16777216 at Jancar Jones

16777216, by San Francisco-based artists Richard S. Mitchell, is cycling through all 16.7+ million frames of the RGB color model at 25 frames per a second, which will take it seven days, 18 hours, 24 minutes and 48.64 seconds. It's officially at San Francisco's Jancar Jones Gallery on Mission St., where it has been shown for a few hours, but in reality the work is being exhibited on the web. 

Meaning that anyone who experiences it, anywhere in the world — theoretically billions of people — will be experiencing it synchronously — until it's gone. And that's what interests me about it — the web as gallery, the web as workshop, and of course the web as public square.

As Mitchell says in the interview below from Rhyzome at New York's New Museum, 

It strikes me there are two ways of using the Web for artistic purposes: as a form of production and/or as the means of distribution. My early efforts focused on digitizing existing works and publishing them on the Web. One could also create the works digitally, but that site of creation is still outside the browser. I wanted to use a partnership between the page code and the browser itself as the site of creation. As I say this, it seems rather difficult to assign clear boundaries to where creation takes place. The idea arises in my head; I code it, test it, code it some more; I distribute it over the internet; the browser parses the code and displays the work. Is there an analogy here with painting or film? Or is video art more analogous? In this case it’s self-generating, purely iconic, i.e. with no indexical or symbolic dimension.

 

16777216 uses the Web for both production and distribution: the piece 'performs' in a web browser, is distributed via the Web, and is synched through the server. No matter where a user/viewer is, the 'performance' happens at the same time, discounting network latency and inaccurate clocks on clients.

We've talked elsewhere on this site about how art is becoming increasingly virtual, and increasingly notional. Say what you will about this piece — beautiful, important, trivial — when it's over, it's gone. And there will be absolutely nothing left.