"The Future of the Web...?"

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  Still frame screenshot from the video

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  Original MUSIC GRAFFITI Painting - background visuals & sound production

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  Vintage Apple Macintosh CRT Monitor

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  Dinky James Bond 007 Lotus Esprit

THE FUTURE OF THE WEB

“The potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable” DAVID BOWIE, 1999.

“Garbage in, Garbage out” WILLIAM D. MELLIN

DESCRIPTION

“THE FUTURE OF THE WEB…?” is a 25 second conceptual MP4 artwork examining the NEAR Foundation challenge question of what lies ahead for the web...and the implications for humanity.

In essence, the web is a machine - or tool - like the very first tools shaped and harnessed by the earliest humans. Tools that are capable of manifold uses both positive and negative. A knife can be used to carve wood or maim & kill, a gun to maintain civil order or terrorise, a nuclear arsenal can keep the peace while threatening the apocalypse.

Similarly, what we have learned of the web in the last thirty years bears out the premonition in the David Bowie quote above. A bewildering rate of positive change has been accompanied by a matching acceleration in the darker side of human behaviour.

The web as a human technological achievement can pave the way to a post-scarcity utopia…or an AI-controlled science fiction dystopia…or a world where the gap between rich and poor is even further polarised… Basically, it is not the ‘tool’ itself that will define its future. It is the use of the tool by humans - both on a micro and macro level - that will ultimately decide its destiny. ‘The Future of the Web’ will be a choice - You decide…

THEMES:

Beyond addressing the (titular) question asked by the METABUILD challenge, the piece encompasses a number of themes that link nearly all my work:

• Transience, Obsolescence, Transformation & Paradox

Equally, the artwork shines a light on the Nostalgia/NO$TALGIA conundrum, and the juxtaposition of futurism with retro-utopianism in an inherent paradox.

STORYBOARD:

A distorted utopian rainbow pattern scans across the background. It is distorted by a white noise ‘barbed wire’ interference pattern. A dial-up internet connection sound is playing as a vintage CRT computer monitor appears and fires into life.

A message is typed out on the screen:

“GOOD MORNING DAVE”

It is a quote from HAL 9000, the onboard computer that went rogue in ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’. Is this the future of the web?...a standard science fiction storyline of humans falling victim to their technological advances?

The screen flickers, accelerates and contracts to black. The dial up tone matches the transformations, before changing to a lower ‘connected’ tone as the screen implodes.

The monitor is filled with a second interference pattern, and then it is criss-crossed by ‘flying cars’ in a space race rush-hour. (Did we want Flying Cars..?) The cars are all the same but in different rainbow shades. The background music is a harmonic interlude created by scanning the interference pattern through a visual synthesizer.

Were Flying Cars the future of the web?...apparently not, but we’ll see. Will there be gridlock in the skies?...maybe. Will we be just as susceptible to car advertising? Probably.

The screen then flashes nuclear white and fades away to reveal and repeat the central question:

CHOOSE UTOPIA / CHOOSE DYSTOPIA

The typeface mirrors the iconic Katherine Hamnett “CHOOSE LIFE” t-shirt designs from 1983.

VISUAL REFERENCES:

The video touches upon a number of visual references:

• The utopian rainbow motif, crossed with a barb-wire interference pattern
• The potential for an AI controlled dystopia: “Good Morning Dave” - Hal 9000, 2001 A Space Odyssey
• A space race rush-hour of Peter Thiel’s “Flying Cars” in rainbow livery.
• Katherine Hamnett’s iconic “CHOOSE LIFE” T-shirt design from 1983.
• The monitor is a vintage Apple Mac CRT, the flying car is a Dinky 007 Lotus Esprit - both date from the 1990’s and are from my personal collection of ephemera.

PROCESS:

“THE FUTURE OF THE WEB…?” combines five separate disciplines: painting, sculpture/installation, photography/video, digital manipulation and sound production.

• An original MUSIC GRAFFITI semi-abstract painting is photographed and scanned into a digital format to form the basis of the background visual pattern.
• The Apple CRT monitor is photographed, along with the James Bond Lotus Esprit model car. Both are digitally manipulated.
• The elements are combined with photoshop still frame text animations, which are then digitally manipulated, and mixed into the video.
• A second original painting provides the white noise interference background to the Flying Cars segment.
• The original background image is then used to generate an accompanying ‘PHREAK MUSIC’ white noise soundtrack by scanning the photographed distortion pattern through a number of visual synthesizers, and then mixing the results into one channel which is timed to match the on-screen visual transformations. A dial up internet tone from the 1990’s is also fed into the mix.

SPECIFICATION:

2600 x 2200 - 81 Mb MP4 Available for download from the Ardrive link below Viewable on YouTube - but please select HD playback...otherwise the compression is horrendous and it will look blurred. A longer pdf description is available to view at the second link below on the Zeitwarp website.

Built With

• audacity
• digital-manipulation
• installation
• photography
• photoshop