Web Media Analysis

The analysis for, "I Like the Internet and the Internet Likes Me", because something keeps messing up in the description and deleted some parts of my analysis.
A link to the piece: wyndbain.deviantart.com/art/I-…

Project from class, Web Media in which we pick a conceptual artist and choose to update/re-interpret their own piece.

Joseph Beuys was a conceptual artist and in 1974 he performed his piece, "I Like America and America Likes Me" in where he spent 8 hours of 3 days in a room with a wild coyote with a shepherd's staff and a sheet wrapped around him.

Joseph Beuys Wiki - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_B…

Reinterpretation- This piece updates and mostly parodies Beuys's performance of, "I Like America and America Likes Me". While Beuys's piece was about the conflict of nature and man, today's world is found mostly on the internet. I used flash to put my viewers in the room with my chosen internet subject, a lolcat. Lolcats are a humorous and well known internet meme, so in a sense they can be seen as a representation of the internet much like how the coyote in Beuys's piece was the spiritual representation of America. Somewhat similar to a virtual or digital pet that someone can take care of, the viewer can interact with the lolcat and see how it will react.

Process- First I started with the piece I chose and searched youtube for the actual video of Beuys's performance.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1RCRP…
www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5UXAq…
After deciding how I wanted to present the piece and in choosing my subject of the lolcat, I used google to try and find well known lolcat images to present as items and reactions for my interactive lolcat. I also visited icanhascheezeburger.com, which is the actual blog that updates with the funny lolcat images.

Medium- I chose flash because I wanted to allow people to be able to interact with the lolcat and put them in the place of Joseph Beuys like when he was in the room with the coyote. Flash is also a widely used program on the internet, so it helps to stress the piece's relation to the web.

Message- While the purpose of the piece is to update Beuys's, the piece mostly parodies his, so the message I intended for people to see isn't as deep as what Beuys teaches through his own work. Joseph Beuys spent 8 hours of 3 days in a room with a wild coyote, which was the spiritual representation of America. When settlers came to America, coyotes were seen as pests and wProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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e demonized, killed off by settlers as humans moved further into their territories. In contrast, Native Americans revere the coyote as an important spiritual figure, a trickster or one who teaches lessons to prideful individuals, not necessarily evil. His time spent with the coyote was his way of getting America to forgive man for their actions. What fascinates me is that while settlers viewed the coyote as evil and something to be exterminated, Joseph Beuys spent 3 days with a wild coyote that interacted with him in a friendly way. At the end the coyote had even grown so used to him that Beuys was able to hug him.