Digital Arts by Christiane Paul - Ch. 3

Digital arts presented the artists not only the new mediums to work with, but also more themes for them to work on. These new themes deal with artificial life and intelligence; telepresence and telerobotics; database aesthetics, mapping, and data visualization; net activism and tactical media; and gaming and narrative hypermedia environments.

Artificial life and intelligence has been an area of research and developments of scientists. To artists, the theme is used to depict their view on human evolution. In Karl Sim’s installations of Genetic images and Galapagos, he established an explicit link between aesthetics and evolution. Also, Christa Sommerer touched on the idea, survival of the fittest with his work, A-Volve.

The concept of telepresence in connected to any form of telecommunication. Telecommunication art existed even before the digital arts have formed. The artists used devices such as fax, phone, and satellite TV. However, the new digital media have replaced the whole theme of telecommunication. The advance in the technology allowed people to be present in multiple locations at the same time, and the artists bring this possibility to their arts.

The arts the deal with gaming is what I am really interested in. The video game has been a big part of development in digital technologies and its industry is even bigger than the movie industry. The artists use the factors of Video game’s success to convey their messages: navigation of simulation to linked narratives, the creation of 3D worlds, and multi-user environments. Some games are known for its plot, some for its visuals and graphics, and some for its gameplays. The artists create whole new game or distort already-existing games to accomplish their goals.

Montage II - Redo

Digital Art by Christiane Paul - Ch. 2

One of the advantages of using digital technologies would be its interaction with the viewers and tendency to respond to every real-time data flow. In digital arts, interactivity takes different forms: navigating, assembling, or contributing to an artwork physically. The possibility of this complex interactivity can be achieved by the technologies’ dynamics. Whenever, the viewer or user clicks something or triggers one specific response, the digital medium can quickly transmit data to the viewers or save changes made by the viewers to the works.

There are many forms of digital arts: movie, video, audio, music, images, websites, and so on. Depending on the forms artists choose, the installation takes different forms. It can be large-scale video installations with multiple projectors or just an Internet Browser. The digital art installations are in and of themselves broad field and come in myriad forms. The installation, alone, change the meanings and the message the artists were trying to depict though their works. For example, the concept of the digital moving images and ‘digital cinema’ have redefined the very identity of cinema. The digital technologies were able to do so because they offer multiple possibilities for an enhanced cinematic representation in installations.

Also, interactivity played crucial role for development in digital cinema arts. Using light in their projection, the artists are now able to allow viewers to interact with even films/videos. The digital arts had been further developed through the advent of World Wide Web. A new genre, Internet Art, allowed the artists to create new forms of expression. Other genre of digital arts is software arts which refers to projects (programs) that have been written by artists from the scratch and run locally on a computer.

Digital Art by Christiane Paul - Ch. 1

The use of digital technologies in almost every aspect of daily life has been increasing due to its rapid development. The same situation is occurring to artists’ choice of tools. The artists have been working in different forms of media such as painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, music, and video. Now, the use of digital technologies allows the artists to expand their tools of creation and aspects of their arts. They can rely on the new technology which reflects on its language and aesthetics, or they can combine analogue and digital works to form a new meaning.

The new technologies are used to produce both printed images and three-dimensional sculptures. For making images, the artists can create entire paintings with these new technologies or use photographs or existing images and change them to create whole new pieces. Such includes Charles Cohen’s 12b and Andie 04 which the class went over for the first project, Absence/Presence. Some sculptors make use of the new technologies both in the initial design process and in the output of the physical objects, others create sculptures that exist only exclusively in the virtual realm and can take the form of a CAD model or digital animation.

What If We Played A War And Nobody Won?: Critical Approaches to War in Videogame Art

'What If We Played A War And Nobody Won?: Critical Approaches to War in Videogame Art' is an online exhibition that deals with the concept of war in today's videogames. The exhibition contains six online games that temper with the rules and styles of standardized games. Such games include 'Play the News. Solve the Puzzle,' which makes player to solve conflict between Israel and Palestine without using violence.

