RockBlog

The piece I chose to research is called D-tower, created by Q.S. Serafijn in collaboration with Lars Spuybroek, NOX art and architecture. Lars Spuybroek was born in Rotterdam, Netherland 1959, graduated cum laude from the Technical University of Delft in 1989, and soon after began his career in architecture. After graduation, Lars was recognized internationally for his work on the island of Neeltje Jans. In 2001 Lars was appointed Professor of Digital Design Techniques at the University of Kassel in Germany, and until 2006 taught at Columbia University in New York. Currently he is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology on Atlanta, and works for NOX, am architectural firm dedicated to art in architecture. It was easy to fin information on the architect, Lars Spuybroek, however it was very difficult to find any biographical information about the artist Q.S. Serafijn. From what I could find, Serafijn, a Dutch artist has had some interest in issues dealing with post 9-11 safety in the public domain. He has contributed several essays to books that cover these issues.
The combination of these two talented artists is certainly what makes the D-tower innovative, but separately, I believe Spuybroek’s architecture is beyond the norm, avant-garde. His designs have been described as blobitecture, and were later formally termed “non-standard architecture”. A link to his work can be found here. http://www.nox-art-architecture.com/ The artist of D-tower Q.S. seems to have a more traditional role in creating art, his portfolio is a collection of large scale 2-d installations, many involving neon light, and a few advertisements it looks like he’s designed. http://www.qsserafijn.nl/

In our text, D-tower is considered “mobile and locative media” because of the interactive properties of this public sculpture. The entire project is composed of three parts, a tower, a questionnaire, and a website. The tower is an epoxy structure located in the Dutch city of Doetinchem, and is meant to and identify and map the feelings of Doetinchem’s inhabitants. A four-question survey, sent out to participants every other day determines the general mood they are in, and is reported back to the tower to show either green for hate, red for love, blue for fear, or yellow for happiness. The context of this work makes us think about the interaction of the audience, and the collective process of making a piece like this.
I am not aware of any other pieces these two have collaborated on, but for me, I find Lars Spuybroek’s work more appealing. One piece I find very interesting is a piece of public interactive work called Joe and Joey. Joe and Joey is a spherical robotic sculpture that lies near the edge of the highway, and passers by can influence the direction of the sphere by means of a simple phone call. By doing this the center of gravity is altered, and the ball will roll forward o backward. The weight is also distributed in two different ways, Joe is one phone number, and Joey is the other, so the two oppose each other each time they get a phone call. The structural, large-scale, and interactive properties of Spuybroek’s work is what makes his work interesting, and I see many features, such as the robotic nature, and ideas related to personal opinion taking shape in my own work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lau0jWTyyGU

Charles Cohen

Joseph Olivieri

Charles Cohen is a digital artist who works with photography, sculpture, and installations. The work that initially drew me to Cohen was his series called “Buff.” “Buff” is characterized by its generally sexy nature. The images are of scenes where everything is visible save for the humans, who appear as white space. Studying Cohen’s work has inspired me to work with the white space in my photography more. I will no doubt experiment with emulating Mr. Cohen’s work.

When we look at pornographic photographs we look at the people, they are the center of the action. By removing the details of the individuals and only leaving the background to be examined Cohen forces his audiences to find beauty in the scene and not just the sex. The project is very interesting to me as it makes me wonder what it is that humans lust after. Even when the details of the human body are removed from the photographs they remain terrifically sexual.

Charles Cohen’s work stands out to me because the concept of whitespace isn’t used a whole lot in photography. I don’t even consider it most of the time when I am shooting. Silhouettes are great and Cohen uses them incredibly well.
http://www.promulgator.com/
http://www.promulgator.com/buff/buff16b.html
http://www.promulgator.com/buff/buff15g.html

David Roberts
Mobile and Locative Media
PDPal - Marina Zurkow | Scott Paterson | Julian Bleecker

Julian Bleecker
Assistant professor of Interactive Media ad Critical Studies departments at the University of Southern California.

Involved with the development of mobile and networked systems. Scholarly studies in technology design innovation. Interested in the relationship between place and social engagement through wireless technology and hand held devices.

Scott Paterson
Active member in the new media art community including Rhizone.org and Mindspace.net. Frequently lectures about his work internationally. Practicing Information Architect and Interaction Designer based in New York.

