musicBottles

in our most recent essay reading in digital visual culture, ralf nuhn mentioned a work by the MIT media lab called musicBottles that i found to be interesting and worth further research. nuhn's goal was "to explore interrelationships and transitions between screen-based digital environments and their immediate physical surroundings" with his 6 interactive installations titled UNCAGED. he mentions musicBottles when addressing human-computer interaction. 

as you can see in the video, the removal and replacement of corks on the bottles triggers the start and stop of music. apparently, the media lab wanted "to maintain the coherence between the new digital meaning of the interface and its everyday functionality as a physical object."

what do you guys think? do they succeed in their goal? or is it just a cool installation?

VHILS

here's an artist i stumbled upon when i was researching for my presentation and ultimately ended up choosing him for my fa331 presentation. he began his artistic career at age 10 when he started doing graffiti in the streets of lisbon, portugal. since then, he's gained prominence with his work involving vandalism as art, where he carves and drills portraits out of building walls.

here is his website.

these are some videos i wasn't able to fit into my presentation, but are totally worth watching:

post discussion

yesterday's discussion topic resulting from heidi's post on douglas huebler’s 42° Parallel Piece was of some interest to me. mainly because of the overall reaction from the class, which seemed to be quite negative. I guess I can understand the position, but it still does not trouble me to consider this piece as art.

if i remember right, ryan peter made a comment along the lines of, "you either need to decide from the beginning that a piece is indeed art, or that it's not and then discuss why or why not"...something like that. and that totally makes sense to me. personally, i would say that i fall into the first group — when i go into an exhibition or gallery, i've already decided that what i'm going to see is art in some form or another. that said, i do not claim that i will always understand the art or its purpose, but only that i accept that it is art. so that is perhaps why it was not difficult to accept huebler's piece as art. sure, it's just a line on a map, but perhaps the concept behind it and the process have more to do with the piece than the final product that we see here. and i've seen a ton of other pieces that made me scratch my head even more than this. see my earlier post on cory arcangel. either way, i find the discussion as to whether something is or isn't art quite interesting and an ongoing, endless topic.

the johnny cash project

this has been around for a long time, but i rediscovered it this evening and thought i'd share, just in case any of you haven't had the chance.

started in 2010, the johnny cash project is a "global collective art project" that basically gives anyone anywhere the ability to create their own adaptation of a single frame from a music video for cash's song ain't no grave. apparently, more than 250,000 people have already participated.

here's a little clip about the project:

what a brilliant idea. there are some really incredible contributions, as well as some very simple ones, but overall they combine into something very moving. i think it would be interesting to do a project similar to this as a class where we each contribute a frame and create a short film using our work. although considering the small amount of people in our courses, it would be a short video, but still an interesting thought.

what do you guys think?

game-like interactivity

as i was going through the first paper in the digital spaces section of our book, digital visual culture, i found the section on game-like interactivity in new media art to be of some interest. the first example the authors give in luc corchesne's portrait one (1990). portrait one is  essentially a "static" portrait of a woman who remains motionless and speechless until she is "activated" when a user moves the mouse. once the mouse is moved, a menu appears giving you a menu of options to communicate with the woman. 

this type of interactivity has always been intriguing to me. the ability to communicate with a computer and have them understand you. obviously, we do it on a day to day basis with computers, it's just when the computer is given human characteristics, it is exciting and somewhat terrifying. on a larger scale, we see this kind of thing in movies all the time and most recently, david, in the film prometheus. it really makes me wonder if humanity will ever reach that point with computers and what sort of advances that would really create.

since portrait one is unavailable to try, i did find a bot modeled after captain kirk from star trek. i played around with it a little while, which was fun, but i had the most laughs watching this video:

you can try it out here.

jochem hendricks

amidst the many artists we're reading about in our digital art book, one of the most intriguing pieces in chapter one was jochem hendricks "eye drawings". in the above photo, you can see the device hendricks uses to scan the movement of the human eye across the page. he then takes the path that the eye creates, digitizes it and then is able to print it out. 

a very interesting concept. i thought it might be interesting to see a comparison between two different people who read over the same page. just to see the differences and similarites. i think a lot could be revealed about personalities in that sense. 

go here to check out his website and other works.

emilio gomariz

i stumbled across this artist's videos and found his website. here's a video and tidbit from his website:

"Emilio Gomariz explores a large area into the digital field. He uses the computer to create imaginary environments and sculptures, which most often are exported and published online as a GIF. Inspired by computer's interface, Emilio works on desktop performances, creating different kind of manifestations by the use of Mac OS X."

comic relief

sometimes i feel like this when i'm talking about art, or when i'm listening to someone talk about art. i've been on both sides of this conversation, mind you. 

digital self portrait

when given the objective to create a digital self portrait of myself, initially i had no clear idea of what sort of narrative i wanted to develop. obviously, i wanted to make something that would represent myself and my interests. i also knew i didn't want to make a self portrait in the literal sense, rather to lean more towards the experimental. as i began browsing through my photos, i happened upon this old rodeo photo from the 70's of my father and my grandfather. my father is on the bronc and my grandfather is on the right side of the photo. i've always liked this photo and the historical narrative it tells, especially since i am close with my father, but never had the opportunity to really know my grandfather before he died. keeping that in mind, i thought of pasting my face onto each face of the crowd. i thought this would add to the historical narrative, connecting present and past in a sort of intertwined and contorted way. it presents myself (many times over) and what is important to me — my family and their history. i've always wondered what it would be like to meet my family members in different periods of their lives, to see what they were like, if our personalities were similar, etc. that was sort of my driving force behind this project. 

dan deacon app

i just came across this article about dan deacon creating an app that allows fans to participate in his performances. pretty rad idea, and definitely falls under the umbrella of postmodernist art.

watch the trailer:

on post modernism, briefly.

in preparation for our discourse on modernism and postmodernism, i've been doing a bit of research outside of the wikipedia article. firstly, i wanted to gain a better understanding of the term "postmodernism" in relation to art. the wiki article described it as, "a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath." since i found that definition to be kind of boring, i located another one that offered more insight into the movement: "A late 20th Century style and conceptual theory in the arts and architecture, characterized by a general distrust of ideologies as well as a rather 'difficult' relationship with what constitutes art." this 2nd definition really gave me a better understanding into what is the driving force behind postmodernism, as opposed to just knowing that it "developed" in modernism's aftermath (already quite obvious from reading the titles). it seems that where skill once championed over creativity (modernism), the opposite is now true for postmodernism. 

however well our discussion goes on tuesday, i doubt that one movement will be proven superior over the other. it's all a matter of opinion.