Myron Turner

Myron Turner is a multi-media artist whose work has combined photography, lightboxes, printmaking and computers. He has exhibited in public galleries and artist run centers throughout Canada, as well as in the United States and South America. He has been working with the Internet since 1994 and is coordinator of Manitoba Visual Arts Network. He is, in addition, an award-winning printmaker. He has also published three books of poetry, and his poems have appeared in many journals in Canada and The U.S.  Turner's web site is room535.org, which displays both his new media work and a collection of his woodcuts.

In addition to Timeline, which is featured here on Sporkworld, his recent work includes bstatzero, a program that analyzes and displays the web traffic on new media sites so as to show the links between art sites, and by extension, the new media art scene itself.  Bstatzero was featured on the Whitney Artport in February 2006.

Turner's career started in traditional art media (prints, woodcuts, photography), and this experience making "real art" has lent an elegance and craft to his more recent works.  Timeline, for example, is based around a technical concept (the idea of a timeline-based nonlinear editing system), but it includes images and texts which would qualify as "art" if they were encountered outside the context of a new media work.  Much of Turner's work is even more "technical" than Timeline, using data mining (for example  BigQuestions.com) and web programming to illustrate various aspects of networks and the World Wide Web. 

I am always impressed with web artists who are able to do serious programming and yet have actual hand-on art skills.   There is too much web art which fails by being interesting technologically but aesthetically sterile.  On the other hand, there are many skilled artists working on the web who produce excellent online art which is not technologically innovative.  The new media art community often ignores such work in favor of more "boundary-pushing" projects which do something new on a technical level.  I find this to be a disturbing trend -- after all, we still exhibit paintings and do not demand that every new painting use paint in a technologically new way; all that is required is aesthetic innovation).  Still, it is refreshing to find an artist such as Turner who uses web technology (for example, server-side scripting with database integration) to its full potential, in addition to having a good mastery of visual art technique.

-- --Millie Niss (2006)