{"id":13553,"date":"2013-02-06T11:35:23","date_gmt":"2013-02-06T11:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wonderlandmagazine.com\/?p=13553"},"modified":"2013-02-20T15:11:52","modified_gmt":"2013-02-20T15:11:52","slug":"joshua-davis-the-first-man-of-internet-art-talks-nuns-coding-and-the-future-bottle-design-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wonderlandmagazine.com\/2013\/02\/06\/joshua-davis-the-first-man-of-internet-art-talks-nuns-coding-and-the-future-bottle-design-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"JOSHUA DAVIS: The First Man of Internet Art talks nuns, coding and the Future Bottle Design Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tumblr artists, fingers off the reblog button. Joshua Davis, graphic designer and judge of Heineken’s Future Bottle Design Challenge<\/a>, pretty much invented Internet art.<\/p>\n

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\"Joshua<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

Okay, the guy’s not Tim Berners-Lee, but the ex-New York club kid was one of the first people to realise the artistic potential of technology, cracking programmes like Flash to generate coding to spit out random art and challenging the pre-2000s (remember them?) idea of what websites were with projects like Dreamless.org.<\/p>\n

Now, the granddaddy of Tumblr art is judging Heineken’s Future Bottle Design Challenge, and there’s a month left for net art wannabes to impress. Davis tells Wonderland<\/em> how to crack the competition.<\/p>\n

You started out as a painter; do you still paint at all?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I sort of lost faith in fine art, so I switched my major to commercial design and really gravitated towards illustration. I fell in love with computers, so I taught myself to program. I\u2019m doing a show in Toronto, and what I\u2019m doing is writing programmes that generates a composition, and then I look at that composition, and then I paint them by hand. There was a 15 year spell where I hadn\u2019t painted at all, and literally have just picked it up in the last few months.<\/p>\n

How did you get involved with the Heineken experience design competition? What appeals to you about the brief?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s in line with work that I\u2019m constantly doing, which is this idea of remix, writing software that changes the composition of things infinitely, so it seemed like the perfect fit.<\/p>\n

What kind of things would you like to see in the winning entry?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Usually the winning work is the one that all of the judges wish they’d done. If I look at something and go “CRAP! I wish I had done that”. If it\u2019s something that you can look at and wish that you were the one that created it, that\u2019s the one that is the winner.<\/p>\n