Marina Zurkow
Character, icon and narrative designer as well as an animator for interactive installations. Adjust professor at Parsons School of Design. Currently resides in Brooklyn.

Previous work with a multi-linear animated installation named "Nicking the Never" in New York, 2004. Award winning animated series "Braingirl" , and "How I Learned to Love the War". Her work has been featured in a diverse range of projects including animated films, hotel design, lightboxes and clothing.

PDPal
PDPal was public interactive exhibition displayed internationally from 2002 to 2004. The idea of the project is to map a city based on peoples experiences within it, rather than through geographical data.

Users would receive the PDPal software through a kiosk via infrared signal to their PDA device. They are then encouraged to travel about the city as they normally would, and write small reports about what they did on their device as it happens. The software would send this report back to the kiosk and map their trip on a digital layout of the city.

My opinion
I am particularly fond of the idea of a digital public installation that any passerby can contribute to. Especially in the modern age, where nearly every citizen of a developed city has some kind of mobile device, and are familiar with the basic workings of a personal computer. PDPal was done back before smart phones such as the iPhone and Blackberry were created, so the potential of modern technology is greatly increased.

PDPal continued

Homepage
http://www.o-matic.com/play/pdpal/

Times Square commercial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvBu24s6Ruo

Kiosk Home Screen
http://i35.tinypic.com/9icx3k.jpg

Eva and Franco Mattes

Amanda Duchene

Eva and Franco Mattes are a duo that works making digital prints on canvas of avatars. In the art world they are also know as 0100101110101101.org. They have done many things in the past including launching an ad campaign for a movie called “Untied We Stand” that was non-existent, they have done multiple forms of media hacking and culture jamming, and they also do a lot of game art in synthetic performances. In 2006 they were working on a series called 13 Most Beautiful People, where they were making digital prints on canvas of avatars. That is what actually made me pick them out of the book its really interesting to me that they can make these avatars look so real when they are on canvas. Their works have a feel of seductiveness and sexiness around them. They are classified in our books as being part of “the next generation of virtual worlds.” Their work is laying out new ground for virtual worlds and is taken from some of Andy Warhol’s work The 13 Most Beautiful Boys and The 13 Most Beautiful Women. Here are a few of the projects that they have worked on:

http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/portraits/thirteen.html
http://www.gamescenes.org/2009/09/game-art-event-eva-franco-mattes-synthetic-perfomances-by-paolo-ruffino.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v

Abby Daza

Kenneth Feingold

Feingold was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1952. In 1970 he move to San Francisco, where he transferred to Cal Arts in Los Angeles in here he was working as a studio assistant. In 1976 he graduated with a Master in Fine Arts. In the 80’s Feingold has an installation called “ Sexual Jokes” that was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art where he received the National endowment for the art on visual arts fellowship and Media Art fellowship. He had to take a sabbatical form teaching because he needed to travel to the Middle East. In the 1985-89 he participated in the Whitney biennial and travel widely in America and Europe. In the 1990 Japan held a retrospective video screening of his work “the surprising spiral”, completed in 1991, which was his first interactive art work, it was exhibited at the Kunsthalle dominikannerkierche, and the European Media art festival. He created interactive works with talking head puppets connected to the Internet. He was comittionated to create and nteractive installation “Interior” for InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, “ICC Biennale ‘97” and was awarded the DNP Internet ‘97 Interactive Award; Dai Nippon Printing, Tokyo. The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, commissioned the interactive work “Head” for the exhibition "Alien Intelligence" in 1999. He had a studio in Buenos Aires where he developed his first interactive conversation works. 1999 Fundación Telefónica awarded him a prize; Vida 3.0 in Madrid and in 2003 he received a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship.

In our book he is part of the section artificial intelligence and intelligent agents. And one of the pieces that I thought that were really interesting is the head on the flowerpot “sinking feeling”. The way that many medias are connected to this piece is a metaphor for the era on which we are living right now. The same thing with the If/Then piece where they create a conversation with misunderstanding silences and failed communication highlighting all of the errors that we as human have every day of out lives. I believe that Kenneth would influence my work in the way to show other our mistakes as well as our daily routines.

http://www.kenfeingold.com/recentworks.html
http://www.mejanlabs.se/article_en.asp?ID=42&KAT=CURREX&templ=2
http://www.kenfeingold.com/IfThen2.html

Amara Barthelemy

Toshio Iwai - Sound & Music Chapter 2
Born 1962 in Kira, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. He is an interactive media and installation artist. He also has worked in television, music performance, museum design and digital musical instrument design. Since there were limited technologies available to him as a child, he spent most of his time creating flipbooks in the corner of his textbooks and making motor-driven mechanical toys. Once he reached collage Toshio was influenced by work of Norman McLaren. This is when he started to produce installations that combined animation techniques with modern methods of image capture and lighting.

