articles you may find interesting

Here are some things I've come across lately that you may find interesting to read (or not). These are not listed with any particular order.

From the New York Times:

Mistakes in Typography Grate the Purists

Finding a Bit of Animal House in the Bauhaus

Did I mention this art blog before?
Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof's Artblog about Philly art

TED talks are really interesting and cover a wide range of topics watch this one on the invisible

The Glass Onion

That's the title of an okay-to-decent Beatles tune, but also kind of refers to the project we now find ourselves beginning that looks at this idea of Layers. The song appears on the White Album and refers to a half dozen other Beatles songs; giving it not only an ironic distance, but making it pretty darned layered.

Okay, so not the deepest thing to begin with, but it's the Beatles!

Let's think about this again...and again. Let's complicate things here. What we are talking about here is developing an idea so that it has more layers of meaning than what you see initially.

The example I used in class was Shakespeare who made sure his plays were thick with drama and comedy, but also addressed much heavier issues of life and death. The British playwright Tom Stoppard wrote a terrific play that is centered on two character's from Shakespeare's Hamlet titled "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead". These two characters are in Hamlet only briefly (invited by Hamlet's mother to cheer up the depressed Hamlet) and both characters die offstage later. Stoppard's play takes place backstage of the Shakespeare drama. It's interesting, you see, because there is already a play within the play that occurs when Hamlet has actors put on a play about a king being murdered by his queen. Can you believe the layers here? Anyway, here's a clip from the movie version of Stoppard's play, it is the scene of the play within a play:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkvpDErv8n0&translated=1

You can find anything on YouTube...

texting while driving?

Just thought this was interesting, play the game and let me know if you do any better at it than I did (I will now stop texting and making coffee while eating donuts as I drive).

http://www.nytimes.com//interactive/2009/07/19/technology/20090719-driving-game.html

Wallpaper sticks to walls

The paper for the wallpaper should arrive tomorrow or tuesday, so we should be ready to print on Wednesday. I will begin printing at 9:00am Wednesday for anyone ready at that time. We will be starting the next project that day as well and save the crit for the wallpaper until Monday.

Though we talked about the project in class I just wanted to reiterate some of the crucial details:

- 5 examples of wallpaper from a time period or of a style you find interesting and inspiring should be posted on your blog.

- a finished design that measures 24x72".

Simple enough, huh?

your wall your paper

"It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper—the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."

-Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

For some interesting information about the history of wallpaper you may want to look at wallpaperinstaller.com where among other interesting stuff you will learn that "the oldest existing example of flocked wallpaper comes from Worcester and was created in approximately 1680."

Wallpaper has been used by many contemporary artists as either part of an installation or as the art itself. Here are some examples of contemporary wallpaper:

John Baldessari, Mike Bidlo, Adam Cvijanovic, Drew Dominick, Nicole Eisenman, Viola Frey, General Idea, Robert Gober, Lonnie Graham, Rodney Graham, Richard Haas, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jenny Holzer, Jim Isermann, Peter Kogler, Roy Lichtenstein, Virgil Marti, Jane Masters, Michael Mercil, Takashi Murakami, Paul Noble, Jorge Pardo, Francesco Simeti, Kiki Smith, Will Stokes, Do-Ho Suh, Rosemarie Trockel, Andy Warhol, and William Wegman

And this is just from the RISD and the Fabric Workshop companion exhibitions in 2003 on Artists' Wallpaper you can read about them here and here. In my next post I will include links to images and the proper description for the project.

My apartment was not pretty

I just came across this web art project while working on something... let me know what you think?

http://www.turbulence.org/Works/apartment/

Links for my daring digital print students

Here are some links (in no particular order) you might find interesting, please feel free to leave your own suggestions in the comments:

http://www.engadget.com/

though not an art site, this is the techie site for reviews and tech news

http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/

I pointed this out in class as a site that is loaded with great images of contemporary art

Modern Art Notes

For some insight on the workings of the art world

BLDG/BlOG

A blog of architecture and architectural ideas for architects and those people pre-occupied with the space we occupy

RomanBlog 2

Zoe Strauss

ICA Philadelphia

Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof

These are Philly blogs that you should check out

Philagrafika

This event runs from January-April 2010 and will spread across a million galleries and museums in Philly

Okay, expect more soon.

