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.