I picked this artist because I like how he takes light and sound and work it in with technology but also keeps a mechanical feature to it. He does not just resort to one thing in digital art. Toshio combines his childhood interests with his interests now as well as the growing industry of technology. What drew me to his piece, Piano – as image media, was the fact that it is open for the audience to use. Not only can the viewers appreciate the visual and sound qualities of this piece, they can also participate in it.

Piano – as image media (1995)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a9dOoLU5xQ

In Piano - As Image Media, a virtual score is made by viewers drawing lighted dots on a projected grid using a trackball. This grid leads to the keyboard of a small grand piano. The dots “strike” the keys of the piano. The piano is controlled by a computer, which plays the note that corresponds to the key that was “struck.” At the same time the computer also projects graphical images on screen in relation to the notes. This causes the illusion that the note seem to “fly” out of the piano opening. This work was shown in Play Zone at the Millennium Dome in London, 1999-2000. It was also one of the works used in Iwai's performance collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Music Plays Images x Images Play Music.

Other Interesting Work
Morphovision
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX3i0fNKjg8&feature=related
Translate light to sound
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEWV5As2XvI&feature=related
Interactive game with sound
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsRP60fkzaE&feature=related

Games Designed by Toshio Iwai
Otocky (1987; Famicom Disk System)
Sound Fantasy (canceled;Super Famicom)
SinTunes (1996, PC)
Electroplankton (2005, Nintendo DS)

Graham Harwood

“What you see is always less then what you get” is what Graham Harwood believes; and this idea sum’s up his work and approach well. Graham Harwood
is a digital artists who is concerned about how his pieces interact with his audience and how they make them feel. What Graham Harwood creates is digital landscapes, collogues, digital instillations, communities and viral media. He started off in the 1980’s by researching and developing different types of digital media and media interfaces in Europe. From here he moved on to producing digital comics in the late 1908’s and early 1990’s. In 1990 he is credited with making the first digital graphic novel ‘If Comix Mental’ (http://www.mediamatic.net/page/12068/nl) a satire of the Gulf War. While from 1989-1994 he was a teacher at Guildhall University helping to establish there MA in computer graphics and animation. Afterword he switched to teaching the long-term unemployed the uses and how tos of digital media to help find them a job in Brittan’s declining job market.

Graham Harwood saw he first major artistic outbreak with his work “rehearsal of memory’ (http://www.mongrel.org.uk/rehearsal ) a digital CD-ROM installation featuring collogues of skin pieces of Mental health pachinests with text excerpts of there lives and self mutilation laid on top; by clicking on areas you would be redirected to others accounts and the goal was to take all there experiences and create one massive general conscious of the community. This was the piece that got him his first award and got him an excerpt in ch. 3 of our Digital art book. His is and is featured under the narratives section because it tell’s the progressive story of the attendee’s and there culture as they go on there gradual slope into there mentally unstable state. This idea continues with his latest project Telephone Trottoire (http://www.rhizome.org/editorial/2297 ), which calls people in a community and they are allowed to respond edit and forward the message as much as they want.

My personal favorite piece of his is rehearsal of memory for two reasons, the content matter and because of his approach on who owns rights to it and how it should be viewed. The fact that he focuses on these social outcasts and wants to better understand them and community they build I thought was a fairly unique approach on developing the kind or work he dose. Also he believes in the freedom of digital information a subject I am found of my self and as a result he makes low res copies off all his work available for free while the high res versions can only be viewed at galleries. His work is most likely going to have the greatest impact on me with how I approach narratives and making my work less “flat” and more functional in the digital realm.

