Erik Loyer: Living and Active
May 2005
Erik Loyer: Living and Active
Erik Loyer’s Gate Page Living and Active provided a portal to his award-winning project The Lair of the Marrow Monkey (1998), a dynamic, abstract interface that allowed users to play with text to construct poetic narratives and reflections on memory. The Gate Page consists of an array of letters that jump around in a rectangular frame and, accompanied by sounds, assemble themselves in response to the viewer’s cursor. While the letters never fall neatly into a linear line of text, they are still recognizable as the biblical phrase "For the word of God is living and active" (Hebrews 4:12). Loyer’s Gate Page makes the meaning of the quote palpable, treating letters and words not as static signs but a dynamic, living, and active force that shapes lives.
This project links to marrowmonkey.com which is no longer online. It is partially accessible on the Internet Archive, though it relies Shockwave .dcr files that are no longer readily playable.
Erik Loyer (b. 1972; San Francisco, California) explores how interactive media change the way we share stories and experiences. In games, apps, comics, websites, and videos, he has used digital media to interweave present and past, music and poetry, performance and archive. Loyer founded the interactive media studio Opertoon in 2008, releasing narrative-driven works while also developing creative tools for exploring digital temporality used in classrooms, workshops, and commercial releases. He has created over a dozen interactive documentaries in collaboration with leading scholars, artists, and organizations such as the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University in California. Loyer’s work has been commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work has been exhibited across the United States and Europe.
Gate Pages
Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.
Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.