Just for Fun | 23 Jan 2008 | Print  |

Go See Geek Art Graffiti

by Adam C. Engst

[Update: 28-Jan-08: The creator of these pictures has decided to remove them; you can read his rationale on Flickr. If you look around at the various sites that linked to the original pictures, you can find a few more samples. -Adam]

If you have a few minutes to spare, hop over to Flickr to see PaulTheWineGuy's set of famous works of art, all cleverly modified with digital artifacts of today's electronic culture. Rodin's "The Thinker" appears with a Windows hourglass wait cursor, for instance, and HTML table tags are superimposed on a classic Mondrian. Then there's Jasper Johns's 1961 map of the United States - complete with Google Maps controls. A few of the images are a bit more subtle (and show a Windows sensibility): Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V have been added to Andy Warhol's "100 Cans" to apply the current concept of replication to Warhol's work, and a much-damaged work by Antonello da Messina has broken-image rectangles overlaid on the parts that lack paint, as though a Web browser had failed to load those parts. The visual puns and trenchant revisions are both amusing and, I suspect, telling commentary on both our electronic culture and the original works.

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