Archive for June, 2010

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Brandnewpaintjob.com, an on-going blog by Jon Rafman, is composed of (as of today, anyway) almost forty posts.

Each of the posts is itself composed of either (1.) a digital image depicting a 3D model, or (2.) a digital image depicting a 3D model as well as a short video clip in which a “camera” moves around the 3D model as if it were filmed in physical space.

The models Rafman uses are appropriated from Google 3D Warehouse and altered by him so that the “texture” or outer surface of the model reflects the style of (in most cases) a canonical Modern or contemporary artist.

So, for example, in the first post of the blog, Motherwell Elephant, one views an elephant whose surface reflects the rough confrontations between the colors black and white in paintings by the abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell; and, in the most recent post, David Hockney Studio Apartment, one views a modern studio apartment with natural light, expensive furniture and a flatscreen television in the color palette and iconography of David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash.

In-between these examples is a series of similar collisions between a particular painting style and a particular 3D model such as Warhol Commodore (a Warhol self-portrait over the 3D model of a Commodore 64 computer) or Parker Ito Condo (Parker Ito’s The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet over the 3D model of an expensive looking condo apartment).

At first glance, these collisions may strike one as somewhat arbitrary postmodern one-liners; however, if one continues to view through the blog or follow its development as it happens live, then one begins to appreciate the way the posts function in greater depth.

Take, for example, Pollock Tank.

Pollock’s infamous dripping style serves here as a formal equivalent to the camouflage designs normally associated with the surfaces of a tank.

However, there are other things happening.

The aggressively armored shell of the tank nudges one towards viewing Pollock’s persona and his paintings as “tank-like”—excessively private and explosive–while this very explosiveness of Pollock’s canvases nudges one towards viewing the tank as itself wildly explosive (as opposed to defensive or keeping the peace).

In each of the cases presented through the blog, a similar collision between the 3D model and the painting style creates a two-way street of meaning in which the painting style says something about the model and the model says something about the painting style.

In regard to this point, Rafman writes:

A conversation is going on between the surface and the underlying structure. In this way, the clash of the cultural weight of a high modernist paintings and a mass produced vehicle is not simply another example of the blurring of the distinction between high and low culture.

*******

It’s often not immediately clear what the connections are leading towards, but this very wiggle-room in interpretation benefits the project as a whole by maintaining a certain ambiguity to each post.

For example, I’m not sure exactly what Lewitt Blue Whale or Morris Louis Penguin have to say about each of their respective collisions off of the top of my head, but in seeing the actual models, each case does make some sort of sense and part of the pleasure in the work is in thinking through why that sense may or may not exist (why is Sol LeWitt like a blue whale; why is a penguin like Morris Louis?)

Finally, when the blog is viewed as a whole, an interesting theme is demonstrated:

When viewed as digital images, canonical works from the history of 20th century painting are inevitably going to lose whatever phenomenological power they possess in the physical space of the museum.

A .jpeg of a De Kooning is not going to afford one the phenomenological “De Kooning effect” which one would experience in a traditional art space.

However, what does afford one a certain phenomenological effect on the Web is the way that, over time, it’s not the style of the famous paintings that serve as art, but Rafman’s performed exploration of them.

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

Acapella, one of two videos by Guthrie Lonergan with that title (the other was discussed in the previous post), opens on a stock video clip depicting a direct point-of-view shot in which the camera smoothly banks through white clouds in an otherwise sublimely blue sky.

Almost immediately after this imagery appears onscreen, an a cappella version of the Oasis song “Wonderwall” emerges on the soundtrack and, then, almost immediately after that, an identical “Wonderwall” vocal track appears, creating a harmony.

The lead vocalist of Oasis, Liam Gallagher, in harmony with himself, sings:

Today is gonna be the day

(Today is gonna be the day)

That they’re gonna throw it back to you

(That they’re gonna throw it back to you)

By now you should’ve somehow

(By now you should’ve somehow)

Realized what you gotta do

(Realized what you gotta do)

********

At about nine seconds into the video, a ray of sun peeks through the clouds and the video clip suddenly loops back to the beginning while the song continues normally.

The video clip then continues looping while the song continues playing.

There’s something blissful about it.

The shot is generic, but somehow beautiful in its simplicity and the harmony created from the a capella versions of “Wonderwall” only adds to the sense of this.