http://digitalarts.lcc.gatech.edu/unesco/internet/artists/int_a_gharwood.html

Golan Levin with Kamal Nigamt and Jonathan Feinberg

Golan Levin received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the Aesthetics and Computation Group from the MIT Media Laboratory. Currently he is the Director of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Associate Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationships with machines. His work mostly focuses on the design of systems for the creation, manipulation, and performance of simultaneous image and sound.
Levin is a part of the Social Networking section of Chapter 3

The specific work I chose was the one featured in the book, “The Dumpster”. It is an online visualization that took fragments of blogs from real American teenagers and compiled more than 20,000 break-up stories. In the program, you can click on orbs to see stories at random, or select stories by age. I really like this project because it gives solace to those newly broken-up people who feel all alone in the world, and it empowers others to see that they were not the only ones that were wronged. This project reminds me of a pre-modern Facebook stalk; the anonymous voyeuristic tendencies in everyone are satisfied with no harm done.
This might influence my work as a new way to look at things. Everyone has things that connect themselves to others, and it could be interesting to try to pinpoint some of those common characteristics.

The Dumpster-http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/thedumpster/index.html
Golan Levin’s website- http://www.flong.com/
Reface- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dh2ghiwJW0

Ashley Wetzel
Usman Haque

Usman Haque is an artist and architect based in London. He designs interactive architecture based systems and he is interested in the way humans interact with each other. Theses interactive pieces are designed completely by him. He designs the architectural piece itself and the system that operates the piece. Numerous projects that he has created have cell phones right in them and they use electromagnetic fields to create colors. Haque has worked in multiple countries including the USA, UK and Malaysia. He was a teacher in the Interactive Architecture Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. He has received multiple awards including the 2008 Design of the Year Award (interactive) from the Design Museum in the UK. His work has been presented at international conferences.

Haque’s digital art is very interactive. It has a lot to do with people and their interactions. One project he did was a massive projection onto the façade of York Minster in Northern England. The project was called Evoke. The name is very fitting. The colors came from noises, sounds and people’s voices while they were near the building. Different pitches and sounds produced different colors, producing a massive piece of art.

In the book Haque is in Chapter Three, Themes in Digital Art and he falls into the category mobile and locative media. My favorite project of his is Sky Ear. It is a massive balloon and cell phone structure that has miniature sensor circuits that respond to electromagnetic fields. Depending on the electromagnetic fields the structure changes its colors. It uses both natural electromagnetic fields in the sky and electromagnetic fields from our cell phones.

After seeing all of Haque’s work I might want to look into incorporating more interactive elements to my designs. I would be interested in doing general interactive work not just based on human interactions.

http://www.haque.co.uk/skyear.php
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=374
http://www.haque.co.uk/evoke.php

Chelsey Luther
Artist: Lynn Hershman

Lynn Hershman is an American artist (film and photography) as well as an internationally acclaimed pioneer in interactive computer and net-based media art. The technology she created aimed to take on the issues of the current time (ie, privacy in an era of surveillance, the relationship between life and digital worlds, humans and machines, as well as identity in a time of consumerism. She has won several international awards for her findings including the ZKM, the Sundance Film Festival, Golden Nica in Interactive Arts from Arts Electronica and most recently, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for an upcoming film on the history of feminist art.
In 1998, Lynn Hershman’s work was described by the Berlin International Film Festival as “the most influential female artist working today.” Since then, her work has been featured in over 200 major institutions worldwide.
Lynn was grounded in still art ( until the late 1970’s when she began working in film. In much of her work, she included the “powerlessness of the female”, using the context of media environment to establish the idea. Since 1995, she has created “telerobotic” pieces that interact with its surroundings. This includes a series of dolls capable of responding to someone speaking to them over the internet.
A piece of her work I found interesting was her “Phantom Limb Series” photographic series. I found it to be the most visually pleasing (and least creepy.) They are the tv and camera as head pictures before it became overdone and outdated. In might be viewed as original, even, for its time.
I do not believe her work will influence my digital art as I am not interested in the subject her work entails, nor in creating interactive media.

