Rhizome Gallery

Dash Museum of Interactivity

Connect the Dots Exhibition

 

http://theroadbetweenus.net/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.witnessthatplace.com/

http://www.steveshaddick.com/2roads/

http://www.unfamilia.org/

something new to CRaVe

Commercials, you hate them when they interrupt whatever it is you’re watching, unless they’re really good and make you forget what it is you were actually watching. There’s seldom ads I can think of that strike me as being clever and innovative enough to remember them, but there is one brand that stands out among a plethora of semi-amusing sale-pitches, Honda.

Car Commercials are a whole ‘nother category when it comes to brand embellishment. All you hear is the terms 0% APR and no down payments or no payments until January of the following year, then they throw in the gas milage and whatever else the producers of those commercials want their customer base to hear. Problem is, ALL car commercials say the same thing, so the smart thing to do would be to revamp the commercial all together. Honda came out with a new line of ads for their sports utility vehicle, CR-V a year or two ago. They were different commercials than any other I’ve seen. It seems to me that they were engineered to appeal to that crowd of people who were tired of being spoon fed the same stats and facts every other company was trying to sell.  At least that’s my take on this. So take a look…

The three commercials I embedded are spiffed up and created to showcase the new line of CR-V’s, their color palettes, and “soft” suspension as shown in the SNOW commercial. Both COFFEE and POPCORN are an animated 360 degree review of the outside of the car, a function similar to those that are commonly seen on brand websites. In these commercials, however, that tactic along with animation [white popcorn popping and black coffee filling] aid in creating a more friendly and appetizing feel to the commercials, and ultimately, the car.

Is it art? Yeah, I think it is. The simple fact that the car and it’s effects had to be animated by using a computer constitutes it as art. The brains behind the idea, are also artistically inclined because they appeal to the viewer’s eye. The ending of each commercial eludes the key word CRAVE and with the use of the same special effects used in the commercial, either pop out or smear the A & E from the word, leaving CR-V to stand alone. What appeals to me, is what I’ve already stated; it’s different than all the other commercials because it doesn’t simply sell facts. Honda is obviously confident enough in their product, and rightly so since they’ve been around for ages, to open the doors towards a new way of brand marketing on TV screens. This way, they’re not only successful on paper, they’re also hitting it big on the screens of viewers at home, all across America.

 

8:11

chain clinking/train/change/church bells/spinning/dialing old phones/phone lines/echo/FEEDBACK/speed/zoom/HEARTBEAT/horses/hooves/magnetic force/metal clanking together/metal objects zipping through space and getting attached together/footsteps/cellphones on vibrate/RHYTHM/continutally pressing one key on a keyboard/tempo/space/spinning the wheel of fortune/GOSSIP/pstt/short circuiting/dropping nails on metal/zapping electricity/powertools/counting down/knocking/CD skipping/fast forward/rewind/sounds from boardwalk games/alone/strumming on a guitar.

So this 8 minute version of a “song” if you want to call it that, got me thinking. Like we were told to do, I sat there and listened to the very instrumental rendition of a song. At first, it was tough to just simply listen to it. I sort of had to challenge my brain to focus solely on what I was hearing, meaning getting every other random thought out of my head. That wasn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s a good thing this song was 8 minutes and 11 seconds long, otherwise, I’d only have 5 words written down on our lovely three-fold piece of blank computer paper. I really had to concentrate on what individual sound could represent, and as soon as I got into the swing of things, I think I managed to jot down some accuarate words and descriptions.

You can see some words are in all caps, the reason why is because while writing them down, I felt they were the ones that were the most overpowering; more apparent and relevant to the composition then the rest. After the excercise, I looked over the words I had written down, and I was actually amazed to see that most of them made some sort of…well, sense. FEEDBACK and HEARTBEAT have, for a lack of a better word, a beat in real life; they follow a pattern. In music, notes often follow particular patterns as well, therefore that is one fact in favor of this song actually being categorized as a song. With the illusion of a heartbeat and feedback, you could sort of hear the sounds coming alive, experiencing some sort of vibrancy.

