Second Life Final

The last project was a lot of fun for me. My biggest challenge was trying to get my face to look right on my body and make sure it looked like me. I uploaded at least five files for my face before I got it right. I think the final product ended up looking like me and I'm happy with it.

Me mean muggin' the camera.

Another challenge was making sure my height and body type looked right without me hovering over the ground. 

The outfit I put my avatar in was actually was I was wearing the day I made it, so I'd so it's a pretty accurate representation of the clothes I wear.

The alter ego I chose to do was a pimp, because what goes better with the username 420yolo4jezus than a pimp outfit? I even made a cane to accompany it! 

The extra object I created was No-Face, the creepy spirit from Spirited Away. I was watching the movie while trying to decide what I should make and I think the final product actually turned out pretty good!

I finally figured out how to get No-Face to hover behind me like it did in the movie, and I'm very pleased with the outcome.

Project 7: Great Art

I was really interested in doing something with glitch art but also wanted to use some video I got of the recent snow, so I did both! I chose to cut between glitching and the actual video so you could get a feel of both.

BYOB: Bring Your Own Beamer

I attended the opening of BYOB on December 4th and it was definitely not what I expected. The flyer for the exhibition was a random array of text -- nothing gave away a theme so I figured once I arrived I would be able to tell what the event was and what the artists were attempting to do. I was wrong. Upon arrival I walked past different records that I didn't understand what I was supposed to do with them until one of the artists came over and showed me. Once I was showed it was fun to go around and try out different pieces, but I didn't like the fact that I was confused until someone was gracious enough to explain what the pieces were. I was even more confused when I went into the rooms with the different projectors running. I thought the setup was interesting and it was a lot of fun to walk around the room and look the different projections, but I didn't understand the art and that took a lot of the fun out of it. There was no running theme to any of the projections. Nothing tied it all together. A lot of them actually looked like different clips from the same TV show. While it was fun to get to stand in the middle of the room and look around at all the different projections, not understanding what the artists were trying to do didn't let me fully appreciate the art. The flyer for the event said it was holiday themed, but I still can't tell if that was supposed to be the main focus of the art or just a holiday quirk for the event. There was a decorated Christmas tree and some of the projections were playing holiday themed things but it wasn't enough for me to feel like the actual theme of the even was about the holidays. I'm glad I went to this event because it was cool to see (and there was free food), but I wish there would have been more of an explanation so that us viewers understood what was going on.

Flight Exhibit

Upon entering “Flight” I was immediately unnerved by the sound that I thought was construction in the back of the gallery. While continuing to look at the pieces in the gallery the mechanical sound was constantly in the back of my mind. The mystery as well as the industrial quality of it affected how I interpreted everything. The pieces that were made out of paper and had a very natural quality to them didn’t seem so natural solely because of the sound I was hearing. The sound ended up being the Daedalus Fashioning His Wings, which is made of an air compressor. This sound affected me. Not necessarily in a positive or negative way, but it changed the whole demeanor of the gallery.

Another interesting way sound was used in “Flight” was in the video gaming/ digital media aspect. Sound most definitely made the outlines for Benjamin Poynter’s gaming outlines more tangible and aesthetic and made it stand out from the other exhibits.

Overall, I found “Flight” interesting because the wide variety of pieces that were displayed in it. There were videos, sculptures, mechanisms and photographs. The topics ranged everywhere from social to fiscal to environmental. My personal favorite part of the gallery was the Hide and Seek Collection by Bahahreh Shahrabi Fararhani because of its ambiguity. There is no outright theme by just looking at the collection of collages/paintings, but they do paint a narrative that has the ability to change from person to person. I think that “Flight” was successful in general because of its limited constraints in terms of the theme, and hopefully there will be more galleries done by the combination of these artists.

UNR Drawing in the Media Stream

Photo taken from drawinginthemediastream.net

“Layer it. It’s like the media stream. The news is always on top of each other.”

These words could not better represent what students came together with Tony Allard to do at UNR’s Drawing in the Media Stream on October 4^th. Students traced news headlines, photos and graphics onto a piece of cardboard that had to be over eight feet high and twelve feet long. Everything overlapped and there was no apparent order to where the news went. The process was chaotic, but after I heard Tony Allard tell a student they were layering different components over each other because that’s what the news does it made sense. The media stream is never-ending and there is constantly information being thrown at the consumers. It’s to the point where it’s hard to decipher what’s true and what makes sense. I don’t know if this was Tony Allard was aiming for, but it’s definitely how I interpreted it. I also appreciated that students and not just Allard himself did this art. Allard even offered me to join in and help trace some headlines onto the cardboard, but having come so late in the process I didn’t want to. At one point there were almost ten people working on the drawing. It was actually really interesting to watch as it all came together. The final product was complex, chaotic, and entirely representative of the media stream.

Manovich Discussion Questions

According to Manovich, all art is interactive, though not seemingly true because of the way we have misconstrued the meaning of "interactive." What do you think?

Why does it matter to make a distinction between new and old media? Will any of these distinctions matter in fifty years when we have new technology?

The Digital Divide

"Does work premised on a dialogic, prosumer model, seeking real-world impact need to assume representation or an object form in order to be recognized as art?" -- Lev Manovich

I personally don't think so. If art is a person's way of interacting with the world then art is inherently a method of communication -- whether it be dialogic or not. Art that seeks to represent and impact should be more valued, not less. What do you think?

This reading says a side effect of the age of technology is the way we research art is easier than ever before. Because of this, many artists are intentionally approaching their research in a more laborious way and taking a second glance at overlooked and marginalized artists of the past. While I think this is interesting I also think it's a bit overrate when there are artists, even now, who have been overlooked and marginalized. This reading even calls attention to a group of them -- the modern digital artist.