Visiting artists
On December 5th, 2007 at the Weisman Lowery Sims did a presentaion on art works that had to to with being enviromentally friendly and global warming. During the presentation she showed many works of art that in some way or another had to do with the enviroment. The purpose of a lot of these artworks were to get people to think more about the enviroment than we do. The artworks that she talked about ranged in style a lot from paintings to earth works. An example of one of the earth works is a mountain that was man made and then had 10,000 trees planted on it arranged into the shape of a spiral. Also, there was a painting depicting a future in which a city was flooded over but life went on for wildlife like birds and jellyfish. Some of the artworks were just to get people to think about the enviroment on a whole while others were more specific and were about global warming. Like one were the artwork was marking around the city how high the water level would be if a future flood was to happen. Throughout the presentation though she showed a lot of artwork from other people she did not show her own.
On April 19th, 2007 Kelly Dobson did a presentation at the Regis. Her presentation was about machine therapy and how we connect with machines. Also, she talked about her current project. In her lecture she said that people can connect with machines more than just using them for there purpose. She found this out when she was walking by a construction zone and used the loud levels of noise to cover up her screaming. She then started to go back and make noises next to the machines and harmonize with them which made her feel conected to them. Because of this she believes that machines have unintentional affordances that affect us. In the lecture she talked about transitioinal objects or objects that we rely on for a need or comfort that we phase out of use when we no longer need them to fullfil that need or comfort. Along these lines she made something she called the sceam body. What it is is a bag that you can scream into and it absorbs the sound so it can't be heard and also records it so that you can realese it later. She hopes that it can be a transitional object that can help people be more comfortable with letting out a scream when they really feel like they need to. Other than through sound Kelly believes that machines might comunicate with us through electromagnetic communication since our heart makes an electromagnetic field that pulses according to our moods. Her current project is Umo, Amo. and Omo. These are little machines that are supposed to communicate with people through different means. Umo does through with sound by making a purring like noise. Amo does so by making electromagnetic fields. And Omo does so by breathing. Overall I found her theories and work to be very intriguing and would like to see how her current project works out.