Motzko / Jan Robert Leegte

Web is a network spawned in the dark, resting within a smart contract waiting to be explored. It is a performance of the Internet itself, a non-linear choreography of a thousand webpages. The pages are expressed as raw HTML structures, empty from content. Some feel vaguely familiar, as if we remember visiting them in the past, some come straight from the depth of the machine.

Web is not a utility, but an expression of the machine. Wandering it suggests a forsaken usage and navigability, but it is just an echo of information architecture crafted with the cold introvert yet careful handling of the machine, leaving you getting lost and walking in circles.

Web is a monument to the hyperlink, a poem dedicated to machine learning and a computer's dérive within itself.

The mid grey chiseled computer interfaces of 1997 have always reminded me of sculptures created in bas-relief, a technique going back to the stone carved petroglyphs that is as ancient as humankind's first steps in making art. The combination of illusion and tactility found in these interfaces shows our longing to have the computer experience to be part of the material world. Therefore it comes as no surprise that the programming language of Ethereum is named 'Solidity'. The blockchain is software, yet it behaves and feels like hardware.

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Window pays tribute to interface culture, and as such, the work is responsive and not scaling. When the work is viewed on a smaller scale, details will disappear, yet the composition stays recognisable. It is like stepping back to see a work from a distance. The work can also increasingly reveal more details when made larger. As a result Window will keep unfolding in the future as resolutions will grow.

The work follows standard window interactions. Double clicking or tapping the title bar will toggle between full browser and windowed view. On a laptop or desktop in windowed view, you can drag and resize your Window as you please. When made tiny, it makes for a nice profile pic. Clicking or tapping the background will cycle through three different background colours.

Window comes in seven latent colours and both in Windows Classic or Mac Classic style. With the feature ‘Latent colour’ I look at the invisible steps within the procedure of a generative artwork. I love the idea that the script has chosen to feature a colour, but in a later step could fail to make it to the composition. By showing the colour as a feature, I try to extend the visual work with deeper invisible layers of the generative process. Check the features to see what colour is seeded.

In honour of the blockchain and the web, the work is written in vanilla JavaScript, using no dependancies, and generates standard HTML DOM aiming for a closer feel of the user interface.

Web is a network spawned in the dark, resting within a smart contract waiting to be explored. It is a performance of the Internet itself, a non-linear choreography of a thousand webpages. The pages are expressed as raw HTML structures, empty from content. Some feel vaguely familiar, as if we remember visiting them in the past, some come straight from the depth of the machine.

Web is not a utility, but an expression of the machine. Wandering it suggests a forsaken usage and navigability, but it is just an echo of information architecture crafted with the cold introvert yet careful handling of the machine, leaving you getting lost and walking in circles.

Web is a monument to the hyperlink, a poem dedicated to machine learning and a computer's dérive within itself.

Compression has been the driving force behind the image-based internet since the early 90s. No compression, no Netscape, no social media, no NFTs. The JPEG compression has specifically enabled photography-based imagery on the net. It has always served that purpose and over time become the de facto default for showing high quality imagery online. But compression always leaves a trace, which has become the lens through which the network sees the world of uploaded images.

"A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience." ― Mark Rothko

JPEG tries to create an image programatically fully expressing that signature compression. An image that is like empty made from barely nothing, yet fully present in its blazing appearance. A work deeply material, expressing itself through the language of code and codec only. This is not a JPEG depicting an image. The JPEG is the image itself.

Delving into the depths and peculiarities of the digital, tethered to art history, JPEG found its way to the surface. Generated color fields are utilised to trigger the compressing algorithm, resulting in a world of raw visual entities. Where the abstract expressionists cut out the depiction in painting, aiming to let the artist convey pure emotion, JPEG cuts out the artist's emotion and lets it emerge from within the algorithm. Carefully you could categorize the work as compressionism. An art form where the machine speaks in its own raw language, but nevertheless makes a direct touch to our human heart.

JPEG is a collection of generative images in the JPEG file format. The work tries to break with the idea of the fixed file format, therefor creating the JPEG entirely from code using no image material whatsoever. The individual JPEGs are generated responsively at the moment of viewing based on the token hash as a random seed. You can literally drag the JPEG out from the browser window.

JPEG pays tribute to interface culture, and as such the work is responsive and not scaling. When the work is resized, the work is again rendered and compressed. When viewed smaller, details will disappear, yet the composition stays recognisable. It’s like stepping back to see a work from further away. The choice of color wanders from monochromatic tones to the brutality of complete randomness and everything in between.

In honour of the blockchain and the web, the work is written in vanilla JavaScript, using no dependancies, and generates a standard JPEG. This way the file is downloadable, aiming for a materiality that comes as close as possible to the standard browser.

The button has been in a continuous state of shapeshifting over the expanding history of collective interface design. Endless webpages filled with designs, haptics, styles, expressions, subcultures, interactions, effects, all layered over this simple and elemental entity leaving in its wake a fundamental material presence within interface culture.

