This work wants you to suspend conventional notions of authorship while you interact with it. Just as the artisans of the popular prints of the last two centuries often used images and motifs from the visual universe around them, so too we have gathered materials from the World Wide Web to constitute the different layers of this work.

This is as much to bring to attention the inherent extensibility and reproducible nature of art work in the digital domain, as it is to reclaim the knowledge-sharing imperative of early popular printmaking. This is why we have chosen the cover of a manual, a primer of public health, as our point of reference.

In the late nineteenth century, printmaking entered the public imagination as a cheap accessible and popular means of producing and circulating pictures, stories, information and rumour. This was a culture that eluded censors and skirted copyright. Today, a hundred years later, a cluster of technologies centred on the computer and the Internet has made possible the birth of a new folklore of images and ideas. Which, like its print ancestor, is also busy eluding censors and skirting copyright.

Pictures, stories, news and rumour, speculations and skirmishes in info-wars, databases and image banks, hard facts and harder fictions are all streaming into our desktops, just as cheap paper prints once piled up in our great-grandparents'closets, or crowded the walls of the cities they walked in.

This work wants you to bridge the distance between the data stream of the present and the fading imprint of the recent past. It asks that you look through yesterday's web of images at the bitmap of where you are today.

We have used reprints of nineteenth century Calcutta woodcuts to build the interactive interface. Contemporary elements have been taken from an array of sites on the World Wide Web. They have then been edited, re-framed, rendered and transformed to embody a new sensibility.

The artists, coders and writers who generated the materials that we have used here are our co-workers in this work. In this sense, and in other senses that you will discover as you navigate through it, this body of work is a work about work.

 

 

 

The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behaviour towards works of art issues today in a new form. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator.

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In Principle a Work of Art has always been reproducible.

- Walter Benjamin