Rdeveux’s Weblog

Ok, so I didn’t have a CLUE on how to use Final Cut Pro, so my orginal idea went down the drain. Originally, I was going to film myself painting and the painting, combined with a few other things fades into a video of a real girl. But like I said…don’t know how to use the program:) So I went to imovie and scrapped the original plan, instead deciding to play with candles:)

All in all, this MIGHT have taken an hour and a half or so…I filmed for about 10 to 20 minutes in my guest bathroom on the floor with the lights off. Then I trimmed the video and added some sound effects that I had found/created (I had already played around with garage band, so I knew what sounds I wanted). I literally hit random keys while creating it, then aligned the video with the movie. Seriously, it was not very complicated…all it involved was trimming.

So anyway…here it is! ( on youtube under candle project) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9I2E-RNuSM

Artificial Life
Some people, such as Norbert Weiner, believe that the guiding principle behind life and organization in information. He believed that communication, control, and feedback are the  essentials.  He and others like Richard Dawkins would consider the social and cultural evolution of the species to happen through information. The theories presented by these men are helping shape AI-related art. Works such as Galapagos by Karl Sims or A-Volve by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau demonstrate this idea. Both are evolution-themed pieces of art that require the intelligence and information of the viewing to work. For example, A-Volve is a touch screen made to look like water. When the viewer makes a shape on the screen, it comes to life and now has to survive, but it will only be able to do so if it was made properly and is protected.
http://www.interface.ufg.ac.at/christa-laurent/WORKS/MOVIES/A-Volve.mpg
Other programs that are similar in concept include Life Spacies by Sommerer and Mignonneau and Tierra by Thomas Ray, although Ray’s set-up is different. His looks more like pixels and code than life forms we are familiar with. Some 3-D versions include Emergence by Rebecca Allen which is a 3-D environment that explores social behaviors as well as Autopoeisis by Kenneth Rinaldo.

Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Agents
Alan Turing was an early theoretician on AIs (artificial intelligence). A few current manifestations of them are the AIs Eliza and A

LICE (Artificial Linguistic Computer Entity). ALICE was created by Richard Wallace and works from Artifical Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) which enables her to give semi-intelligent responses. A few art pieces that include this idea are

If/Then by Kenneth Fiengold and n-Cha(n)t by David Rokeby.

Telepresence, Telematics, and Telerobotics

Tele in Greek means far off or distant. Considering this, anything that uses a telegraph or telephone and is art-related is a precusor for this subject. Artists use telerobotics in such things as Mori (Ken Goldberg) and Rara Avis by Eduardo Kac which is a program that enables you to see through the eyes of a mechanical parrot

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Body and Identity

Body and Identitiy help explain ourselves in digital art today. Currently “privacy” is a thing of the past and our identity is being recorded onto machines through fingerprinting and the like. Some artists are using this idea to “extend” their own body like Stelarc in Exoskeleton. This piece creates six legs for the artist. Another piece, called Liquid Views by Monika Fleischmann, Wolfgang Strauss, and Christian A. Bohn digitally creates the viewer’s face in a reflection, as if in a pool.

Databases, Data Visualization, and Mapping

These days, data is organized into a structure…a “map” of sorts. Data is something that cannot be grasped or “held.” In this sense, it is somewhat abstract. But even though the idea of “information space” is directly applied to the internet, it is a term that applies to anything containing information, including libraries and the like. This could be called “information architecture.” Examples of artists who have used this in their artwork includes Apartment by Martin Wattenberg and Marek Walczak. In this, users type in data (words) and rooms appear on the screen to reflect the data. Another example is Stock Market Skirt by Nancy Paterson which uses live data from the stock market to affect the shape of the skirt.

Beyond the Book: Text and Narrative Environments

Another valuable aspect of the internet relates itself to writing. Some say that text is “performed” by the reader, since it requires a reader to make it work. Hypermedia applications are taking this idea and trying to mimic the brain in its associative nature. One example is Beyond Pages by Masaki Fujihata who created a program of images projected onto a table that the user can manipulate to an extent. One other example is Stream of Consciousness/Interactive Poetic Garden by Small and White in which words are projected onto a stream.