The internet is an unimaginably vast ecology of data and processes. Deeply stored data is immutable like buried granite, where other is constantly in flux like a rushing mountain stream. The whole system is in continuous evolution through endless processes reshaping the data interacting with each other and with ourselves. At the opaque surface of this churning ocean of bits is the exchange between both the realm of the computer and that of ourselves. The interface. And in the centre of this human machine culture lives the button. A binary entity reaching out from the very core of the machine's logic to touch, at the surface, our reaching finger, after which it dives back down in order to toggle some state from a zero to a one.

The mid-grey chiseled computer interfaces of the late nineties tend to evoke early sculptures created in bas-relief, a technique arcing all the way back to stone carved petroglyphs that is as ancient as humankind's first steps in making art.

By carving into a flat surface, the play of shadow and light holds strangely between drawing and sculpture. – Flat and three dimensional at the same time, the bas-relief is an art discipline on its own.

Skipping past the more elaborate reliefs found in classical traditions around the world, this discipline takes a wondrous turn with chiaroscuro grisailles. Painted using only grayscale tones, these faux three-dimensional surface sculptures are created by only using highlights and shadows in paint.

It is this bridge that leads to the early computer interface, like an expanded grisaille, hyper-charged with interactivity and live procedurality. A double flattening of perception, brimming with its own reality. Both practices wish to be in two places at the same time, making the bas-relief appear destined for the computer interface: existing in a space of illusion, but also right here at our fingertips.

Similar to the most ancient uses of bas-relief, communicating early language in stone walls and tablets, these Bas-relief works are also scribed with coded shapes. Their boxes represent the language of data behind their making – programmatic code that allows humans and machines to communicate. The concentric shapes, columnar and tabular layouts, and interactive boolean states are presented as artifacts of digital language in a form like ancient tablets. These works immortalize this era for cultures looking back thousands of years from now, curious about the computer age and basic units of communication during this time.

Bas-relief, by Jan Robert Leegte, is a dedication to this long history leading to the computer interface, and an offering for millennia to come.

Mountains are grand natural statements of sculptural expression. They are birthplaces of sublime monumentality and romanticism. Their crumbs are the raw materials that provided us with a long tradition of sculpture.

In another realm there is the ambiguous materiality of the digital, the human-made bits and bytes, in constant flow through systems, from which a new order of materials emerge at the surface of the interface. Among them is the user interface phenomenon of the drop shadow. A material bereft of all our notions of materiality, it being nothing but the absence of light cast upon a surface due to an obstructing object. In the work the shadow has been severed from a non existent casting object making it less then nothing. But also the drop shadow being a digital simulacrum adds another step deeper into ethereality, making it almost a shadow of shadows. This places it in direct opposition to the most earthly rooted of them all, the mountain.

Mountains and Drop Shadows is a continuation of a line of work going back to 2013, with the net art piece www.mountainsanddropshadows.com in which a live script would continuously fetch images tagged ‘mountains’ from online databases. Because of this, the landscapes would become anonymised and delocalised, merely becoming an image, often ending as a humble desktop image.

For this most recent iteration of the work, querying databases felt like a thing of the past, as all those images have been added to the datasets of various image generating AI services. Mountains and Drop Shadows, 2023 uses AI generated mountain images, a mashup of all images of existing mountains, fully erasing the subjectivity of the photographer and a-localising the image.

The work is a sculptural desktop standoff between a mountain dreamt up by the internet and a drop shadow. Embodiment vertigo on the summits of the interface.

In 1983, Bill Atkinson was working on MacPaint, a graphics application for the Apple Lisa. While drinking a beer at a local bar, he noticed an animated waterfall in a beer sign on the wall. The effect was created by rotating an image under a mask. Back home he applied the animation using simple diagonal lines producing a moving dashed line. The ‘marching ants’, or animated selection marquee that became ubiquitous in interface culture, were born.

I have always been spellbound by the selection marquee. The elegance and sensitivity of this element of GUI is unlike anything else. Extending the idea of circling a word with a pencil it is a physical manifestation of our mental capacity to select, bringing in all the unique material beauty that only the computer can offer. Paraphrasing Bruce Nauman, on the one hand it’s just a daily used functional element, but on the other when seen for what it is, it is a profound experience. Like something between a beer and a waterfall.

The generative long form NFT collections introduced a highly successful format in showing the range of coded art as a series of instances. Yet, in its novelty also housed the centuries old model of the edition, a (limited) series of isolated outputs.

The Internet exists as a network of content which is built to be seen. And as Web2.0 emerged, each observer within this network also became content. In Walled Garden all collectors share the experience of the same central procedural artwork. Perspective creates the unique output rather than variation. And as perspective forces attendance, the observers are all present within the work, and they too become a part of the installation.

The architecture of the garden recalls herman de vries' Sanctuary, in which the GUI becomes the wall to an online peep show. This aspect also brings in Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés, peeping at an online wild garden in all its beauty, only to be come aware of all the others looking back.

Walled Garden is a place we can look at and be looked at, but not touch. A sanctuary we own, but cannot enter.