Daily, curated by Jacqueline Friedman:
Artist Martin John Callanan’s “I Wanted to See all of the News from Today†collects the front pages of newspapers from around the world daily and displays them all together on one large web page. The primary purpose of this artwork is to include all printed national newspapers daily on one website. This is unique because each day a spectator can view all the front pages on national newspapers simultaneously. Therefore, a viewer is able to compare the subject matters from different nation’s front pages of their newspaper from around the world. This piece is unique to Daily curatorial show because it is the only art project chosen that is not user-friendly when trying to look at previous days’ sites, as it is not treated like a blog. “I Wanted to See all of the News from Today†successfully visually expresses history per day.
Daily is an online exhibition portraying the effect of art updated daily and continuously, ranging from a set collapsed-time projects, such as a year or three months, to ongoing artwork with no end date. With an array of themes such as World News as well as personal daily blogs, the linking factors among the artwork in Daily exemplify progression and history. Although some of the artwork chosen for Daily directly portrays history of news, the progression in the show Daily is dealing with the development within an artwork.
A common factor within each artwork is a start date, and one can compare the first post of the project to the most recent or any post in the project, allowing a viewer to note its succession and development. Furthermore, the consistency being updated everyday is significant; it forces an artist to update on a daily, regular basis rather than when an artist feels like updating. This helps distinguish what art-updated-daily is. This new form of documentation is similar to the 21st century, common term blog – a digital, update website that can resemble a diary as well as a place on the Internet to post comments. Another distinguishing factor, is that the artwork included in Daily are on the World Wide Web, meaning they are accessible to everyone on the Internet.
Besides being updated daily, each piece of artwork displays the information in reverse chronological order. This is a distinguishing factor of a blog. The one exception to a “blog-like†appearance in Daily is “I wanted to See All of the News From Today†by Martin Jon Callanan who only shows the most recent update on the initial website; a viewer must search harder to view previous posts. However, the piece was included in Daily because it is a new form of updating daily, and has similarities with some of the other pieces.
Each piece of artwork in Daily has to do with a progression over a certain amount of time; however, some pieces deal with self-portraiture and privacy on the Internet, personal information on a public space, while other artwork included deal with history and the news. Daily brings these pieces together to show how these pieces are linked together through being updated daily.