There are certain artists out there in the network that frustrate me. Here I am, day in and day out, trying to formulate some sort of useful taxonomy of all the art forms I see emerging on the net, and do the artists care? Noooo! Some of them just go along mixing and warping and wilding the media until I just sit in front of my lousy machine wondering guiltily why the sun was out and everything was green when I sat down to look at their sites and now it’s cold and there’s snow on the ground and my girlfriend left a note on our printer telling me in the most polite terms possible for such an exchange that she’s leaving me for Brian Kim Stefans because his pedigree is more legitimate than mine, he being well beloved by the folks at Iowa Review Web and I being reviled (they send me dead rats in the post, actual dead rats, with cute little notes attached telling me I’d better give up making art or I’ll be in the same predicament as ole Algernon here) by same said benchmark institution. It’s enough to make a net artist/critic cry in his monitor.

The tears, though, are far outweighed by the thrills, especially when it’s the work of Jtwine I’m looking at. Jtwine’s site, available at http://www.jtwine.com/, is one of those thoroughly entertaining and unpredictable sites that keeps me coming back to the net for my art entertainment needs. Jtwine is a visual artist primarily, one whose work closely resembles the old expressionism of Dubuffet and the newer expressionism of Jean Michel Basquiat–two of my favorites as far as visual art goes. Wandering through Jtwine’s domain is like watching the work of these two artists come to life with dynamic animated gifs and Flash animations. He loves frames, Jtwine does, and his use of frames is startling; clicking on a link in a sidebar one watches expressionistic, almost childlike scenes of the power structures inherent in adult corporate life. It’s a definite feast for the eyes, and probably one of the wildest art sites I’ve ever seen.

Recently I had the chance to interview Jtwine. He burst into my home at 3:00 in the morning, eyes glassy and enflamed. I thought he was there to get back the Kid Rock album I’d borrowed from him two years ago (I’m such a huge fan I couldn’t bear to part with it), but no: he wanted to talk about his art. He had to get it off his chest. Being an artist myself, I understood, and invited him to pull up a kitchen chair and hold court.

Q:How was the transition to net-based work for you? What were some of the problems you faced in assembling your site? How has the work’s presence on a network changed the nature of what you do?

A: The transition to net based work was like a powerful drug getting hooked right away. There where no real problems except multiple system crashes, lost data and tendencies towards carpool tunnel syndrome. The core of my work didn’t really change I’m still driven by drawing in real space but my projects became more conceptual over the years.

Q: Describe for me your first experience online. What needs could you at the time forsee the network fulfilling for you? What needs has it fulfilled that you didn’t imagine?

A :The first experience was waiting while loading but it was exciting anyway to have a new medium to work in. A slow modem and not enough ram at that time made it difficult to develop an image based web site. I got a bigger audience. I didn’t imagine that people write about my work or being included in museum shows.

Q: Do you feel having a bigger audience and wider distribution has influenced the way you work? You mentioned becoming more conceptual on the network—why do you think this is?

A: The net-audience is more or less anonymous so it didn’t really influence my work in terms of comercialisation, intension, style and content. The first rush of intuitive, imidiate exploration was transformed through experience into projects that involve more planing, research and time.
Q:Tell me about your favorite tools, both software and offline. What do you use to do what you do?

A: A pen with black ink and what ever software that allows me to manipulate images.

Q: How do you feel about digital images? Knowing underneath that they’re basically information, as opposed to the “concreteness” of pen and paper? (Of course, pen and paper are also information…)
A: I like the pixelized flatness of digital images, they become the objectification of hand drawn images The underlying code of digital images is not important to me in terms of content and immediate perception.

Q: I’ve noticed on your site a proliferation of animated gifs, sometimes in a flash format. Did animation interest you before you went online? What prompted the move from static images to moving ones?

A: Before I went online I was experimenting with video and super 8.
To achieve an intensified visual impact and to transport more content it was a necessary step to create animations for my website. Animations make the net more exciting to me.

Q:What were some of your influences? I detect a strong expressionist or neo-expressionist bent in your art. To what do you owe your style?

A:I was dropped into the corporate world when I was 20 and I was disgusted by it. To express my unhappy situation I start literally to draw myself out of it. The influences changed over the years but I always liked Gruenewald, Goya and Grosz.

Q: All of these artists used various methods of distortion as a path to the harmony of their works. How do you feel about distortion and beauty? Is beauty for you symmetry, or something else, something deeper? Is beauty connected to distortion?

A: To me beauty is sealed inside the realms of aesthetics and fashion and represents a superficial surface. Im interested in truth not beauty. Distortion or essentailisation might be necessary to create a true image to reveal visions of the human drama on the battlefield of reality in our commercialized and machine dependent world.

Q: Tell me about the corporate world. Do you feel it’s informed your work in any way?
A: It definitely did. Power structures, technology and human relations became a Leitmotif in my work.

Indeed they did. The splash page for his site cautions: “Be aware of your surroundings and exercise caution when visual reflections refer to you.” It’s an awareness of just how much of human perception is grounded in human predisposition. One piece on his site, “mindgame”, opens a flash animation of a seated figure (it’s one of those egg-shaped chairs, in fact, supposed to yield such comfort in the office) superimposed against an exploding color background that keeps declaring, looped, ad infinitem, “empty refill.”

My favorite piece on the site, though, is Jtwine’s homage to September 11. “9.11” offers the user a scrolling sketchbook of reactions to the terrorist attacks; the sketches are organic (they were quite obviously scanned in from an actual realtime sketchbook, and converted to transparent gifs, quite possibly with the magic eraser tool in Photoshop); expressionistic drawings of the event coexist with handwritten poetry, all scrolling down into a bath of digital flames licking up from the bottom of the screen. “some people feel dead inside,” he asserts in this piece, and it rings true here, punctuated as it is by sideswipes of sketches upswipes of flames. This is a graphic examination of power teetering, the mundane frustrated by disaster. It’s a statement you won’t soon forget.