Game The Playing

This is my Video Art piece. I wanted to take somthing that i do every day and decontextualize it so i chose video games. Everyone always sees the screen so i decided to take video of my face and the keyboard while i played instead.

Stelarc

Stelarc is a performance artist that uses machines and mechanical devices in his work. His view on the human body is that it is obsolete and that new mechanical parts will take over soon. Some of his works include a 6 legged walking spider vehicle and a third mechanical arm. He has also had his body controlled with electronic muscle stimulators connected to the internet. A lot of his work tries to extend and enhance the human body beyond what it is capable of.

His work to me is important because the use of technology to aid the human body is an old concept, but he is adding to it with all of his ideas. I do believe one day we will have a choice to keep our natural body or be implanted in an artificial one, but this may be even after I die of old age. The major argument with creating artificial bodies for people is the lifespan of the person. It would be extended incredibly, or even cease to exist all together.

Stelarcs work with the body continue to amaze and interest me. i would love to take a class with him as my professor some day.

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys is a very interesting person from both his standpoint of art to his style and background. He flew bombers in world war two for the german army and was shot down on a mission. He crashed in a forest and his copilot had died on impact. a few days later some natives found him and wrapped him in body fat and felt, to keep the warmth inside. This experience would carry over to his work later in life.

The work of his that i like the most is the one where he wanders around a room at a gallery with a coyote. he is wearing a felt cloak and has a shepherds staff. The coyote is a wild one and he stayed in there for 8 hours over 3 days. I think that he was trying to say that animals of america and the humans of america can get along together. He also does a lot of sculptures with felt and body fat. he uses body fat to make sculptures of used spaces such as a triangle of fat on a chair as if it were meant to be there. Some of his sculptures are objects that he has covered in felt like a piano.

i think his work is a definite window to his inner self, showing what he really thinks and what makes him grateful. some of the most eccentric artists are the best because they can think outside the norm.

The Xerox project

For this project i wanted to get away from the basic poster board feel and do somthing different. I enjoyed the exquisite corpse exercise that dadaists used and that was my inspiration for this project. all 6 sides of all 3 boxes have images on them, and you can rotate them to make different pictures.

Grid art project

This is my grid art project that i did for class. I thought about this project for a while before i set my mind to this idea. I wanted to create a project that would embody the classic dungeons and dragons feel and use a medium that would be interesting to work with. I chose to make a wooden sign of the logo because I felt like when dungeons and dragons first came out, they were on the brink of the digital age.

First I took my wood and created the grid by using a table saw to cut lines every 1/2 of an inch. Then i found the logo online and photoshopped it to look more pixilated and I had to match the number of pixels to the piece of wood that I had created. After that I used wood stain and paint brushes to color every square on the piece of wood. It took about 3 or 4 hours to stain the whole piece.

Name June Paik

Name June Paik is a very interesting and literal person in his work to me. He takes many normal activities like playing instruments to a new level such as when he "plays" the piano or violin. The piano is played with a sledgehammer as he bashes away at it on stage. Once the whole piano is in pieces on the ground he stops "playing" and walks off stage. His definition of "playing" an instrument is different from the classical viewpoint of sitting down and using the tool as it should be used. One of his performances was to drag his violin around behind him on the ground as he walked through New York City. He stood on a bridge and dangled it off the side hitting it against the railing and beams.

To me this was an example of taking things to the extreme in my book. To me this is also taking the word "playing" literally. He "plays" with his instruments like a kid with a child's toy, dragging it around and beating it up.

Fluxus

Fluxus is a collection of artists in the 1960's that came together to collaborate and create art that made you think. They took objects and ideas that were basic and common and made art out of them. Many of the works had a very basic approach to it, and they wanted it to be simple, not complex. The artists worked with anything that they could find.

Fluxus is a group but also a way of thinking and a movement. The artists worked together as a group but also some worked alone.

Orlan

The works of Orlan have definitely changed dramatically over the course of a few years from doing work primarily about women to more digital aspects going back to the roots of civilization. Her works with plastic surgery were a very striking example of using yourself as the art and also to transform something so mundane into something out of this world and creative. It was almost as if she created an installation of herself in the operating room of the hospital. To me this was the pinnacle of her work dealing with the human form and transforming space.

When she conducted her art in the hospital operating room she did not just lay there by herself. The whole room was decorated with art and sculpture and she was actually awake during all of the procedures. This added a surrealist feel to it because most people would never want to be awake for a surgery, but she was and at some points was actually reading a book while the surgeon worked.