However, as one watches, one may wonder if it’s too blissful–after all, artists who work in a conceptual vein (as Lonergan does) often use aesthetic beauty ironically or to make a broader point about art.

So, one scans through the image, on the hunt for clues or a punchline.

But, there doesn’t seem to be any goofing going on here—it’s not like it’s all a big joke.

Eventually, though, the song ends and the viewer is left only with the endless silent looping of the video clip.

There’s an unsettling quality to just seeing the video clip without the song; it’s not “silent” as in a silent film, but rather “quiet” as in a person who could speak, but chooses not to.

At this point, one can either leave the work or follow it through this new phase.

Now, all that said, a strange sort of question pops up:

Is Acapella a narrative video with a beginning, a middle, and an end, or is it an infinite loop?

Is the piece done when the song finishes or does it just go on endlessly?

To put the question in practical terms, how would one show this in a gallery?

At the opening do you play it through with the song once and, then, for the duration of the exhibition just let the loop cycle through itself in silence or does the curator or gallery assistant just occasionally go over and start it up again based on either whims or an arbitrarily regulated schedule?

Perhaps that’s missing the point, though.

Maybe it only works as Web art in which the user is free to control their own personal experience of the work, viewing for as long as they choose, reloading as frequently as they choose.

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Guthrie Lonergan created two videos composed solely of the a cappella vocal tracks of famous pop songs mashed-up with appropriated stock footage clips.

Both of these videos are titled Acapella 

In the first video, one views, to start, stock footage with burnt-in time code depicting an hourglass spinning on a pedestal in front of a blue background, which is itself probably designed to be used as a generic “bluescreen” in video postproduction.

The blue background in the clip, though, is creased and wrinkly which would make it difficult to use for a seamless bluescreen effect.

Also, the lighting is generally harsh, casting an entire half of the blue background in darkness, again defeating the point of bluescreen as an even, unchanging field of blue which can be easily keyed out in a single gesture in post-production.

Each of these qualities give one the impression that this an amateur production, perhaps a single person hoping to sell cut-rate stock footage from their bedroom.

Following this introductory shot, the soundtrack opens with an a cappella rendering of the Police song “Message in a Bottle” as the view on the hourglass itself zooms in, focusing closer and closer on the sand dripping from the top of the hourglass to the bottom.

The viewer watches these sands of time drip away as Sting sings:

Just a castaway, an island at sea, oh

Another lonely day, with no here but me, oh

More loneliness than any man could bear

Rescue me before I fall into despair, oh

*****

It should be noted that as an a cappella version of “Message in a Bottle,” these lyrics become simultaneously more isolated and more rawly emotional than they would come across in the original song; and, furthermore, despite the seeming incongruity of the hourglass imagery and this raw vocal track, they begin to quickly make some sort of emotional sense together as they’re each sparsely produced and they each reference a certain threat of being alone in the world.

As the song continues, this hourglass imagery dissolves to a shot depicting a man (whose slicked back hairdo is visible in the bottom of the shot, incidentally) holding his hands above his head, demonstrating the idea of “growth” by placing his palms close together and, then, spreading them far apart over and over again.

At this point, the chorus of the song kicks in:

I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world

I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world

I hope that someone gets my

I hope that someone gets my

I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle, yeah…

*******

When the man’s hand motions are juxtaposed with these lyrics, the viewer can, then, almost read them as themselves an “S.O.S.”—a ritualistic signal to a distant viewer, asking to be saved (or at least acknowledged).

This becomes poignant when one considers that—again–this particular stock footage is amateurish and naïve—one more drop of water in the ocean of non-professional or semi-professional user content on the Web, one more person expressing themselves in an environment of endless amounts of other personal expressions.

This is the problem of trying to express oneself in what Lonergan has termed “The Big Database” in which even what would otherwise be “amazing” content is flattened out; expressions (any expression–the videographer’s, Lonergan’s, my own)  are consumed and, then, almost instantaneously forgotten.

As such, anyone trying to get their ideas heard in Internet-land is a sort of castaway.

Related to this point, Sting sings:

Walked out this morning, don’t believe what I saw

Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore

Seems I’m not alone in being alone

*****

What work like this video by Lonergan does, though, is start from the idea that everyone working on the Web is sending out their own S.O.S. and, by self-reflexively picturing that, a different lens and set of criteria for thinking about work in The Big Database might open up.

