In Look, See: July 04, 2004 – July 10, 2004 Archives, Chris Ashley was amused by my entry and attempted experiment. He notes that for him these works need to be understood in context,
My drawings, though, don’t stand alone. They exist within a context; anyone who has followed these for awhile will have a sense that:
1. the drawings have or respond to a subject, and are somewhat representational, but not always of tangible things;
2. the drawings also derive their meaning from the fact that they exist within a weblog where I have a daily deadline, one drawing (typically) is exhibited each day, and the weblog serves as a gallery and an archive, all public;
3. meaning is also inherent in the fact that the drawings (almost always) are in series, so that drawings are part of a body; and
4. I am really working up against the edge of the limitations of HTML tables, a very simple medium, so that even though I use the grid everday I am working against making an image that is just a set of blocks;
5. I use color like a painter, which is my background- I mix, tint, shade, and use it for structure, space, and composition.
While his works don’t stand alone, and that makes the site more than just a collection of HTML art, does that mean that the technique can’t be repurposed and used in other contexts? How tied is a technique to its original context? Does one have to follow the blog to appreciate a particular work? These parallel the questions we have in literary theory around the authority of the author and their control over their work. The web (and blogging) makes it that much easier for fragments to be taken out of context. I would go further and say that you can’t count on context on the web. I certainly missed the importance to Chris of the sequential evolution of his work working my way backward from the entry point.
That said, some of the questions that prompted me to try my untutored hand were:
How does one think through what one wants to achieve if one uses a WYSIWG editor like Dreamweaver? As Chris notes, “It’s all a little bit more difficult than it looks and sounds.” Well, how hard is it to paint through the coding? (Very, but that could be inexperience.)
Could we set this as a student assignment to get them thinking about web art and HTML? (Not sure)
Various attempts I have seen at robotic art or visualizatons use sophisticated technologies to generate SVG or GIFs (or are Java apps). Chris has found a way to use plain old HTML expressively – can this be leveraged for robotic projects?
What are its limits?
What are its extensions? Is part of the beauty of his work the simplicity of the code – working within the constraints? Would one lose the expressive simplicity if one introduced text into cells, images into cells, or animated cells? (Proof depends on pudding)
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