Born in 1967 in New York City, Yael Kanarek grew up in Israel, but moved back to NYC in 1991. Here, she became one of the pioneers of net art in the mid-90s.

Her central work, World of Awe, is built around a series of three web-based pieces, 2000 - 2006, but the larger project spans three decades.

Each chapter of World of Awe is an interactive work mixing computer-generated landscapes (constructed in now-obsolete Bryce3D, which launched in 1994 and saw its final update in 2010), recreations of already-archaic computer interfaces, and poetic narrative text. Each could be considered an epistolary hypertext fiction; the work is structured as a series of love letters from the Traveler in a parallel universe to an absent Lover, mediated by technology. Both of these characters are left ungendered. The story is distributed, almost hidden, through icons and modified menu systems. Interactive digressions intercede. They are soundtracked by ambient loops of wind and atmospheric noise.

The projects remain accessible online: https://www.worldofawe.net/

Chapter 1 (2000): Forever
Chapter 2 (2002): Destruction and Mending
Chapter 3 (2006): Object of Desire

While 1 and 2 continue to work as intended, Object of Desire, built in Flash, has recently gone offline. In 2017 Kanarek wrote "It was a risk, but I figured that as long as advertising, video streaming sites, and Facebook use the technology, the work is safe from dying."

Kanarek originally trained as a portrait painter. After moving to New York City, she continued painting, working in acrylic and collage elements in an attempt to distance her style from previous traditions. But as her small East Village apartment studio filled up, moving into a new digital zone of production appealed to her.

It was 1995, Netscape Navigator had just launched and Web 1.0 homepages were taking form. Kanarek's day job provided an opportunity:

In the next building over was the office of Razorfish, a design and advertising company started the year before and already at the forefront of early web design (with an animated homepage, one of the first!). Kanarek introduced herself and became involved in a circle of artists experimenting with new possibilities, also contributing to Razorfish's early net art platform The Blue Dot. In addition to her own projects, Kanarek also did web design for other pieces.

The earliest World of Awe creation, still in part an outgrowth from Kanarek's paintings, Love Letters from a World of Awe also appeared in 1995 and continued to evolve through multiple iterations.

Chapter 1: Forever, the piece that defined the project's lasting terms, was launched in 2000, and was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, displayed for visitor interaction on a laptop. Orgiginally, this single digital platform was intended to be endlessly extendable, but considering the distributed nature of the internet, Kanarek began to place further chapters on new servers. Chapter 2: Destruction and Mending was the result of 2002 commission from SF MoMA and carried the narrative forward into new explorations.

Chapter 3: Object of Desire, developed in an MFA at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with support from several grants, the Jewish Museum, and the Bitforms Gallery (where I was lucky enough to wander in and see it in 2006!), took the work into a much more elaborate visual language, with explorable animated environments built in Hypercard like Myst. Interwoven into the landscape were the 3D texts of love letters in three languages: English, Hebrew, and Arabic. In embodying the borderless, polyglot territory of the internet, this choice already carries a political weight but the the process of creating this chapter brought further illumination:

Scenes from the chapter would be download not from any single source but, with messages to alert the audience, from servers in four cities: Izmir (in Turkey), Tel Aviv, Ramallah (in the West Bank), and New York City. Sadly, the demise of Flash means that this chapter is the only one not currently accessible. Another challenge of working in Hebrew and Arabic is that the languages are gendered in a way that would normally have forced the Traveler and Lover to have more defined identities. Instead, Kanarek created a new letter, a blinking eye turned back to the audience and used this in place of letters that would have clarified gender.

Other components include landscape prints, data works, an album of music based around the love letters, and variable installation views. The entire project, from early paintings to more recent offshoots was summed up in a show at Bitforms in 2016.

More recently, Kanarek has taken 3D text out of the digital and into physical space, as sculpture (as seen at the U.S. embassy in Zimbabwe) or jewelry. Another ongoing project is to invert all of the genders in the old and new testaments, reevaluating our foundational cultural myths by playing with gender, as in World of Awe.

These and other works can be viewed at www.yaelkanarek.com

Sources:

Yael Kanarek and Kerry Doran, "World of Awe, Chapter 2: Destruction and Mending", Zoom recording, April 30, 2020, https://vimeopro.com/bitforms/kanarek/video/416375911

Kaela Noel, "Gravity Is Optional", Rhizome, June 15, 2017,
https://rhizome.org/editorial/2017/jun/15/yael-kanarek-gravity-is-optional/

Illya Szilak, "Yael Kanarek's Must-See Show at bitforms", Huffington Post, last modified December 6, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/art-review-yael-kanareks_b_9778852