Lorna Mills

Canadian alt-film-based and internet artist Lorna Mills has been active in solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990's so you could say she is a part of NET ART history already. She has worked in a variety of mediums including Cibachrome printing, painting, super 8 films, and has been producing raw and ethereal digital video animations since 2005, sometimes incorporated into restrained installation work. She has also worked as a game programmer since 1994, starting off in children's CD-ROMs, before moving to web based programs and currently edits video for IPTV and iPad delivery.

Lorna’s latest work revolves around animated GIF’s which she appropriates from the internet in the form of original public unattributed GIF’s grabbed from viral YouTube videos, network news and movies which she then manipulates into her animated collages. The end result is a piece that can be offensive, sexy, violent, and quite often just plain bizarre. These works are made of components from the digital world and are completely designed for viewing on the internet. “They absolutely have to exist on the internet first before I change their context for real life projects”, she explains, “It’s the conditions of the net, economy and compression that make the gifs more interesting to me than just straight up video”. The irony is that in most cases Lorna makes the work off line and it equally lends itself for a unique exhibition experience as well. Her friend and associate on their blog (www.digitalmediatree.com), artist/writer/publisher/curator Sally McKay, compares Lorna’s latest exhibition, “ The Axis of Something”, at Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn, to the aesthetics of the 1280 Florentine artist Cimabue and his application of gold leaf on canvas; …”Lorna Mills’s artworks have a similar quality in that they impact on several perceptual registers at once. Scanned images of shiny ceramic animals, printed out so large that the highlights become colorful rivers of molten abstraction, gleam with a physical sheen of applied gloss medium. On the monitor, animistic fabrics twist and morph while the digital tools of their making - control handles and anchor points - feather and twitch around them like weird antennae. On another monitor, screens depicting maps of the earth jump around spasmodically, reminding viewers that today's material moments of earthly aesthetic interaction transpire in a conceptual register of global interconnectivity."

Lorna herself describes her GIF work as hovering between film and photography and feels that a looping GIF feels more organic with the jerky looping action somewhat mimicking biological functions like a heartbeat or breathing. She explains that she tends to gravitate toward the ridiculous and has a good sense for it. Extreme and absurd activities appeal to her; so masturbating kangaroos, animals humping inanimate objects, animals who smoke, people fighting, animals fighting, pro wrestling and owls doing absolutely anything are staples in her personal collection of imagery. She says that she spends about two hours a day collecting this odd stuff and when asked what she is trying to say she confesses, “I'm not always sure of that, but for the most part, absurd perpetual conditions, obsessions, perhaps puzzlement over and recognition of 'otherliness'”. A thin but very important thread that has tied all my work in different media together for over 20 years has been my belief that the particular and peculiar can expand to universals which, at an alarming rate, contract right back to the particular and peculiar - basically, constant oscillation punctuated by the odd abrupt rhythm”. Lorna seems to be well balanced between her on line and off line activities with a strong curatorial output and a hybrid practice, blending art production with art criticism, cross-promotion and dialogue. She is a founding member of the The Red Head Gallery which was established in 1990 and is Toronto’s most enduring collectively run art gallery. It has stood the test of time as an exhibition space as well as a collective where critically engaged, highly productive artists enjoy curatorial control over the presentation of their work. Over the past two decades more than 100 artists have been part of The Red Head Gallery and have produced over 200 exhibitions. She has also co-curated monthly group animated GIF projections with Rea McNamara for the “Sheroes” performance series in Toronto, a group GIF projection event “When Analog Was Periodical” in Berlin co-curated with Anthony Antonellis, and a touring four person GIF installation, “:::Zip The Bright:::” that originated at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, with artists Sara Ludy, Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva. As far as promotion there was not a lot of information about this artist but just enough to find out what she is up to and where she will be. There are postings of exhibition info on G+ and Facebook and random GIF’s in the G+ streams and here and there, but if you weren’t looking for her specifically you wouldn’t find them. On her own site, the gifs are just posted as she makes them and I sometimes had to look closely to see whether it was her piece or one of her many GIF friends’ work. One of the influences she mentioned was the work of Francoise Gamma (http://francoisegamma.computersclub.org/), which is absolutely amazing. As I looked at more and more of her work I couldn’t help thinking that her GIF work reminds me of a moving version of the work of the famous photographer Jerry Uelsman; not bad company at all.

Francoise Gamma "Rhetoric on Sublime" Animated GIF References (http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/973600/the-newest-new-media-lorna-mills-on-the-evolving-niche-of-gif) (http://www.triangulationblog.com/2012/04/lorna-mills.html) (http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-affect-of-animated-gifs-tom-moody-petra-cortright-lorna-mills/) (http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/LornaMillsImageDump/)

Digital Flux Persona

"The advent of digitally networked culture and the social media performance art practices we all now must role-play as an operational mode of survival in an ever-transforming age of aesthetics creates an unusual opportunity for new media artists to develop alternative paths in the construction of their flux personae and to focus on the “cybernated life”" ---Mark America Thanks for your direction Mark.

