Final Project part. 1 the johnny cash project

this was really fun to do, you got to do your own portrait of Johnny Cash anyway you want it. I did mine a little abstract with a lot of the doodles that I normally do in the margins of my notebook paper.
 this is the original picture that I chose to do

and this is my own portrait of the same photo

I wanted to go for a more whimsical feel to it, by adding the curly-cues from the bird, and just coloring in the dark spots. I added some funky "pine" like trees in the background, and some weird halo like lines around Johnny's head as well as the stick in the corner.

Final Project part. 2 Learning to Love you more

The next project I decided to do one of the assignments from Learning to Love you more, they are no longer accepting submissions, but I really liked assignment number 11. Take a photo of a scar on your body and then write about it.  Well here is the picture of the scar on my upper right arm. It goes straight across my arm

It happened around the beginning of the summer of 2010. I was at work, cleaning the toilet in the stall in the men's bathroom, when I finished and  was leaving the corner of the stall door nicked my arm. At first I thought it was just a scratch but then blood started running down my arm. I had to quickly go to the first aid kit so I could stop the bleeding before it fell on the carpet. I quickly bandaged it up with two bandaids. And 6-ish months later the scar is still there representing my clummsiness.

Final Paper

Ken Rinaldo

Lillian Schwartz

Ken Rinaldo creates interactive art installations that explore the relationship between nature and technology. He creates robotic and bio-art installations to try to merge the organic and the “electromechanical” together. He is influenced by living system theories, interspecies communications, artificial life research etc. He was born in 1958. His best known works are Autopoiesis in 2000:

 and Augmented Fish Reality in 2004.

 He graduated with an associates in computer science from Canada College in 1982, and has since gone on to graduate with a bachelors from University of California, Santa Barbara and San Francisco State University. In 2000 he won first place at the VIDA 3.0 international artificial life competition for his piece Autopoiesis. And in 2004 his piece Augmented Fish Reality also won an award at the same festival. He is now in charge of the art and technology program at Ohio State University.

In his piece Augmented Fish Reality; it’s an interactive installation of five rolling robotic fish-bowl sculptures. It allows the fish (he used Siamese fighting fish because of their excellent eyesight and their color vision) to use the intelligent hardware (installed in the robotic fish bowl sculpture) to move their bowls and control their environment. All under the fish’s control. They were able to affect their environment by communicating with the other fish, their own robotic fish bowl sculptures and they reacted to the humans in the space.

Before I chose this artist I was mainly interested in exploring the difference between 3D art installation and that of 2D art. I was curious as to how the viewer reacted and what was similar and what was different.

In Augmented Fish Reality, the viewer would indirectly causing the environment to change. Just by being in the space, would cause the fish to react in some way, and therefore change the environment. By doing this Rinaldo is actually having the viewer part of the art. The art installation wouldn’t be complete unless people participated in it. Because if not, then the fish wouldn’t really have that much to react to so the environment wouldn’t really change that much.

Lillian Schwartz was born in 1927, she is well known for being one of the creators of 20^th century computer developed art. Perhaps her most famous work is Mona Leo. She started off working with Bell Laboratories, developing sound, video, and art mixtures. Then during the 1980’s she started experimenting with computers to manipulate artwork. She mainly uses computers to manipulate images that related to art and in art history. She was doing this with computers before digital art became more widely used in the 1990’s. She basically uses shapes generated by a computer to make images on a computer screen. She has also experimented with ways to put multiple images together on a computer as a college. And she has also transformed images of faces to (for example she transformed the face of Rembrandt to a photo of Albert Einstein). She has also combined images of art for a post for the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Big MoMA).

In her art with Leonardo Da Vinci, she uses a 3D computer generated model to show the lines, so she can manipulate the perspective lines on another piece so they will match. A great example of this is in her piece Mona Leo. She replaced the left side of the famous Mona Lisa with a red chalk portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci. She used the 3D computer generated model to make sure that the eye, eyebrow, nose, chin, of Leonardo Da Vinci and Mona Lisa line up perfectly.  I found this interesting because, in some way or another you can always tell who created an artwork. Whether it’s from a particular style the artist uses or not, this gives that new meaning. She merged the art and the artist together so they form one person.

mona lisa before

Leonardo Da Vinci before

Them together

The interaction for the viewer with this piece is much different than in Rinaldo’s Augmented Fish Reality. In Schwartz’s piece the viewer isn’t really interacting directly with the piece. They are left to be a viewer of the art, and not as an active participant. However, that is not to say that in 2D art works the viewer isn’t entirely left out. It’s true, they are mainly observing instead of participating (like in Augmented Fish Reality) but they are participating in the artwork mentally instead of physically. The viewer is using their minds to participate in this work, by looking at the matching of the eyes, eyebrows, lips, chin the mind will automatically look to try to find flaws in the match. Therefore their minds are participating in the piece by trying to find flaws in the work.