The vast majority of the videogames have glorified and celebrated war and violence. If you look at the recent best-selling videogames, they all deal with wars and violence: Halo 3, God of War II, Grand Theft Auto IV, etc. One project in this exihibition shows the list of the U.S soldiers died in Iraq and the exact time. I like the project and its concept because it engages the players the true natures of war, and how it is distorted through the videogames.

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Furtherfield Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=227

What If We Played A War And Nobody Won?: Critical Approaches to War in Videogame Art
http://jschumanmc75.nexo.com/whatifweplayedawar

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Through this project I wanted to criticize the diet pill companies. They always have before and after photos of people who took their pills and show off how successful their pills can be. Everyone in the before pictures look depressed and but in after pictures they look happy. To me, it seems like they threw away their individualities to become somebody else they had seen on TV's. I replaced their after pictures with one model and added 'transformation' in bold letter on the ad because that's what people proudly refered this pill as.

Personal World Map - Roxana Torre

Roxana Torre's "Personal World Map" is an interactive world map that is distorted depending on the user's time and budget limiation for his/her travel plan. The project starts with world wide map, and the viewer will be given multiple cities s/he starts with. From the center city, user will input his/her time and budget (in euro) for the trip and the map will be distorted to show the users possible destinations for their trips. Rather than distorting map geographically, she chose to do it by money or travel time distances.

I think the message she was trying to convey throught this project is the difference in how today's people think about traveling. Due to the emergence of the low cost flight industry and online ticketing, people are allowed to make last minute decision on where they are going to go. Before this, people used to think the destination before money and time, but now they started to think of going to place 'anywhere except where they are now.' I think this is a great project depicting the change in how people perceive things due to the advance in techonology.

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Furtherfield Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=162

Personal World Map
http://www.personalworldmap.org/

Tobecontinued - Tobecontinued

Tobecontinued is a group project that is still in progress. The project is open to everyone with myspace accounts. They can upload their works in any forms such as videos, animations, photos, or paintings and inspire other artists. The project is started by a group of students in the Fine Arts Academy of Rome. The project is based on open art-work where artists from all over the world can exchange their ideas.

I visited the project's myspace and saw a lot of works that intrigued me. It seems that almost everyone at the site are students and I was amazed to see such works.I really liked the idea of professional artists and soon-to-be ones sharing their ideas and interacting to one another.

One of the video, 'Cut & Paste' by Anne Cécile Le Borgne and Caroline Carliez were the most memorable. They did not leave a note explaining the message they were trying to convey. In my opinion, they were trying to criticize 'cut and paste' function of the computer and its abuse. The funtcion allows people to plagirize the works of other people and also kind of shows one of the bad side of advanced technologies.

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Furtherfield Reviews
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=219

Tobecontinued
http://www.myspace.com/tobecontinuedigitalart

The Sheep Market - Aaron Koblin

‘The Sheep Market’ by Aaron Koblin is basically a series of ten thousands images of sheep drawn by online workers of AMT (Amazon Mechanical Turks). The visitors can view each sheep and buy them on stickers or have them fill their field of vision as part of gallery installation.

In my opinion, the project represents the bad side of capitalist society. What AMT workers do is to answer Amazon customer’s question rather than the machines answering them. They get paid a few cents for each answer and Koblin asked them to draw sheep facing left. Sheep is often used as a symbol of the pastoral in art. Pastoral illustrates the values of the sophisticated by the unsophisticated and reinforces the universal rightness of their audience's values and an immanent apologia for wealth, power and inequality. The project portrays the same thing and also foreshadows the grim future of effective labour.

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The Furtherfield Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=220

The Sheep Market
http://www.thesheepmarket.com/

Montage I

I wanted to criticize MTV and kids from its famous show, 'Super Sweet Sixteen.' They are spoiled, have big attitude, and whine about everything. They do not even know what they are talking about. One girl from the show said Paris Hilton is her role model. Everyone from the show seems to worship Paris Hilton. I put her face on the Statue of Liberty and the kids from the show around her to depict it. Above them are people chanting for communist revolution. These kids are getting Mercedes-Benz, BMWs for their presents but can't even pass the writing part of permit exam. This seems unfair to me because their parents are rich, it doesn't give them rights to spend all that money to waste rather than go to charity or some other good use.

