Original story

NEW ART 30.11.2003

Virtual art breaks down barriers -

Alvar Bonk’s programmed paintings turn heads in New York

Art has always put the latest technological developments to work in its name. One function of art is also to test our ability to grasp new concepts, and to push the limits of good and bad taste. Alvar Bonk’s latest showing at the Intel Gallery on Reade St manages to tightrope along both of these limits simultaneously. The cult artist has come up with yet another new technique and style, which he has dubbed “the living painting”.

All the “paintings” on show are high-resolution, flat VDU elements. The essential common factor is that they all derive their content from the Internet. Bonk uses visual search engines in his pictures, and they seek out pictures, audio material, and video clips from the various networks. Some of the works are programmed on a fixed loop and show a succession of the same images over and over, while others are instructed to collect new content as they go, according to certain pre-programmed parameters.

The big draw for the New York opening night audience was a piece entitled 1000 Fish. The picture resembled an aquarium, which is not really surprising, since this is where the constantly changing images were taken from. The ever-affable Bonk says that he sold around 30 copies of the work in the course of the first evening.

Other pieces to attract interest and comment included the video collages Home, The Desert Lives, and Faces of the Planet . This last concoction showed pairs of facial close-ups, changing every second, drawn randomly from the millions of mugshots available from the Net. Sounds Almost Human, on the other hand, sees Bonk experimenting with a sounded landscape and fractal technology, and was particularly popular with the younger members of the invited audience.

All the works are fitted with energy-friendly presence detectors, such that a curtain is drawn over the screen and the online connection is interrupted when there is nobody looking at the piece.Prices ranged from USD 500-1500, depending on the size and the resolution of the work. The artist has numbered all the works, and will limit the number of copies to 100 in each case.

It was amusing to watch the confusion on the faces of the normally “seen-it-all” opening night New York audience, but the overall reaction was positive, and sales were brisk.

The artist’s patron is a local datacoms operator. The fulsome support Bonk has received may well be fuelled not only by a desire to further the course of art, as each painting naturally brings money into the company’s coffers in the form of net connection tariffs to be paid by the eventual owner.

Hannula I. & Linturi R. 1998: 100 Phenomena. Yritysmikrot Oy, Helsinki 1998. Copyright notices ISBN 952-9508-18-2

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