Thoughts on New Media Artist Brian Knep

I have great respect for artists whose work is purposefully made for the viewer personal experience. I really like the fact that Brian Knep’s work becomes apart of the surrounding space and exists in the real world rather then just on the gallery walls. His work looks like fun and it’s alluring to be able to interact with something you can see but not touch. Brain Knep has a pretty heavy artist statement, which ties inconstancies, human experience and technology together, but I feel like his artist statement is unnecessary for his viewer to have fun and appreciate his pieces.

 

Social Networking Project

For this assignment Alyssa and I teamed up to create a fan-base community for the hit show Degrassi: The Next Generation using Ning's social networking website. Our page allows fans like us to show their love and comment on the characters and their drama in this series and answer weekly questions posted on our forum. The link is posted bellow 

The Grape Vine

Response to the Yesmen

I fully agree with the ethics of what they do I think what they are doing is forcing these higher powers into a state of realization that there meetings are not as secure when complete strangers can sabotage their meetings. What they are doing is out smarting large corporations that most likely feel safe and secure with in their statues. I have got to admit I personally know very little of the institutions that fall to the hijinks of the yes men but it seems obvious that the members of the yes men have a substantial amount of information that can give good reason to play a prank on them and all in all it’s just a prank and no one gets hurt. It is disgusting to me that the people in these conference refrain from any disagreement or protest their demented ideas only because they assume they are people of power and statues. This makes the victims of the yes men to appear heartless and with out any morals or concerns for others, which is a pretty freighting realization.

 

While researching more about the yes men I found out that Jacques Servin one of the two leading members of the yes men pulled a large-scale prank while designing the game Simcopter before the creation of the yes men. “Servin inserted “himbos” (male bimbos) in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other, who appear in great numbers on certain dates. Their fluorescent nipples were drawn with a special rendering mode usually reserved for fog-piercing runway landing lights, so they could easily be seen from long distances in bad weather. An unintended emergent behavior of the code caused hundreds of himbos to swarm and crowd around the helicopter, where they would be slashed up by the blades, and then need to be air-lifted to the hospital -- which earned the player easy money”. This stunt seemed so similar to the yes men’s pranks, such a ridiculous event thrown in to such a mundane atmosphere resulting in a humorous juxtaposition. 

Generative Topic

For my generative topic I chose to pull an Idea from new media artist Elibeth Smolarz video Freund Hein. This video explores how humans think about dieing by showing multiple interpretations the act of death and dieing improvised by people of different ages and backgrounds. It was interesting to see that the idea of death for these individuals only varied slightly. The majority of the participants choose between the acts of getting shot, choking, heart attacks and suicide, while some just choose to lie on the floor motionless. The one thing these deaths all had in common was that they were all highly dramatized and overacted mirror deaths seen on TV and in movies, which makes for a humorous display. This video gives the viewer the fascinating realization of just how huge an impact pop-culture images have had on our personal perceptions of death and dieing.

 So, for my generative topic I choose to research death in mass media aspect presented in Elizabeth Smolarz. People are strangely attracted to death and violence and movie industries are making bank off blood and gore. I am unsure why we as humans are entertained by viewing scenes of death but personally believe it is a fascination in the unknown element of how we may die ourselves. To start with I googled greatest death scenes in movies and found some of the most ridiculously unrealistic scenarios, such as the clip presented in the link bellow.

 

BEST DEATH SCENE EVER!!!!!

 

Do movies such as this desensitize our views on death and lead to real life death/murder, or are they more beneficial by helping us conquer our fears of dieing?