Montage II

My first intension was to contrast between people with aneraxia and African orphans dying from starvation. Mindset of the people with aneraxia wanted to have better figure and causes them to have such issues. They waste food everyday. Their one meal could be a week worth food for the orphans. This piece could be reinterpreted as people who do not appreciate what they have and always want better things while there are people who are desperate to get a little things.

Elephants Dream - The Blender Foundation

Blender project announced their production of short animated film, Elephant Dream, in 2005 and the film is released on DVD and Bit Torrent Download in 2006. Rather than following Disney's Pixar fantasy, Blender Project used European social-realist surrealist fantasy for film's visual. Its modeling, texture, set design, lighting source, and camera works make this film a piece of perfect art work. However, the characters' movement is somewhat awkward and makes it more like in-game animation.

The most significant thing about this project is the license which the film is released under: BSD-Style Creative Commons "attribution only" BY license. This allows the viewers who are not comfortable with character animations to use source files for the movie and improve animation using their skills.

The story sounds confusing and lame. However, the viewers' interaction with the movie seems awesome. I am interested in the graphic animations and if I get the chance I would like to watch the movie and tweak it a little bit to see how much better I can make this film.


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Furtherfiled Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=197

Elephan Dream
http://orange.blender.org/

Super Sweet Sixteen and Unicef

I made this project to show how spolied the children from the show are. While there are people dying from hunger on the other side of the earth, these brats always ask for better things. They could have done some decent deeds by donating half the money they spent on the party.

The Lost Biology of Silent Hill by ]]MEZ[[

Silent Hill is a title of a famous game with four sequels (total of five versions). It is looking to expand its audience range by making a movie version of it. The storyline of the game is basically solving multiple puzzles in order to escape from an army of zombies. Its various game elements such as sound and visual effects produce introspective thrill-connection.

The movie version, rather than emphasizing on the universal theme of Hollywood, plays out through game projections and is incrementally driven by a mixture of anticipatory/reactive adrenalin spike-&-pump. They do so by making film characters one of NPCs of the game which means no character development and just running away from the monsters.

The most important factor of the movie is the rewritten conception of ordered biology. The writers flip the gender roles of the characters. The woman protagonist, Rose, takes the role of hero, which was taken by male characters in game versions, and saves her daughter. However, Chris, Rose’s husband, falls asleep while the rest of his family is going through tough journey.

I, a maniac gamer, do not think of flipped gender roles. The movie is bad and ruins the reputation that the game version had created. Several games with zombies in it have turned into movies such as Resident Evil and House of the Dead. No matter how important the messages inside the movies are important, they were awful. The movie producers should leave games alone and create their own story. Two cents from a crazy gamer…

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Furtherfield Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=203

Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5mT5LhbRJw&mode=related&search=

Oil Standard by Michael Mandiberg

Oil Standard is a Firefox plug-in developed by Michael Mandiberg. The program replaces dollars shown on the web browser with its equivalent price in barrels of oil. Not only that, the project retrieves any oil-related news from across the Internet. It allows the prices to rise and fall in real-time, depending on the fluctuation of the commodities exchange.

This project could be interpreted in many ways. One possible way is the educational purpose because of its technological resources while another is making a social and political comment. Using oil as his subject, Mandiberg allows its viewers to link the ongoing issues of money, war, pollution, and so on.

I never got a chance to try it out, but I think it is very interesting project. Since the artist did not express his purpose of making this project, I do not know what this project is about. The fact the artist use oil as his subject makes it interesting, but the artist letting the viewers to set their own interpretation makes it more enjoyable. My takes on the project is that the rising price of oil since War on terror and Katrina and the Bush Administration's fault for not taking care of it.