Gaming

The SIMS are a classic example of gaming interactive environments.

Tactical Media, Activism, and Hacktivism

Internet was supposed to be for everyone, but like everything, media reflects our values and corporations quickly took over while e-commerce is invading. Some people use their art in an activist manner, trying to reflect this problem. One person who used this is Harwood who created a piece called Uncomfortable Proximity which uses the Tate Museum as it retells British History.

Technologies of the Future

Sky Ear by Usman Haque is a cloud of helium balloons with infra-red sensors and LED lights; electromagnetic waves, like weather or cell phones, trigger sensors that change the colors of the balloons.

Mobile and Locative Media

Social Networking

The Next Generation of Virtual Worlds

I liked this project:)

Honestly, it freaked me out when we started and Matt can tell you that I wouldn’t stop asking if I was doing it right. Overall though, it was fun after getting the hang of it.

I didn’t really have a direction so I started my posting artwork I actually created in the site. Once I found out this project involved links (and once I did that research on embedding youtube videos), I started to do both…put in a lot of videos and make them into links. A part of me could not seem to get away from the organizational side of websites, and I could not master the art of horizontal scroll no matter what I did. Because of this, I just kept adding on web pages with their own little categories (and create a lot of links).

Here is the link to the site itself…

http://clem.mscd.edu/~rdeveux

This process is very simple…a lot simpler than it first seems. Many websites will say that there is something wrong with the youtube embedding code. Ignore them. When you go to youtube, grab the embed code there, copy it, and paste it into Dreamweaver (or whatever programing site you are on). Don’t panic if you cannot see the actual video on your program…you will not see it there, but only on your site itself.

You can easily resize your videos once you have the code. The only “hard” thing here is calculating the ratio of height and width so you don’t distort your video. Once you do this, there are two spots in the code where the dimensions are listed (beginning and end of the code). Make sure that you change both codes or nothing will happen.

One student who was sucessful in removing the skin from his videos (the little indicators that it’s a youtube video) has the information in the html of his site (http://clem.mscd.edu/~tbrown79).

In their next chapter on Digital Art and its uses, Thames and Hudson examine the use of digital art as a medium. They discuss how it is “interactive, participatory, dynamic, and customizable.” Digital art is interactive in how it enables the viewer to experience complex interaction in an image that goes beyond a mental event. It is participatory in how it sometimes relies on a multi-user input. It is dynamic in the sense that “[it] can respond to a changing data flow and the real-time transmission of data.” Finally, digital art is customizable in how it tailors itself to the viewer’s needs.

There are several forms of digital art today. Some of these include installation art (videos, films and the like), internet art, software art, musical art, and virtual realities.   Installation art is one of the bigger categories here. This form of art does its best to combine the physical world with the virtual one. With installation art, there has been experimentation in creating virtual worlds using purely digital mediums and creating locations with light to name two examples. As the art continued and began to even fuse with science, a need for a distinction between representational and presentational art was needed. Representational art was cinematic…an electronic image. Presentational, however, was considered to encompass all of digital art.
As virtual space is explored, people have started to realize the amounts of interfaces needed—an input device, a monitor, plus anything that makes the artwork unique from other pieces. Perry Hoberman is one of the artists who studies these interfaces; one result of these studies is his work, titled Cathartic User Interface, is shown here.

Installation art asks about the construction and perception of space. Some argue that the space that the digital world creates is more of an idea than a reality—“symbolic space” as he puts it. It brings up the classic question, “It is a pipe or an image?” Peter Anders declares that “space is actually the product of complex mental processes and cyberspace is an extension of consciousness.” It deals with perception and cognition. An example of this is Shaw’s The Golden Calf.
One definite aspect of digital art is that used in film. Movies consistently move the viewer into a quasi-reality; this technique requires digital art to create impossible places and people within videos, as well as situations that would be hard to film live. Digital-video media is not confined to movies, however. It addresses the issue of spatialization of moving images. This can include projects such as Luc Courchesne’s The Visitor—Living by Numbers. Here is an example of a similar work.
Digital work can extend to methods that make the audience the content of the work such as Campbell’s Hallucination.

