#tangledweb

#tangledweb

By Tom Wachunas 

   One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of 'us.' - Douglas Adams

   The Internet is neither good nor bad. It's neutral - it becomes for each of us exactly what we bring to it.  - Glennon Doyle Melton

   The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.   - Dave Barry

   When the Internet first came, I thought it was just the beacon of freedom. People could communicate with anyone, anywhere, and nobody could stop it. - Steve Wozniak

   What’s the Internet? LOL! Why, it’s Pandora’s clever spawn, silly! – June Godwit

   More musings from my studio. I’ve been thinking about – fretting over, actually – sophisticated distance learning programs and remote instruction platforms as they necessarily apply to my current situation as a teacher of art appreciation and art history. At this point my brain is floundering in “the cloud” of Internet potential and practice. What is an old-school lecturer like me to do in the face of the growing demand for online teaching?

   At the moment, I’m making art about understanding another language I call Digitalese. And once again (as in the previous work I addressed here on April 21), I’m immersed in an assemblage/collage dialect. This newest manifestation is called #tangledweb. I’m seriously thinking of subtitling it html blues. HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language. Hyper- textured, and marked up, to be sure.

   I’m stepping slowly into a complex realm, twisting and turning in a mysterious matrix folding in on itself. It’s got me tied up in knots, a little unraveled at the edges, and feeling blue about it. Just like a jittery kid on the first day of school. How ironic.