BLOG PROMPT SEVEN: Discuss an Artist
Identify one digital artist that you most enjoy or relate to from among the many we have looked at in class this semester through prompts, in class discussion, or project "inspiration" lists. Explain what you find engaging about her/his project or body of work. You must include the artist's name.Artists we've viewed include (but are not limited to) ...
Owen Mundy, I Know Where Your Cat Lives
Natalie Bookchin, Now He's Out in Public and Everyone Can See
Free Art and Technology (FAT) Lab: The Universal Construction Kit
Olafur Eliasson, Little Sun
Daan Roosegarde, Smog Free Tower, Smog Free Bicycle, Sustainable Dance Floor
Emily Allchurch, Towers of Babel
Olia Lialini, The Most Fragile GIF on the WWWW
Alexei Shulgin, See Free
Michael Mandiberg, Buy Michael Mandiberg
Milos Rajkovic, http://sholim.com/
Stephen Haley, One Second More
Among the artists that we've looked at, I really appreciated and was inspired by Olia Lialina. Her work reminds me of another artist that I love - Pipilotti Rist. Both these women use color in a way that is visually engaging, usually extremely saturated colors. Lialina creates a lot of gif animations and web design that tackle important subjects. Even her own website is designed in a really quirky and exciting way. Instead of creating a traditional website that is highly organized and "easy" to navigate, she treats her website in a way that makes you move around the site, searching for different projects. There's a lot of visual information being thrown at you all at once; the colorful galaxy themed background is an animation that sparkles and makes you feel as if you're floating around in outer space. A lot of her work is playful and nonsensical; among my favorites is "Peeman" also known as peeguy.gif, peepee.gif, or piss.gif. The work is a simple gif animation of a man peeing on something. The way she created it, it had to be combined with another element like an image for Peeman to pee on. She placed Peeman next to images of Bill Clinton, Britney Spears and many other public figures. I love that Lialina also works in other multimedia mediums. Another piece I was really inspired by, both in concept and installation, was "Something for Everyone." In this project she created advent calendars for each member of her family, and placed objects that motivated them in each of the pop-up squares. She realized that most of the objects were related to pop-culture, and so her project was challenging the role of consumerism and pop-culture in our lives. She installed them in class containers on pedestals for people to gaze at from a distance, much like the way we gaze at celebrities and objects that we think will make us happy. Overall her work is very engaging and I have looked at her work for inspiration when thinking about unique web design and gifs.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed quite a few artists we were exposed to this semester. The artist I enjoyed the most was Owen Mundy- especially with his piece "I Know Where Your Cat Lives". On the surface level, I genuinely love cats and the idea of looking at other people's cats around the world. It's so intriguing getting to see what pictures people actually post of their cats. It's always very entertaining. On a deeper level, I enjoy the awareness he's trying to bring with this site. Though its just about cats, it sends a deeper message. In a way its trying to warn people and let people know that anyone's information is out to be grabbed. Nobody's information is safe on the internet, and he does this in such a way where he's not targeting any specific people. He's showing that this is the same throughout every country. He's showing that as a humanity in general, we need to be aware and be careful, and I genuinely appreciate that.
ReplyDeleteOwen Mundy's "I Know Where Your Cat Lives" is probably my favorite piece we looked at this semester, although it is difficult to narrow this decision down to just one. IKWYCL was interesting to me for a few reasons. First of all, it demonstrates the way in which media has evolved (to the point where everyone is essentially being tracked). Second, it shows that art can be virtually anything. I wouldn't have necessarily thought of art when looking at IKWYCL, but now I do, so it opened my eyes in that sense. The piece is also extremely interesting in terms of concept: it allows people to have a global view of a common interest -- cats. The most enjoyable part of the site for me is just simply clicking around and seeing the variety of content. Cats become a universal language in that sense, as pictures themselves do not have a language barrier. It's obvious that Mundy was trying to show just how little privacy anyone has nowadays, but to me, the idea that something as simple as one's cat can stress this idea is also very apparent. I really enjoy Mundy's approach, as it's both unique as a whole and also interactive. It's simple in the sense that from the outside it's simply a website about where cats live, but as the viewer peals back the layers he or she can see the root of Mundy's ideas come to life.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite piece we looked at this semester was Natalie Bookchin, "Now He's Out in Public and Everyone Can See." I really enjoyed this piece because it blurred the lines of collaboration and appropriation. I think this piece is powerful in that it showcases how the use of the internet and posting does away with things that may be intended to be private. I think it also highlights the "rant" posts on the internet that are everywhere. I relate to this work because it both speaks to the problems of internet privacy and kind of makes fun of it/ makes people realize their own words- both concepts I enjoy exploring in my own works in my communication courses.
