launch art object

spacer.gif{ART}. 2006.

About the Project

Obsolescence meets timelessness in new Art form.

What is a "spacer.gif"?
The spacer.gif is a means, employed by web designers, of keeping table-based layouts from collapsing in on themselves. The spacer.gif was once a valuable tool in a net world governed by the interdependence of content and layout. However, to the contemporary high-efficiency web designer, who employs css formatting and layout capabilities, spacer gifs are largely an obsolete and unnecessary tool. The independence of content from layout has come, and spacer gifs, as a concept and as digital objects, are disappearing.

What is spacer.gif{ART}?
As the digital culture industry forges on to virtual territories yet unseen, spacer.gif{ART} hopes to salvage small pieces of the wreckage left behind. spacer.gif{ART} produces and distributes limited edition archival prints of spacer.gif image files downloaded directly from the web by our highly skilled team of curators and techno-conservators. Our portfolio collections represent a dying breed of often unknown artists who utilize(d) the tools of a rapidly fading past to create extraordinary table-based web design experiences. Our curatorial staff hand picks the most extraordinary examples of the spacer.gif to offer to you, our patron, as handsome limited edition archival prints.

More than a parody of http://www.softwareartspace.com, spacer.gif{ART} is simultaneously a functioning ecommerce art site and meditation on the projection of artistic value in early and late capitalist society – how, in the digital age (the age of the nonexistent original), art marketers are still relying on analog value systems (based on the the logic of original / copy). It seems we've entered the postmodern digital age with much of our modernist baggage still in tow.

LINKS
Rhizome Artbase Terms: Anti-art, Conceptual, HTML, Participatory, Readymade, Visual