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?