For her portfolio, visit (stills and film) : http://www.lynnhershman.com/
http://mocoloco.com/art/archives/hershman_phantom_limb_oct_0.jpg
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/feminist_art_base/archive/images/235.365.jpg

Paul M. Smith
Chapter 1 - Digital imaging

Paul Smith is a British photographer who specializes in photo manipulation. He was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England in 1969, and lives and works today in London. He attended Trowbridge College and then went on to get his Masters of Photography from Royal College of Art. His artwork is mostly about questioning what it means to be a “Man” and what's the difference between masculinity and femininity. He also explores the idea of group dynamics and how we seem to lose the sense of our individuality when we are a part of one.
Smith’s first series is one called “Artist Riffles” It’s a collection of pictures depicting him dressed up and in seemingly real combat situations. There was a small town called Warminster that contained a large military base and this became his set for taking his war scene pictures. This base had been used for testing so the sounds of gun blasts were an everyday occurrence around this town. Smith joined the army in the footsteps of his brother Steven and Smith said “The roles I acted out during my childhood played a fundamental part in shaping my perception of military life. I vividly recall the endless carnage I reaped with my brothers, played out in the local woods with an arsenal of replica weapons.” In these pictures he clones himself to make him have many different roles in the same picture. This kind of playfulness leads to ideas of role-playing and fantasy just like young children do, and what it means to be the masculine hero that they look up to.
After his “Artist Riffles” collection he came out with his “Heroes” collection that I find very interesting. In the pictures it depicts the protagonist of a narrative just like we see in the movies but again he puts his own face on all the characters. It makes me think about how we as people tend to pretend like we are in the position of the hero and we admire the qualities this hero possesses. There are shots of Smith jumping from a plane and holding on to an edge of a building and even coming from the rooftop like a James Bond agent. And as I remember his work with the “Artist Riffles” I can see that this “Heroes” collection is also about masculinity and what it means to be a man. It seems that we have become accustomed to thinking that “being a man” is something that can only be achieved through fantasy of heroic actions. I think Smiths work might influence my digital art by not only trying to create almost flawless photo composites but that he has a thought that he wants to share with the world and instead of just sharing his idea he represents it through his digital imaging and it makes a powerful statement.

http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=2438
http://www.paulmsmith.co.uk/
http://www.photography-now.com/artists/K08268.html

Erwin Redl by Jarid Waniger

Erwin Redl is an Austrian born artist, architect, carpenter, computer programmer, and electronic music maker. His interest and training in all these subjects help inspire his work which consists of site-specific LED light instillation pieces. His work is very minimalistic and highly reliant on digital technologies as a medium as he is listed in the book Digital Art by Christiane Paul.

The works found in his Matrix and Shift series are prime examples of digital technologies as a medium. Redl takes many small LED light and lines them up in tight accurate grid patterns. Often the light will shift from one color to another gradually and slowly, sometimes accompanied by music or sounds. His grids can often be found on walls, ceilings, the negative space in rooms, and even entire buildings.

My favorite series he did was his Matrix series. There is something to be found in an entirely blue or green room lined with thousands of tiny LED lights. All you can see is a dim solid color around you and simply geometric forms. Minimalism and repetition can be quite beautiful in that there is not a lot to distract the viewer’s eye, allowing them to process the work in an easier manner. Without having to break a work down by the various subjects and possible meanings found in it, all one has to do is take one glance and they have it. From there on all they have to incorporate the sheer magnitude of the work and realize there is so much to see in such a narrow amount difference.

I already try to incorporate minimalism into my work, but Redl has shown me that I can cross both my love of minimalism and my love of technology and form them into on coherent thing. Here is how Redl sees it:
“My work reflects upon the condition of art making after the ‘digital experience.’ The formal and structural approach to various media I employ, such as installation, CD-ROM, internet and sound, almost requires binary logic, because I assemble the material according to a narrow set of self-imposed rules which often incorporate algorithms, controlled randomness and other methods inspired by computer code.”

Interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsAzLWxeHl8
Interview and Work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7qRd8DCV6A&feature=related
Bio and Portfolio: http://www.paramedia.net/index.htm

Jessica Etter

Artist: David Small

David Small completed his third degree at the MIT Media Laboratory in 1999, his focus being display and manipulation of complex visual information. He worked as a student of Mureil Cooper and John Maeda, where he explored dynamic typography in three-dimensional landscapes.

David Smalls thesis “Rethinking the Book” looked at how digital media, more specifically three-dimensional use of dynamic typography, would change the way designers approach large bodies of information. It is obvious in his work that this has been the focus of his career. To provide information in a new, interactive, and dynamic way is what his art reflects.