The worlds of internet art, nomadic networks, software art, and virtual reality are all interlocked. Generally speaking, the definition of virtual reality is anything having to do with reality on the computer. To categorize them a little bit, internet art and nomadic networks are found via the world wide web mostly. It helps the user experience and access all the information on the web in an appealing and clear way. Software art also falls in this category to a certain degree. The difference comes in the fact that software art does not have to come from the internet. One interesting example of both categories is Webstalker which was referred to in the text. Virtual reality is still coming about since users cannot yet completely immerse themselves in a fabricated scenario. People are thinking about this, and the idea appears on shows like Star Trek. Virtual reality can be in a room, as shown, or created with helmets and goggles.

Music and digital art are a class all their own… there are many installations that combine technology in general with music and digital art. One example of this is Toshio Iwai’s Piano—as image media. Setting the pattern determined which keys would be struck, which in turn also determines what color pattern appears on the screen.

Wow….THIS was an interesting project! I actually went to my family and boyfriend for help on ideas…it was from them that I came up with this. We are all “hard-core” Christians as some people think of it (I all hear “really religious.” This is supposed to be a demonstration of sin in all it’s ugliness and disgust and how we need salvation. Nobody likes to face the “evil” side of themselves, so it seemed pretty abject. Some of these photos are of people I know, but most are internet pics (and one or two pics of artwork from artstor). For the most part, I just changed the photo to black and white and highlighted some aspects of each (or on occasion, just created the color myself).
Oh and by the way, if you want to view this in a larger setting, try clicking the slideshow button at the top of the photobucket webpage (Top-Right corner)

Abject Sin by Rebekah DeVeux is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at rdeveux.wordpress.com.

I really had fun with this, especially after I simplified it. Honestly, I have trouble with over-doing my art and just adding too much…well, stuff. I ended up using photoshop alone and pictures that I pulled from google images. I have a lot of affiliation with the military and I may even be living the life of a miiltary wife, so hearing about people who speak against our troops really bothers me. I thought up this slogan while at work sometime in early September … honestly, I believe it is important to support our boys.

Support our Troops by Rebekah DeVeux is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at rdeveux.wordpress.com.

An ad is successful when it can intrigue the viewer enough to sell a product, idea, etc. The best kinds of ads are those that the viewer cannot forget later. An excellent example of this on TV is the Mac vs. PC ads. They are funny and memorable without letting the viewer lose sight of the product being sold.

This particular ad uses elements of color and content to convey it’s meaning to the viewer. The content (especially in how the objects are positioned) sends a very clear message to the viewer (notice that only the product being sold contains multiple colors). The circle created by the position of the  objects constantly draws the eye inward to the object of interest. This is assisted by the use of line. It’s as if the vanishing point were right in the center of the Capri-Sun and everything else is drawn to it. The implied line created by the straws makes this illusion.

In addition, the tension and vibrancy in the coloring draw the eye in. There is an interesting tension caused by the complementary colors (purple and yellow) that someone can see fairly quickly. There is another example of color tension caused though by the blue which is right between the yellow and red (the primary colors…also the colors that combine to make blue’s complement).

It’s interesting because the ad almost doesn’t need wording. The eye is drawn to the 100% juice sign on the capri sun and then to the circle of bland “100% juice” signs on the other boxes, and the mind immediately gets it. To reinforce the message, however, there is plain, bold wording entered into the ad. The wording contains terms to appeal to kids (“cool”) and moms (“real fruit juice”) alike. The blue box at the bottom almost has a finality to it, “clinching the deal” as if the viewer was so intrigued that they would want to see how the product looks in the supermarket.

Visually speaking, as I mentioned before, the coloring in all its vibrancy immediately draws your eye to the center of the ad (Capri-Sun). The eye then starts to follow the circle of other juice boxes to realize the exact message the ad is trying to convey. The eye is then drawn to the captions, first at the top of the ad, then the bottom, finally to rest on the “clincher” at the bottom.