Others, such as “zapping electricity”, “short circuiting” and “metal objects zipping through space and getting attached together” are what I like to think of as the music makers; they are the instruments used to make the noise aka music. Aside from traditional music instruments, ordinary objects can produce music just as well as anything else. No one ever categorized music as solely being produced with musical instruments.

I would identify “Echos” and “sounds from boardwalk games” as special effects. In the music studio, artists and producers use a variety of special effects to enhance the sound they are trying to portray. In this case, I think familiar sounds were used to create a balanced, yet unbalanced sound.

Most of these sounds stem from an electronic base, cellphones, powertools, CD’s, keyboards, zooming in/out. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that this 8 minute 11 second song would not have been created before the Electronic and Technological Age. Not only because half these sounds wouldn’t have existed, but also because without a computer, I don’t think such sounds could be compiled in order to make a song. I guess in this case, the song is a product of its generation.

A Futuristic Facial Fast Forward

Can you imagine striking the same pose for 8 straight years? Wouldn’t that make for an ideal timeline of how you have changed and progressed throughout the duration of 2,920 days? Wouldn’t it also be the most accurate way to document age progression..and wouldn’t it be even more awesome if you uploaded all those pictures and made them into a video? Well, that’s exactly what Jonathan Keller did. He’s the brains behind a daily photo project he titles “The Adaptation to My Generation: Living My Life Faster”. What makes this project really intriguing, is that this sort of experiment could not have been done years ago when computers were the size of a room. (I realize I keep saying that in pretty much every blog I post, because after all, that’s one technologically advanced fact that cannot be ignored. Computers are the masterminds behind everything. Plus the smaller they get, the faster and more advanced they become. Anyway.) The fact of the matter is that digital photography is what has enabled JK to seamlessly transform his still photography into the video format, allowing him to successfully record his own aging process. The experiment has been duplicated now by tons of people and their videos can be seen on youtube and other likely sites. It’s a sort of journal for people to keep, everyday, an entry is like a declaration of a person’s appearance and mood from one day in history.

 People change overtime, but you can’t tell just how much they’ve changed on a day to day basis. However, when you have 2,920 photos and maybe take 15 random pictures from that 8 year span, you can see how a person ages; from the obvious hair color and style, to puffy cheeks or more sunken ones. This is a great way for someone to keep family members updated. You know how distant aunts and uncles see you after a couple months or years and “Say, My Oh My, Bobby how have you grown?” and make a big deal and aunts usually squeeze your cheeks, well if you’d want to avoid that, simply keep in touch with them through this day-to-day project and that way, when they actually see you in person, they will no longer be amazed at how much you’ve changed and leave your cheeks alone.  

 So here is the website and a couple more links to other’s renditions of Keller’s project.

Let’s See How Far We’ve Come…Literally.

Although this video may not be as technically advanced as others are in this day and age, it serves a purpose. The title itself “How Far We’ve Come” states the purpose of the representation Matchbox Twenty strives to portray. The images are the message almost as much as the lyrics are, both in fact parallel each other. Video clips ranging from the first man on the moon, to JFK, to the Woman’s Rights Movement, to Ali, to Pele (the Brazillian Soccer Player, hailed as one of the greatest players ever) to the ancient computers, to Live Aid, to the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall to images of Princess Diana, to President Clinton meeting with Yasser Arafat, to Y2K, to last year’s Live Earth brought about by Al Gore and his strives to address the changing climate, to this year’s biggest story, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton being two of the front runners for the Democratic Party in the 2008 Presidential Election…whew. See how far we’ve come? For the most part, the video is a performance video, at least whenever the band is shown playing in the studio or on rooftops.  Besides Matchbox Twenty playing along, the main focus is on the events of the past 6 or 7 decades. It goes to show just how far our society has advanced. For example, in the beginning of the video, a clip is shown of women marching for equal rights. President John F. Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1961 and appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as chairwoman. The Equal Rights Amendment was passed in 1972 by Congress. Now in the year 2008, Hilary Clinton is running for President. That’s less than fifty years since women have been discriminated against because of their gender. Let’s just think about this for a second, what if Senator Clinton becomes president, won’t she then be in the position to meet with other world leaders, men no less, in countries where women are still experiencing prejudice? I think it’s safe to say that Matchbox Twenty might have to reshoot their video in the next decade, because times are changing, fast. I know I’ve said this in my first blog, but think about the computers that used to be the size of the room, and now Apple introduced MacBook Air..which is thinner than any other laptop on the market. How ’bout them apples? 🙂

Burning Questions..

