Fotograf Magazine

In April 2006, Oliver Laric, Christoph Priglinger and Georg Schnitzer founded their blog vvork.com. They were four unknown students who set a single rule: to publish a picture of at least one work of art per day. The site became a hit overnight. In September 2007, a year later, the website with a simple functional interface made of pictures in vertical lines had an average 9000 unique visits per day. The fact that the group copied discussion forums such as 4chan, with an accent on image and minimum of text, proved to be ground breaking in its focus on the internet not as a specific medium in the sense of previous “internet art” but as a promotional space for “real life” art. This doesn’t mean that the internet hasn’t influenced how art looks; on the contrary, the internet has influenced the look of art radically. Similar to all other fields, and contrary to many people’s expectations, art hasn’t shifted from the real world to the virtual one. From the very beginning the number of virtual works was kept to minimum at vwork, although naturally the blog did start to give preference to works amenable to its structure, i.e. one work = one photograph + one sentence description.