Look, See

Convergence Culture: The web remains unconquered territory for mass brands, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.

The visual landscape is predominantly an amalgamation of brand images. Car-makers such as Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen, Alfa Romeo; the premium watches of Piaget; images of sun-brightened vacations; coffee. If we laid them end-to-end we'd have the Bayeux Tapestry of how we spend our incomes. I was surprised to read this week that in the UK coffee accounts for a third of all domestic tap water consumed. Presumably the rest is used in the bath.

Starbucks and Nescafé, Matey and Palmolive. Brands offer a way into a lifestyle and a way of expressing aspiration. What is most interesting about them, though, is that they are a visual statement rather than a textual one. Go back a hundred years and newspapers, then the primary means of communication, carried few images. An image-free Irish Times is now unimaginable. Newspapers have to print magazines in order to attract brand advertising in an environment marked by the competitiveness of the visual.

That means we are blessed with abundant imagery. Images, not sounds or words, communicate brand values and mark the chronology of the day and week, from breakfast TV to newspapers to daytime TV and the weekend supplements. Here is the gallery that most of us constantly attend.

So, there are two things that are happening because of the world wide web. The first is that brand advertising is under threat. Brands demand the highest standards of reproduction for their images; the web cannot provide this.

The second is that a select group of artists is exploring images within the constraints of the web to stunning effect, reminding careful observers that the limitations of an art form can be as powerful as the broad liberty to stun that comes with huge advertising budgets.

Chris Ashley is an interesting artist because he confines himself to the limitations of the world wide web and produces an extraordinary variety of images as he tests this form to the limit. Ashley, who works from Berkeley in California, gave up art until five years ago when he began a visual blog.

Every day since he has posted a new variation on his chosen theme - what can an artist create out of the scripting code used to design web pages? While blogging remains largely associated with the written word, its use as a visual medium is on the increase and here in Ireland we now have a handful of exceptional photobloggers, from Donncha O Caoimh and Ryan Whalley in Cork, to Gingerpixel in Dublin and North Atlantic Skyline in the west.

I know of no artist, though, who has taken the disciplines of blogging as literally as Ashley and few photobloggers come close to creating a new discipline for the internet in the way Ashley is doing for art.

Also an accomplished painter, Ashley has devoted a part of every single day in the past five years to producing one new image in web code. That's now almost 2,000 variations on the limited potential of a screen-sized image, making use of a blocky medium that does not like curves and offers an extremely limited range of colours.

The significance of Ashley's work is that he produces extraordinary imagery in what is fast becoming the most watched medium, the web. At the same time, major branded goods companies are struggling to transfer the high-cost imagery that served them well on television screens, outdoor hoardings and magazines, to the scaled-down environment of the internet. The fact is, we now know that the web as a medium has the potential to amaze. The problem is that the brand culture has not been able to unlock it.

It is a reminder too that art and brands have a relationship that goes largely unexplored. Over the past 30 years conceptual art has had to contend with the power of brand imagery stealing its show, as well as with the power of the software industry to influence behaviour and to initiate change. Under our noses, brands as images, and software as a mechanism for altering human behaviour, have exerted the influence we once associated only with politics and conflict.

Right now the influence of the brand and the coder is also shifting. Nobody is creating imagery in this new medium on the scale and of the quality of Ashley, whether you count the better photobloggers or major brands. What is most engaging about Ashley's practice is there in the work of the more important bloggers: a sense that to communicate is a duty, the need for discipline not to shirk it; an acceptance of limitations and a willingness to explore them creatively; communication before money.

In the past 30 years we've experienced a shift in curatorial power over imagery from the museum and gallery to the brand, and a shift in the power to change behaviour from politics and our moral guardians to the people who code applications. At least in this one small corner of the web, the balance of power is shifting back to artists who are constructing a moral framework in which to produce works of beauty using, of all things, computer code.