The interaction for the viewer in Augmented Fish Reality is much different than in Mona Leo.  Here the viewer is actively participating with their bodies. By moving around the space, which causes the fish to react. The viewer is therefore not a viewer in Augmented Fish Reality but a participator in the art itself.

In 2D artworks, the viewer participates in the piece more mentally and passively. 2D artworks can therefore be classified as more intimate. It is just between the viewer and the art and nothing else because nothing else is affecting it.

In 3D artworks, like Augmented Fish Reality, it’s more of an active and physical participation with an art piece. The viewer is no longer just a viewer but a participant in the art itself. In face the art would not be complete unless there was some participation. Because of this however, 3D works are not as intimate as 2D, they are in fact more social and more physically demanding than mentally demanding.

Both forms are incredibly different, for very obvious reasons (2D vs. 3D) but they do have the viewer in some form participate in the artwork. With 3D work the participation is more obvious, whereas in 2D the participation is a little more difficult to pin down.  But once you do, you realize that both forms of participation are not that different. Because after all, the viewer is participating in them no matter what dimension it’s in.



Joy Garnett Lecture 2

(the reasons for not being able to attend the second lecture is the same reason I gave in the beginning of my post on Lecture 1).

Joy Garnett is a painter who paints photos that she finds on the internet. She is interested in images of war, riots, destruction, etc. and her main theme is government secrecy. She mainly uses google search engine because you can just type in a word, like riot, and tons of images will come up. She is interested in how regular news print images don't really affect us as much, because they either go "through us " or over our heads. We don't really take the time to really look at the image. She says she wants to find images and turn them into paintings because we view a painting differently than we do a news print. We study the painting, really look at it, interpret it, etc. All that is lost on a news print. She said that she chose painting because it has more "baggage" historically than any other medium, which would force the viewer to pay attention to it.
Here is a painting from her "Riot" show

She likes to retrieve "lost" media images to paint them so people will be forced to pay attention to whats going on in the painting. She believes that a lot of these "lost" images need to be shown, for people to pay attention to them. She said that she usually changes the name of the image file, which causes her to forget where the original image came from. She prefers it this way because then the image is completely open to interpretation especially if you don't know what context it originated from.

She then listed some artists (before her) that basically did the same thing that she is doing now, one artist is Andy Warhol, who took a lot of news images and silk screened them and repeated it over and over, another  is Gerhard Richter, a German artist who painted news images (like funerals, murder scenes, etc.) and Leon Golub who mainly used images from the Vietnam war. By having these artists use a separate medium than medium from the original image (news print) its more affect in having the viewer slow down and really pay attention to the work.

Garnett did get into  trouble with copyright laws for one of her paintings. This one:

The original photographer stated that its original intent was creative, Garnett got a legal letter stating that she had "stolen" and "pirated" the image and the original photographer wanted her to take it off her website. Stating it was "copyright infringement".

So she said doing this kind of work is a little dangerous because the copyright laws are not very clear, but very blurry, so if you do anything over anyone else's work it could be classified as copyright infringement.

Cory Arcangel Lecture 1

The reason why I was unable to attend any lectures was because when they were scheduled it was either when I had class, or I had to work. I am the only person (where I worked) in my position so if I don't work the whole place closes down which would make my boss mad.

Anyways back to the review. Cory Arcangel is a computer artist he likes to create art that has a relationship from technology to culture. He is a founding member of beige. They recycle computer parts, gameboys, game systems etc. to create art with them.

He talks about how most of his art is about recycling (stealing) code (mainly from video games. A great example of this is his piece called Super Mario Clouds. He stole code from the super mario game and made it so the only thing that shows is the clouds. Here it is

this picture is from where it was being exhibited at the time. He said that he wanted as many projections as possible to make it seem kind of like a picnic with the constantly moving clouds.

He said he first got into computer programing as a way to play pranks on people at school. One example of this is he disassembled the internet program at the school's computer lab, and changed it so when you went to check your email, the computer would shut off and the CD-rom would pop open. He thought it was hilarious.

Another example of his art is the piece called Super slow tetris. He kept everything the same on the program except for the speed. He made it super slow.

He said that he really likes to do art where he can change the littlest easiest thing from the program.