Deck@HTTP

Reblog of 'mini-review of Andy Deck at HTTP gallery' from NodeLondon Digest

Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 10:13:56 +0000
From: Saul Albert To: digest@nodel.org
Subject: mini-review of Andy Deck at HTTP gallery

The opening of the Open Vice/Virtue: The Online Art Context at HTTP gallery (Haringey, N4) last Thursday was quite a mob scene: everyone crammed into the little gallery space in the front of HTTP, drinking, chatting, hanging out of the door to smoke... the convivial boozy atmosphere of an opening.

Happily, this was also a great way to see some of the artwork. One of Andy Deck's experiments with pictographic communication: the user-contributed patchworks of 'glyphiti' are drawn by another jostling mob, this one online, vying to get their icon-sized pictogram (glyphs) onto the chequerboard canvas. The sped-up video version showing in the gallery managed to keep pace with the increasing volume of the assembled crowd.

Some pieces would be better visited in a leisurely weekend mode though Imprimatur , a web-based groupware tool for poster production requires a bit more time and focus if you'd actually like to see your participatory propaganda printed out and plastered to the wall of the gallery with all the other posters-so-far.

My favorite bit, however, was Andy's own remix of the various characters and visual tidbits that users of artcontext.net had contributed over the last year. The 2006 calendar is the latest in a yearly series he's been producing since 1979.

Surrounded by the accomplished installation of his gallery pieces in HTTP, this calendar, simply printed and stuck to the wall, seemed to say most about Andy Deck's own influences, styles and concerns. This year's calendar is a low-fi mash up of Jim Woodring's psychedelic 'Frank' graphic novels and the semi-automated deadpan sysadmin humor of Jerkcity.com. But the knowledge that these characters have found their way into Andy Deck's comic-strip cast through the tools he's built to evoke them from users of artcontext.net charges the illustrations with a unique social persona. Static, paper-based, clearly mediated by Andy Deck's authorial intervention, and on sale as a prosaic utility: a calendar, these illustrations seemed somehow more 'collaborative' than the software-based pieces on show.

Definitely worth a look-in, and the local pub: the Oakdale arms does the most wonderful range of single malt whiskeys I've ever encountered in North North London.

Saul Albert
-- -- http://chinabone.lth.bclub.org.uk/~saul/