In Lonergan’s words:

…Something very real struggling beneath a heavy and ancient structure of corporate software defaults and cultural banality…

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Chris Coy’s contribution to Contemporary Semantics Beta, an art show curated by Constant Dullaart at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam, consists of two elements:

1. A pair of large, printed images hanging beside one another on the wall.

The first of these images depicts a straight-faced young man in a red t-shirt holding a completely blank, white rectangle vertically (as if it were a painting).

The second depicts a group of enthusiastically smiling young people in business attire holding a similarly blank, white rectangle horizontally (as if it were a novelty-size check).

In both of these images, it seems as though the white rectangle should contain some sort of signage which would relate it to the rest of the given scenario, but it doesn’t.

As it turns out, these are appropriated stock photographs whose original intention is to provide either (1.) a clean, broadly cliché “stock” image of a person or group of people holding a generic sign which, for example, a corporate client could easily digitally insert their own chosen signage into the white space; or (2.) a visual equivalent of the phrase “blank slate”which could be used in the off-chance that a magazine or advertising campaign need communicate the idea of “blank slate” in a single potent image.

It’s not the artist who subtracts from the original image here, but the original image created by a stock image company which subtracts from  itself; the artist merely points this phenomenon out.

2. The second element in the work is a large, completely blank, white rectangle which is placed on the gallery floor, leaning against the wall below the prints mentioned above.

This white rectangle functions the same way that the white rectangles in the stock photos do:

It is meant to be an open space for something that another person could insert; in this case an artwork.

Coy knows that the installation will survive as a digital photograph.

The white rectangle completes a loop—from the mutable digital image on the computer, to the art space, and back again.

Monday, June 21st, 2010

In High Fives-Apple Fingerworks Multitouch Patents Sheet by Kari Altmann (a part of Altmann’s on-going No Glove, No Love meme), one views a series of smeared, blood-colored handprints slapped to the surface of black & white printouts of x-y graphs.

Each of these x-y graphs contain a representation of seemingly arbitrary numbers and undecipherable technical language around a set of black streaks.

The direct indexical imprint of the biological body over an array of technical data creates a collision; each instance of the series suggests either a paint-crazy toddler run amok with their older sibling’s physics homework or a 1980s corporate-office slasher film in which the maniac killer slices up a victim at the copy machine.

The title of the work–High Fives-Apple Fingerworks Multitouch Patents Sheet—points out for the viewer where to go.

Each of the diagrams over which the artist places her blood-colored handprint is, it turns out, the schematic diagram of a touchscreen computer technology (a touchscreen computer technology being, for example, the touch responsive interface of the Apple iPhone).

With this information in mind, one can, then, read the “black streaks” described above as the representations of handprints which are labeled with accompanying data.

What one views here, then, is not a collision between Altmann’s blood-red handprint over any old data, but rather over virtual data representing the human hand.

It’s a “high five”—the physical trace of the artist’s handprint colliding with the copied and quantified representation of an anonymous user’s own handprint.

What’s important to reiterate here is that the immediate impression of each of the iconographic elements colliding in the space of the image doesn’t favor either the technical representation of the handprint in the background or the messy, bodily handprint in the foreground; rather each are roughly equivalent in graphic power.

This equivalency is meaningful when one considers that as touchscreen technologies become increasingly mobile and responsive to the physics and ergonomic constraints of the human body in the physical world, they simultaneously become increasingly influential in directing the control of the human body towards the ubiquitous usage of these very technologies.

It’s great that the interface of the iPhone opens up possibilities for greater bodily freedom in the use of computer technologies, but is it great that this interface also nudges human beings to spend all of their downtime hunched over, tapping and rubbing away on a little computer?

Regarding this point, Altmann writes:

In High Fives the idea is to use red finger paint to represent fake blood, and provide a handprint on this map of flesh and touch interaction being controlled by the interface.  Resembling the handprints some of the earliest cave dwellers left as a mark of their civilization, this handprint in blood is a way of leaving a mark on the infrastructure being created by these systems of power and product–the virtual “cave” that technology often expects us to live in more and more, filtered from direct experience. It’s also a way of meeting every interface confrontation with an unexpected and human reaction.

*********

Altmann’s handprint, then, is a sign of the human body confronting the technology which influences its control—yes–but, through her choice of blood-red for the color of the handprints, it becomes something more intense, as well—a sign of aggressively confronting the technology which influences its control.