Her later work digital pictures of herself transformed into cultural themes and icons has a very tribal feel which is a definite thing she was going for. I feel like she is saying that we all come from different locations but we all originated somewhere. She has done a few series' of these kinds of works, and each of them are based on a specific era and culture.

To me her early work is outlandish and wild, but as she continued it became less about her and more about the image itself.

Gilbert and George

Gilbert and George are a british artist duo that make a lot of different types of art. From they're early work as the Singing Sculpture they exhibited the idea that you do not have to have objects to make art, you can be the object. They seem to take what they like and make art out of it, which is an interesting concept because a lot of artists do whats popular at the time. I think that their piece "bend it" is such a good idea, taking a song and pretty much doing what ever you want with it, like dancing.

I used them as inspiration for my Performance Art piece. i thought that using the objects such as the pots and lids and the plastic bowl would be different uses for drums. the music in my headphones was an idea i had right before i shot the video. The idea was for people watching to not hear the music, but only hear what i was playing on the pots and lids.

Performance Art

This is my performance art piece that I did for art 211. The concept is that I would play it in a gallery and there would be a button for the audience to press if they wanted to skip to the next song. Only I would hear the song playing so that way all you hear is the drumming on the pots and pans. Turning this into an interactive piece was my idea in the first place, and I got my inspiration from Gilbert and George.

Flipbook!

This was one of my favorite projects so far. I had to animate a flipbook that had to be at least 200 pages. I used a book that i was going to throw away.

Steve Jobs and the Apple tablet

To me Steve Jobs is one of the pioneers of the computing world with all of the innovations and technology that he has had his hand in. To hear that this Apple tablet is the most important thing he has ever done is saying something for all his other contributions and just how awesome this tablet will be. I think that a tablet will be a good addition to the Apple lineup in that a tablet is a portable version of a laptop with the ability to work in many different situations where a laptop would be too big or too hard to hold with one hand. Also a tablet, being touchscreen, would allow for easier manipulation of programs and documents.

All in all i think that this will be an interesting step for Apple and i am looking forward to seeing if Jobs has made another beast of a product like the iPhone.

Museum project

This is the museum project i had to do last semester in beginning digital arts. this whole project took me about 15 to 20 hours to complete.

Time travel

The thought of being able to record our surroundings being able to reconstruct or turn back the clock and see what the looked like before we first saw them is amazing to say the least. First of all it would be a great teaching aid in classrooms worldwide o be able to actually take your class to the location your studying and precieve it in three dimensions. I believe this program would also be very beneficial to historians in that you could see exactly how and what happened to an area and how it became what is it today. I think the most interesting thing of all is the implications such as a "holo deck", although this would not just be having to record three dimentional objects but be able to project hem inside a room and actually make these things solid objects.

Digital Pictures for Museum

These are the five pictures i included in my museum and their discriptions:


1. Title: The Dark Horse of Abstraction, 1995

Artist: Scott Griesbach

Medium: Digital collage

This collage by Scott Griesbach depicts 4 horseman (Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, and Reginald Marsh) in a race. The significance of this work is that Pollock, the abstract expressionist, is puling ahead in this race of artists. The other three artists were considered regional artists and in the late twentieth century abstract expressionists were becoming more notable and recognized than regional artists. This digital collage is meant as a allusion to how art changes over time and how one style of art can over take another style.

www.scottgriesbach.com

2. Title: Blind Genes, 2002

Artist: Andreas Muller-Pohle

Medium: Digital Print

This digital print of many colored dots seemingly randomly placed is not what it appears to be. the artist Andreas Muller-Pohle has taken gene sequences he has found on a internet gene search and divided them up into increments of ten. Each of the four gene types (Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, and Thymine) have had their first letter translated into braille and been color coded with yellow, blue, red, and green. This work also shows the depth of how little we understand the human body and how much there is still to learn.

www.muellerpohle.net

3. Title: net.flag, 2002

Artist: Mark Napier

Medium: Digital Print

This depiction of a flag is an ever changing model. The artist has created this flag in such a way as to let users manipulate the different aspects of it from menus such as stars, fields of color, patterns, and emblems. As people add different combinations of patterns and colors to the flag it stacks one on top of the other, covering up what has already been done by previous users. Users can also save the flags that they create for their own use. As more users add to this project, the creators implemented a search function to allow people to see past flags divided into categories by main idea such as peace and war.

www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/napier_mark.html

4. Title: Unfolding Object, 2002

Artist: John F. Simon Jr.

