For project 6, self portrait, I choose to create a mosaic image. I used 100 photos from my scrapbooks to create my self portrait. The central image is a high school graduation photo and within it are 99 images of family, friends and myself. The mosaic shows important moments throughout my life. I believe that every moment and every person impact and shape who you are and how you turn out.
Samuel Beckett – Not I
The Samuel Beckett piece Not I, is a disturbing and compelling mixture of simplicity and fragmented storytelling. Beckett sets the stage by placing a small screen projection in a big room. Beckett has the room very dark so that the viewer’s attention is almost always on the screen and highlights the dark quality of the story with the contrast of light and dark surroundings. The video projected is a fourteen minute black and white monologue of just a mouth talking. The monologue is delivered by a British sounding women that seems to be a fragmented and a times random worded story. The contrast of the woman’s black lips with her almost too bright white teeth, I think connects to and enhances the darkness of the room and the light of the projection. I found that with the brightness of the teeth and screen was hard to look at for long amounts of time and had to turn away or close my eyes. Having the sight of projection taken away and just relying on the audio to get the idea and intention of the story I found allowed and further enhanced the compelling and disturbing nature of the monologue. One major part of the disturbing quality of Beckett’s piece for me was the huge tongue; I keep getting so distracted by the tongue that it was the only thing I paid attention to and kept being creeped out by it.
The monologue from the woman starts so fragmented that it took me three listening’s through to get a grasp of what was going on. The volume starts very low then explodes and then your finally about to start and get a grasp of what is being said. The speed that she talks is very fast and was another contributor to why it took so long for me to get a grasp of what was going on. A denotation that I got from the video is that with most inner monologues that people try to just spit out without constructing them into sentences are fragmented and you can’t always articulate what you want to express without some sort of filter and sentence structure process. Your ideas and thoughts are all over the place and just speaking them straight never really comes out being able to understand it even though it might be understood inside your head.
Another denotation for me is the attention span of most people these days. The A.D.D that runs rampage through your brain with you going from one thing to another then back and forth; your attention is always moving and changing. So by having the monologue fragmented and having the sharp contrast between light and dark with a really big mouth Beckett’s mimicking a person’s attention span and also keeping your attention with the randomness and contrast in the room and video. The one denotation that I thought of that appealed the most to me was the idea of what you would hear in an asylum. The monologue to me sounded like you are hearing a person that is having a psychotic break. The randomness and dark and insane sounding quality of the voice and the string of words sounded like what I expected a crazy person to sound like based off of how television and books portray a crazy person or someone going crazy. “…No lover, torment, no sound of any kind, scream, words coming, can’t stop, tears, brain, no idea how she survived, beginning, what, how, no,…, punished for sins, not suffering” were a few key words that I always caught through each listen. The story is so fragmented that if you’re not paying enough attention to the words it just seems completely random.
Reading the artist statement on the way out cleared up a lot of confusion and reinforces some ideas that I had thought of about the video monologue. “This work features a pulsing fourteen-minute monologue spoken by a woman who is only visible as a mouth on a black background. The phrases she speaks, though obscure and fragmented, take the shape of a story: an older woman is trying to recount the memory of a traumatic event. This unexplained event seems to be responsible for her inability to emerge as a fully functioning person, as an “I” in the world.”[1] I found Samuel Beckett’s Not I, to be interesting, compelling, disturbing and a different way into looking at the human thought process that I had experienced. I think Beckett was successful in portraying and getting his point across in a different and memorable way.
[1] Beckett, Samuel. Not I, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver
http://www.mcadenver.org/index.php/exhibitions/Samuel_Beckett
What are the Major themes in digital art and why?
The major themes in digital art range from artificial life and intelligence to telepresence and telerobotics, the body and identity, databases and data visualization, gaming and narrative media, social networks, activism and others.
Artificial life has been addressed in many digital art projects, because it is basically digital information that characterizes most of digital technology. Many digital artists have explored the relationship between humans and machines. A-Volve by Austrian artist Christa Sommerer uses evolutionary rules for a virtual realm, with human creation and decision that has a key role in this world. A-Volve also touches on complexity of any life form and the human role in creating artificial life. Artworks that have artificial life also use algorithms for specific behavior instead of evolution. Rockby and Feingold are two artists that work with machine intelligence that reflect human communication and the meaning of subjectivity and objectivity the second which most always influence artworks. It’s no surprise that artificial life with regards to machines is a major theme in digital art considering how digital the world is and how dependent people are on technology.
Telepresence is a theme to digital art which is an old concept with it basically and simple pt as communication over a distance. The Internet can be counted as telepresence. Within the theme of telepresence, telematics, and telerobitcs the issue of privacy, voyeurism, and surveillance because of Web cameras uploading views to the Internet is explored. Telepresence and telerobotics also explore remote human communication and exchange.
The theme of body and identity is centered on how we classify ourselves in virtual and networked spaces. “Ubiquitous surveillance cameras track out movements; biometric technologies, such as electronic fingerprints, face-recognition software, and retina scanning, push into the market as a means of identification. Out virtual existence suggests the opposite of a unified, individual body – multiple selves inhabiting mediated realities.” (pg. 165)
Databases and data visualization at the core are about archives and structure which are key elements to digital culture. “One of the inherent characteristics of digital art is the tension between the strictly linear and hierarchical structure of instructions, data sets, databases and the Internet’s territory (as a multitude of severs with hierarchical directories) and the seemingly infinite possibilities for reproducing and reconfiguring the information contained within these structures.” (179)
Narrative media has become a large part of digital art because of the increased flexibility of digital technology. Hyperfiction is a type of narrative media that are cause and effect relationships based in a hypermedia environment that connects text, visuals and sounds. Gaming is another take on narratives that is a major theme of digital art.
Gaming played an important role in the ‘digital revolution’; early games explored many of the models that are now common of interactive digital art. A similarity that gaming and digital art projects have is the audience participation. Digital artists use and refer to existing games and game structures in multiple ways when creating their art.
The theme of activism in digital art is to turn technology on itself, like the projects They Rule and the The File Room that strived to transform the closed circle of power systems into an open network. Since people are constantly on the Internet it provides a great stage for sending information, staging interventions and projects. Within the activism category is hacktivism which is “a method of engaging that uses hacking – the breaking, reformatting, and re-engineering of data and system – as a creative rather than merely destructive strategy”. (209) Social networking has become an essential part of digital media because of the shift from the networking of date to the networking of people and the ease that people can participant.
I’m interested in exploring and showing a octopus’s ability to change color according to it’s environment. Through the use of time and placement (movement), I want to show the octopus’s ability.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/47368213@N05/
I was going for a old, archive look. I changed each picture to a sepia color. One of the themes of the project was how the perception and use of a Samurai changed. I included old Samurai prints, historical artifacts and armor photo’s along with new age movie, anime photo’s. I wanted to show the updated settings and duties of the 21th century Samurai with what the traditional stand point would be. I found that even though the placement and look had been changed at the core of most pictures the traditions, idea and respect of the Samurai was still present and fundemental.
The inclusion of the space picture was to add more mystery and to the feeling a history and longevity to the concept. I also wanted to give the project a little more interest and appeal then the standard sepia look so that the pictures wouldn’t just be briefly look over and not thought about. How people can change the look and representation of a Samurai I think is limitless and infinite like space.