Friday, June 18th, 2010

Still Available by Oliver Laric is an on-going list of Web domain names which are still available to be taken.

Laric’s work Taken is an on-going list of all of those domain names listed in the Still Available series which have, in fact, subsequently been taken (at present, almost seventy domains are now taken from the over three hundred listed over the course of the series’ five installments).

In the earliest iteration of Still AvailableStill Available 17.10.08—approximately one hundred thirty-five potential domain names are listed, each of which refers to keywords rich in value relevant to that particular historical time period regarding, for example, politicians, political theorists, luxury commodities, pornography, artists, art theorists, art world events, physics, pop culture, or cities.

These domain names are often funny and perceptive in the way in which they pinpoint strategies employed by “parked domain” companies who buy up domains in bulk using keyword strategies not unlike those employed by Laric himself.

So, for example, he lists domains which have no value other than a speculative one regarding the future of value-rich keywords such as elections2032.com, documenta13.com, and beverlyhillsninja3.com; or domains which combine vaguely-related value rich keywords at that particular moment in historical time such as putinpalin.com, gucciprada.com, and platinumclit.com; or else domains which just sound as thought they could be actual domains such as botoxbros.com, divorcebattle.com, or thenewsocialism.com.

Likewise, in the following four iterations of Still Available, a similar method is employed.

In this way, Laric creates a portrait of the practice of domain naming as an increasingly complicated and speculative enterprise which, in turn, results in a Web consisting of as many empty, “parked” domains awaiting potential owners as it does active ones—a portrait of the Web as a space undergoing not exploration, but relentless colonization into the predicted value-rich keywords of the future.

The Taken list of domain names underlines this understanding.

On the one hand, it’s true that some of the domain names from the list are taken by “normal” people or small not-for-profits such as the artist Billy Rennekamp taking billyrennekamp.com, a modest Amon Düül fan site taking amonduul.com, the “Frankly My Darling…” blog run by a middle-aged woman taking 13dimensions.com, or the breast milk donation info hub taking breastmilkdonation.com.

However, most of the domains were taken by Web-based companies in the business of parking on domains in order to cybersquat or provide advertising space (my favorite example is steaksonaplane.com which was taken by the Godaddy.com company to advertise its own services).

With all of this in mind, what one views here, then, is the way in which this increasingly colonized landscape is different from the geographical landscape of Earth in the sense that its potential space for expansion is itself continuously expanding as world events, and memes both high and low open it up to the contingency of the moment.

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

Sand Saga by Shana Moulton, a ten-and-a-half minute video with a family resemblance to Moulton’s own Whispering Pines video series, is the story of a vision quest through a landscape involving not the traditional natural environment of the Native American vision quest, but rather a mishmash of the natural environment, new age kitsch, mirrors, vaginal Georgia O’Keefe iconography, archetypal myth, psychoactive skin creams, digital effects, time travel portals, and an extended hallucinatory state.

The narrative opens with two views of Moulton’s alter ego, Cynthia, viewing her own represented reflection in, first, a large bathroom mirror, and, second, a small personal mirror which (due to its ability to magnify facial details) morphs her face, stretching it and compressing it into bizarre forms.

Cynthia, then, returns to her reflection in the larger mirror as she applies a brown-green facial mask while, in the meantime, various objects in the bathroom–a Georgia O’Keefe “cow skull” poster as well as masks and sculptural busts depicting mythological figures–look on.

After putting on the finishing touches, she turns over an hourglass and, as the sands of time drip away, Cynthia—continuing to stare into her own reflection—watches the facial mask transform into a portal which itself leads to a lush landscape in which a shamanic figure drips sand onto a Native American sand painting (perhaps there is a Jackson Pollock reference here).

The shaman, represented to Cynthia as herself wearing an O’Keefe cow skull mask and a red jump suit, directs her to lie down on the painting as she applies consumer-quality massage gadgetry and polished black stones to Cynthia’s back.

Through the stages of this ritual, the shaman is able to extract both symbolic representations of blockages to Cynthia’s chakras as well as a contact lens from her eye–actions which, then, set off a cathartic, carnivalesque montage composed of dancing figures wearing mythological masks in the midst of a blissful void space composed of imagery from O’Keefe’s flower paintings.

This montage, accompanied by rhythmic new age music, continues for roughly three of the video’s ten-and-a-half minutes and, then, in a final scenario, Cynthia returns to her bathroom as “a new woman” and proceeds to eat her facial mask, taking what was initially a synthetic cover to her face and ingesting it, symbolically destroying it by absorbing it into herself.

