Chris Joseph: Amazing Net Art from the Frontier
I've been following Chris Joseph's work as a net artist since the late 1990's when he was living in Montréal--he's a Brit/Canadian living now in London. He was on Webartery, a listserv I started in 1997; there was great discussion and activity in net art on Webartery, and Chris was an important part of it then, too. I visit his page of links to his art and writing several times a year to see what he's up to.
I recently wrote a review of Sprinkled Speech, an interactive poem of Chris's, the text of which is by our late mutual friend Randy Adams.
More recently--like yesterday--I visited #RiseTogether, shown below, which I'd somehow missed before. This is a 2014 piece by Chris. We see a map, the #RiseTogether hash tag, a red line and a short text describing issues, problems, possibilities, groups, etc. Every few seconds, the screen refreshes with a new map, red line, and description.

I sent Chris an email about it:
Hey Chris,I was looking at http://babel.391.org/remix_runran/2014/risetogether.html
I see you're using Google maps.
What's with the red line?
What is #RiseTogether ?
The language after "#RiseTogether"--where does that come from?
ja
Chris's response was so interesting and illuminating I thought I'd post it here. Chris responded:
Hi Jim,
Originally this phrase, as a hashtag, was used by the Occupy Wall Street
anti-capitalism movement, but I think since then it has been adopted/co-opted
by many other movements including (US) football teams. The starting article
and the text source for this piece was http://occupywallstreet.net/story/what-way-forward-popular-movement-2014 .
It was one of three anti-capitalist pieces I did around that time, which was
pretty much at the beginning of my investigating what could be done outside
of Adobe Flash,
along with http://babel.391.org/remix_runran/2014/capitalist-manifesto.html
and http://babel.391.org/remix_runran/2014/thedaywefightback.html . And
thematically these hark back to one of my first net art pieces, which isn't
linked up on my art page at the moment, http://chrisjose.ph/quebec/
The red line was for a few reasons, I think. Firstly to add some visual
interest, and additional randomisation, into what would be be a fairly static
looking piece otherwise. But I find the minimalism of a line quite
interesting, as the viewer is asked to actively interpret the meaning of that
line. For me it's a dividing line - between haves and have nots, or the 1%
and 99%, or any of those binary divisions that the protesters tend to use. Or
it could suggest a crossing out - perhaps (positively) of a defunct economic
philosophy, or (negatively) of the opportunities of a geographical area as a
result of that economic philosophy.
All three of those pieces have a monochromatic base, but only two have the
red, which feels quite angry, or reminiscent of blood, of which there was
quite a bit in the anti-capitalist protests.
I used the same technique again in this piece:
http://babel.391.org/remix_runran/2015/plague-vectors.html - but here the lines are
much more descriptive, as an indication of the supposed 'plague vectors'.
----------------------
Chris Joseph
@cj391
chrisjoseph.org