I used to be an artist…and I used to have my art organized on this very website. Since that is all in the past (and maybe the future, who knows), and I stumbled across some work on an old hard drive tonight, I’m capturing it here. Maybe it will be a trend as I continue some digital cleaning up.
In November 2001 I installed a digital art show at a bar in Delray Beach, FL. It was an awesome bar called Dada. (Dallas has a Dada, too.) (Apparently Delray’s Dada is still in business!) They hosted local bands and open mics and at least once a digital art installation.
Sadly, I don’t have the original web application that was Hate Mail. It’s somewhere on one of these hard drives, but I have yet to find it in my casual trips down memory lane. I have, however, found some of the photos that were part of the installation, as well as a few photos from the opening night. Screen resolutions weren’t always what they are now, so they’re a bit small.
The installation’s intent was to be a meditation on society’s ideas about success and failure and what is important, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. It took excerpts from a hate mail I received and paired them with images I captured in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Princeton (NJ). They were presented in a web app that randomly arranged the pages in a (virtual) grid and then allowed the viewer to navigate in any direction (up, down, left or right) from any page.