Living in public

This week's On The Media, a program on NPR (that's radio which is way-old-media) has a very interesting article on the new film We Live in Public that you should take twenty minutes to listen to, it will give you much to think about.

From the program's website:

The new film We Live in Public focuses on Josh Harris, whom the film calls “the greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.” The film offers a window into Harris’s psyche, and the impacts of living in a digital, recorded age. Director Ondi Timoner talks about this web entrepreneur’s fascination with privacy, and with recording life’s every moment -- including the most intimate -- 24/7.

Click here to visit the site where you can listen to the article online.

second project

Text as Art

Twitter me this…

As we know Twitter is this ridiculously popular social networking thing. 140 characters per message to express yourself to your friends, to update them on every small thing you do, every little tiny thing you do.

Well, artists have been effectively using short pieces of text for years to express an idea, to explore concepts, and to generally challenge people. I showed you a few examples in class the other day, but below is a much longer list of artists who have worked with text.

Your assignment, as you may recall, is to stick within the confines of Twitter’s 140 character count (and that includes spaces), but to create a work of art within those confines. Yes, you can combine an image with the text to create the artwork, you can repeat the text, you can do many things… as long as you have a conceptual reason for doing so.

I talked quite a bit about how artists view language, that language is this seemingly invisible thing that is turned visible by their acts. We will continue to explore the ideas of text-based art over the next few weeks. To begin with do some research yourself, look up the artists I have listed, go online and do some independent research, maybe go to the library. For Monday’s class I would like you to bring with you some ideas for discussion after our crit. Good luck, and check back at the blog for further updates.

Artists working with text:

El Lissitzky

Andy Warhol

Alexander Rodchenko

Kurt Schwitters

F.W. Marinetti

Rene Magritte

John Heartfield

Hannah Hoch

Ed Ruscha

Barbara Kruger

Sabrina Ward Harrison

Dan Eldon

Tauba Auerbach

Jenny Holzer

Cy Twombly

Kay Rosen

Robert Indiana

Jasper Johns

Roy Lichtenstein

Guerilla Girls

Lawrence Weiner

William Wiley

Alexis Smith

Jeff Soto

Raymond Pettibon

Glenn Ligon

Bruce Nauman

Christopher Wool

Neil Jenney

Joseph Kosuth

Nancy Dwyer

John Baldessari

John Michel Basquiat

John Cage

Robert Rauschenberg

Tim Rollins and

Kids Of Survival

Trenton Doyle Hancock

Howdy and welcome to the fall semester!

First things first, here are the blogs of the students:

Kasey http://kc96.blogspot.com

Natalie http://natalian86.blogspot.com/

Rachel www.rachelkozlowski.com

Garrett http://crowdedlives.blogspot.com

Olga http://olgavuk.blogspot.com/

Aaron http://crimcram.blogspot.com

Brian http://digitallysound.blogspot.com/

Griffin http://grifflotz.blogspot.com/

Anja http://printmakingfall09.blogspot.com/

G Mutz http://gmutzprocess.blogspot.com/

Robin http://www.robinzeggblu.blogspot.com/

Andrew http://smotherparty.blogspot.com/

Ayelet http://ayeletdaniel.blogspot.com/

Allison http://allisonwolfeblog.blogspot.com/

Mirida http://miridab.blogspot.com

Colin http://www.colinkellyart.blogspot.com/

Digiscape Digiscape Digiscape!!!

Digital Printmaking Project 3
Digiscape: DUE May 4

There has been a long tradition of landscape painting in American art. After the confusion of early colonization, American artists began to depict the incredible landscape around them in oil paintings. This tradition continues to this day. This generation and the generation to come will also be faced with the subject of landscape, however, it might take on a different form. This new Landscape or digiscape exists solely inside the digital world, comprised of million upon millions of bits of data. Like "Real" landscape, within this metaphysical digiscape, everything is in a constant state of flux, with each person perceiving it from a different point of view. Unlike the "Real", the digiscape abides by a different set of rules, not constrained by the properties of the physical world. In this way, the digiscape is analogous to the dream world, constrained only by the limits of human imagination.

