Week 15 artist

http://obadike.tripod.com/ebay.html

Keith Obadike's Blackness

Keith Obadike, like many others mocked Ebay with his sale of an unconventional product through the site, his blackness. I really like that his location is "Conceptual Landscape", in Hartford Conneticut.

It would at first seem like Obadike is just trolling, but once you read the benefits and warnings listed, then you can begin to see how he feels about the issue; that it can be more of a hinderance than a gift at times, and how the benefits and the warnings seem to contridict eachother.

I think that this performance piece, mostly carried out by Ebay, and bidders on the site is interesting, but do not think that I would necessarily call it art.

Week 14

Eyes of laura is creepy and reminds me of watching the waterfront camera in hopes that someone would walk by and do something ridiculous, while I was using it for my Sculpture Studio project.

The piece raises issues of voyeurism and privacy, but after watching it for about 2 hours on and off, I have found that nothing really happens, so there is not really any legal issue, in my opinion.

Apparently, Laura, the woman who is running the site and everything got fired from her real job. While it is lame, I do not blame them, because it is kind of weird, and would probably look bad for the company, if people made the comparison. I think Laura needs to find a hobby

Week 13 artist

While visual thesaurus, found at www.visualthesaurus.com, may not seem like art, it comes across as art in terms of its visual representation of words and their associations to other words. Markings in a color and line style key denote synonyms, antonyms, representations of verbs or nouns, etc.

I really like this, and think that it can have so many practical uses, especially in education. The visual representations of like and expressively unalike, and how close each word is to another would really help struggling students who learn better visually than they do when hearing it, or having to read and make conclusions on their own.

When you scroll down the site, you can see that they have words lists, which take buzzwords and show them and their counterpart words visually, in close proximity to each other. I think I could spend days just looking at the letters and words as images.

Psychogeography

The wikipedia article was really wordy, and didn't really describe the subject that well, but Psychogeography is basically a way to try to apply the rules and methods of cartography to alter the way that one experiences a place, or to depict one's mindframe, or the way that they experience life. They do not necessarily read as actual maps, but more in the mode of stories, and sometimes carry on a narrative.

The way that it is described makes the subject sound very pretentious, which I abhor in art. I think that art should be accessible to and judgeable by everyone and anyone. These maps do not seem to lend themselves simply to this art format, but more of a way in which to communicate feelings and emotions through the frame of a map, as simple navigation is something that about everyone should be able to do.

Week 12 artist

http://www.earstudio.com/projects/listeningpost.html?=listening_video.html

Listening post is a project that takes fragments of text from internet chatrooms, and then "read" by a computer. This is played as and over music, and creates a symphony of sorts of anonymous people from all over the world.

This piece of art is interactive, not in that people explicitly have control over aspects of it, but in that the words are dependent upon someone using a chatroom. The speech of internet users and its use in Listening Post is described by one of the creators as being like wind and a wind chime. I really like the piece, but wonder about privacy, or in a hypothetical situation that someone admits to a crime and it is "overheard" by listening post, would it be admissible in court, or for a warrant?

Week 11 artist

pacmanhattan.com/about.php

Pac Manhattan was created in 2004 by NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. They were the first generation to grow up with video games. Everyone has their heroes, those they respect, admire, try to emulate, I think that the students' involved hero was Pac Man.

Pac Manhattan is a location-based game, which, means that gameplay relies on the character or characters' location IRL (in real life). Like many other location-based games, this game uses a form of localization technology, the cell phone.

The game consists of 10 players, 5 on the street: four ghosts and one pac man, and 5 in the control room, each of these controllers is paired with one of the players on the streets. The players and their controllers are to remain in constant contact during the game, the player tells the controller their locations, and then the controller updates the system with their player's position, and in the case of pac man, updates how many and which of the power dots have been used.

The game lasts until pac man is "eaten" by a ghost, or until pac man defeats the ghosts. Pac man can eat ghosts, like in the regular game after eating a power dot.

This is really interesting in that it takes a videogame and then applies it to a "real life situation", while the the opposite usually holds true.

I like this idea, and have always been a fan of flash mob type art works. Even before I knew that it was a form of artistic expression, I would always enjoy seeing peoples reactions and the value of challenging expectations. My friend and I would sometimes get people together when we were in the mall sometimes and all wear a certain color shirt, or speak in a particular accent. Who knew that being annoying was art?!

