Lew Baldwin (American, b. 1969) is an artist and filmmaker whose work spans video installation, film, painting, internet-based art and music. His work builds vessels rather than statements — structures other people complete, from browsers stripped of content to installations that respond to a museum visitor's own movement.
Baldwin launched his first website, redsmoke.com, in 1995 as a vehicle for a fictitious rock band that evolved, in his words, into a depository for the subconscious. The site was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2000, and the following year Baldwin created Milk Milk Lemonade for “BitStreams”, the Whitney's first all-digital exhibition. In “BitStreams”, visitors affected the installation's graphics and sound simply by moving up and down the museum's stairs. The following year he made GoodWorld for the Whitney, a generative work that erased a website's content and reduced it to abstract magenta and yellow blocks, a response to the flashing ads and pop-ups that then dominated the commercial web.
