Bringing it all back home

Well, here’s the end.  I’ll say that I really enjoyed this course, but I’m sure glad it’s time for a break.  Having never taken an art class before,this was a very new and different experience for me.  I think I put more hours into projects I did for this class than I put into entire classes before.  Whew.  Some of the topics we went over I really enjoyed, especially those of appropriation, mapping, and social networking.  I learned that Flash is a really interesting and powerful tool, and also a real pain in the ass.

I think that classes like this are really paramount to a modern education.  No matter what field you are going into, be it business, medicine, academia, or (most likely) visual design,knowing how information is communicated digitally is a necessity.

Finally, I’d like to thank Amy and Matt for all their hard work, and congratulate Amy on her new baby girl.  Happy winter, everyone.

Copyright

In the reading “Copyrights and Copywrongs” the author mentions how copyrights, which were once meant to protect someone’s “intellectual property” are now actually becoming so constraining that they stifle creativity.  In this new age of digital media, appropriation (clearly, one of my favorite topics) is becoming an increasingly significant expressive technique.  The only problem with this is that under current copyright law, there is no acknowledgment of “appropriation,” only “copyright infringement”.  It seems to me that its quite a shame that we are not allowing artists and others to elaborate on ideas that others have created before them.  What is learning and advancement, and culture as a whole, but building upon the knowledge and work  of those before you?  I don’t think there’s anyone who would agree that starting from scratch every time is a good idea.

As a side note, here’s an example of appropriation at its finest: a band called Animal Collective have managed to secure for themselves (legally, of course) the first ever licensed sample of the Grateful Dead’s music.  Listen to it, I bet you can’t even tell where GD ends and AC begins.  It’s another testament to the kinds of creativity that we’re stifling  with these restrictions.  Luckily, these guys had the means to pull it off.

Animal Collective – What Would I Want? Sky

Art?

An example of something that I consider to be"art." This untitled piece by Felix Gonzales-Torres is hanging on my wall right now, not only because I like the way it looks, but because of the vision that the artist had when creating it.

The internet is one helluva place.  Not three hours after I last saw Michele, she had already posted an entry about a conversation that we had today.  Of course, then, I have to respond – both because I need to present my point of view and because I need to write more entries.  Here we go.

My idea of what constitutes art is quite liberal, as opposed to Michele, who openly says we should “be critical of what we accept as art.”  I find it very difficult to draw a definitive line between “art” and “not art” -  I just tried to write my own definition, and came up blank.  Near as I can tell, Michele’s definition of art centers on the aesthetics of the piece and technical ability of the artist, based on her analysis of Duchamp and Malevich’s work.  I, however, consider art to be just as much about the ideas, concepts, and processes behind the product as the product itself.  And never mind that aesthetics is entirely subjective.  One point I was discussing with Michele earlier today was that just as much (if not more) conceptualization, consideration, and meaningful thought went into designing something like a factory (widely considered to be “not art”) as did something like the David (widely considered “art”).  Even a factory could be the aesthetic ideal for an engineer, while something with a more “classical,” “artistic” aesthetic would be the ideal for someone like my grandmother.

Case in point: I personally quite liked the Malevich piece that Michele posted under the “not art” category.  My personal aesthetic gravitates more towards minimalism, in both form and color.  I’d imagine that piece would be quite impressive in person.  Nothing gets you thinking about What It All Means quite like a giant black hole (which is actually quite a maximal thing, eh?).  Oh but there I go talking about “meaning” and “concepts” again.

Simply put, I argue exactly the opposite of Michele: we should be very liberal with what we consider art.  Humans are extremely thoughtful, and everything we create is an expression of ourselves.  Regardless of whether it’s a painting or a parking lot, any human creation will have something meaningful to say about its creator.

Oh, and of course, this is all in the name of healthy, happy, constructive dialogue.  In no way is this a personal attack on Michele – or to use her words “I don’t mean to bust” on her.  Anyone else with an opinion (or who needs another entry) is welcome to join in.