The question is, what does your digiscape look like? In this assignment use images that you find online, along with at least five images of your own, to create three virtual renderings of what the digiscape might look like. Experiment and alter the relationships between elements by changing their size, scale and transparency. Think of this as an opportunity to realize a personal and original vision of an electronic space, rather than a re-creation of something you have seen before, i.e., slick, geometric, computer graphic spaces or the psychedelic fractal-scapes of which we are already familiar. Experiment enough to create at least three variations of your idea.

Requirements: The finished images should be flattened (no layers) .PSD or .TIFF files and must be at LEAST 12000 x 3600 pixels (width x height)/40” x 12-18”. The resolution should be 300 DPI. In addition, please include a .JPG version of your images at a pixel width of no greater then 900 @ 72 DPI.

INDEPENDENT RESEARCH
Everyone is expected to find at least 3 contemporary artists using the landscape that are working in ways that they find inspirational. Work by these artists will be gathered either from the web or from books, and presented to the class in a coherent digital (projected) format. Examples from these artists along with five preliminary sketches should be posted on your blog. During the process you should also comment on at least three other student blogs.

WRITTEN STATEMENTS
A one-page typewritten statement explaining the visual, emotional, and intellectual motivations behind the work presented at critique must be handed in at the start of each critique. This should also be posted on your blog.

Technical details of the project must also be included, including what worked and what did not, so future students can learn form your experiments. Include name, class, semester, year, and project title, at the top of each document.


ASSIGNMENTS WILL BE EVALUATED
BASED ON THE FOLLOWING CRITERIA:

CONCEPT - idea, intention and meaning. Does the artwork clearly communicate something to other viewers?

CREATIVITY - originality of thought and expression. Does the artwork show innovation and uniqueness? Did the artist solve the given assignment problem in an expected or unexpected way?

COMPOSITION - arrangement and organization of elements. Has the artist carefully considered elements such as balance, proportion, texture, color, shape, and positive/negative space?

CRAFTSMANSHIP - attention to detail. Does the artist skillfully manipulate the images? Are all details carefully finished and/or intentional-looking?

Wait, where did last week go?

Okay, so this is the long delayed second post from GDC only a week later. It turns out I'm no good at writing from the road. In fact I happen to be pretty bad at doing anything all that practical when I am traveling. My main focus was to absorb everything I could at the two conferences I attended so that next week in class I can share with you what I've learned. Let me pick up where I left off last week at the Game Developers Conference.

On Tuesday of last week I attended a number of sessions and I'll try to paraphrase them for you:

The first session I attended was titled "Getting Serious About Alternate Reality: Designing a Different ARG. ARG refers to Alternate Reality Games, this description comes from the GDC website: 

 ARGs combine different forms of media and real-world presence to create an experience that actively blurs the border between fiction and reality. With their radically unconventional structure and reality-blurring ambitions, ARGs have generated a great deal of attention from mainstream media, but does the actual experience of playing an ARG live up to the hype?

Well, no. The game discussed was titled Chain Factor designed to support the CBS TV show Numb3rs and was an attempt to integrate the narrative of an episode of the show, an online game, and some clever advertising to create a game that seemed to require way too much time and energy to become involved in- all, ultimately in the service of a television show. If there is one thing going to GDC teaches you is how much energy, mental and otherwise, is expended on creating disposable consumer culture. While Frank Lantz, the game's lead designer, had some interesting ideas about constructing narrative through game play and puzzle solving based on the French Literary movement Oulipo at the end of the day this is still a game for a crime drama on TV.

More interesting was the second session on the impact of Will Wright's Spore on education. Prior to the game's release there had been much speculation that this game would be used in science classes to discuss evolution and even had the creationists up in arms, unfortunately that wasn't the case. While relatively entertaining the game failed to deliver on the science and ended up being criticized by both sides of the evolution debate (yes, there's still a debate). Interestingly the game has been used by English teachers, but mainly it's free creature maker feature that can be found online at the Spore site. This is totally fun and I'll give extra credit to anyone who reads this much, downloads the software, and then posts their creations.

The last session I attended on Tuesday was whether video games could be considered an art form in their own right, a point of debate after Roger Ebert had once written an article claiming they could not be. However, this is a big topic and one that I will address in an upcoming separate post.

