Jack Dollhausen Machines

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~jackdoll/index.html

This website stuck out to me because it was set up a little different than the other online portfolios that artists have posted in the past. Dollhausen is a new media artist who creates machines that perform tasks; some simple and some are complex. What I like about his website is that it is a reflection of his work. He turns his portfolio into a piece of art itself by creating photo montages of his work together in order to create an untraditional library of images. When clicked upon a larger image of the work can be viewed along with a small caption describing the function of the piece. The descriptions are very technical and do not touch on the idea behind the work which is left completely to our imaginations. 

A common theme that can be found in his work is the use of light. Many of the machines use colored lights in some way as part of their function. For example in his work "August" he uses colored lights to create patterns in response to body heat. Another one of my favorites is "Spnx" which is a machine that generates all four-letter combinations of letters in the alphabet. That means there are 456976 different options.

There are so many things to look at on this site. My only criticism that I have is that I would like to see some of the machines in action. I really think viewing the works would be have more of an impact if you could view a quicktime video of the machine performing its given task.