In this day and age, digital media has become our lives, surrounding us in just about everything we see. More and more artists are using this art form in some fashion or another. Digital work can look as plastic as traditional media. The pieces of art that employ this method however owe as much to traditional methods and art forms as they do to the new digital world. One basic characteristic of digital art is that it allows for collaging and seamless manipulation of the art. It makes easy what was once difficult. The following will provide just a few examples of this.

            Using math to create digital photographs was a technique that began to be developed by Charles Csuri. As it developed, it started to not only encompass portraits but classic and modern artwork as well. One example of this is the Mona Leo, a piece that splices the two famous pieces by Leonardo Da Vinci (the Mona Lisa and Leonardo’s self-portrait).

            As artists continued to experiment with photo-doctoring and composite images, people began to realize how the images were excellent advertising tools, both for the tangible and the idealistic. Composite images were an excellent way to bring creativity to bear in the advertising world. To draw on an example from the book, the image of the coast of Spain is too blurry for people to see, but the small stickers at the bottom of the piece communicate beautifully what the seller wants people to do…come vacation at Calpe! Another example given is of Annu Palakunnathu Matthew’s Bollywood Satirized series which depicts racial and gender-related stereotyping according to our text. Here is another example that shows both the tangible AND idealistic.  

Another function of digital art as it relates to photography is that of creating a constructed reality whether that reality is past, present, or future. Any doctoring of photos, old or new, creates a constructed reality. This can be achieved through adding elements, erasure, and enhanced nature. One type of constructed reality that is interesting to examine is that of bioengineered organisms. For example, our text discusses the Klone series by Dieter Huber and the organisms by William Latham. Using digital media, these two artists have produced fascinating pieces of art that look as real as any plant, yet look nothing like anything ever seen before. The work below is by Martin Naroznik.

Part of what became interesting specifically about Latham’s work is the use of algorithms and mathematical formulas that created the programs for his organisms. The exploration of “algorithmic” art continued as time went on, blending science, math, and art into one mass.  In part, this method is coupled with sign systems that represent actual information turned into art.  

One other area of digital photographs and prints that I will mention briefly is an emerging area of art. This method is when the artist uses an interface to complete his work. This is accomplished through digitizing traditional art, creating a piece digitally and then painting it, or using machines and programs to alter your art, jus to see what happens. While some protest that it is not by a particular artist simply because it is manufactured by a machine, others argue that the work is art by a certain artist because it bears the mark of his own creativity. Here is a eye drawing by Jochem Hendricks.

 Today, digital art and sculpture are media that are becoming increasingly interesting to work with. Rather than just use tools to create more tools for their craft, such as a carver to create sculpture moulds, artists are starting to use these tools to create their work itself. One interesting subject that is used in most of the examples from the book is warped human anatomy. According to the text, this can be achieved through rapid prototyping, a method that creates prototypes or moulds by carving it out of a block of material or building it layer by layer. Perhaps someday soon this technology of 3-D printers will be available to the general public. This piece is a digital sculpture by Robert Michael Smith.

 It is interesting to think about all these different types of art in this era of technology and speed. We are asked the question, “How does digital art/ new media relate to or impact different aspects of our western culture?” How doesn’t it? The classic saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” I would venture to say that most things in today’s society are image-driven, especially ad campaigns. Digital art makes the mass production of such imagery far easier than it ever would have been before. To approach it from a different angle, digital art, as examined in all its uses in this chapter, is reflecting the advances in science that our culture has found. In a strange way too, this reflection of our society is shown to us in a far clearer sense after it is turned into an art form.

Here is the project we did in class on the 22nd. I created it using powerpoint and grapher. It was interesting coming up with a process out of the blue (when you don’t have normal tools OR a specific goal but are told simply to create). I am not entirely happy with the finished project, but I thought that if I did too much more, the project would be FAR too busy. I was going for showing a correlation between math and art, but it might have flopped.

Art to Math by Rebekah DeVeux is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.