GDC Day 1

Good morning from San Francisco! Yesterday was the first day of the Game Developers Conference and it was a pretty packed day. I am here to attend the Serious Game and Casual Game summits, with the occasional wandering over to see what the independent game producers are up to. These summits consist of presentations, panel discussions and workshops on a number of issues around game design over the course of two days. The conference itself lasts five days, but the last three are really about games for entertainment that's when companies like EA and Nintendo pull out their big new games for everyone to preview. I'll stick around for the first day of that part of conference because that's when there is some interesting overlap between the two sides of the business.

Much of the hype this year has been about iPhone and other smart phone games, as well as games for Facebook. I am interested in the growing number of platforms for gaming, but as an artist the small screen size is a major drag. This is also a year when everyone is talking about government RFPs (requests for proposals) these are typically issued from a government agency like the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Department of Education or more often the U.S. military. Such government contracts are a growing part of the serious game industry as these different agencies start to see the potential for gaming as a training or education tool. These contracts can be very lucrative and small companies are often encouraged to apply because of rules that support small business. I'll return to this topic later when I discuss the session I went to on RFP's.

Anyway, the morning began with a short presentation on a social game project known as Akoha which bills itself as the world's first social reality game where you earn points by playing real world missions with your friends. The whole point is basically a pay it forward concept, you get cards that have points on them for performing acts of kindness, in using your card you receive the points and then pass the card on to the next person who is supposed to do the same thing. Everytime your card is used after that gives you more points. The presentation raised some interesting questions about social gaming and acts of kindness (is it still a good deed if you are doing it for the points?). What I was interested in was how with these cards and other merchandise the company was looking for a real world product to sell that would generate income and support the online game. This is a concept really developed successfully by Webkinz and I'd been wondering why it hasn't been done more.

The second session in the morning was a workshop on teaching game design in the classroom without using a computer. For this workshop we were put in teams and assigned some group projects to complete. It ended up being pretty interesting and could prove useful in a course on interactive art/media as well as game design.

In the afternoon I attended a presentation by Katherine Isbister on the topic of designing more compelling avatars for your game by considering the psychology of the player. Katherine suggested that as designers we think of the avatar as a bionic problem solving suit, it represents and enhances the image of the player to others and themselves. She discussed four levels of psychology to consider in developing the avatar: visceral, cognitive, social, and fantasy. She gave some examples of successful character designs from Bear.com to Little Big Planet and City of Heroes. The big take away for me was to consider ease of use in personalizing an avatar vs. a more complex interface such as in Second Life that requires much more buy-in from the player. There's more, but I'll have to write more after I reflect a bit.

The last session was on the RFP thing I mentioned earlier and here I'll just paste my notes because I need to run to Day 2's events.

Legal Issues
1. Who owns the intellectual Property?
2. Who has rights to the source code?
Marketplace Issues
If you are a sponsor where do you post opps?
See sites
Serious Gaming
Building Better RFPs
3 q’s
What are we trying to teach the player?
How will we know when the player has learned it?
Who needs to know if they have learned it?

And a list of sites for funding:
Sites
www.fedbizopps.gov
www.grants.gov
http://ies.ed.gov/funding
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5361
http:///digitallearning.macfound.org
http://www.kauffman.org/
http://www.rwjf.org
http://www.cpb.org/grants
Chronicle of Philanthropy

Okay, well, more later.

Readings for Monday

As I discussed in class I would like you to read this essay by Luis Camnitzer that can be found at the Philagrafika website. Here is the link: 

http://www.philagrafika.org/pdf/WS/printmakingacolony.pdf

extra credit to anyone who reads the other essays as well...

The infinite print

We discussed this project pretty thoroughly in class, but I'll give a brief synopsis here. I will also try to write another post over the weekend that expands on the ideas of the project.

The infinite print takes as its starting point the idea that with advances in technology from desktop printing to faxing and the internet printing has never been so ubiquitous or the dissemination of information so easy (too easy?). Just what types of objects are we creating with a desktop printer and what kind of experience is possible in viewing these objects? What is left of what Walter Benjamin called in his essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Production the "aura" of the original art object? With this project you will be creating both the infinitely re-printable and lossless image as well as the unique art object. What experiences result from both will be the focus of our discussion. 

Specific requirements:

For the infinite edition, your project should be designed to be printed from any desktop color printer.

The unique object should contain an element of the digital, but should not be re-producable in it's exact form. What that means is up to you to define.

