Color Field Painting ("Where," after Morris Louis), Browser Windows
by Michael Demers (2009)
Launch Project
Color Field Painting ("Where," after Morris Louis) consists of a series of vertical browser windows that appear consecutively across the screen from left to right. Each browser is set to 800 pixels high, 100 pixels wide, making each window a broad stripe of color. Each stripe is filled with a different color. JavaScript is set to randomly determine which color will be loaded, but the set of possible colors is determined by the artist. The piece plays on the codification of online color in the context of art history. Morris Louis’ painting "Where" (1960), also consists of a series of multicolored bands that run vertically on the composition, and all of Demers’ color are digitally sampled from this palette. However, where Louis’s composition consists of hand-painted lines, and fluid and continuous brush strokes that gently converge at the bottom, Demers’s color bars are all formed according to the same rectangular dimensions and orientation. They are also animated in time; after all of the bars have appeared, they disappear after ten seconds, making his appropriation of the original a commentary on the grid-like structure of HTML code, and the ephemeral character of internet art.
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