Grafik Dynamo

February 2005

Supported by Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Grafik Dynamo loads live images from blogs and news sources on the web into a live action comic strip. From the time of its launch in 2005 to the end of 2008, the work used a live feed from social networking site LiveJournal. The work is currently using a feed from Flickr. The images are accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. The work takes an experimental approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of data animating the work and the formal parameter that comprises its structure.

REQUIREMENTS

Broadband connection.

MEDIA & ACHIEVEMENTS

Comix for Jung Ones
by Nathaniel Stern
Net Art News, Rhizome.org

Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett are exploring where and how narratives might emerge from a collaborative environment whose participants are thrown together in a dynamic mix. In Grafik Dynamo, these artists are packaging a LiveJournal feed – news and images from the real-time blogosphere – into Lichtensteinian frames. In short: a random re-blog comic strip. The initial idea was to pull from RSS feeds being created on servers all over the world; so as an ever-increasing number of blogs are parading pop culture, news, art, politics, science, personal rants, etc., Grafik Dynamo would make an exquisite corpse of this collective conscious. Comics have become an experimental form that routinely reaches into surreal, photorealistic, and impressionistic realms. The juxtaposition of these varying styles, speaking back to broad trends across blogging culture in this format, is uncanny in the Freudian sense: strange but familiar… I think I’ve read this comic before… And the layout? Armstrong and Tippet ironically display the new religion of information as a continually regenerating triptych, begging questions of author-ity, narrativity and ‘public’ information in general.

Graphic Sublime: On the Art and DesignWriting of Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett | Joseph Tabbi | Essay (this is available as a printed book with images)

Grafik Dynamo | Dene Grigar | Leonardo Reviews

Networked Narratives and Search Fiction | Christy Dena | Writer Response Theory

Between Play and Politics: Dysfunctionality in Digital Art | Marie-Laure Ryan | Electronic Book Review

Grand Text Auto » Frames are Required | Nick Montfort

Kate Armstrong Interview | Greg J. Smith | Serial Consign

Digital literature and the three levels of the Digital | Serge Bouchardon

Grafik Dynamo (2005) | Alison Coleman | furtherfield.org

Temporal Windows and Transient Identities: An Examination of Emerging Internet Art | Anistoriton Journal, vol. 11 (2008-2009) Art

Grafik Dynamo | Electronic Literature Directory

Future of Digital Studies | 2010 program

Grafik Dynamo | we-make-money-not-art

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