Final Project

For my final project that was concentrating on appropriation, I decided to do something very simple and recognizable. I took 90's cartoon characters and graphically reduced them in illustrator and then applied an Andy Warhol pop-art style to them. I think the Andy Warhol style is very recognizable and as are the cartoon characters I used. By appropriating both the style and the subject, I gave the viewer 2 different levels to connect on. I think my piece is within fair use rights because I'm not claiming to have illustrated the characters as my own, and I am not stating that my pop-art style is something that I came up with. I am giving credit to the original creators. My style of pop art is obviously not identical to that of Warhol's but it is highly suggestive of it.

girl talk

The Girl Talk movie was very interesting. I thuroughly enjoyed watching it and would definitely recommend it to my friends. I learned so much about how copyright and fair-use laws are used/violated. I learned that the Girl Talk DJ is a biologist as a day job and is only a DJ for pleasure purposes. I think the fact that anybody would try to sue him for his music is ridiculous. He's not making money off of his shows and his albums are free to download. The artists that are used in his pieces should be flattered that their songs are being used to create such enjoyment. And not to mention, a lot of the artists he uses are getting great exposure without having to pay for it! Overall the movie made me more conscious as to what is far-use/appropriation and what is STEALING!

BROADCAST recap

This project was extremely interesting to take on. From the beginning the research and development was very informational and exposed many projects I was not aware of. First of all I started by researching Krisztof W. He used very large projections on the side of public spaces to raise social awareness. His tactics were often guerrilla-like and only lasted a short period of time. This tactic added to the intensity of the issues that he was trying to expose.

After seeing all the different broadcast artists and their works, I came up with the idea to use Facebook for my project. Initially I was going to just post a graphic asking questions to provoke discourse among my facebook friends, but after some in-class revising I decided on a different approach. I decided to create an all new facebook for myself. I update it on a daily basis (usually at night) and posted a picture regardless of how I looked at the time of the status update. I would like to continue this approach to “facebooking” for an extended period of time.

I think this project is great example of how facebook can be used to truly portray someone versus how facebook is typically used to portray someone in a certain light. Since facebook is typically used to glamorize one’s life my approach showed a “no bells or whistles” approach to facebook. Again I would like to continue my project for a while and see how a collective of these posts impacts my facebooking experience. I may also delete my normal facebook account and try just using my objective facebook for a week and add all of my regular friends.

505 poster

Mirrors

Facebook is a mirror. Looking at your Facebook as a reflection of yourself can display an idealized version of how you see yourself. I think most people portray a glamorized version of themselves for the world to see. They skew themselves in a way that makes them more desire-able. Human nature, maybe? Or maybe it's a consequence of the obsession with celebrities and commercialized beauty. Whether a person is glamorizing themselves in the form of their physical appearance, or glamorizing the experiences of their life, I think it's safe to say that Facebook is the glittery soap box of the social media world.

For my project I am going to make a Facebook account that documents my life from an objective point of view rather than a subjective one. I will take and post a daily picture of myself. Whether I have makeup on or not.. whether I have the flu or not... whether I'm happy or not. It will document my life in a factual way rather than a glamorized way. My statues will not be brags about my daily life accomplishments or my bitches and rants, but rather factual statements about what I did that day.

I think it will be interesting to compare my "normal" Facebook (where my life is glamorized and filtered to say only what I want to expose) to my "actual" Facebook that displays my mundane daily activities.

Nate Larson

http://www.natelarson.com

GEOLOCATION PROJECT
"Twitter has allowed us to become intimately involved in strangers’ lives as we follow their tweets through daily errands and thoughts; exploring the lives of others 140 characters at a time.
The GEOLOCATION project follows random tweets and by using Geotag information embedded in these tweets, travel to the GPS coordinates and take a photograph of the site of the update. By photographing the site with its accompanying tweet, the project creates a real life situation and location for these usually anonymous posts. The GEOLOCATION project focuses on the cultural understanding of distance as perceived in modern life and grounded in network culture." -http://cac.wildapricot.org/events?eventId=258757&EventViewMode=EventDetails

Photo from Geolocation Project via Twitter

“Mapping the Data Stream” features three recent series of technologically enabled photographs by Larson. The newest series, “History Lessons,” is a photographic exploration of significant historic sites, coupled with references and messages to the site gathered from online social networks.
The second series, “Geolocation,” monitors public Twitter tweets and the associated Geotag information. Upon viewing a particularly compelling, poetic or personal Twitter update, Larson and his colleague Marni Shindelman traveled to the GPS coordinates and made a photograph to mark the location of the update in the real world and paired the image with the originating text.
The third series documents recent site-specific GPS drawings made by Larson and Shindelman and uses invisible technological threads to create virtual drawings and writings in urban landscapes."
-http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/n/2010/09/01/michael-sherwin-nate-larson-photography-exhibitions-open-at-mesaros-galleries

sketch of Dick Cheney from GPS drawings project

This is the first image I posted on my Facebook to provoke responses:

Project Proposal

Being an artist I think it is extremely interesting to receive other peoples feed back on issues. Knowing what other people think about a piece of art is very fulfilling to me. I think that other people’s interpretations of something can say a lot about their past and their future. People’s personalities can come through in what they have to say about art. 