The process:

In creating this work you are free to develop the visual content around your own individual research.

You should have at least five preliminary sketches posted on your blog, as well as a written description of your project that includes examples of artists and/or writers who have influenced your thinking (this is to give us context for your work).

The deadline for the infinite edition is Wednesday, March 25th. I will be out of town that week, so you will e-mail me the print in pdf. format for easy printing.

The deadline for the unique object is Monday, April 6th. Since you have a good amount of time to complete this project be ambitious, think large, think extreme, think pastry!

Digital Printmaking First Project Description

Introduction
ma·nip·u·late \mə-ˈni-pyə-ˌlāt\
1: to treat or operate with or as if with the hands or by mechanical means especially in a skillful manner2 a: to manage or utilize skillfully b: to control or play upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means especially to one's own advantage3: to change by artful or unfair means so as to serve one's purpose : doctor

Advertisers have as their rhetorical purpose the presentation and exhibition of a product or service and the exhortation and coercion of the potential purchasing population to the extent that that population becomes actual. Simply put, advertisers try by the various means at their disposal to get people to buy the product or service advertised. Moreover, advertisers want potential purchasers to consider what is advertised to the exclusion of all other similar products or services. They therefore attempt to construct an advertisement that will fully involve the attention of the potential purchaser and which will have a suasive effect. Advertisers thus create a semiotic world in order to persuade their audience of the essential "rightness" of purchasing the product or service advertised.
Artists have manipulated the feelings of viewers since the beginning of art. Plato warned against the power of art as a dangerous delusion making us have feelings that go against our better natures. Consider the role of art in religion as in the many images of Jesus crucified. In Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut writes of the traumatizing effects of one representation of the crucifixion on the book’s main character Billy Pilgrim:
Billy, after all, had contemplated torture and hideous wounds at the beginning and the end of nearly every day of his childhood. Billy had an extremely gruesome crucifix hanging on the wall of his little bedroom in Ilium. A military surgeon would have admired the clinical fidelity of the artist’s rendition of all of Christ’s wounds– the spear wound, the thorn wounds, the holes that were made by the iron spikes. Billy’s Christ died horribly.
To create an emotional response with an artwork is an aim of many artists, but true manipulation implies something more…sinister. Such manipulation often occurs because the artist or those who have hired the artist want something. Whether it’s power or money, there is a goal and the art of manipulation is the means.



Project Description:
Basically put the student is to create an image that either manipulates the viewer in some way or uses the concepts of manipulation (whether it’s on a personal or corporate level) as its theme. This image can be created using a variety of media including: photography, drawing, collage, sculpture, or raw food. The final product, however, will include as a component a three color screen print created using stencils printed digitally.
To complete the project the student will:
1. Research the concept of manipulation in its various forms with an emphasis on its use in art
2. Write an artist’s statement that offers the student’s definition of manipulation, provides examples from culture and art, and describes the student’s project, its intent and intended audience
3. Create at least ten preliminary sketches (these can be multi-media in approach)
4. Create a blog that will act as a sketchbook/journal for the project and will document the research and sketches
5. Give a five minute presentation of this blog to the class, with five minutes left for questions
6. Write a comment on at least three other student blogs
7. From the presentation and comments the student will create the final work incorporating the digital in some form as well as a three-color screen print
8. The student will document the work on the blog
The following criteria will be used in the grading of the artwork:
• The student understands the concept of the project and this is evident in the finished work
• Clear progression of ideas is visible through the sketches to the final work
• Application of skills learned in the Photoshop demo
• A demonstrated understanding of screen printing process

Project timeline
Wednesday February 18
Set up blog
Your first entry should include your ideas on the meaning “manipulation”, as as examples of images that have been manipulated or demonstrate a type of psychological manipulation
You should also have a description of the project you intend to create, include your concept as well the materials and process you will use for the work
Monday February 23
Create five sketches for your project. These sketches each be radically different or demonstrate a progression of ideas (they should represent about ten hours of work)
Wednesday February 25
Five more sketches, these should be even more developed with the last few representing the evolution of the final project
Screen printing demo
March 4
Meet in Mac Lab for Blog presentations
Images prepared for screen printing
March 9
Work day printing
March 11
Critique!!!!