of uniform-width in which each painting’s content was dictated by the shape of its stretcher bars, its edges. Here, a banner ad for the Army Reserve is copied ad infinitum, creating an image of concentric borders which frame and re-frame an ever-receding, dissolving void where online “content” would normally reside. In their innate search for e-“substance,” our searching eyes are instead confronted with and enclosed by a two-dimensional chasm of imagery they are trained to literally marginalize if not completely eliminate.

Newer Realism

These pieces were inspired by the Nouveau Realistes, a group of artists in Paris in the early ‘60s, some of whom (namely Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains) made collages using scraps of street advertisements. My “collages” layer “scraps” of banner ads over each other to create abstract final products, a digital revisiting of the technique of the Nouveau Realistes who strove to create a heightened realism in their works through the recycling of society’s detritus. The juxtaposition of my digital works with those of Villeglé and Hains draws attention to the question of depth in the plane of the browser window and asks the viewer to reconsider his or her conception of the materiality of the internet.

Topography

This piece was inspired by Maya Lin’s topological cut-outs of atlases. In my piece, banner ads are cut up and arranged so as to confound the viewer’s sense of depth on an internet page. The piece can simultaneously be seen as two holes through a pile of banner ads receding into the screen, two towers of banner ad pieces rising out of the screen, or simply a series of perfectly fitted rings cut from different ads.