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Furtherfield Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=183

Oil Standard
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=183

Kill Yourself - Rebecca Cannon

Game art is new ganre that is following footsteps of the previous media arts such as video art, net art, sonic art, or telecomuncation art. However, most do not consider as art. In my opinion, game should be considered as art because of the fact art reflect the society it was created in. The game, nowadays, is a big part of the society.

Rebecca Cannon, with help of Karen Jenkins, developed the game with Java for mobile phones. This game is dedicated to all the people who are bored to death. Since playing mobile game means desperate attempt to end one's boredom, the artist's main theme and purpose could easily be understandable. The game requires the player to choose a character, and s/he will kill the same looking character over and over. The game's difficulty is set to increase as the player's self-hatred level increases.

I was really surprised to see game arts. Since I spend most of my time on playing video games, I can really relate to these pieces. The major figures for this kind of ganre are Cory Arcangel, Mary Flanagan, and Anne Marie Schleiner. I will study them and follow their project fron now on. I am hoping to get a chance to make game art just like this one.

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Furtherfield Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=187
Kill Yourself
http://www.selectparks.net/rebecca/?2005:KillYourself

The Possible Ties Between Illness and Success - Carlo Zanni

This work of art is a movie with the quality of major motion picture that is only shown in the web. I couldn’t watch it personally because it seems a Login ID and Password are needed to view the project. However, the movie is described in the review at Furtherfiled.org. A couple of man and woman are in the same bed. A man is covered with stains on his body is scared for his stains getting bigger. A woman is trying to cheer him up and goes to sleep.

This movie can only be shown on the web because of the viewers’ participations. They won’t know it, but their access information such as date, time, and IP addresses will be sent to Google Analytics. Then, the data will be sent to the server, hosting the film, and the stains on the body will be filled with those information. So, when you watch the movie twice, the latter time won’t be same as the first time you watched it.

The stains that are filled with viewers’ data perform a determinant role in the narration. More stains on the body means critical illness. However, as more people come to watch the film, the stains will contain more information and get slightly bigger. More visitors would mean the success of this film, yet the condition of the man would be worse. This symbolizes the interaction of the artist and the viewers (which is too deep for me to fully comprehend)

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Furtherfield Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=218

The Destabilisation of perception - Andy Stringer

This 'painting' is from Andy Stringer's exhibition, 'The Destabilisation Of Perception.' His medium was Photoshop on Mac with a Wacom tablet and a little bit of Illustrator and Painter. Many conservative artists do not accept his paintings and just call them images because they were created digitally. They believe medium for paintins should be oil, acrylic, alkyd and so on. However, as society developed over time so did the technologies. The medium used for painting in 13th century and ones used for painting in today are totally different but they still call them paintings. Artists used techonolgy they had at their time period to create arts. Charcoal for caveman, Oil for Renaissance man, and Computer for Today's man.

Because his painting was done in computer, that doesn't mean Andy Stringer's paintings are any different than the ones done in brushes. He only had a few advantages such as 'undo' actions. His work is mainly formed by the mutiple lines and filling in the space between those lines. His work visually engages the viewers with the complex forms and their relationship to each other. In the review, it says that the composition of his paintings in the gallery makes them a lot more interesting.


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Review on furtherfiled.org
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=207

Andy Stringer: The Destabilisation of perception
http://www.thespace4.org/gal-current.html

Absence/Presence

Today's journalism is mostly based on celebrities and their lives while politics, science, and medical are the ones they should focus on. If one looks at cover pages of best selling magazines, s/he would most likely to see pictures of celebrities and headlines such as 'someone & someone broke up,' 'how thin she is,' 'new looks of somebody in Oscar,' and so on. Also the media trying to brainwash people with what they call 'perfect body figure and looks' put numbers of celebrities on the cover page. I wanted to comment on these by replacing the figures with black silhouette and erasing their names on the cover pages.

