WHITNEY.ORG INTERNET ART PROJECT

http://whitney.org/Sunset
A series of Internet art projects commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org mark sunset and sunrise in New York City every day. Unfolding over a timeframe of ten to thirty seconds, each project accompanies a transition of the website’s background color from white (day) to black (night) and vice versa. A new project will be posted every three to four months.

Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s adjunct curator of new media, notes: “What distinguishes these projects is that they use whitney.org as their habitat, disrupting, replacing, or engaging with the museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the Internet, the intervention in existing online spaces.”

To see sunset or sunrise, be anywhere on this website. Sunset today: 4:39 PM, New York time. Sunrise: 6:41 AM. Time in New York now: 2:32:25 AM.

untitled landscape #5

First in the series of commissions is “Untitled Landscape #5,” a project by the collaborative ecoarttech, (Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir). At sunrise and sunset, fluctuating orbs of light disrupt the “digital landscape,” and the information environment of whitney.org is disordered by ecoarttech’s visuals, suggesting a natural phenomenon. The size and speed of the orbs will vary based on the number of visitors to whitney.org since the previous sunrise (for sunset) or sunset (for sunrise); higher visitation results in larger, slower-moving orbs. ecoarttech’s work has consistently explored relationships between landscape, technology, and culture, and their commissioned work for whitney.org metaphorically explores the museum’s information landscape as it is shaped by its visitors.