Now, on the one hand, Sand Saga is a bildungsromant in which a young, seemingly dissatisfied character gains confidence through a mystical journey into the archetypal depths of herself.

On the other hand, though, the constant, knowingly jokey references to borderline quackery, “cheesy” special effects, and sham new age commodity culture casts the sincerity of this vision quest thesis into doubt—like, oh, it’s all a joke.

So which is it?

Well, at a recent artist’s talk at E.A.I., Moulton made several references to the television series Twin Peaks, citing it as an inspiration and ironically claiming that her own best video was a remake of the “Black Lodge” scenes from the final Twin Peaks episode which she made as an adolescent (unfortunately, that tape is now lost).

The appeal of Twin Peaks at the height of its meteoric rise in the 1990s was its tone of, on the one hand, absolute vulnerability and sincerity, and, on the other hand, absolute detached coolness and irony.

The viewer of Twin Peaks is invested in following the case of “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” not because they intrinsically care about Laura Palmer nor because they care about the show’s detached hipster humor, but rather because of the satisfactory collision between these two elements in which it’s impossible to tell which one is the true Twin Peaks.

Similarly, Moulton’s videos are perhaps best considered as operating in the cracks of a collision between sincerity and irony and a lot of that has to do with Moulton’s skills as a performer.

Like Kyle MacLachlan in the role of Special Agent Dale Cooper before her, if one views Moulton’s character enough, it doesn’t matter if she’s serious or goofing or if the truth will ever be revealed; the pleasure is in following her figure it all out for herself.

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Plato with biometric overlay by Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas of Aids-3D is a work of inkjet print and acrylic on canvas depicting two elements:

1. The photo of a Greek sculptural bust.

2. A formal pattern of  intersecting pink lines and “stars” at each of the intersection points that together map out the facial features of the figure depicted in the Greek sculptural bust.

At first glance, one views the contrast of the relatively smooth lines and monochromatic color palette depicted in the photo of the sculpture (which read as “ancient”–the photo comes across as signifying the era of Ancient Greece more than a particular artist or subject), with the rigidness and dayglo color-scheme of the lines and stars (which themselves each read as “artificial”–they create a pattern reminiscent of graphic iconography from the Transformers cartoon show and film series).

So, there’s an immediate collision between two starkly differentiated iconographic elements–each of which pull one in an opposed direction.

The title—Plato with biometric overlay—points out for the viewer where to go from there:

In the context of the philosophy of art, Plato is perhaps best known for his “mimetic theory” of art in which art is an imitation of an imitation of a real thing; there is—here–a higher level of idealized, capital-F “Form” (an abstracted, immaterial idea of a bed), an imitation of this ideal (an actual material bed based on the idea of a bed) and an imitation of an imitation (a drawing of an actual bed based on the idea of a bed).

Biometric overlay, on the other hand, is a surveillance strategy employed by security professionals in order to create an abstracted, immaterial representation of a person’s facial features which can be digitally stored and cross-referenced in a computer network in order to, for example, quickly see if the subject’s facial features match those of anyone on a terrorist watchlist.

When the biometric overlay is placed over the face of Plato, a collision occurs in the work between one vision of idealized Form and another—one vision of Form as the transcendental space outside of the “cave” of “normal” consciousness and another vision of Form as the nightmarish acceleration of Biopower in the wake of the military industrial complex (or some such).

In their own commentary on this work, the artists lay out a similar reading.

They write:

The form has become the Form—There is no longer a need for a distinction between the particular and the universal. Plato’s ‘faceness’ has been quantified and digitized and his biography, stress levels, horoscope, download queue, credit history and criminal record have all been cross-checked for potential threat-patternage. Are the laser lines a symbol of magic and wonder or of cold totalitarianism?

******

With this in mind and as one continues to view through the work, the biometrics overlay, with its diamond-like rigidity, becomes aggressive, confronting Plato’s face like a muzzle or the “facehugger” alien from the Alien films.

However, against this pressure, the eyes of the philosopher—emptied out of content in the classical style—are able to momentarily resist, extending beyond the biometrics, pointing towards (without naming) something seemingly outside of any representation.

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Parker Ito’s recent solo show at the Adobe Books Backroom Gallery in San Francisco, entitled “RGB Forever,” featured eleven unframed paintings and one video.

