Buttons #237
Buttons is a series of 256 long-form generated pieces that serve as a testament to Jan Robert Leegte's artistic career. Leegte ingeniously employs ubiquitous web elements as the building blocks of his digital sculptures, reshaping the overlooked designs of our computer and internet environments into captivating new forms. Each piece is constructed with pure CSS-styled HTML interactive buttons, allowing the work to dynamically reorganize itself as the browser window is resized.
The button has been in a continuous state of shapeshifting over the expanding history of collective interface design. Endless webpages filled with designs, haptics, styles, expressions, subcultures, interactions, effects, all layered over this simple and elemental entity leaving in its wake a fundamental material presence within interface culture.
The internet is an unimaginably vast ecology of data and processes. Deeply stored data is immutable like buried granite, where other is constantly in flux like a rushing mountain stream. The whole system is in continuous evolution through endless processes reshaping the data interacting with each other and with ourselves. At the opaque surface of this churning ocean of bits is the exchange between both the realm of the computer and that of ourselves. The interface. And in the centre of this human machine culture lives the button. A binary entity reaching out from the very core of the machine's logic to touch, at the surface, our reaching finger, after which it dives back down in order to toggle some state from a zero to a one.