Andy Warhol is an example of another visual artist who chose the subject of images of death being presented in mass media in a series of silkscreen prints entitled death and disaster. Warhol collected gruesome images of death taken from newspapers and magazines. During this time the media was flooded with images of the Vietnam war, car crashes and the assassination of JFK. He repeatedly printed a single image to form a grid-like composition and he was quoted in an interview that “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again it looses effect.”

sites related to generative topic on popular electronics being intergrated into the arts

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18824759/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15350569/

Thomas Ruff

For my generative topic I choose to research how popular electronics are being integrated into the arts. Familiar gadgets such as picture phones are now being used for fine arts photography and moviemaking for their convenience and inexpensiveness. Picture phones are wide spread these days and more and more Americans are ditching there land line phones and sticking to there cell phone plans. They have also become a popular tool to document a moment in time such as the election of president Obama where a disgusting amount of people wiped out there phone to record his speeches and the following performances by Beyonce and Jay-Z. Camera phones were also used to document the horrible events in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. I found a photographer while researching named Thomas Ruff that uses google and other internet search engines to find images that he then blows up and hangs in galleries. 

 

Well equipped satanic vagabond boy scout guided by hate and heading toward pizza planet

I choose to relate my midterm project to the idea of living in virtual reality that introduced to me while we learning of second life. The internet can serve as a way for others to create a new identity and even give it a detailed appearance such as an "avatar" which is ultimately an iconic alter-ego or split personality constructed in pixels and tacky digital renderings. I choose to keep within my own style of art making when creating my avatar. 

catsup

I now have an online portfolio, check it out!

Michael Guyette's Portfolio

As the flowers sleep, greed stricken mice set out under a haunting full moon to kidnap a lifeless goddess

Christiane Cegavshe is a stop motion animator in Los Angeles where she works and lives off a healthy diet of elaborate cakes and fancy tea parties. Christiane first got into animation when she was only in the fifth grade but ended up going to art school to study painting. While she was a painting major at the San Francisco Art Institute she was introduced to Jan Svankmajers animated movie, Alice, which helped to set her down a path to stop motion animation.  Soon after seeing the work of her friends in the animation department she decided to take a stop motion animation class, where she created her first short film in 1992, Blood and Sunflowers. She continued creating animations since then and her work has appeared in movies and TV shows such as “X-Chromosome” and the movie The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.

She is best known for her feature film Blood Tea and Red String, which came out in October of 2006. What was planned to be a 12 minute long movie ended up becoming 71 minutes long and taking nearly 13 years to produce. The movie was filmed in several different locations all along the west coast and in two different studio spaces. Christiane wrote and directed this film as well as created the characters, the settings and the costumes. Christiane immerses the viewer into a romantic fever dream world where wordless creatures blindly follow love and greed through life threatening obstacles. This story is a dark and epic fairy tale that seems to have been around since the days when folklore was at the tip of everyone’s tongues. Christiane’s nostalgic longing for this fictional world and her painterly compositions fit more naturally in the contemporary art world then that of the film industry.

 

Blood Tea and Red String is the first of a trilogy and Christiane is now working on the sequel Seed in the Sand expected to be released in 2012.

Blood Tea and Red String Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR2zL-qErX8&feature=related

Christiane's Home-page 

http://www.christianecegavske.com/

NY Times Movie Review

http://movies.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/movies/04bloo.html

Myspace Profile

http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=4276110&Mytoken=20041018112318

Response to Second Life

It seems that there is currently a throw back to romanticism in contemporary art these days and I couldn’t be happier for that. I can think of so many reasons why people, including myself, are more then willing to detach themselves from reality and search for a new meaning in nature and within their own imaginations. Reasons such as our relentless war over seas and our wounded economy could leave anyone and everyone in our society searching for something better. Though the concept behind second life can coincide with this rejuvenation of romanticism in art it’s medium has helped to cripple the social bond between people.

 Technological dependency can and has left many people isolated and brainwashed by our materialistic mass media. Personally the very idea of virtual reality makes me flaccid, it just appears as another easy accessible vice for people who are more then willing to give up on trying to change who they actually are in real life and focus there time and energy (sometimes even money) on an avatar. It is also now another way for major corporations to target vulnerable consumers. Second life could easily become an unhealthy obsession by finding an a false purpose in a false life.

I guess one of the reasons why I feel so strongly against the need for a massive virtual world such as second life is that the ted.com video did not give me any examples of how this creation has benefited people. After hearing of the death of a 28-year in an internet cafe in South Korea and the murder suicides that have taken place in the united states due to dungeons and dragons quarrels leaves me in the back of the line for people who are afraid of this rising trend.