nowadays fine arts has its foundations in its textual descriptions. as a result the visual form of expression is drowned by a complex construction of highly specialised vocabulary. the piece of art is finalized by means of words.
a constantly growing number of those specialised words or keywords are flying around the art scene and result in a textual satiation.
now the artist is forced to acquire that art language and to learn the art of sculpturing with words. this learning process, which is necessary to be able to participate in the ongoing art discussions, is different from artist to artist.
one approach to acquire the necessary skills is to use a kind of articulation management: build up a vocabulary of art-relevant words by collecting them from art magazines, catalogues, lectures, discussions, etc. by means of tables, lists or databases.
in this context the project “words” was developed, a collection of more than 1500 terms, common in art language, which again consists of more than 2500 words. this list of text modules is constantly updated and enhanced.
since 2005 different kind of installation with these “words” where developed (wallpaper, postcard, poster, flag, barrier tape).
in this manner we want to publish our collection of words as public domain and by that offer artists an easy way to start working with articulation-management.
as the media for our publication we have chosen a homepage.
the core part of this homepage is a text generator. this software offers the possibility to interactively generate texts using the “words” in our collection: in a first step the “words” are provided as material to the user, of which he can chose from. in the next step the “words” which were selected by the user are automatically connected to word arrangements by means of text synthesis.
the user may also expand the vocabulary of the text generator with his own “words” by classifying the grammatical category it belongs to.
the generated hybrid text is a simple way of producing an art text and serves a kind of incompetence compensation competence.
after the previous more graphic installation oriented works with the “words”, www.art-words.net deals with the interface between private and public space.
even though the graphic interface of a web browser seems two-dimensional, it’s possible to see the internet itself as a multidimensional space. the web’s surface refers in it’s two-dimensionality to an invisible three-dimensional network making the internet also an essential room for language.
now the project www.art-words.net tries to connect real and cyber space.
a distinct quality of the public space internet is that it´s not confined to a public location: every computer terminal in the world with access to the internet can be used to exhibit net-art displayed in the world wide web. all it takes for an exhibition is an observer in front of a monitor interacting with or through it.