This page is lost... forever. Sort of.
Hi there. You're likely doing some research on the history of internet art (via http://www.irational.org/tm/mr/garnet.html) or digging through some Google search results to find some dirt on me.
Sad to say, my original Mr. Net Art entry page has been lost somehow: the PowerMac Performa 5200CD that I had the data on had a hardware (drive) failure, and some of the stuff died forever.
As a quick context, I was living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada at the time and become active in the 7-11 mailing list after Carey Young had referred me to the list after writing an article on The Simulator. I had also recently finished a BFA in Studio Art at the University of Saskatchewan. I subscribed and started becoming involved in the group's activities - including the Desktop project (Alexei Shulgin) and Mr. Net Art (Trina Mould and others). Most of this stuff was done in a few minutes at the spur-of-the-moment and didn't involve a whole heap of brainpower: it was the rapid-action of the mailing list that was its strength, though.
So - although this page is gone, I still have a couple of tidbits and memories of my entry:
(to quote and interject commentary from my 7-11 newsgroup posting, now at http://www.irational.org/tm/mr/garnet.html)
FEATURING:
* Contributions to Net.Art in 1997
- I'm quite sure that I submitted my Simulator, which is still online (unfortunately)
* Photos [one casual, one formal, one sporty]
- I think my casual picture was:
- I don't remember what my formal picture was
- I think my sporty picture was:
* Net.Art Statement
- I don't remember what I wrote, but it could have possibly been: "i am convinced that my amiable personality, charming good looks, sexual
performance [with proof], good public relations, online presence, and
net.art contributions in '97 will convince all judges that i am the man
for the job."
* Personal Info
- Not sure what I wrote, although I was 23 at the time.
* Release of the Proposed Mr.Net.Art "GIRTH" and "BUTT" Award Graphics
- These are lost forever: they were small GIF-animated banner ads.
* SEXUAL PERFORMANCE PROOF [272k QuickTime Video]
- I've had a couple of people recently ask me about this. The video was an ultrasound video of my daughter, Emma (born March 17th 1998). Although I don't have a digitized copy of the video online right now, a screenshot of the video was included in my desktop submission. The ultrasound video can be seen in the center of the image below:
Emma - the ultrasound baby, is now (as of 2005) a rock star of a 7 year old: she changed my life forever... completely for the better.
A bit of trivia - as a tangent to the Mr.Net.Art competition - is that the screenshot above has hints of things I was working on during the daytime (and dotcom boom) during the same time that all of the 7-11 stuff was going on. The funniest one is the URL (at the bottom of the screen) to "considerateseat.com" - now [thankfully] dead. This URL was featured in my most popular Desktop image, which has reprinted in the New York Times and more recently in Rachel Greene's "Internet Art" (Thames & Hudson, 2004).
As it turns out, "considerateseat.com" was a website for a company that made toilet seats. In the high tech world of 90s toiletseat manufacturing, however, the company had made the "killer app" of toilet seats: they had designed a heterosexually-minded toilet seat that automatically (and considerately, in artificial-intelligence-style) lowered itself with its patented "HydraGlide" technology after an absent-minded male urinator left it up. Of course, this product was touted as being capable of ending the battle of the sexes.
I was working at a film production company at the time ("Creative [sic] House Studios") that thought it would be a good idea to abandon their real revenue in film to pursue a vaporware CD-ROM market in the [way too late] wake of Myst. I was the "web guy", and ended up having to create inspiring websites for hockey stick manufacturers, machine shops, sheepskin that was designed to be human-urine-resistant (to reduce bedsores, but that's a whole different story), and companies that wanted to revolutionize the toilet seat market. Eagerly wanting to push my techno-artistic-interactive abilities to the fullest, I convinced management that I could revolutionize the toilet-seat-website-scene: I could produce a new-fangled "Animated GIF". By wielding the powers of Photoshop 3.0 and GIFBuilder I'd take them to the next level: I could show the toilet seat doing its thing in 37K without any special applications or plug-ins.
The production company and the client loved the animation, and - after a simple Google image search - see that the same shitty animation I made in 1997 is still online and being used. Here it is:
Only months after this, I quit. I wanted to work at home near my new baby, and also wanted to do less toilet-seat-animating. I still think it's the best animated self-lowering-toilet-seat I've seen on the web, though... a symbol of a full-on toilet-seat shit-slinging GIF-media-war.
References:
Virillio, Paul. The Speed of Media: Animated Media-GIF-War... Bathrooms and Beyond (Architecture/Home/Digital). Semiotext(e), 1998.
Garnet Hertz, November 27th 2005
conceptlab.com