A paragraph about David Small can be found in Ch. 3 under the subject Beyond the book: text and narrative environments. They look at two works, the Talmud Project, 1999 and the Stream of Consciousness/Interactive Poetic Garden, 1998; two projects David Small did in corroboration with Tom White. The first is a interactive digital reading space, that allows you to see the text as a whole as well as focus on specific areas. The second work is a fountain in which words are projected into the pool, seemingly flowing. The fountain also interacts with users allowing them to divide words and arrange them into new ones by touching the steam.

One specific project I liked was the exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It was designed to create a visual to raise awareness of the threats of genocide today. The project allows visitors to make a pledge answering the question “What will you do to help end the treat of genocide today?” They write it on a card with real ink pens with digital sensors in them. The pledge is then projected on the wall along with thousands of others, both hand written or submitted online. The reason I like this project is because I feel that the effect you get from this exhibit is enhanced by the use of digital art. It would not be as effective without the created technology.

How I feel this will affect my work is the consideration on how the use of text influences art. Using text in an appropriate way can really get your vision across and create the response you want. It is a way of displaying information in a new way.

http://www.davidsmall.com/
http://www.davidsmall.com/articles/
http://www.davidsmall.com/about/

Mark Huebsch

Artist: Benjamin Fry,
- themes in digital art – databases, data visualization, and mapping

Benjamin Fry creates art by visualizing large amounts of data and finds a unique way to organize, construct and understand the information. He is the director of Seed Visualization and its Phyllotaxis Lab. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Seed Visualization helps companies find solutions to clearly manage complex data sets and visualize it. In the lab, experimental design is combined with basic research in order to advance the field of data visualization.

Ben earned himself a doctoral degree from the MIT Media Laboratory. He spends his time developing tools for the visualization of data, for example, genetic data. I find his work very intriguing, just from a glance. Everything he does is extremely detailed, complex, and takes a little more work than just designing art. Computer science, statistics, and graphic design are all used in order to construct and build his pieces.

To get a little better feel for what Ben does, Valence, from 1999, is quite a complex piece of digital art. The purpose of this data visualization software is to take larges bodies of information and sort, relate, and organize them. You can add to it anytime, and it’s a great tool for many different occupations. For example, biologists are becoming familiar with it when using the classification of plants and animals, and finding the relationships in between.

I like Fry’s work because his pieces and the software he develops are very useful, practical, complex, difficult, and it looks amazing at the same time! It is extremely creative, looks fantastic, and serves a purpose, which is what I look for whenever I am assigned a project or assignment. His work will influence mine a little because I’m always trying to find new ideas and ways to work on things and this is a great example of something new.

http://artport.whitney.org/exhibitions/biennial2002/fry.shtml
http://benfry.com/
http://www.siusoon.com/dat/blog/?p=241

• Golden Nica - Prix Ars Electronica in 2005
• 2005 Interactive Design prize - Tokyo Type Director's Club

• Personal work shown:
• Whitney Biennial in 2002
• Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in 2003
• Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Arts Electronica, Linz, Austria
• Nature Magazine
• New York Magazine
• The New York Times
• Seed
• Communications of the ACM

Artist: Kazuhiko Hachiya
Hachiya is a quirky Japanese installation artist and designer that finds inspiration in fictional and anime worlds. His innovative and sometimes silly projects easily equate to this vision and it seems he has no problem turning his fantasies into reality. People call him an inventor, but he disagrees saying that his pieces have no practical use. I believe this is what makes him such a great artist. Without a practical use in the physical world, it allows him to journey further into his pipe dream fanciful world, and come up with more imaginative ideas.

Hachiya’s most recent project is called “OpenSky.” It is a one-man glider with a 32 ft wingspan based off a similar design from a popular anime film by Hayao Miyazaki, called “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.” In this film a small girl rides a similar gliding machine. Hachiya’s was successful with several seconds of flight, thanks to a large bungee cord and soccer field. This is a perfect example of Hachiya’s work. He is always looking to distort people’s perception of what can and cannot be achieved. It’s not hard to see why he claims to be influenced by anime; worlds completely based off fantasy.
Another innovative project Hachiya created was a computer program called “PostPet.” This application is a “pet” that is integrated with your email service and lives on your desktop. It does such tasks as “fetching email,” and interacting with the owner, taking the normal mechanics of email and turning it into something interactive and incredibly enjoyable. Hachiya is spoken in Chapter III of the Digital Design book. This chapter’s subsection where his work is discussed is the data visualization and mapping section.

