Goodworld
2002-2005, Whitney Museum of American Art - Whitney Artport2003, Bank Gallery, Los Angeles
website, plex-mounted archival digital prints
Conceptually, GoodWorld is an idealistic 'wrapping' of the Web. Similar to Christo's planting of giant yellow umbrellas along a California highway, Goodworld forces a frantic website into a child-like vocabulary of color and abstraction.
GoodWorld takes the conventional framework of a commercial site and re-appropriates the text and images, forming an entirely new work. The code picks the most prominent image on the page and turns it into an abstracted reproduction of the original in real-time. This is done by choosing the dominant RGB value from a select number of pixels, and then tracing that color using Ming, a PHP library, and Flash (now defunct). What you see is a phantom representation of the original sketched in magenta squares. Most, if not all, of the remaining images on the page are turned into yellow 'wrappers' and the text and links are transformed into ‘.....’ Goodworld neutralizes the Web by wiping out content and unifying all pages into one creation. PHP programming by Charlie Killian.
For many people, the online experience has become a bombardment of pop-up windows and sneaky ad tactics, i.e. seemingly endless spawning windows, fake windows, etc. We've grown accustomed to being interrupted by flashing ad banners selling investment services while reading the latest news about a pending nuclear attack. Goodworld neutralizes the Web by wiping out content and unifying all pages into one creation. Hence the whole world becomes a 'Good World' in the eye of the artist -- or possibly an unsettled dilution of the safe and familiar we've come to expect.