Erasure/Replacement

International adoption has been an issue for a short time since Jolie's and Madonna's adoptions. It's a good thing they are trying to help other countries, but they could have adopted the ones in the U.S. There are orphans in the U.S., too. It takes a lot of time and money to adopt one baby from other country. Those are the points I tried to make by repacing Jolie's adopted babies with money and orphans in the U.S. There were a lot of talks on Madonna's baby. I do not know what her intention was on adopting a baby but mostly from the fame she would get, I believe. I replaced her baby with paparazzis for that.

'You are not here' is a project developed by a group of people to allow internet users to be in two different places at one time. This project starts with printing two maps. The users will be downloading two maps, one of New York City and another of Baghdad. The map of New York City is reversed and the map of Baghdad will contain several signs. They are to be printed in one page and by calling Tourist Hotline the users will be given audio-guided tours of Baghdad through the streets of New York City. The signs of Baghdad map mean must-see monuments.

The strength of this project lies in direct connection between two cities which everyone knows that can’t be related in a good way because of the 9/11 incident. Not only does this project create a big meta-city by overlapping two cities, it also tries to engage in political issue on collision between two different worlds. Their next project will be on streets between P’yongyang of North Korea and Seoul of South Korea. Since I am from that country, I can’t wait to see what they have done with it and what they are trying to say through the project.


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Review of 'You are not here' in Furtherfield Review
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=216

'You are not here' Project
http://www.youarenothere.org/

Pileus

Pileus is basically an umbrella with an ability to surf the internet. The 10 Laboratories of KMD led by Sho Hashimoto and Takashi Matsumoto in Japan developed it. The team is working on Ubiquitous Content project which expands the styles of media we have right now. Today’s Media contains movies, video games, animations etc. and all these come in ‘box’ containers. What this project is trying to do is changing the container. In this case, the container is an umbrella.

This umbrella has a special device attached to its handle. Not only the user can log on to internet, s/he can take pictures and videos. Recently, they built a new one with GPS system, allowing the user to find his/her way through rainy days. They are using Web 2.0 and technological vista to combine handy hardware and internet.

These days, cell phones are becoming smaller and smaller everyday yet more functions are added. However, this team is looking for other mobile objects to provide web services. Their project, including other mobile objects they are working on, will significantly improve our daily lives. Smaller cell phones with multiple abilities attached have huge impact on our lives and this will do he same. I read the article five times but I still don't get how they were able to complete this project, though.


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Pileus http://www.pileus.net/
Interview wih Takashi Matsumoto http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/003743.html#more

F.Wish - Wishing Tree

For my first blog entry, I looked into F.Wish by Folly and Boredom Research. This work is based on Asian tradition of people hanging notes filled with their wishes on trees that are near temples or shrines. The developers began their work from researching the history of the wishing trees, mainly on Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees of Hong Kong. They worked with softwares called Processing and Director to create this online project.

The background color and the lines which form the branches of the tree reminded me of the Chinese calligraphy. The oranges with pink strings and notes are attached to the branches. In Hong Kong, people write their wishes on the notes which are attached to the oranges and hang them over the branches. If you click and drag the pink notes, people’s wish will be shown. The letters appear from the orange and form the original wish on the gridlines on the bottom. You can leave your wishes by typing while the gridline is empty. The letters will appear from the bottom. When done, you click it so it changes into the orange with a pink note. Along with that, the arrow will appear and you have to aim for the tree nodes. If you threw you wish well and it hangs over the tree people will be able to see your wish. If not, you have to try again.

I liked this work because I could really relate to this artwork due to my Asian origin. I read the review from Furtherfield Review and had couple of questions about the physics and libraries mentioned by the developers. They mentioned a few such as traer.physics, and Michael Chang’s Vector Library. I followed the links to see what they are but I got more confused. I am still not sure but it sounded like rather than drawing the whole scene, they used programming code to get it done. They could have used other softwares such as Flash. Overall, I liked the idea of bringing wishing tree online and how it looks. Can't wait to learn how these are made and working.


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Furtherfield Review on F.Wish
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From=Index&review_id=202
F.Wish/Folly
http://www.folly.co.uk/wish

just testing my blog