I love Inter Discommunication Machine. It works by using two head-mounted video cameras and allows people to interact with each other by seeing themselves through the opposite’s camera. In other words, your vision and hearing are replaced with someone else’s, and vice-versa. More than anything I would like to try it, if possible. I am so intrigued by the way that it blurs the lines between one’s self and another person. It can perhaps give you a brief feeling of walking in another’s shoes.

I am glad that I was lucky enough to choose the artist that I did. I can definitely agree with his outlook on fantasy vs. reality and self-discovery. This is something that I have been searching for in my design/art work. When I read through the ideas he has discovered, I feel the sense of déjà vu, as if I have thought along the same lines.

"Nothing begins until it is touched, nothing is delivered until it is experienced."
I wanted to end with this quote because it can be the artist’s statement of almost all of his pieces. It corresponds with his creative ideas, and brings his illusions to life. Hopefully Hachiya’s future inventions are as fantasy driven as his ideas are now.

http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol17/?pg=40&pm=2&u1=friend
http://glicose.ilikesushi.org/blog/?p=49
http://90.146.8.18/en/archives/prix_archive/prix_projekt.asp?iProjectID=2537

Olia Lialina

She is featured in the section of the book titled “Internet art and nomadic networks”. Olia Lialina was part of a core group of artist who formed the ”net.art” movement. She is most famously known for her piece of art entitled “ My Boyfriend Came Back From the War”. It is an interactive piece of art that uses the strong contrast of black and white images and text to make a solid point. As you interact with the webpage new links appear for you to click on, as you click through the web page, it becomes divided into section that’s tell you different snippets of the story. With this piece of art, its hard to get bored, because you have to participate in creating her art as your are learning and interpreting it. It makes you feel as though you are apart of it. Almost like without you, it wouldn’t be able to be created.

I really loved how she truly made each person part of her artwork. When sitting on your computer it is you personally interaction with the piece of art to interpret in your own way at your own pace. All while still feeling as though without you( the person clicking) the art could not continue. I also enjoyed how she made it simple. She used only two dramatic colors, which kept things interesting but yet still focused on what she thought was important. I want my art to make the interpreter feel as though if they were not there to interpreter it, it would not be the same. It’s like they are just as important as the creator.

Olia graduated from Moscow state university in 1993 where she studied film criticism and journalism, soon after to be followed with art residence at Budapest.
As mentioned before, her most famously know piece it “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War.” But she is also known for doing some other creative pieces that I did not enjoy as much. http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/online_newspapers/ It’s a different style that I don’t completely relate with.

http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/online_newspapers/

http://www.teleportacia.org/war/wara.htm

http://art.teleportacia.org/

http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/stellastar/poehali.html#onskazal

Aphtin Rapp
Chapter 3 Themes in Digital Art: Mobil and locative media
Artist: Michelle Teran

Michelle Teran, born in 1966, studied science in Vancouver, Canada for her undergraduate from 1984 to 1986 and then in 1987 went on to traveling to Mexico to get a footing on painting, theatre, and visual arts until 1988. At the Ontario College of Art and Design from 1988 until 1993 with a year of it with independent studies in Florence, Italy. She has gotten numerous awards and scholarship for the work she has done and to go more into that visit http://www.ubermatic.org/misha/cv_mteran.pdf . She travels the world and pushes the boundaries of space between private and public dwellings through the surveillance and recording of the public in several cites. For her work, Life: A User’s Manual, Teran walks through these cities with hidden cameras on her person and pushes or pulls monitors to display the capturing and crossing the physical boundaries between people. She has done a lot of different adventures in capturing people in motion. ­
A project that she has done that really stuck out to me Michelle’s concept with GoogleEarth in Spain and combining it with YouTube so that when a person uploads a video it will automatically show up on Google earth (link http://www.ubermatic.lftk.org/blog/?p=225). I really like this because it is an actual visual representation of the visual aspects of where YouTube video creators are. Her work influences my ability to think outside of just my relative location and exploring maybe a combination of media digital, video and studio. It gets me thinking to new possibilities.