Burning Chrome… the first image that popped into my head was a motorcycle “burning chrome” towards the sunset. The first paragraph of the text however, totally contradicted my initial thoughts and made me feel like an idiot. The main difference between my preestablished ideas and the actual storyline were the characters. Whereas I thought about two Harley Davidson -leather-wearing-bicyclist-tough-guys, I came to the realization that Bobby Quine and Automatic Jack were hackers, a pair of so-called “lowlifes” who spent their afternoons in a gloomy and stuffy apartment in front of monitors looking at matrices all day long. Is this what the future has in store for us? If it is, then I won’t mind not being there.

As I read further into the story, aside from being totally confused by the words describing the plight of Jack and Bobby, I noticed that the story, like many others, had a subplot. Jack was in love with Bobby’s girl, the girl who in the end craved money, only to spend that money on Zeiss Ikon Tally Isham baby blues, but I guess that’s a storyline for another blog. The linguistics of the story however, are somewhat of what the future holds. When the world turns into this shady Matrix-like universe, we’re all going to start using words like “ice[1]” when talking about software, and not referring to “bling”, or rather, jewelry. Another instance of futuristic language, or maybe just something that struck me on a personal level,  is “Waldo”, and kids it does have anything to do with “Where’s Waldo” except maybe when Jack can’t find his ‘techy’ arm appendage and calls out for it. The terms used throughout “Burning Chrome” serve as a boundary between the old and the new, the old being people who don’t understand that lingo, and new being those who do. The hacker world is so involved and detailed that it can be categorized as it’s own era, one which the older generations won’t be able to comprehend, or adopt as their own.

On a much larger scale, the overall picture paints a realization for us. Technology is the key factor here, technology is on its way to becoming the universal language on earth. F. T. Marinetti’s The Futurist Manifesto delivers a striking proclamation of futuristic ideals. His 8^th point states a bold outlook on the coming years,

We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.

I take that as an optimistic look toward the future, to leave the past and all its glory alone and move towards new and better ways. Marinetti shares the belief that the future holds tribulations and obstacles but the sense of history cannot be left out of the equation. Moving forward is a special moment, many things are going to change into new forms and new contents, but man will be able to pass through these variations, bringing with himself what comes from the beginning of civilization. This ties in with last week’s topic of the Age of Electronic and Mechanized Media, change happens, and so far for the past two thousand years humans have managed to survive and thrive in these new eras.

“Burning Chrome” was a truly futuristic tale, but it did not have the gusto of F. T. Marinetti and his “stick-it-to-the-world-attitude”. Both, however, succeeded in painting a visual of a different world, mainly contrasting the world in which we live in today.

 

 

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[1] Ice is security countermeasures software. The Net runners spend most of their time in the matrix encountering, evaluating and evading these countermeasures. The encounters with ice are brilliantly described in many of Gibson’s books.

From the article “What is Cyberspace?” by David G.W. Birch and S. Peter Buck <http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/whatis_cyberspace.article.txt>

 

Look out, a new era of art is emerging!

Art owes its widespread diversity to the people who create it, the people who critique it and those who simply view it, regardless of its location. Every decade, a new art form escalates from a previous technique; it’s modified to establish a different effect and generate an entirely new response.  Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction has an “aura” based on an old belief and understanding of what art ‘truly’ is. I’m not saying he’s wrong by any means, but his views are dated, if not totally outdated.

 

It’s the year 2008, that fact alone stands to prove a point; we’re no longer in the “middle ages” or in the midst of greats such as Rembrandt and Titian, we’re in the Age of Mechanized Media and Digital Art. The Middle Ages, The Renaissance, The Baroque, The Age of Enlightenment, of Romanticism, all the way to the Impressionism to Post-Impressionism, to Art Nouveau to the Modernist Revolution…you get the idea, my point is, no one woke up one morning and said, “oh February 6^th, well if it isn’t the very first day of The Renaissance, let me grab my paint set and start painting like the true Renaissance Man” Yeah? No. That didn’t happen and you can’t expect everyone to welcome the age that we’re in now and embrace it for the true advancement that it is.