Medium: Interactive networked code

This work is actually a computer program that creates images very quickly. The work was first a blank square on a web site, and as uses pull and touch the object it unfolds in response. When a new fold is created the original face is modified with a graphic that shows the state of the object, such as 4 vertical lines indicating the face has been modified four times and each horizontal line indicated the face has ben modified ten times. As more and more users manipulate the object it stores everything that happens. As the faces of the square become more modified they darken, and when a new face is created its is bright.

www.numeral.com

5. Title: No Ghost, Anywhere out of the World from No Ghost, Just a Shell, 2000-present

Artist: Phillippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe

Medium: Digital Print

This project was a joint effort by two artists to buy a manga character template from a design firm that specialized in making these characters. The character, named Annlee, was therefore saved from being a casualty of some story. The artists purchased the copyright to her and both gave her separate stories of her explaining her situation. They now offer her "blank existence" to other artists to add a story to her. The title, No Ghost, Just a Shell, alludes to the thought that she is just a body and has no soul, but the person writing the story can add one.

www.mmparis.com/noghost.html

Calligrams

thse are the three calligrams i created.

Foursquare articles and parents of the future

Devices already exist that monitor your childs location with a remote. Also i have seen a sort of geotagging service that sends a text to the parent whenever a child arrives at a certain location via the childs gps enabled cell phone. I think that depending on the age of your child, maybe somewhere between 16 and 18, a parent should not continue to monitor their children. this is because at 18 the child is by all legal rights an adult and therefore should not be monitored if he or she doesent want to be.

As for a cybernetic implant, that would be up to the child in my opinion because it is his or hers decision. i would definitely agree to a non implant device such as a watch that does the same thing because that way if in the future the child did not want the implant they cant take it out that easily but a watch they can. I do think that a biofeedback device would actually be a hindrance to parents in the sense that if a child gets injured then you only know what the readings are telling you and have no idea how bad or good it really is. this could easily be a mental strain on the parents. Another thing would be parents would constantly check the readings of the biofeedback device becouse of paranoia and im sure that would lead to problems at work, school, and anywhere the parent needs to be concentrating.

The real you

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/fashion/22Avatar.html?_r=1&8dpc

Creating a virtual avatar of yourself can be an interesting way of showing your own personality and doing things in the virtual world that you could not normally do. I think that the use of virtual currency is alright for a game but there needs to be a distinction between that currency and the real thing. You should not be able to profit or exchange virtual currency for real world currency because if you were able to do that with other games, such as World of Warcraft, then that would corrupt the game economy and only those with real world currency would be able to play the game to any degree and i think that would be considered cheating. I do know for a fact that the creators of World of Warcraft frown on what are called "gold farmers", those who gain currency in he game and sell it for real world money. At one point a few years ago they went so far as to remove 11 million gold from the game, from peoples accounts that had collected large sums of it. Although for some games this interchangeable currency with real and virtual dollars works, with others it corrupts gameplay so i have mixed feelings about this topic.

Sign project

These are the three signs that i made. When i posted them to this blog the last two did not have a background and the picture was messed up so i will have to redo them. It helps if you look at them in order.

Virtual Self...

I have thought about this subject for a long time now and i can say without a shadow of a doubt that i would definitely be different if i had not come in to contact with a computer. I use computers so much now that i don't think i could function without one. Although i do like the outdoors and i think living in the mountains would be great, being cut off from everything in the outside world. I sometimes think about what life would have been like before the information age and although i think i would like to visit that time, i don't think i could stay.

The world has changed so much in the years that i have been alive, from the internet being brand new to it overtaking the world and something that we can not do without. As humans we have changed our world in the sense that we have created a new one. This "virtual world" is our own making, and therefore corresponds to what we want it to be. With all the video games and social programs out on the internet we tend to use these as a crutch in the sense that its an escape to many people. A lot of people use these avenues to escape from their lives and delve into a world where they can better control the outcome of what happens.

My favorite movie and show on tv are Ghost In The Shell and if you have ever seen any of the episodes then i think you might see what our future wcould hold for us. I think in my lifetime the "virtual world" will cease to be a retreat and become the main place that people will congregate. the day that this happens, our "real world" will become the escape.