Brad Troemel and Jonathan Vingiano
Wednesday, 6 July 2011
Brad Troemel and Jonathan Vingiano
Work from Blind Mist
“Blind Mist is a platform that relies on participants to submit their URL to an open database. From here, the website scrapes every image off the URLs participants offer and adds those images to another archive.There is no limit to the number of URLs/images a participant may add. A stream of images from this archive is presented at random on the Blind Mist homepage. Each image functions as a link back to its original website, allowing users to continue exploring content they found interesting. Through Blind Mist, we intend to offer an alternative to the dominant blogging format of aggregated or self-selected digital media and open possibilities for new, unforeseen juxtapositions in visual content. Additionally, we are interested in promoting a platform that mixes ‘high’ and ‘low’ artworks, allowing any and all content to be viewed in the same, uniformly context-free space for further investigation– hence the name’s reference to a ‘blind draw’. While the internet is often spoken of in terms that represent a desire for fast paced action (‘The information superhighway’, ‘surfing’, ‘Tumbling’, ‘streams of content’, ‘torrents’) we often come to see online content in isolated, static presentations. Blind Mist is an attempt to show content at a pace more compatible with contemporary media landscape in which we exist. Blind Mist is also an attempt to offer a chance for the discovery of our peers artwork in a way that sidesteps the troubled subjectivity associated with curating.
By allowing everyone to mutually benefit through exposure and contribution, Blind Mist is currently the beginning of an artistic commonwealth, fulfilling the artistic potential of a decentralized population only feasible in our digital age.” – Brad Troemel and Jonathan Vingiano