Assignment 2

History of Digital Assignment 2 In the first two pieces we looked at, Shelly Jackson’s “My Body” and Adrienne Eisen's “Six Sex Scenes”, the conceptual framework is very much about how these women feel in their own skin. So much so and so personal that it made me somewhat uncomfortable to read. They are very much about coming of age but made me feel like I was snooping in some little girl's diary. I get that it is tough for girls growing up in a predominately misogynistic society, but I’m not really interested in hearing about someone sniffing their panties or being confused about where exactly pee comes from. I had my own curiosities about biology but to this day, I still wouldn’t write about it for millions to read. Guys just don't talk about stuff like that I guess, nor do I know any that write in a diary about it. You can call me old fashioned or square all you want. Sorry but I really couldn’t get through but just a few pages of these very intimate details; give me a great sci-fi story instead. Tina Laporta’s piece had much more to offer I feel when questioning this phenomenon of “presence” in today’s ever increasing online environment. It had a somewhat linear narrative that is reminiscent of a screenshot of a chat session from a Facebook conversation told in the third person. Donna Leischman's “redridinghood” had some technical issues and I couldn’t get past the part where her mother was handing her a basket. I did like the interactive story format with the moving cartoon characters and looked at some of her other work as well but it seems a lot of it has Flash problems. All the stories could be fiction but the last two seem the most likely. The link strategy on My Body and Sixty Sex Scenes was very similar. Random pages of a diary or the authors’ stories that the user selects sends the reader in random directions depending on which hypertext link that you select. The user has only a faint idea of what the next page will be about so you didn't really know where you were going within the story and each new link felt like another page of a diary with no structure or no sense of a structured autobiography. For me I just felt kind of lost and confused and didn't really care to move on past three or four links which could be a lack of this kind of sensibility caused by a lifetime of reading books in a linear fashion. The structure caused me to lose interest but the content could have also been a factor. Tina LaPorta's piece explored a much more interesting storyline for me; the actual disconnect that we all have in an age of constant communication. Again the linear structure is something I am used to. As Tina explained, this was a dialogue that she did in fact have where she photographed the interaction as it happened. Overall I didn't feel like any of these artworks was very literary but more like a journal or diary (and not even a social media page) as in the first two, or more scientific as in Tina Laporta’s investigation of the “disembodied and dislocated nature of on-line communication.” I also didn’t see them as visual or performing art pieces either. Since the electronic environment is not subject to restriction to a degree it has allowed these women to express themselves without rebuttal or immediate criticism, making it a very arbitrary decision contingent solely upon their discretion. Once again, arbitrary or not, you wouldn’t catch me writing something like this. “What happens in Vegas”…, you might say.

What is Internet Art?

So I started digging through the vast cyber space trying to find out what this internet art thing was all about. Doing my Google search like a good little member of the collective, I stumbled upon an article; 11 Net Artists You Should Know by Marina Galperina . This form of art is entirely new to me being only familiar with the traditional gallery and museum system. All the works are quite different but a treat to experience in such a different way than I am used to. One of the net artists I was drawn to right away was Lorna Mills from Toronto.

She makes animated GIFs that come alive on your monitor and can be strange but familiar having a certain odd yet sexy quality to them. Her style moves from a playful aesthetic to sophisticated organic abstraction. Although these images move, unlike what I am used to looking at, they do have a certain quality that appeals to me. This was not the case with most of the other work I looked at, which was confusing and hard to navigate at best. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work and I’m not sure how keen I am with having to be a part of the piece rather than sit back and contemplate it. As I dove into this maze of techno-imagery I found out about some of the pioneers of this new art form and the key organizations that brought this genre about, to include; SITO; The Thing; Adaweb, directed by Benjamin Weil; and Alt-X, founded by our own Mark Amerika one of the oldest online art and literary networks. Much of the imagery is very busy and seems cluttered and all over the place but that could be the point, I couldn’t say. I’m sure this “art” needs one to develop a new sensibility but at this point I just don’t get most of it. Take Jeremy Rotsztain’s “Action Painting” series for example, talk about Jackson Pollock meets the 21st century. It is a very cool piece and I do appreciate taking the idea of Hollywood action movies and combining moving visual elements with the perceived action. I’m just not sure about what he is trying to say. I almost wish he would have used music, still very inventive. Apparently with social media facilitating a transformative shift in the distribution of internet art, the direction it will take in the future is anyone’s guess. The production of meaning seems to be externally contingent on a network of other artists’ content which brings us back around to appropriation in this age of file sharing. Call me old fashioned but I still like to look at stuff hanging on the wall.