View Photos of Mike (4,478,976)

Just finished my final project.  Not to brag, but I’m honestly impressed with the number of hours that I put into it.  The process of conceptualizing what things needed to be done, figuring out practically how they would be done, teaching myself how to do them, and actually doing them (over and over) made up for one hell of an experience.  It turned out to be extremely rewarding, however.  By the end, I was even helping to troubleshoot some of my classmates’ projects!  Er, uh, not to brag.

Here, I’ll put myself in check a bit: I know already that the project’s not perfect.  Most noticeably, due to working on these impressively massive computers in the library, the pixel dimensions of my project are a bit too large for normal screen dimensions.  We’ll see how that goes over in class.  Also, I found a few typos, but I’ll let you find them for yourself.  It’s a bit too late in the game to change them, because the text was actually part of a whole image that I would have had to recreate.  So it goes.

I did end up getting pretty far away from the original design for this project, but I’d like to think that I stuck pretty close to the original concept.  There’s a full explanation and artist’s statement within the project, but in more colloquial terms, social networking (and more broadly, the entire internet) is a mighty strange beast that we’ve unleashed.  I also returned to the hand-drawn characters from my Map project.  I like the idea of continuity between projects, but also I thought it was appropriate to use it to emphasize the idea of someone creating their own “mental sketch” of me.

Honestly, working on this project was a bit strange for me.  As Matt mentioned in class one day, there’s something oddly narcissistic about such an elaborate self-portrait.  Pouring over photos of myself at all hours of the night in public computer labs was quite an odd feeling, to say the least.

As evidenced by the quality of my writing, my brain is pretty fried right now, so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead (or at least not too far behind.)

Here’s a link, hope you all enjoy:

View Photos of Mike (4,478,976)

Facebook.

I had the rough crit for my final project yesterday, and in doing so got a glimpse of what my classmates have been working on.  There was a very interesting common theme.  Three of us are working on projects based around Facebook: I’m working on a project that appropriates Facebook pictures, Alison is mapping commonalities between herself and her “friends,” and Leah is asking “what the hell is the deal with Restaurant City?”.  And only half of the class was in my crit section!  If my elementary statistics are correct, that means that there could very well be six projects in our class based on this topic (I’ll say that’s unlikely, though).

This got me thinking: Why are we so fascinated with Facebook?  It’s clearly a huge part of our culture nowadays, but are we doing art projects on it because we see something about it worth exploring with our art?  Because we don’t know how to think outside of Facebook anymore?  Because it’s a topic that lends itself so beautifully to a New Media class?  I’d love to hear what the rest of the class has to say about this, especially the two who have decided to tackle this topic as well (C’mon, I just gave you a topic for a blog post!).

As for me, I’m going to say that any social phenomenon of this scale, be it Facebook or something else, is worth examining.  And not just with art – there’s something here for everyone: social scientists, computer scientists, social workers, advertisers, the list goes on.  I do think, however that it is especially fitting that we fight fire with fire, so to say (not that we’re really fighting anything) and open dialogue about a new media like Facebook with our own new media.

In Bb

In Bb (http://wwww.inbflat.net/) is described by it’s creator as “a collaborative music and spoken word project.”  And that’s it.  There are are no real instructions per se, just information and suggestions about what to do with a page full of YouTube Videos.  Other than that, it’s up to you.

And that seems to be the genius of the project: there are twenty YouTube videos that each feature a submitted video of someone playing an instrument.  It’s up to the user to pick which instrument videos to play, and when.  Thanks to music theory, they all work together perfectly, almost magically.  The result is a mesmerizing soundscape (that is highly reminiscent of Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, one of my favorite pices of music) that will make you wish the videos never ended.  That is, until you realize that’s your opportunity to start up another video and watch the magic happen again.

So many things about In Bb are exemplary of the directions New Media is taking, and how these opportunities can work fantastically.  There is no beginning, no end, no right way to do it – the user is in total control.  The content was created by people who never met, or even talked to each other.  And still it creates an impressive, cohesive whole.  One of the videos is even a spoken word piece that is alarmingly applicable to the discussion of New Media.  The entire project has even been reappropriated in a number of ways – one of which solves the aforementioned problem and will play forever.