Passwords of Group Hug

The password screens are as follows…it would be fun to mock up interesting content to the page. I would like to link the statements displayed in the boxes of the passwords with the posts from GROUPHUG This site offers a safe place for people to be anonymous and reveal there inner most thoughts. This idea of security is highlighted most in this site – the concept of HONESTY but also DISHONESTY (because people are totally anonymous). Identity is removed!

Man Ray - X ray

Man Ray offers an inverted vision of the world and looks at the negative space as the form. He was also involved with Dadaism but this technique could be achieved in Photoshop and highlighted on the web using roll overs!

Concept concept concept - Show me the IMAGES!!

My concept is a wall containing propaganda content- images that have pasted upon each other – the user is to reveal the layers – each area is independent of other areas and therefore a personalised image is created. There are a few sites that have this ‘page turn’ prompt that could be utilised in FLASH!

An amendment to this concept is too add secure passwords and each entry could add text inputted to the artwork…and allow each entry to reveal more layers.

The second idea is to create a page and then capture the page and present in onscreen, like page in a page. The idea is to separate the user from the content – filters and heighten the space between the individual and the tool. The security gained in the impersonal nature of the web and computing in general. Highlight the machine.

The third idea is to have password upon password and each level to create an artwork. The concept is to remove the user from the work, to heighten the idea of security – not securing the information but the securing of the user – i.e. the concept of restriction or containment!

The fourth idea is to have a static functional website, that the more you navigate it, the more you destroy it – it becomes chaos and triggers dysfunction. This aligns with the concept of Dadaism I have been researching.
The concept is underscored by the idea security of the computer, the Internet and how it is changing our culture – creating counter culture. I believe the iconography, as HOME for the homepage of an Internet site would be the conceptual idea of security – most information on the web is NOT secure – viruses prevail and I think exposing this concept as false and incorrect would be fun! Maybe I could rip off a secure site – government / bank / stock exchange. Internet Piracy or Terrorism!

Hmmmm… I have too many ideas and not enough mock – ups / storyboards!

James Rosenquist - Pop Art

James Rosenquist began his career as a billboard artist. Many of his works are of an oversized scale. The enormity of the images has a particular POWER over the viewer and a certain WEIGHT is achieved. In digital works, it is harder to express this. Navigation is one tool that can help to emphasise this idea. The HAVAIANAS site highlights what I am referring to. The page ‘space’ is larger than the screen or viewing space and one must interact and NAVIGATE!

F 111 - 1965


The F 111 is a fighter plane that was developed for the Vietnam War. Rosenquists’ artwork is a anti war protest and a social commentary about the commercial effect of war on society, heightened in part by the ‘billboard’ dimensions and commercial nature of the imagery. The ‘F111’ artwork is 10 x 86 feet and follows the length of 3 walls when hanging.


Different elements combine to create the F111 – many juxtapose in context to each other; an airplane, a tire, an umbrella, spaghetti and a girl under a hair dryer.
The work was critically compared to the enormity, dimension and message of Picasso’s Guernica.



Craig Adcock, Director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa undertook an interview with the artist in June of 1994; Rosenquist discussed the meaning of the symbolic images in the work.



The spaghetti represents the flak that a pilot/plane had to fly i.e. political flak.
The diver is like a big gulp of air that a nuclear explosion consumes.



The angel food cake is a metaphor for a missile silo.
The Firestone tire is represents the concept of industry – bold and oversized.
The wallpaper suggests an atmosphere filled with radioactivity like acid rain.

TYPOGRAPHICAL ANARCHY

In artistic terms, Dada constant chosen enemy was traditional art styles- images are confused and presented without logic in order to upset and humiliate tradition. During the time of Dada i.e. World War One; a bourgeois spirit prevailed without individuality – it was as if a dehumanising element was present. I interpret many works of photomontage in this way. The juxtapose caricature nature of the photographs; expressed out of context and scale – suspends belief and therefore human/real relationship to the work. The Dadaists thought that by creating paradoxical art that emulated the unpredictable nature of life they could protest against the misguided rationality of society.

The artwork is entitled 'ABCD' by artist Raoul Hausmann. ABCD is like a scrapbook of Dada activities; a photograph of the artist appears. The scrap of map in the top right hand side shows Harrar, Ethopia – the town where his favourite poet lived after renouncing poetry!

The combination of word, media and photos seem at once to be coming out of the 'artist' (photograph of his mouth wide open) but also enveloping him - as if the words/emotions were overwhelming.
This work is very eyecatching and is loaded with symbolism. This type of work is said to be like early graffiti!

DADAISM - Photomontage - Max Ernst

The DADA cultural movement began in Switzerland during the time of the First World War. The ethos was to challenge convention and aesthetics and oppose intellectual oppressiveness of any kind. It was often concerned with political statements and influenced other art movements including surrealism, Pop Art and Fluxus.

Max Ernst – often thought to be the inventor of FROTTAGE, created surrealist works in the 1920’s as part of the German Dadaist movement; a commentary on World War I and not so much ‘anti-establishment’ as those in Zurich. The German Dadaist dealt in overt manifesto and propaganda. In fact the term and technique of Photomontage was created by the Berlin Dadaists i.e. introducing photography into their works. Montage in German means ‘assembly line’ and Monteur means engineer; the artists thought of themselves as engineers and rejected the idea of being an ‘artist’ as a bourgeois pursuit of self importance.


The juxtaposition of the human and the mechanical was a recurrent theme in Ernst and Berlin Dadaists. Fragments of text are used in photomontage a lot more aggressively than in Cubism, a clear and obvious distinction between word and image.

In an essay by John Berger ‘The Political Uses of Photomontage’: “The peculiar advantage of photomontage lies in the fact that everything which has been cut out keeps its familiar photographic appearance. We are still looking first at things and only afterwards at symbols”.