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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

There are a massive number of other videos on the web that show large wall paintings being done over time, to create a stop motion effect.  But they tend to be more like documents of the process that led to the final product. This video, a collaboration between the painter BLU and artist/filmmaker David Ellis, was shot with the intention of the process being the product.  Making a stop-motion animation of a wall being painted is one thing, but in this piece, the wall is painted with the intention of being a single frame in a larger animation.  Because it is being done in paint (and there are no paint erasers), the previous frame must be painted over before painting the next image in the sequence, leading to a very cool trail of discoloration behind the moving object.  Clearly, this was meant to be more than a document of a wall painting, as there are numerous camera and angle changes, as well as sound effects, and the “looping” effect that the end alludes to.

Pieces like this ask us to rethink the ways we think about things that are seemingly very basic such as what the medium of the piece is – is it a painting?  Is it an animation?  Why must it be destroyed to be completed?  The way the video “ends” leads us to believe that it might be best presented in a way where it can loop indefinitely, instead of being forced to stop by YouTube, creating even more questions about destruction, rebirth, and continuation.

Check it out here:

While surfing YouTube for more of his work, I found a video titled “Brent Green performs his film ‘Carlin’ live”.  I thought that maybe it would be him reading the narration over a projection of the film, and decided to check it out.  I was correct, but additionally, it showed Green and a full band performing the soundtrack to “Carlin.”  I find this very, very cool.  Being able to “perform” a flim is a concept that not many people would think of.  It really begins to cross the lines of genres and really shows off the artist as a jack of all trades.  This performance of “Carlin” mixes film, music, spoken word, and performance art all into one very exciting piece.  It opens up a whole new world (not to mention audience) for someone who is nominally a flimmaker.  He could go on “tour” with his films and play them at rock clubs.

Bleow you can find the performance of “Carlin,” as well as the original flim.

The tension and release of the commercials make for a great 30″ storyline, the colors are vivid, and he does a great job of being a commerical artist, and making sure that the product is not the secret that is revealed at the end (thereby not acknowledging the product but for a few seconds – sorry, I’m a Communication major).  Lastly, I really like that he created his own little world inside these ads.  You can see elements that reappear between the different spots, such as the landscape, and city, frequent use of martini glasses, and even the train tracks in the Train and Yacht clips.  Take a look at the Yacht spot below, and visit either his webiste or YouTube channel to see the rest of the spots.  And don’t be mad at me for liking commercials.