Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Final Paper - Bram van der Poel & Raquel Meyers ‘Wh-t-v-r!’ Video Game vs. Adam Connelly's Pixel Pornography



A pixel is a curious thing. It is the smallest piece of visual information, vital to the creation of everything that is seen digitally. It is also taken for granted, as multitudes of them are needed to create simple figures, and as many as billions of them are needed to create complex environments for gaming or digitally-enhanced entertainment. Rarely is the pixel thought about in terms other than digital, but it is a mode of artistic communication in itself. Artists Bram van der Poel & Raquel Meyers, and Adam Connelly understand this idea, and have made it the primary focus in their work. The artists detailed in this report have taken their relationship with the pixel to another level, both conceptually and visually.


OVERVIEW


Adam Connelly is an American artist who has lived all over the country, studying and creating work. He has a professional background in graphic design (with special attention to interactive and motion graphics) and has worked with companies such as Pixar, CNET, Sega, and Apple computer. His biography, as well as his art work, speak to the connection that he has with the digital world. His series from 2002 – 2004 transcends the digital and the analog for some thought provocation about how and why those worlds meet, how they influence each other, how our lives are shaped by technology and other questions raised by “public and private identity, privacy, censorship, information sharing, and information awareness” (Statement).






Connelly’s work, for lack of better terminology since no collective title for it has been given, is hand-painted portraiture of pixilated pornography. The entire collection is up for viewing on his personal website, http://www.adamconnelly.com/gallery/index.html. Subjects are pulled from a seemingly-endless array of pornographic images on the internet, transferred to large identity-concealing pixels, and drafted and painted in oil onto a traditional medium of canvas, where it will be hung in a traditional gallery space like other “traditional” works of art, but with a twist. He states that his inspiration comes from both the painted nude and popular pornography, and instead of just putting his collection up and letting the viewer revel at more images of naked women, he claims to address the role that porn has on technology and culture...though, his artists statement is the only place where that message actually comes through.


Raquel Meyers, a Spanish low-res (graphic) video artist teamed up with multimedia developer and designer / enigma extraordinaire (meaning, there isn’t any meaningful information on him online) Bram Van Der Poel to create a videogame installation called “The great adventure of Wh-t-v-r!” in 2010. Wh-t-v-r! is an experimental game around the person, Wh-t-v-r!, where … basically nothing happens whether you play the game or not. The statement for the game summarizes it best:


“ Step into the shoes of Wh-t-v-r! and play around into the great realm of “work is never over.” Experience a unique game play and find the disks and feed the dogs! Play through no levels until you reached no goals and get defeated by the great monster of “W-RKC-MPL-T-” and save no princes. The great adventure of Wh-t-v-r! is a experimental game around the person Wh-t-v-r! and explores the possibilities of alternative game play where no usual goals as level up, collect coins, battle enemies are met. Created when the Video artist Raquel Meyers and digital creative Bram van der Poel met and mashed their skills, and start working together. “






Meyers uses low-res graphics to create the surreal imagery, large archaic pixels and eerie atmosphere in the game, while Van Der Poel uses his technical abilities to bring this exhibition to life. While there isn’t sufficient information to concretely state the “How’s” of the project (though through the pictures, it appears that the game is projected onto the walls), the reason “Why” is known: it’s a “why not.”






Wh-t-v-r! looks like a game played though projection over a vast space; the people involved have to walk around and navigate through a maze of strangely-colored rooms where the next bit of pointless game play and no objectives awaits on the walls to be completed, so it is more interactive that someone staring at a 2D gallery exhibit. The question remains: how does one interact with something pointless, and does the knowledge of its futility affect the player’s willingness to explore the work?


COMPARISON


The biggest similarity for Wh-t-v-r! and any of Connelly’s work (I’ll use “freckles10,” one of the more tasteful canvasses) is a distinct schism between the conceptual reality / written “meaning” of the artist’s work, as compared to the emotional reality / the way their work is interpreted by the viewer. The emotional reality most certainly will be affected by the framework of the artist statement; in this case, it will be assumed that no knowledge of the work or artist is known ahead of time.


