Information

"100 Bricks"

Conceptual Art + Fine Art + Net Art = 100 Bricks
PHP Code + CSS
17th October 2006
Updated June 2007

By the way, if CSS style sheets are disabled in your Internet browser, you will not see any bricks at all!

This work arose from wandering around the Internet, in the kind of places which discuss art theory, net art, and why conceptual art sucks (sic). The previous month I briefly pondered how painting could be used in net art. So this work was suddenly inspired by the meeting of three seperate artistic areas, conceptual art, net art, and fine art.

The idea is quite simple (and naff): An image from my website is chosen at random, and from that image 100 bricks are constructed to show random areas of the image.

Visually the work is about texture, about a series of similiar textures and what happens when they come together. About how the textures from paintings, photographs, and other sources, parallel with the textures of real bricks.

CSS is used to chop up the image, if you look at the HTML for the page you'll see it. Each brick is a cell in a table. All cells use the same CSS class 'td.b', which specifies the cell size. Within each cell, is a single <div> element. Every <div> within a cell, has the same background image, specified by the CSS class div.b. To make each brick appear unique, each div has it's own unique CSS ID to specifiy the background image's position.

This version of 100 Bricks uses CSS more efficiently than the original, so there's less of it to download. For no apparent reason I've also added an image swapping effect for when the mouse hovers over any brick.

This version removes the necessity to press the refresh button to generate a new set of bricks, adds a link to rebuild the bricks, and allows images from other internet sites to be used.