I have only recently become aware of the work of Cory Archangel but this is one of the most exiting pieces of digital net art I have seen in a long time. The most interesting point about his practice is that he goes to great lengths to explain the entire technical process he has gone through to achieve his final out put. For example for this piece he has written on his website ;
'' So, I probably made this video the most backwards and bone headed way possible, but I am a hacker in the traditional definition of someone who glues together ugly code and not a programmer. For this project I used some programs to help me save time in finding the right cats. Anyway, first I downloaded every video of a cat playing piano I could find on Youtube. I ended up with about 170 videos. Then I extracted the audio from each, pasted these files end to end, and then pasted this huge file onto the end of an audio file of Glenn Gould playing op11. I loaded this file into Comparisonics. Comparisonics, a strange free program I found while surfing one night, allows users to highlight a section of audio, and responds by finding "similar" sounding areas in rest of the audio file. Using Comparisioncs I went through every "note" (sometimes I also did clusters of notes) in the Gould, then selected my favorite "similar" section Comparisonics suggested and wrote it in the score. After going though the 1000's of "notes", the completed scores were turned into a video by some perl scripts I wrote which are available here if you wanna do something similar. ''
Not only is this a comprehensive guide to recreating the work yourself, he is even giving you access to the code that he has written to make the process work. By making this information available to the viewer, anybody could extract elements of this work and bring them into their own practice. This approach makes for a much progressive piece of net art for if all net artist shared aspects of their practice to each other, well at least the technical aspects then this would undoubtedly only lead to better artworks being created.
Below are three examples of clips of cats playing piano from YouTube reconstituted to play Arnold Schoenberg's 1909 op. 11 Drei Klavierstücke (aka Three Piano Pieces)
The original link is located HERE
