Software Art

Loic Martenot — his picture you can see above in some seconds — is not an ordinary Bora-Borian and not a typical student for the Applet Workshop on the beach. He is subscribed to the Rhizome maling list, once he applied with his page to the Ars Electronica award (it was not accepted though). And he had an one month scolarship at ZKM in Karlsruhe. Actually it was one year scolarship for French Polinesian computer science students, but Loic could not imagine to stay the longer in, as he says, “grey walls.”

He is expirienced, he is the context of current media art trends. So instead of using an applet he decided to make his own applet.

And it is just a great piece! However it needs some intructions how to use it:

1. First of all, if you don’t see an applet you should download the latest Java Runtime Envinronment from Sun. If you see the applet everything is ok.
2. Next step is to choose a picture of yourself, your friend, pet, collegue and upload it. Use the provided web form. We recommend to give preference to pictures where the person is “cut out” from the background, like in the example on the left. Also the picture should not be bigger than 400 to 500 pixels to fit into the applet. Use the JPEG, GIF or PNG image file formats.
3. Press the button labeled “Show” to upload the picture onto the server and see yourself on vacation.
4. If neccessary, use your mouse to drag your image to the correct position in the scenery.