Of the eleven paintings exhibited, one of them was The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet (which is discussed in the previous post) and the remaining ten comprise a series of digital prints on canvas which (1.) each depict a wide range of subject matter and (2.) over all of which the artist applies an acrylic texturing gel in order to give the surface a more tactile, painterly feeling.

At first glance, it’s difficult to see how the varying images in the series converse with one another.

One views, for example, the stock image of a bowl-of-fruit still life, a photorealistic portrait of a woman photoshopped to blur at the lower edge like a tableau vivant, broad squiggly lines which read as “digital” over a background of paint blobs which themselves read as “painterly,” a cliché image of messy abstract brushwork, a  wheel of gradiating digital color, an “animal portrait” foregrounded by LOLCATS–style text graphics, a collage of varying pictorial strategies from the history of art placed in a grid, nude models covered in paint, a digitally drawn rendering of a Hudson River school style landscape, and, finally, a rigid formal pattern composed of a tactile material (in fact, it’s a close angle on the texture of the same canvas material Ito used to print the images in the series on).

So, as mentioned, there is a heterogeneity in subject matter here which is initially disorienting.

However, as one continues to view through this wide variety of imagery, taking the show in as a whole, one theme begins to emerge as a constant variable:

A collision between the physical act of painting and the simulation of the physical act of painting.

In each instance, a pictorial strategy or “effect” drawn from the history of painting is input into a computer, simulated through digital tools (where it gains its own currency as part of digital culture) and, then, re-output as paintings which were automatically “painted” by a digital printer.

On Ry David Bradley’s Painted, Etc. blog, Ito is quoted as calling the works in this series not paintings, but “painting objects.”

He writes:

…these “painting objects” were simulating hand made things, but also referencing modes which have been typically associated with the reproductions of paintings. The whole premise of the body of work was approaching painting as “found”, so I selected jpegs that referenced genres/history of painting (sorta based on wikipedia). The work is very involved in painting history and an awareness of that history, but I also believe the jpegs I selected reflect on other issues that are not so specific to this history, and are more specific to Internet culture.

*********

With that mind, the kick of the paintings is similar whether one views them in person or on the Web.

In both cases, what one views is a painting straddling each of those two worlds.

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Parker Ito asked orderartwork.com, a Chinese company which makes oil paintings on-demand, to create a series of paintings based on a single image which would be broadly familiar to Internet users—a stock photo depicting a smiling, blonde female wearing a backpack which (amongst its other usages) a “parked domain” company called Demand Media employs to catch the eye of Web surfers who accidentally click to the sites it owns.

The resulting work–The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet–exists as both these made-to-order paintings as well as a heavily re-blogged Web meme.

In regard to the paintings, they might be considered in relation to Warhol’s Marilyn series of silkscreened paintings.

Both Marilyn Monroe and “the parked domain girl” are icons of emptiness.

Monroe was  a blank slate for sexual desire, the parked domain girl is a symbol of sites without content.

Furthermore, both painting series automate the painting proces which, then, further amplifies the sense of an emptying-out of content.

And, finally, in both cases the artists are each interested in depicting the process of their own making as much as they’re interested in depicting the icon being processed.

For example, one views Warhol’s rough usage of the silkscreen technology as much as a legible image of Monroe, and one views the hands of the different painters Ito employs to create the painted images as much as a single painting of the parked domain girl.

However, at this level–the level of a process being depicted—Ito’s series takes a departure from Warhol’s own that allows it to exist as an intriguing version on pop art rather than an imitation of it.

What fascinated Warhol was the way that “real life” stars like Monroe developed a life of their own in the sphere of reproducible images.

Ito, though, picks up on the fact that an icon like the “parked domain girl” is not even based on a “real life” star—she’s an icon who short-circuits the previous paradigm of stardom.

In the wake of the Internet, pop culture is something consumed and lived amongst; there is no need for pop to reference a real world as the real world is to a great extent pop.

A model posed for the photograph, yes, but that model is anonymous; the parked domain girl’s identity is entirely native to the sphere of pop representation on the Web.

By hiring a company to create hand-made oil paintings of the parked domain girl, Ito brings her into the realm of “real life” for the first time.

His work is thus meaningful not for depicting the automated painting of a “real” icon, but for depicting the outsourced hand-painting of a “fake” icon and, in so doing, bringing Warhol’s joke full circle.