For my project I plan on creating 2 different images in illustrator that say something that provokes discourse. I will post the images on facebook and see if they create any sort of conversation among my facebook friends. I will not participate in the comversation, but rather see what just putting a message out there can stir up. 

Krzysztof Wodiczko

NAME: Krzysztof Wodiczko

DOB: April 16, 1943

BORN WHERE: Warsaw, Poland

WHERE ART PRACTICED: New York, New York

EDUCATION: Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw

MESSAGE: using the built environment to create a discourse among the community - "...imperative for passersby to stop, reflect, and perhaps even change their thinking"

VEHICLE: Projections on buildings

"Cuantos"

Regan's hand in Pledge of Alligence
Manhattan AT&T Building

Lenin as Polish Shopper

A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko
(JSTOR article)

Homeless Vehicle Project
(JSTOR article)

LESSONS LEARNED

The process of making the games in class, shined light onto many important lessons.

First of all, I realized that it is very important to do research on a topic before diving into it. When the class was first assigned the task of coming up with an art-game, I was VERY intimidated. But after researching different artistic games, it became more clear as to what we were expected to create. After researching Exquisite Corpse, it was easy to come up with “spin-offs” or ways to manipulate the game to make it different (yet fit the requirements assigned to the game).

 I also learned that it is important to take things one step at a time and to have faith that by going through certain steps, you will achieve your goal. As I stated before, it was a very intimidating topic to brainstorm on, but after following the steps that Leslie had assigned us we came to our achieved goal. Each of us ended up coming up with a game of our own and then we also came up with combinations of our games with other classmates. I think we were all surprised to see how many different variations of art-games we had come up with since the beginning of the assignment.

 I think it was also very important to have our teacher involved every step of the way. Instead of like most teachers- where they assign a project and then receive the students end results a week or so later, Leslie was just as involved and dedicated to the assignment as we were. She felt more like a guide than a teacher and she invested a great amount of time into helping create our games. By dedicating her time I feel she kept the moral of the group and didn’t allow us to get overwhelmed with the projects.

         Overall I think the process of making the game was a great oversight on how to involve steps and processes in making a successful project.  I feel our end outcome wasn’t so much about the game itself that we created, but about how we came to achieve that goal. 

Broadcast Artists

Nam June Paik
   -The Year Video Art was Born



- ACTIVIST TELEVISION

- ARTISTS HOUSE WEBCAST

9-19-2011

The process of making this game was a lot like making a piece of art. The processes involved were very similar. When making a piece of art, you first determine what it is you want to make and/or what it is you're trying to say. You then decide what steps to take in order to achieve the desired outcome. If you wanted to make an art piece about Global Warming, you would first decide your medium. For example purposes we'll say we decide to make a video piece about Global Warming. You then have to decide what props, persons, images, and audio you want to use. Then you decide in what sequence(s) and combinations the elements work best together in order to achieve the message you're trying to send. For the game we created, we first decided that we wanted to make a game and then we decided that the elements of it were that it had to be played on campus and that it had to use our cell phones. Then individually we came up with ideas that involved the elements of the campus and cell phones. We also did research about artistic games that helped us in our process of coming up with our own game, and in art pieces you can also do research about the mediums you use or the topics your making the piece about. Overall I see extreme similarities to the steps involved in making our class game and making a piece of art.

Kelsey & Amanda's GameDiscussion

To combine our two games- Oblique Strategies and Exquisite Corpse:

• Persons of 3+ belong to an agreed "community" in which if one person has a dilemma they MASS TEXT the others in the community the CODE 4357 (HELP spelled out in numerals). The people who receive this CODE then send back a random Oblique Strategy, not knowing what the person's dilemma is.  Instead of sending back a written oblique strategy, the people who receive the HELP CODE 4357, have to send back a picture of something that they find inspiring. This picture must be a photo taken by their camera phone and can contain words, but cannot contain explanations. It is the person with the dilemma's job to interpret the photo(s) received as an Oblique Strategy.

Exquisite Corpse

DESCRIPTION
"Among Surrealist techniques exploiting the mystique of accident was a kind of collective collage of words or images called the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). Based on an old parlor game, it was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution."  
-http://www.exquisitecorpse.com/definition/About.html,  "Dada & Surrealist Art," by William S. Rubin

• These poetic fragments were felt to reveal the "unconscious reality in the personality of the group"
• Example: "The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine" (how the game got its name)
• Later adapted to use drawings, instead of just words

DATES

• 1918-1930's
• Surrealism still lives on today
• Many examples of "Exquisite Corpse" style works being made today
• movies, novels, music

PARTICIPANTS

Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, Benjamin Péret, Pierre Reverdy, and André Breton. Other participants probably included Max Morise,Joan Miró, Man Ray, Simone Collinet, Tristan Tzara, Georges Hugnet, René Char, Paul and Nusch Éluard.

EXAMPLES

Ray, Tanguy, Miro, Morise; 1927.

Hugo, Breton, Knutson, Tzara; 1933.

Hugo, Breton, Eluard (Paul & Nush); 1934.

Ray, Tanguy, Miro, Morise; 1928.

HOW TO APPLY

• By using camera phone, one person could take a picture and send it to a person in a completely different location and then that person has to take a picture that somehow connects to the picture sent to them. 
• Shapes have to create a fluid movement, but do not necessarily have to make sense.

Example:

First Blog

This is just a testing post  to see how the concept of this blog works

This is a painting I did 2 years ago