For a viewer to successfully see any of Connelly’s work, the distance at which they initially look upon it will be of importance. I could not see the image within the first canvas that I found until it was saved on my desktop; I was given no mode of reference, and saw the shapes purely as abstraction. It was only after looking at the thumbnail on my desktop did I actually see the form within. I knew that the pixel itself was an important focus of the work, but since Connelly’s collection has no title with which to guide the viewer’s interpretation, it could be difficult for them to immediately grasp the subject matter. Once they do, though, they’ll be more than happy to stare at length at the other pornographic images within the collection. If no written statement is supplied for the arrangement, any additional thought that may have been given to it is lost. The viewer, when faced with a common category of images, will most likely fail to see past what is ahead of them.







The makers of Wh-t-v-r! may have a similar reaction. Since the audience playing the game is an important part of the exhibit, some obstacles may have to be overcome in order to get people interested enough to play something that does not have any instructions, especially with other people around. Once people figure out that there isn’t really any point to whatever they are seeing or watching someone else do, will they stop playing? Will they wonder the empty question of why did the artists do this, instead of actually thinking about it?

The obvious difference of these works is the medium with which they use and what they are attempting to say through the platform of their work. Connelly is connecting the classical form of paint and portraiture to the sleazy objects of modern attention in a digital manner. Meyers and Van Der Poel combine their knowledge of graphic design, and digital creation to connect with the viewer about the reasons for entertainment, as well as the radical idea that you don’t have to have a set of objectives and guidelines to dictate your free time; you can make video games that don’t have a point, so that it is you making the point, not the person who made it (at least, that is what I take out of it).

PERSONAL CRITIQUE

I would like to see Connelly’s artwork possess the same feeling that one extracts from the artist statement. I want to look at these canvasses and see what is there, but also see the artist’s feeling about it, without it having to be explained to me in a separate piece that I may not take the time to read on my own or may miss the physical relaying of in the gallery opening. I like work that stands solidly alone, without modifiers, without outside explanation or modification. He says that his objective was to raise questions about the nature of his work, but presenting pornography (or nudes, in their cleaner form) in a different way is not going to raise questions about it; the oversaturation of these kinds of images counteracts any kind of differing thought about any subject matter that is represented in this way.

I have a problem with Meyer’s and Van Der Poel’s work specifically because I was hard-pressed to find anything of substance about it or the artists, which gave off a feeling of laziness and unprofessionality towards both the artists and their work. I have no idea how big this installation is, how exactly it is set up, a length of the game (definite or indefinite), or a viewer reaction to the piece. The only thing I know about it is that it was created by them, it doesn’t have a point, the work is never over, gathering disks and feeding dogs are involved with this game (which partially counteracts the premise of the work, which is not to have a point or contain anything that dictates your success in the game), and that if you do “win” the game, you inherently lose, because the work is over and you are defeated. I feel that the description of the piece should not have focused on the narrowing premise of “it doesn’t have a point, really,” and instead used that space to speak about the concept of not having a rigid list of tasks to complete to be successful, the freedom of choice within the game, the reason that we use games and seek that rigid structure even when it exists in other instances and aggravates us, and so on. Their concept was put in such blunt terms that it leads the viewer to mirror those same terms when thinking about the piece.




A pixel is a curious thing. It functions as a molecule in the digital world to create life; that life, in turn, usually creates meaning. We are turned off by things that don’t have meaning (at least that is true in my case), or take it upon ourselves to create something that is more concrete and less abstract. Whether these artists achieved what they set out to do is open for interpretation--- which might just be exactly what they hoped to achieve.












Artist Exhibition - Paho Mann


Liking Paho Mann’s lecture so much, it didn’t make sense to see any other exhibit, so I ditched a class to make it. I wasn’t let down. The layout and mediums used were great, and they were nice to see up close. My favorite piece was one that was mentioned in the lecture; a rainbow array of metaimages with hundreds of smaller composite pictures of trash … most of theme looked like recyclables, like jars, plastic bottles and jugs that probably weren’t recycled. The environmental theme was a great one to choose for the style of execution for this artist.

Another part of the exhibit that I enjoyed was a photographic arrangement of spent gift wrapping paper, boxes, gift bags, and other crap that we buy simply to throw away after unmasking the surprise underneath. It was kind of a sad thing to look at, as funny as that sounds. It connected itself quite well with the overall theme of his work, as well as getting the viewer to possibly think about all of the unnecessary things that we buy because we feel that we have to; shopping season is notorious for this feeling.

