The Wonderful WebArt of Aaron Koblin

The Wonderful WebArt of Aaron Koblin

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In my time working on this blog, it has been somewhat challenging to find a contemporary, individual artist whose whole body of work is dependent on the Internet. I have found many different artists who dabble in using the Internet or computers creatively but none thus far who matched the criteria that I outlined in my post NetArt? What Art? Thankfully, however, I was fortunate to stumble across the amazing artworks of Aaron Koblin.   

Aaron Koblin is an artist who specializes in using “real-world and community generated data…to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and the systems they create”. While all his entire body of work is based off this idea, his individual works seem to fall into three loose categories:

           1. Data Narratives

           2. Collaborative Works

3. Interactive Narratives

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Data Narratives: Data as Storytelling

As of late, “data” has been getting some bad press. Many view the collection and aggregation of information through the Internet as a threat to personal freedom and privacy. Also, it can be argued that the sheer extent of data collection is having a reductive impact on the phenomena it describes. Do all the GPS coordinates stashed on one’s iPhone really tell us anything about the owner’s experience of visiting those places? How can humans conceptually understand all this information? As a result, it can be tempting to view ‘data’ as scary or reductive. However, Aaron Koblin’s artworks turn this sentiment on its head.

In his 2011 TED Talk, the artist opened his talk by saying that, “Data can make us more human”. His artwork “Flight Patterns” is a prime example of this sentiment. This piece creates visually appealing representations of flight traffic data gathered through the Internet, and in the process, it humanizes the data by artistically connecting it with the actual phenomena.

A still frame from "Flight Patterns"

It is one thing to hear statistics of flight patterns in North America, or even to see the actual data files, but it is another thing to see Koblin’s visualization of this data. In only a couple minutes, viewers are able to conceptually understand the trends of human activity contained with these huge data sets of flight traffic information. Additionally, Kobl
in’s work is predictive of what may become a large part of Net Art in the future. As the Internet is mined more and more for data of all types, making conceptual sense of this data will become a fascinating challenge for future NetArtists and Computer Scientists.

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Collaborative Works: Crowdsourcing Art

Crowdsourcing has demonstrated its efficacy as a solution to a lot of problems, such as fundraising and content creation (Kickstarter, iStockphoto). In the realm of art, crowdsourcing has been applied with varying levels of success. For example, Swarmsketch, a collaborative drawing project, asks users to collaborate on a single drawing based on a specific theme.  The program allows users to draw a line and then vote on the lines that others have drawn. The lines with the most votes create the picture. As a thought experiment, Swarmsketch excels at creating a democratic, collaborative artistic process. However, in reality, the drawings often lack a visual cohesion. (Truthfully, these drawings can still be visually interesting and a small minority of these drawings are actually well rendered. see: 28 Gauge Shotgun)

A selection of typical Swarmsketch drawings.

Instead, Koblin has managed to manipulate crowdsourced efforts to create structured works of art. Instead of allowing users to influence the decisions of other contributors, Koblin has designed projects that allow users a high degree of autonomy over their own little aspect of the greater project. This allows users to be creative and deviate from the instructions creatively, but it allows Koblin to maintain the overall structure of the piece.

For example, in “The Johnny Cash Project”, one of his most visually stunning pieces, Koblin created a website that allowed Johnny Cash fans across the world to illustrate a single of frame of an animated musicvideo for Cash’s song “Ain’t No Grave”. While certain frames may deviate from a realistic portrayal of the scene, these scenes end up contributing to the video’s artistic spontaneity.

An individual frame from "The Johnny Cash Project"  

Another individual frame 

A section of "Ten Thousand Cents"

In his line of collaborative works, Koblin has also managed to innovatively make use of Amazon’s MechanicalTurk, an online labor-sourcing tool. Essentially, MechanicalTurk is a platform that allows an individual to pay Internet users or ‘turks’ small sums of money to do small tasks over the web. In “The Sheep Market”, Koblin paid over 10,000 turks $0.02 to draw a “sheep facing to the left”. Similarly, in “Ten Thousand Cents”, Koblin paid 10,000 turks $0.01 to illustrate a very small segment of an image of a hundred dollar bill. While the way these artworks use Mechanical Turk is innovative in of itself, these artworks present an interesting commentary on the evolution of digital labor markets. By using them to do something artistic, Koblin has subverted the stereotypical portrayal of crowdsourcing as these faceless, almost mechanical entities.

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Personalized Net Art Experiences: Interactive Narratives

A concept still from "3 Dreams of Black"

Finally, Koblin’s artwork demonstrates the ability of the Internet to create unique, interactive artistic narratives. For example, “3Dreams of Black” (a music video for the Danger Mouse’s “Black”) and the “The Wilderness Downtown” (a music video for Arcade Fire’s “We Used To Wait”) are two artworks that allow users to create a “personalized” viewing experience. In “3 Dreams of Black”, viewers use the mouse to influence the WebGL environment that the artists created. In “The Wilderness Downtown”, a personalized music video is created based on the information about one’s home via Google Maps.

A still from "The Wilderness Downtown"

Although the ability to “personalize” these experiences is somewhat limited, these artworks explore artistic Internet-dependent tools, like WebGL and the Chrome browser. They could be considered artistic studies for future projects that would implement these features of “personalization” more comprehensively.

An example of "Exquisite Corpse"

“The Exquisite Forest” is another project of Koblin’s that explores interactive narratives. Unlike “3 Dreams of Black” and “The Wilderness Downtown”, the interactive experience is not limited to a single user. A homage to the Surrealist game “Exquisite Corpse”, “The Exquisite Forest” is an online collaborative project that “lets users create short animations which build off one another as they explore a specific theme”. However, what’s interesting is that these animations do not follow a linear path. Unlike “Exquisite Corpse” where players are unaware what has come before their contribution, participants in "The Exquisite Forest" can choose to take any prior animation and extend it in any number of ways. So, one idea – one branch – can branch of to any number of other branches in an almost recursive manner. The ‘forest’ motif comes from the idea that many of these separate thematic trees will one day be displayed on the website.

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Koblin’s artworks are a testament to the Internet’s value as a tool to create original artworks. They exemplify the multi-faceted possibilities of Net Art and their respective media. His work is also a unique look at the recursive qualities of collaborative, web-based artistic projects. From my personal perspective, it is satisfying to actually find an artist whose body of work is actually definable as Net Art.