Mindscape In Cyberspace

Venereal Kittens is a collective, conceptualized and edited by artist-poet Matina L. Stamatakis and dedicated to archiving and preserving innovative works by writers and artists of the 21st century, with a strong preference for experimental, avant-garde,post modern poetry and art. They say very clearly that they are not interested in mainstream writing or art.

They have already featured great artists and writers like, Alexander Jorgensen, Kane X. Faucher, Theoni Tambaki, ek rzepka, Carmen Racovitza, Ted Warnell, John Moore Williams, Angela Genusa, Javier Kronauer, Marco Giovenale, Raymond Farr, Anna Christina, Mauricette Beaussart, Drew Kunz, Nico Vassilakis, Linh Dinh, Robert Chrysler, Catherine M. Bennett, Michelle Detorie, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Mark Lamoureux, Bruna Mori, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Philip Jenks, Diana Magallon, Jeff Crouch, etc.

Recently they have added my digital paintings and visual poetry to their archive. It feels really nice to be featured on a journal with all those great artists who are shaping the art and literature of 21^st century.

Find the thumbnails of my paintings and vispos that are featured on Venereal Kittens, below:

Entangled

… and Birds and Birds

Comics

Park Street Junction

Watching TV - Emotinally Red

Take a look at my works on Venereal Kittens at following locations:
http://venerealkittens.blogspot.com/2008/10/samit-roy.html
http://venerealkittens.blogspot.com/2008/02/samit-roy-continued.html

Flickr is one of the most popular on-line platform to showcase and share your images with millions of users from various corners of the world. Though, primarily Flickr is meant for sharing Photographs (and now video, too), however many artists, painters, calligraphists, print makers, and designers share their artworks, illustrations, paintings and other non-photographic images on Flickr. If you visit specific groups dedicated to non-photographic visual art, like paintings, graphics, digital art, illustrations, you will find thousands of artists showcasing their artworks and providing an amazing spectrum of visual culture, across the globe.

Here is a list of 20 Flickr groups dedicated mainly to non-photographic art, which I find very interesting:

1. Art and Artist »
2. Art is Art »
3. Art Directory »
4. Art District »
5. Art - Drawing and Painting »
6. Art Now »
7. Art Vision »
8. Artists Without Borders »
9. contemporary fine A R T S + Culture »
10. Digital Art »
11. Global Urban Art »
12. Graphic Design »
13. Illustration »
14. Illstration Now »
15. Obsessive Drawing »
16. Painting »
17. Paintings from you… THE ARTIST »
18. Sketches »
19. Urban Artist Collective »
20. Your Art - Not Photography »

If you are a visual artist and looking for an on-line WEB 2.0 community, where you can showcase your artworks and photographs, share them with fellow artists, build your own network, create an online portfolio and publish it, then Dripbook is the perfect place for you. In a nutshell, Dripbook is a full-fledged WEB 2.0 community for visual artists, painters, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, animators, fashion designers, printmakers, sculptors and architects. One needs to register with Dripbook to avail the services offered by the site. Currently Dripbook is invitation-only for new accounts and does not offer direct registration. To create a new Dripbook account, you need to send a request to them with a little brief about you. Once they receive your request, they will review it and if satisfied, they will send you an access code to your email address. This access code is needed to create a new account on Dripbook. The standard membership is free, but one can upgrade a free account to a premium account with a nominal charge of USD 12 monthly, $ 30 quarterly or $ 108 annually. The premium membership will allow the user to publish customized website, upload more images and create more books.

Once registered (Standard or Premium), one can start uploading the images, publish books (portfolios), create his/her profile and portfolio page. Dripbook allows all its users to have customized URL for their portfolios. The URL is simple to remember and looks like this: http://www.dripbook.com/[username]/

I have created my art portfolio on Dripbook and got my personal URL too. Please visit my art portfolio on Dripbook at following location:
http://www.dripbook.com/visualsamit/

If you are a visual artist and want to create a Dripbook profile and portfolio, then please visit following URL to request a membership:
https://secure.dripbook.com/restricted/

I came across an impressive on-line exhibition called ‘Comic Abstraction‘, presented by MOMA. The full title of the exhibition is ‘Comic Abstraction - Image-Breaking, Image-Making‘. The exhibition physically took place at the Museum Of Modern Art, from March 4 to June 11, 2007. It was organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, MOMA. It featured famous artists, illustrator, animators like Arturo Herrera, Takashi Murakami, Polly Apfelbaum, Ellen Gallagher, Sue Williams, Michael Majerus, Inka Essenhigh, Juan Munoz, Julie Mehretu, Franz West, Garry Simmons, Phileppe Parreno and Rivane Neuenschwander. The website - Comic Abstraction is a nice and comprehensive on-line representation of the exhibition.

I liked the work by Rivane Neuenschwander and the way she tackled and questioned the political agenda of a canonical work in comic book history. In her ‘The Return of Ze Carioca’ (1960), she consciously tries to disassemble a historic edition of a popular comic book featuring, Ze Carioca aka Jose Carioca, the famous Brazilian parrot and a popular ‘Disney’ character, created in 1941, during World War II, when Walt Disney was visiting Brazil to support American relations with this region. She feels that Jose Carioca, the character created by Disney, is actually based on the ’stereotypical cliché of the Brazilians’ and helps to ‘crystallize the national image of a Malandro or a rascal in local language and confronts this ‘implicit political and racial undertone’ by over-painting the figures with bright flat colors and the text, with blank opaque white.

It reminds me the famous book of a baby-faced European comic book hero - in which, he goes to South America, preaches ‘morals and ethics’, ‘enlightens’ the local guerrillas with ’social values’ and ‘teaches’ them about revolution. It also reminds me, the dumb and expressionless faces of Africans or Asians, as they are pictured in this particular comics series.

I also liked, ‘Speech Bubbles’ (1997) by Phileppe Parreno, because of the subtle reference of political undertone it carries along. Parreno’s work is not an image but an installation with clusters of helium-filled balloons with shapes of the speech bubbles of a comic book. Parreno’s idea of a ‘good image’ is also very interesting. According to him, “A good image is always a social moment.’ I agree with him!

The On-line Exhibition can be viewed here »