Though his work borders delightfully close to OCD, it is his meticulous attention to the tiniest aspects of our life, as well as the focus to shoot the multitude of images that he has without a sense of hurry or unimportance to them, that makes his work striking. You can tell that he spent a lot of time on the projects that he has done, and that he enjoyed their evolution, as well as that his work said to those who viewed it. Being able to see this subject matter in multiples allowed the viewer to see the “bigger picture” of our habits as humans, and our connectivity within. His work is one of the few presented within this class that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Artist Lecture - Paho Mann

I connected immediately with Paho Mann’s subject matter, which is human’s consumption and waste, and also the idea of consumerism versus individuality. We as individuals never really consider the things that we do to be harmful, wasteful, or otherwise detrimental to the environment because of the small scale of our perception. Paho works to prove us wrong in his work. He has cataloged items at a recycling plant, made a database image of individual snap shots of various colors of plastic bottles to make us think about how all of our individual consumption and waste adds to others’ and creates what we seen in landfills.

He also has projects cataloging the interiors of medicine cabinets and junk drawers. Initially, I thought the idea was curious and perhaps uninteresting, but he executed his ideas in a way that it felt sometimes more intimate that portraiture, because of the array of items that are hidden away in people’s bathrooms or drawers. The intimacy of being able to snoop through people’s things mixed voyeurism with a better understanding of our connections through the products we use / what society tells us that we need to consume. 

Though his work borders delightfully close to OCD, it is his meticulous attention to the tiniest aspects of our life, as well as the focus to shoot the multitude of images that he has without a sense of hurry or unimportance to them, that makes his work striking. You can tell that he spent a lot of time on the projects that he has done, and that he enjoyed their evolution, as well as that his work said to those who viewed it. Being able to see this subject matter in multiples allowed the viewer to see the “bigger picture” of our habits as humans, and our connectivity within. His work is one of the few presented within this class that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Artist Lecture - Mark Tribe

Mark Tribe is a digital media artist and curator with interests art, technology, and politics. He teaches at Brown University as an assistant professor of  Modern Culture and Media.
 
In his lecture, he shared his view of humans being a performance species; this idea carries over into his art, where he enjoys performance and interactive pieces. His first project that he detailed was Car Park, where he engaged incoming cars into a California parking lot to park in order by color. The media made a small spectacle about the event; the aerial footage made this project more appealing, knowing that so many cars participated. Though not everyone followed the rules and some just parked where ever, it was cool knowing that many participated because of the fun [and easy] guidelines, showing that people will involve themselves in a little bit of creativity to break up the monotony of something simple, like parking a car.

Mark focused on manipulating space and recreating history in his other pieces that he shared. They focused back on his main idea that everything that humans do is a performance. Politics and media-covered events are certainly not exempt from that. The first project was a compilation of speeches from famous historical protesters that were recreated by artists in the same spot that they were first delivered. The energy and idea that Tribe took away from this project helped him compile the Dystopia Files in 2010. This project was made up of video footage of protesters within a partially-visible room. Once the viewer's curiousity was peeked and they went inside the room, the footage stopped, and the audience explored file cabinets with names of different protest groups on each, but they were all locked, so no further learning could be done within the exhibit. The connection I made with that was the secrecy of uprisings in the US. If you werent right there with the action, you seldomly heard about it, because the government tries to regain control and snuff out memory of your actions are quickly as possible. It's only through archival footage kept in the right hands and contemporary home footage of protests that we know as much as we do about these events. 

Tribe's work was conceptually engaging, but I felt like some aspects of each work fell through by varying degrees. I was more interested in his works that engaged historical material or were influenced by history, rather than the Car Park project, which left me thinking "so what?" His others works felt more important.

Monday, December 6, 2010

Final Project - Learning to Love You More

LTLYM Assignment #36: Grow a garden in an unexpected spot.

Take a series of three photos showing:
1) The garden location before you planted the seeds.
2) A photo of the flower plants while they are growing.
3) A photo of the plants after they have bloomed.



While indoor gardening isn't uncommon, I believe that the multitude of things that I enjoy growing in small indoor spaces qualifies this space as unexpected.


