HTML as art, pick your number

Here is an alternative way of looking at a website or a blog (in this case, at the blog you're reading):

That is the HTML structure of this blog rendered by Zurich artist, PhD student and dual blogger Marcel Salathé, who goes by the name Sala. When we look at a website, we see words and images and applications on the screen. Behind them is a code written in HTML, the standard language for publishing info on the web. The browser we use does the translation (if you want to see the code behind this page, select the "View source" option on your browser's menu).
HTML is made of tags: bits of standardized information that can be read by the browser. "A" indicates a link, "IMG" an image, "BR" a linebreak, and so on. Tags are organized hierarchically, and that's what Sala picked up to create his graphs: he has programmed an applet that grabs the hierarchical structure of a website's code and turns it into, basically, an artwork - that's what I used to create the image above.

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Every site is different, of course: some are massively complicated, other supremely simple - check out the gallery of images that people have been putting up on Flickr these last days after running the applet on their own sites. And if you run twice the applet on the same site, you will see that the graphs are slightly different. The basic structure is the same, but the final form is not. "That's because I've programmed the applet to "throw in" a node - a tag - every fifteen millisecond, so that it looks like the process of creating the graph unfolds under your eyes, and nodes don't necessarily come in in the same place every time. But the overall structure, if you study it carefully, is the same", Sala told me today.

Artist and programmer ("I consider programming an art"), Sala is also behind another online art initiative that has attracted alot of attention these days: the onethousandpaintings project. Sala is selling on his website 1000 paintings, all square white canvases with a blue number painted on them, from 1 to 1000. "The number is the art is the limit is the price", he says: "This is an experiment of art and mathematics on the web". The math comes in to calculate the selling price of the painting. He defined the price in two steps:

• each painting is priced 1000 USD minus the number painted on it (hence, higher numbers cost less - but with a minimum price set at 40 USD)
• and discounts apply: initially 90% off, which will decrease by an absolute 10% for every hundred paintings sold (after 200 paintings, the discount will be 70%).

As I write this, he has already sold 502 paintings.

UPDATE 5 June - Anthony White has been painting a similar series for a while - with less math involved and a more straightforward relation to money: he paints monetary figures (in US or Australian dollars or British pounds) in unitary increments, as reader Belinda Moxam points out (see "comments").

[tags: websiteasgraph onethousandpaintings themoneyseries]

Comments

[frosty]

I like the thousand paintings idea but I must say his pricing scheme is very gutsy.

If you look over there now, there are a lot of numbers available in the $500 range, and the cheapest is $147. And that's for a pretty bland number. ;-)

I do hope it works, but I think the prices have already passed what people are likely to pay based on the novelty or the blogospheric buzz. If you're paying $500 I think you probably expect it to actually hold that value, ie you're in the art market now and not just having fun.

And there are a whole bunch of them over $500... so the rest of the project could be really difficult. Or maybe it'll just take a few years.

The artist calls it an experiment in art and mathematics, which is true, but it's even more an experiment in the art market and innovative commerce.

Another, older web-related art thing you might find interesting is Valery Grancher's Internet Paintings:

http://www.internetpainting.vg/

[Belinda Moxham]

Anthony White started his Money Series at one Australian dollar and it continues up in one dollar increments. When he sells one painting in the series for the dollar amount on the canvas he then works on selling the next one in the series. He has also branched out into British Pounds and US dollars. www.anthonywhite.net

I think I find the simplicity of Anthony White’s pricing of his “Money Series” more interesting than Zala’s One Thousand Paintings. White probably highlights the relationship between art and money better.

[Sheila]

I like this one: http://www.artinitials.com

[BrunoG]

I don't, Sheila: it's a shameless imitation of Sala's and Anthony's work -- although I acknowledge that you've been pretty good at PR.