User:Asbill/Sandbox

Dipylon 2.0

Keywords: history, war, Dipylon vase, database, images, collage, objects

http://www.jimpalt.org/dipylon_war

In Athens, Greece around 760-750 BCE, ancient Greek vase painters painted vases decorated with precise geometric patterns called Dipylon vases. These vases had paintings of warriors, chariots, battle scenes, death scenes, and burial scenes that were related to life in ancient Greece. The scenes painted on the vases were abstract images of the figures and there surroundings painted in a collage like scene. The vases were then placed in the Dipylon cemetery and used as grave stones to mark the place and the life of the deceased. That is where these vases got the name Dipylon vases.

In February of 2009 an artist by the name of Olle Essvik also known as Jimpalt created a modern version of the Dipylon vase called Dipylon 2.0. Olle Essvik is an artist originally from Sweden. In 2006 he received his MFA in Fine Arts at the Valand School of fine arts, Gothenburg University. Since then Olle has created installations, objects, and net art.

Dipylon 2.0 uses a computer program that downloads search terms used by people when they are searching the Internet for war related topics. For example some search terms related to war would be military, Bush, firearms, Hitler, and death. Once the computer program has collected the search terms they are added to a database. The computer program then picks three of the search terms randomly and a web-program searches the Internet for pictures that are tagged with the war related terms. The pictures are then placed on a box layout making the collage pattern for a box. The box can then be printed and then folded if the viewer likes. Every thirty seconds a new box is created using three different search terms. The computer program constantly will update and create new collages as time goes on.

These boxes then become a modern digital version of the Dipylon vase. Both the Dipylon vase and Dipylon 2.0 have a collage of pictures that depicts war and death from real life scenes. Olle Essvik was trying to show how war keeps on happening and that humans will not stop making images of war as long as war is still around. Also Dipylon 2.0 shows how complex the Internet can be. There are thousands and millions of pictures and information at our fingertips and it is constantly multiplying and updating in real time. The possibilities are endless.

Reference
Olle Essvik