Turbulence.org Commission: "Grafik Dynamo" by Kate Armstrong, Michael Tippett (2005) v1

Screen-capture from http://archive.turbulence.org/works/dynamo

Grafik Dynamo loads live images from blogs and news sources on the web into a live action comic strip. From the time of its launch in 2005 to the end of 2008, the work used a live feed from social networking site LiveJournal. The work is currently using a feed from Flickr. The images are accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. The work takes an experimental approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of data animating the work and the formal parameter that comprises its structure.

Review: "Comix for Jung Ones: Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett are exploring where and how narratives might emerge from a collaborative environment whose participants are thrown together in a dynamic mix. In Grafik Dynamo, these artists are packaging a LiveJournal feed - news and images from the real-time blogosphere - into Lichtensteinian frames. In short: a random re-blog comic strip. The initial idea was to pull from RSS feeds being created on servers all over the world; so as an ever-increasing number of blogs are parading pop culture, news, art, politics, science, personal rants, etc., Grafik Dynamo would make an exquisite corpse of this collective conscious. Comics have become an experimental form that routinely reaches into surreal, photorealistic, and impressionistic realms. The juxtaposition of these varying styles, speaking back to broad trends across blogging culture in this format, is uncanny in the Freudian sense: strange but familiar... I think I've read this comic before... And the layout? Armstrong and Tippet ironically display the new religion of information as a continually regenerating triptych, begging questions of author-ity, narrativity and 'public' information in general." - Nathaniel Stern, Net Art News, Rhizome.org