Week 10 artist statement

www.singlecell.org/jh/index.html


Juha Huuskonen is a self described artist, curator and software designer. He created the piece, bob meets barbara, for the collection of pieces focused on dualities, comparisons and contrasing relationships, doublecell.

The page starts up with a dot orbiting the two pieces. The user is instructed to make circles with their mouse. While orbiting the two pieces fast enough, they get closer, until they reach, and the box is split in fourths, with 1/4 size bob and barbaras. This goes on for about 4 or 5 rounds until the boxes get really small, and the viewing area zooms into one of these, and everything essentially starts over.

I like this work, because it is simple, and combines aspects of games with simple actions and divisions. The two pieces are probably bob and barbara, and this is probably a metaphore for sex, because there is a raised piece and a receded piece, and the two bocks come together like a puzzle.

I spent over 30 minutes playing this instead of doing finals.

A-Z response

I think that I will try to do a sensory overload kind of work, and maybe try to create some sort of way that the letters play with our perception of signs, images and symbols that are already being used, and to help examine what is at play when we interpret and internalize our environment.

Artist Topic #7

I found this work interesting because of the shear amount of work that went into the creation of something seemingly flawed. Upon viewing the code input for this piece, you see that there is great intention behind the characters that the creator used. Random symbols from the keyboard are amassed into the formation of what appears to be an ASCII atomic bomb. When viewing the output, or what is displayed in the page, you see a blinking jumble of the complex code. The translation is lost, and the bomb is not expressed in the visual output. This failure to express visual imagery through coding is analogous to the intentions of many artists. The artist inputs a loaded amount of emotion, creativity and resources into the creation of a piece of work, and often they are unable to communicate their message due to limitations in the medium. This piece, a jumble of flashing code, represents the inherent limitation of external expression for internal input.

A-Z exploration

In searching for a shared aspect of each of my initials, I found that B and P had Egyptian pictographical counterparts, but not C. C came later, it was used to make the "g" and "c" sounds in Greek. The Romans associated C more with Kappa, than Gamma, as before.

I then began to think about the letters in terms of their contemporary forms. As an image, the letters each share one common trait; the curved 'c' shape. 'P' with a backwards 'c' attached at the bottom makes the B shape.

I thought about the fact that (except in certain cases like a, or I), on their own, our letters do not represent anything really on their own, and are not able to be pronounced without other letter sounds. B, P, and C would be phonetically pronounced as "bee", "pee" and "see". It is interesting that these letters "spell out" actual words in this sense.

I've also been exploring other ways besides speaking that we represent letters.

B: Binary= 01100010











P: Binary= 01110000











C: Binary= 01100011

Artist Topic #6

I am pretty much in love with Etoy. In attempting to critique corporate culture, they were able to initiate ToyWar, which they have described as “the most expensive performance in art history.”
After some confusion between www.etoy.com, and www.etoys.com, a customer complained about how they were offended by the site. This prompted etoys to sue Etoy, for copyright infringement, but weren’t able to, as Etoy had their domain name two years before etoys. After unsuccessfully trying to buy the name from them, they attempted to sue again.
Instead of trying to fight the lawsuit, Etoy initiated ToyWar, which used the internet as a battlefield in which sympathetic supporters basically trolled and hacked etoys. I would have liked to have been a part of this, even though it was probably really illegal. This is a story in which a big corporation is afraid of being mocked by artists.In an attempt to assert their dominance, they make a fool of themselves and look like jerks.

Artist Topic #5

®TMark is a corporation in which artists “mimic the language and graphics of corporate sites.” This highly controversial group’s use of images from corporate websites elicits thoughts of absurdism, Dadaism and “DuChampian readimades”.

On top of this use of premade sites, they also create sites that are highly commercialized and sensationalized. The artists are attempting to protest this form of commercialism by taking it to the extreme; To show the audience that the truth is not far from being this crazy.

“There should be limits to freedom” is a quote from George W. Bush in response to their creation of www.GWBush.com. I am not sure how to feel about this, because it could very well be taken out of context, or the then-president could have been talking about other freedoms too (we are not free to shoot anyone we want, so there is a limit on the things we shoot), but I would not doubt that he said it either. I think that ®TMark was successful in their goal in getting this kind of response from Bush. In a little way ®TMark is kind of like a kid who (after being fed up with the corporate culture we live in) teases his siblings just to get a reaction.

