In my practice I want to ask how our view of the internet has evolved over time. Once a fun novelty, it has now infiltrated almost every aspect of our daily lives, including how we express love for people. I also explore the idea that the internet has a physical form and is not just ephemeral. To connect each other, there are physical wires and servers all over the world.
To convey these ideas I created an interactive website that generates wedding vows, using wedding vow templates found online. I also ask the viewer to contribute their own wedding vows, providing a contrast to the ones made by a machine. I would like viewers to think about the nature of wedding vows and consider the difficulties of putting something abstract like love into words. The work also contains a generator that makes insults, showing the multifaceted nature of living life on the internet. Especially since both love and hate imply an obsession with the subject.
The work is a web page to reflect the themes of the work. It also allows it to be widely accessed. When displayed in a gallery, it’s displayed on a laptop to mirror how everyday people interact with the internet.
This project was also based on my fascination with internet art.
Many pieces of internet art from the 1990s consisted of webpages that utilised user interaction.
This may seem commonplace now, but strangers being able to contribute to your art from anywhere in the world was an exciting step.
It was also common for sites to make creative use of basic aspects of HTML like forms, buttons and scroll bars.
Some examples of sites that inspired me:
Mouchette.org (1996) by Martine Neddam. Allowed users to submit everything from fanart to suicide strategies.
My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1993) by Olia Lialina utilised frames to create a cinematic narrative in a web browser.
WILL-N-TESTAMENT (1998) also by Lialina raised questions about digital ownership and your online presence after you die.
skinonskinonkin (1999) by Auriea Harvey and Micheal Samyn was a site chronicalling the artists falling in love over the internet. It was hidden behind a paywall, making it seem secretive and voyeuristic.
My own project dealt with how weddings and love are represented online. It also featured text gathered from image sharing website pinterest:
For those who didn't see the work, it was a webpage that randomly generated a new wedding vow every time the spacebar was pressed. You can see it here.
I was feeling frustrated with many things about the piece. Having work about love but feeling so frustrated seemed ironic to me.
I started thinking about work that is deliberately hostile to the viewer. For example, art that is in bad taste, offensive, upsetting etc.
This lead me to creating something that was the opposite of the previous piece. Perhaps something that created insults instead of declarations of love.
Above is the new generator I ended up creating. I knew I wanted to integrate this into the next version of the piece.
Here are some things I did to expand the site beyond the studio:
The site is now mobile compatible and the generators can be triggered with a tap on the screen as opposed to just pressing a spacebar.
I added a chatbox to get feedback and comments from users.
I didn't want to give specific instructions to the user, but I felt like it needed more explanation, so I asked the user to "touch their screen". This also ties into my theme of asking users to think about the hardware of the internet.
I added more pages, giving the piece a loose narrative, and tying in my other generator that I created.
Inspired by a previous project I did, I put stickers with the qr code linking to the website around Farnham and London, hoping this may increase the chances of strangers interacting with the site.
Here are some responses I got to the piece:
Allowing people to contribute their own wedding vows surprised me in how much it added to the piece. It provides a stark contrast to the robotic and cold nature of the vows generated by the previous page.
I expected also people to just write anything, but most participants took the prompt seriously.
I want to work on the hate generator, since it's less developed (it's hard to think of good insults, so it repeats the same ones often)