“Dematerialization is not an oppressive suffocation of art but a possibility for art to flourish in disparate and progressive discourses. The web offers infinite room for expansion and participation unlimited by the more severe constraints of space and finance.”
This is one of the last paragraphs of the reading and in the paragraphs before this one describes the nature of the content of Tumblr, a website in which I frequent quite often to spent countless hours staring at lengthy posts, pointless memes, dog videos, what seems like either great or really bad photoshopped images of various things that seem completely unreal. Whatever the content, Tumblr seems to draw me in. It isn’t because it was once considered a popular social media site, where people hoped to get “Tumblr famous,” but because I am drawn to the content of the people I follow. Dematerializing an object, such as adding a smiley face to a tomb stone is only a small example of how art can flourish by going beyond the norm. The internet is the birthplace of creativity in a sense. Granted you can explore local arts and support art at galleries and museums, however, with the internet, it enables you to view art from across the globe by novices and professionals everywhere who you can take notes from instantly and help enhance and develop your own artistic style.
“Is it an impulse of data, sounds and images to surpass the boundaries of information channels and to manifest.”
If you asked me before, I would never think that glitches could become art, instead of distract it. In Rourke’s article, a glitch is a disruption of the art on the page, but in a way that it disrupts what is expected and produces something even more beautiful. For example, as a still piece, the man and woman look totally innocent. As a GIF, it appears that they’re engaging in sexual behaviors which may or may not have been the purpose of the original artist, but was definitely the purpose of the creator of the glitch GIF. The idea of combining data, sounds, and images to surpass the norm intrigues me just because it provides a whole new realm of possibilities for art to exist in.