Journey Project Critique Response

I got favorable reviews for what I thought was a kind of slap together job on my behalf. I did not come up with the idea until late into the project and feel like that held me back a little. I was unable to go as far as I would have liked with either project, and the setup (with the HUD-like display). While presenting I began to see areas that I missed and got mad at myself for forgetting to cut out some pixels or smooth out a selection.

I think that it may be too much work to go back and change a lot in the realistic journey, but that I may increase the complexity of my fantastic journey, traveling through a rat maze. This was a hard journey to do because it set up a 3 dimensional space in which the audience had to click through, but in order to make it fully 3 dimensional, and allow the user to go and to face in all directions, it would have taken a lot of the fun out of the project, especially for me.

I am glad that I have beat the learning curve for photoshop for the most part, as it allowed me to focus on learning more about dreamweaver and creating a more efficient space on the internet.

Artist Topic #4

When I think of the old video games, like space invaders and pong, when remade or reproduced in this day and age, I think of pop art. Natalie Bookchin created a web based piece that is based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that resembles a video game. I’m not sure how I feel about uniting of the high art of the story, and the low culture is kind of heavy handed. This is especially the case in the translation between Borge’s story and Pong. She has the player bounce the girl between the “brothers.”
I would like to play Metapet, I hope it is like neopets. I play neopets every day and invest in the neopets stockmarket, my favorite games are Destruct-o-Match III and advervideo (it is the most blatantly corrupt part of the website).

Artist topic #3

Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre, and Brody Condon are concerned with the current state of affairs in the media of video games, specifically Counter-Strike. They see issues in the game, which pits terrorists versus counter-terrorist, as being an oversimplification of issues.

At first I thought they were an anti-violence group, but after considering their goal, I realize that FPS’s strive to be as realistic as possible, striving to make the player experience every scene they see and every sound they hear as close to life as possible, but the situations that these players are placed are not realistic. They attempt to create a space in the digital world where there are non-violent protests, and “directs a group of players to gather in a heart-shaped formation while repeatedly sending out the chat message "Love and Peace" and stoically refusing to move or return fire.” I like this idea but would get kind of annoyed if I was in this server. I’ve played Counter-Strike before, but couldn’t play for too long before realizing the kind of people that play like to troll, I’m glad that these artists took the initiative to try to bring a message to this game.

Artist Topic number 2

Alexei Shulgin

Alexei Shulgin caught my eye as an artist because the article opened by discussing Neil Stephenson, a cyberpunk author who wrote one of my favorite books, Snow Crash. Cyberpunk was originally a genre of literature that incorporated themes of futuristic technology, and usually a dystopian social order. The protagonists are usually rogues or marginalized people usually with a knack for computers or hacking, so it is no wonder that some new artists, like Shulgin, may identify themselves cyberpunks.

Shulgin covers popular songs using MIDI for the instrumentalization, and text-to-speech software for the lyrics, all performed on an old computer using an intel 386dx processor. These songs from the album: Best of 386dx and can be found on www.easylife.org/386dx/.

His work flooded with issues involving copyright law and intellectual ownership, as he is most likely covering these songs without permission. While this may be considered theft, he the work is not about the actual song. Shulgin's covers are process pieces, and make the audience think about the work that went into translating the music to 8 bit "computer music."

Other artists I enjoy that address similar issues are the DJs Girl Talk, and Tanner4105.

386dx- I shot the sheriff
Girl Talk
Tanner 4105

Artist Category: Mark Napier

Mark Napier's Shredder 1.0 is a web interface that he has developed that allows the user to input a web address, and see it in a whole new light. The program rearranges the code in a way that creates a new piece of art with each new webpage. This means that there is an almost infinite number of sites waiting for reinterpretation.

Shredder 1.0 is like many of Napier's projects in that they rely on interaction from the audience. Without other people creating websites, there would be nothing to see, nothing to alter, without the audience typing in a url, Shredder 1.0 would just sit, lonely, wasting webspace.

His other projects are Landfill, which makes art out of the audience's "unwanted e-mail, obsolete data, HTML, SPAM or any other digital debris"(http://potatoland.com/landfill), Feed which interacts with an input url, and Waiting Room, which is a "moving painting"(http://www.potatoland.org/waitingroom/) that changes based on the actions of one of 50 users who see the same screen.

Above is a segment of the image created by Shredder 1.0 based on the school's web page.

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link to my website