A link to her projects
http://www.ubermatic.org/?page_id=3
Videos of her work
http://www.ubermatic.org/?page_id=20

Jenny Marketou was born in Athens, Greece in 1954. She is now living in New York. Her influence are traveling and human networking. She teaches at Cooper Union School of Art. Her art medium mainly consists of surveillance cameras. Her art deals with the Concept of identity, the usage of public space, and surveillance. Marketou's work is very international, because it deals with human networking and interaction.
One of her mostly well known pieces of art; which is shown on page 224 of Christiane Paul's book of Digital art, is the 99 Red Balloons game. 99 Red Balloons can be seen at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California. It was inspired by the 1980's pop song 99 Red Balloons which was sang by Nena. The concept of the game is to have people who are playing to get random people out in Cezar Chavez Plaza to join their team. The way that they covence people to join is where Marketou's concept of human interaction comes to play. There are nine teams, and each team has to redesign a set, where they will play a mini game, and have pedestrians join in. The "mini game" that the team decides to play consists of freeze tag, Simon says, red light green light, and others. While this game is taking place each team will have two red balloons that has a wi-fi cameras that will record the game. The recordings are then transmitted back to Tech Museum of Innovation and shown on 5 different flat screens. The game lasts for 45 minutes and at the end the players themselves will judge the footage to declare a winner. One other note is that while the game is taking place each person must stay with their teammates.
I feel that this is a genius way to show how human interaction works. I always thought that I learn more about a person when I play a simple game with them. Right now my art is inspired by my interaction with others, and my successes and struggles with one being or a community. I definitively see my work in Marketou's. Hopefully I will find some way to incorporate my media with hers.

Links:
http://www.jennymarketou.com/99redballoon/

http://eyebeam.org/people/jenny-marketou

http://www.jennymarketou.com/

To add to Benjamin Fry

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTO0Rvmc8DQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-JZvxEHxyg

Michelle Teran used Google Earth to find YouTube video's locations and display them on a bus tour. In her work she uses video scanners to show the radio waves of public and private cameras of live footage for the pubic to see on the monitors that she takes along with her. On the Bus tour of Murcia they stopped and met some of the Youtubers and saw some of their tricks being performed.

Tyler Nelson

Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel is an American digital artist, born in Buffalo, NY, in the year 1978. He specializes in film, video, photography, and prints, although he cites himself as a computer programmer, cyber sculptor, comedian, web designer, and artist. In 1998, Arcangel, along with Paul B. Davis, founded BEIGE, a programming ensemble with other fellow designer friends. His work can be found all over the world, from the Migros Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, to Galerie Ropac in Paris, to the Team Gallery in New York. Arcangel can be found in the Digital Art book in the Gaming section of Chapter 3. His style is what some people call “dirt style design”, a term coined by one of his students in a lecture. He disintegrates and decays digital canvases, kind of like html butchering. What Cory is most known for is his hacking and deterioration of Nintendo game cartridges and obsolete computer systems of the 1970s and 1980s. One of his most famous pieces is called “Super Mario Movie”, which is a complete hack of the original NES game. It’s a 15 minutes long movie of what happens when the game code for Super Mario Brothers is replaced by a movie program created by Arcangel. In the movie, Mario questions his own existence when his world becomes corrupted. Along with “Super Mario Movie” is “Super Mario Clouds”, in which everything from the game has been erased save for the clouds. His style has since progressed, from using modern digital tools only to tear them apart to the idea of using technology as it was intended but in a way that could be seen as “non-expert”.
As I’m stuck in the style of the 80s and 90s, and also love to destroy art to create art, this work really appeals to me. I love the way he butchers technology. New technology was created to simplify everyday tasks as well as to advance human life. Arcangel, however, intentionally goes astray, using technology to create chaotic glitches in the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UglrbH6DdJ4
http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made/SuperMarioMovie
http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made/SuperMarioClouds
http://www.beigerecords.com/cory/Things_I_Made/Photoshopx1098y1749x0y4160

Here is a link to a video about Usman Haque and his project Evoke. It is a really cool video, it is actually a building projection like we talked about in class a couple weeks ago. It is about five minutes but if you want to just watch a short interview followed by the projections, scroll forward to 2:53 and watch through 3:53. The beginning of the video gives a short introduction to the project. This project is really awesome. The lights that project are based on the noises around the building. Different noises make different projections. You should really check it out!

http://www.haque.co.uk/evoke.php
The video is near the bottom of the page.