 

In his essay, Benjamin outlines a couple key facts to base his argument on. He states that replicas, rather the results of the easy reproduction era, lack the presence of space and time, two aspects that determine the artworks history. True, there’s no arguing that, but the same can be said for the artwork of this generation, it will date back to the 21^st century. Another aspect he points out is ownership, which I don’t think will be an issue for us as far as documenting goes. I mean, yeah there are scams on the Internet and identity fraud, but if you’re careful enough to sign and copyright your work, ownership won’t be a problem. Back in the old days, ownership WAS a big problem. There were countless works whose artists were anonymous simply because they never signed their work. Many artists had apprentices and to this day, we don’t know whose painting it is, the artist or their helper’s. Douglas Davis makes a point in his rebuttal essay that I think summarizes a key fact about Benjamin, he states “Walter Benjamin saw accurately the logical implications of mechanical reproduction, he erred only in assuming that the world would bow to this logic, that the endless reproduction of a painting, for example, or a photograph, would diminish what he called the “aura” of the original.” People still value the works of famous masters and bid top dollar for them at auctions, but the point I’m trying to make here, is that we need to give this new age a chance.

 

Let’s face it, it’s a new day and we won’t know how successful “our” age will be until our computer babies write about us in those imaginary floaty super invisible computers like a hundred years from now. I think we need to look at it as a phenomenon. Change is good; this is a way for our generation to prove that we have actually achieved something. There’s always been a lingering thought in the back of my mind whenever I was asked to invent something. I always though, “Oh great, how can I invent something on the spot, everything’s already been invented!” That’s when you need to step out of the box and realize that you need to look beyond the things you know and are familiar with. You need to think of something so totally ridiculous because that’s how inventions start, as an off the wall idea. Maybe that’s what this era is, an off the wall idea that we just have to get through and perfect and maybe then the followers of Walter Benjamin will think, “Hmm..This isn’t so evil after all.”

It’s a Mac world, we just live in it…

During the last couple of days, my eyes have been peeled for any inspiration pertaining to the Art Now idea I could perhaps blog about. When I had resulted to nothing, I tried to think back a couple weeks to maybe remember anything I could comment on but as usual, nothing was clicking. It wasn’t until I accessed the front page of my laptop, the Apple Startpage, did I think EUREKA!

It’s Mac to save the day, hence the title.

The Startpage had an article on it dating January 24, 2008 and titled “Folding the Mac into Origami”. The article deals with an Origami Master, Robert J. Lang who creates some of the most astonishing Origami creations with the sole use of a MacBook Pro. The artist himself created two freeware programs: TreeMaker and ReferenceFinder, and along with another program, Mathematica, conceptually plots out his creations and maps them out for a rendition on paper. The point he’s trying to make doesn’t have as much to do with his origami, as much as it does with the Mac itself.

Lang states that on a Mac he can “shift effortlessly and seamlessly from program to program, whether he’s designing a figure, analyzing its underlying mathematics, creating folding instructions of a book or documenting it on a website, the Mac simply becomes an extension of his hands and mind.”  The Mac is the true art piece in this instance; its versatility of programs and compatibility is what has made the Apple product a state of the art machine. Lang summarizes that the biggest reason he’s stayed with the Mac is that in his origami work, he uses a lot of programs and since there’s no giant origami program, he uses bits and pieces of a lot of programs. “The Mac programs just cooperate with each other.” At the end of the day, we can look back on the past couple decades and realize the advancement of electronics and technology. I know I wasn’t alive back when computers were the size of a room, but I’ve heard the phrase used a million plus one times by teachers or grandparents, which leads me to believe that we’ve come a pretty long way.

Lang uses his MacBook Pro to keep all of his origami work, book manuscripts and illustrations in one place, he says “I take it with me and I live off the laptop. I love that wherever I am, I can have my life with me.” Isn’t it amazing that you can have absolutely everything you need, within reason of course, in one compact 17″ piece of equipment? As for me, I tend to agree, my life would not be the same without my MacBaby. 🙂

Here are a couple examples of Lang’s Origami..

 

 

a link to the article, and to Robert Lang’s website.