My dorm room window is 4 feet wide and 12 feet high. Within that space, I have grown / am growing:


  • 6 bell pepper plants from seed, 4 are photographed for this project [2 - 5 1/2 feet tall]
  • 1 string bean plant from seed [15 feet tall]
  • 1 basil cluster from seed [2 feet tall]
  • 20 tomato plants from seed, 15 are photographed for this project [1 - 3 feet tall]
(1: take a picture of the area) August 28, 2010, before the garden moved in  



(2. Growing) Tomatoes

(2. Growing) Tomatoes

(2. Growing) String Bean

(2. Growing) Peppers

(2. Growing) Peppers later

(2. Growing) String bean. It began growing an inch or two every day.





Phase 3: After Blooming / Fruiting. Taken as of 12/5/10

 
(3: After) Tomato, blooming finally

(3: After)1 Pepper plant, 4 peppers

(3: After)Another pepper plant, 2 peppers

(3: After) Basil

(3: After) Pepper flowers

(3: After) Beans

(3: After) Marigolds about to bloom

(3: After) Bean plant, little bean





Evolution of the space:





August 28th

November 2nd

December 6th

 

I love gardening. The process of planting them and watching them grow from seed as amazing. I love coming home and checking on them and discovering a flower opening, or a tiny green sprout punching up from the soil. The pepper seeds were scraped from organic store-bought veggies ... I was actually surprised that they sprouted at all, let alone flowered. Half of the plants are producing, the other two are not. I enjoy picking the string beans from the window and eating them; they are slightly warm from the sunlight and very juicy. Pesto from my fresh basil is to die for, and the thought of being able to eat my peppers when they get big enough is very exciting, since stuffed peppers are one of my favorite things. I wonder if they will change color. Yes, I totally am a plant nerd, but my hobby pays off in delicious and high quality food.





 

      















 

Final Project - Johnny Cash Project

Contribution to the Johnny Cash project

I wanted to focus on the shape and texture of the photo, rather than its detail. In this way, it becomes more abstract; the subject in the photo could be anyone. The texture brushes were great, I enjoyed the way that they separated the face form from the background; it creates a feeling of 3-dimensionality. There is also a simultaneous feeling of movement and stability that I enjoy in the piece.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Youtube Mixer


I decided to do a mixer of Failblog videos to make a collection of people seriously hurting themselves. Included in the collection are videos of laughter, as well as a single video montage of Homer Simpson's famous "D'oh!" sounds. The only sounds that are heard in the project are the two videos that are previously listed; all of the others are silent so that you can really soak in what is happening to them.
I thought it was important to do a project with this subject matter because it is so prevalent that we have become desensitized to violence and injury. I hope that a collection of these kinds of images will help raise a question concerning the nature of these videos. Are they all accident? Do we really have any idea of our surroundings and bodies ... or do we figure it out only after we hurt ourselves that we should have taken a bit longer to think about what we were doing?

Monday, September 27, 2010

Triptych Animation: Fish Tank




I wanted to make animations similar to what you would see in a fishtank; mostly subtle movements with a few points of interest [fish almost getting eaten, sudden changes of direction]. The animation assignment was a better way of communicating what I was trying to do with the triptych [subtle changes in each of the frames] and more engaging than a flat, static surface.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Project 2, Digital Triptych

I made an aquarium, because it was the most awesome thing I could think of.


I had a lot of art noir and illustrations laying around, and I like sea creatures. It was a natural fit. I used the magic wand tool to take the bulk of the backgrounds out, and used the eraser tool with smooth edging for the details. This took me about 7 hours, and I just sat down and did the entire thing. The first panel took the longest, but once it was done, the rest came easily. Each panel has something a bit different going on. See if you can find them all.





Project 1, Photo Montage

I went through my favorite thrift store, looking for the tackiest and most bad-ass thing I could find.... and I found it :


How can you not give props to George Washington? He had syphilis, slaves and a dream ... to be King of America -- before he decided that it was a bad idea, considering what happened to the French. His face is on bills, he has art pieces and monuments dedicated to him ... he even has fan music. Oh yeah, didn't know that?





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7iVsdRbhnc



And ... I'm a slacker and didn't pick up the photo of the finished piece yet, but whatever. I hated modding this thing. Turning George into an allergy sufferer killed me a little inside.