Unfolding Object

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Unfolding Object
John F. Simon - screenshot of Unfolding Object.jpg
Artist John F. Simon Jr. Blue pencil.svg
Year 2002
Collection Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Blue pencil.svg
Website unfoldingobject.guggenheim.org

Unfolding Object is a 2002 work of internet art created by John Simon after a commission from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Along with net.flag by Mark Napier, it was among the first pieces of internet art to be collected by a major museum.

Internet art is a form of digital artwork distributed via the Internet. This form of art has circumvented the traditional dominance of the gallery and museum system, delivering aesthetic experiences via the Internet. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work of art. Artists working in this manner are sometimes referred to as net artists.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Art museum in Manhattan, New York City

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum located at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously expanding collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions throughout the year. The museum was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, under the guidance of its first director, the artist Hilla von Rebay. It adopted its current name after the death of its founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim, in 1952.

New York City Largest city in the United States

The City of New York, usually called either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States and in the U.S. state of New York. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.

Simon has described Unfolding Object as "an endless book that rewrites itself and whose use dictates its content." It begins as a blank square visible on a web page hosted on the museum's website, but responds when clicked by visitors to the site. Gradually the square unfolds, click by click, until it reaches a certain point, after which it begins to close. The "pages" of the design are programmed to respond differently as they receive more clicks; vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines denote different numbers of previous clicks. The colors of the square and of its background are both programmed to change hourly.

Website set of related web pages served from a single web domain

A website or Web site is a collection of related network web resources, such as web pages, multimedia content, which are typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server. Notable examples are wikipedia.org, google.com, and amazon.com.

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