art & design
Internet Destroyer!

May 3, 2012

Miami artist Jillian Mayer is a fresh talent to watch.  Her experimental and affecting work ranges from installations to illustrations to short films featured at Sundance and SxSW including a remake of “La Jetee” with Uncle Luke from 2 Live Crew and a NSFW music video featuring singing vaginas. Her latest provocative creation is an interactive web-based project with graphic artist extraordinaire Eric Schoenborn called Erasey Page in which participants can have any web page they want erased before their eyes. On display at Miami’s Bass Museum of Art until August, we chatted with Mayer about the new piece and what she hopes to demonstrate through it.

How did Erasey Page come about?

Jillian Mayer: I think Erasey Page came out of me becoming more and more obsessed with the possibilities of the internet and the technological singularity of it. There comes a point of empowering people to go the other way. There’s too much obsession with technology and what’s next, so I am kind of trying to refute that and give people the chance to experience life without it.

So how does the whole experience actually work?

JM: You go to the site and the viewer is greeted by me on screen and I encourage them to live the life they had before the internet and ask them to click my hand. Then the next web page pops up and I appear again like a cheesy spokesperson and ask them to type in a web address above my head, anyone they want, and it will start deleting it.

What happens if the participant doesn’t do anything?

JM: If they don’t do anything, the web address we are on will begin deleting as well. At the end, I congratulate them for empowering themselves to make the choice of deleting an internet page. Our connection is not real though, much like the connection to the internet is not real. I am actually thinking about adding another element to the piece, where people who are unsure about what they just experienced can call a number that will have an automated message on it telling them to go back to the site. So it will run them in circles.

Do you think we’re addicted to technology?

JM: There will always be the fear of technology and new things. I know I’m obsessed with it and you kind of have to be to be relevant in any type of media field. If you’re not online, you really don’t exist much anymore. I think a lot of my work has to do with communication through technology and human interaction with it.

Sam Feeder is a poet/writer/photographer who works primarily in Los Angeles and Austin. Feeder is a careful observer and tries to experience as many different aspects of life as possible, ranging from travels all over the world to discovering that hole-in-the-wall restaurant or bar no one knows about.

Image: Courtesy David Castillo Gallery