ReplyDeleteI honestly connected most with Joe Hamilton's "Indirect Flights" over any others we looked at in this class. Initially, I'm in love with the visual of it. I love the color and the scenery that all flows together. But I also love the layers to it, the connectivity of it as it connects the world together and connects modern art and technology with traditional and ancient art. I love the interactive component to it that allows us to take part in actively experiencing the art. it feels like it's telling a story, and we get to decide where we want to go, but it all loops back to the beginning eventually. This really resonates with me in the connection I see from it to my own art, in the color, the layering and texture, and the connection between nature and humans.
ReplyDeleteOne digital artist that really stuck out to me was Darren Solomon. I think I was most attracted to his work because most of it has to do with music and music production. One piece of his that we looked at was "In B Flat", which I really enjoyed. It resonated with me a lot because he used a bunch of videos to create music, a thing I had never seen before. It was also really interesting how you could theoretically make an infinite amount of songs with the dozen or so videos the piece contained. I'm really into music and music production so this peaked my interest. I also enjoyed it so much because it is extremely interactive. The user can play and pause the videos, combining them to create a connected sound. It's as if Solomon is allowing users to literally create their own music within the boundaries of a single note. What was also interesting to me was that this piece is collaborative, which, to me, makes it even cooler because people, these different artists, are working together to make new, original music.
ReplyDeleteThe artist that we discussed in class that most interested me was Olia Lialini, with The Most Fragile GIF on the WWW. It just caught me as such a cool idea to have the individual frames of the gif on different pages on different servers. The idea that it started off so slow, then got faster and smoother as the pages cached was so neat!
ReplyDeleteAnother project I discovered on Lialini's website that caught my attention was "On the Internet Everybody Knows You had a Dog." I'm starting to get fascinated with the fact that there's so many websites out there on the internet that are made by so many people, but how I only usually go between a few standard websites in my day to day routine. In her dog project, it gives the viewer a glimpse at all these largely unknown pages internet users have created for their beloved pets. And a really interesting part about these websites, is that some of the page-makers have added their stories about their pets, or about coping with the loss of a pet, and so on. The internet became a place for these people to share their stories, and to voice things that might have been hard to communicate otherwise. And, aside from the more deep side, it's just so interesting to see what others have made on the internet, and Olia Lialini brings a lot of the interesting undiscovered internet to her works.
The post by "Unknown" above about Olia Lialini was posted by me! My account seems to be giving me some issues at the moment.
ReplyDelete-John Marsolek
My favorite work we looked at was Michael Mandiberg's website "Buy Michael Mandiberg." The first reason I enjoyed this was because it was humorous. I got a good laugh out of it, and it was just fascinating to see how he made everything have a value. Even more interesting was the fact that people bought some of the things he was offering.
ReplyDeleteI thought the message of the site was very important. By putting a value on literally everything he owns and selling it, he is giving away all of his privacy. He was also handing over all of his identity, because we as human beings put so much value on material things that without them, many of us are less of who we are. Not only did he sell all of his material things, he sold his time too. One could argue this was the last thing he had that made him human.
Overall, I thought this was a really good example of a classic piece of web art that was really inspiring to me!
Out of all of the projects that we have looked at over the semester my favorite one would have to be Owen Mundy's, I Know Where Your Cat Lives. This was my favorite project because it was not only interesting to see all of the pictures that were tagged with cat but also because of the sheer scope of the project itself. It displays how much that people share in their everyday lives and how sometimes what is tagged a specific way isn't always in the picture. In the future I hope to be able to create this type of project because it has the potential to lead to very interesting things.
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