Moitri’s 3rd Event: Chris

Chris is an engineer and an artist. His art is more geared toward functionality than aesthetics, and this took me a little by surprise, because when I hear the word “artist” I think of pretty things. And when I hear the word “engineer” I picture machines and buildings. I couldn’t stay for the entire event, so my perception may be a little skewed here.  When I saw Chris’s designs they didn’t seem very artistic to me in the sense that they weren’t very aesthetically pleasing. At the same time though they were incredibly interesting and  I couldn’t believe that he came up with such a design. He showed us a picture of a machine that had three microphones attached to it. The mics would pick up on any sounds that took place around it. It was designed to pick up the sounds of gunshots during war,  after sensing where the gunshot came from the machine would fire back at the sound-target. This way American soldiers wouldn’t have to risk their lives in the Middle East—instead they could just send a bunch of these machines (called hunter hunter) and not risk their lives. This machine seemed absolutely brilliant. Why wasn’t something like this established before? Why is the U.S. government still sending over people instead of robots?

There was another piece that he created which was equally useful. It was the robot that Clara mentioned that would move around with American soldiers and take part in the present situation.

To me hunter hunter would not  seem like an art piece the first time I saw it. To me it seems purely technology / engineering driven. Maybe Chris has other pieces that fall under my definition of art that I didn’t get a chance to see. But as I am writing now, I’m glad that I had the opportunity to see Chris’s work because now I don’t find it as difficult to associate machines / robots with art anymore. They came from concepts that were based on some idea and the artist found ways of putting it together. Just because it wasn’t a painting or a computer program doesn’t mean that it cannot be called art. If he considers himself an artist then he’s an artist. What are we to do about it.

What also struck me as interesting was how he  incorporates politics in his work. I stay away from the words politics, but his robots all have something to do with politics and how the government works and how it could work better. I liked that I was able to learn a little bit about politics from his presentation that I would not have come across in my daily life. He was talking about these pilot-less planes that were created for surveillance purposes only, but in actuality these planes were capable of targeting down a person and then shooting him/her. Apparently this information was kept a secret for a long time, until these planes were needed and used for it’s full purpose. Chris’s art work seems like a much better way of learning about what goes on in politics than studying it in a classroom. I enjoyed his presentation.

|Moitri|

Quantizing Effects: The Liminal Art of Jim Campbell

The art of new media and installation artist Jim Campbell was on display at the new Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California Irvine from September 2 through yesterday, December 2. At the recommendation of a friend, I was fortunate enough to visit the Beall Center over Thanksgiving break. The exhibit on Campbell presented a judicious selection of the artist’s work – a wide variety of experimentation that includes sound work, motion capture, and video. The majority of the pieces featured are Campbell’s liminal portraits, LED-lit images in motion.

The scope of Campbell’s work is diverse, though its aim seems to be set on one main theme: the nature of experience. The most illustrative pieces in the exhibit come from two groupings. The first are what Campbell calls “motion portraits.” A selection of simple images – a bull bucking, a bird feeding, a car on the open road – are displayed in specially designed light boxes. The images are taken from a time-lapse sequence of a few seconds and slowly dissolve within the span of about two minutes. Therefore, the process of watching the portraits is one where the viewer notices first the static image, and then the transition of successive images, but only in retrospect. The transition of images is so slow that the dissolve is hardly noticeable. The most fascinating example of this technique is the first piece in the series, Psycho, which presents the entirety of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, each frame dissolved on top of the other within about two and a half minutes. Upon first glance, all that one notices is a vague outline of a women’s face (we soon realize its Vivian Leigh as she drives to the Bates Motel) and a lamp in the corner (from apparently the longest shot in the film, where Norman Bates and Vivian Leigh chat in the office of the Bates Motel). The rest is just a slowly swirling cloud of light, revealing only so much as to pique one’s interest as they stare for minutes digesting the images.

The second grouping, perhaps the best in the exhibit, shows five LED motion protraits of a man moving throughout a loft on crutches. Each of the five portraits is a random 5-minute loop from an apparently 30-minute original video. The artist has taken out much of the information prior to programming the LED display, so the image is already highly degraded. Now, as it is shown in motion in the LED portrait, it becomes even more abstracted. Only by viewing the pieces from a distance, and with much time and patience, does the sequence begin to appear in the viewer’s head. Time spent with the piece is proportionate to the rewards gained. I spent over 20 minutes watching these works alone. Rather than some artists, who use abstraction and new media to incite meditation, Campbell’s work achieves this Zen-like purpose of uniting meditation with the processes of perception over time. As one watches the portraits, they are implicated in the process of forming these images in their brain and simultaneously projecting meaning onto them.

The ultimate goal of Campbell’s works, it seems, is to present to us the complex and subtle interplay of memory and direct experience. Campbell’s work wrests a personal vision from a sterile technological medium. Without being self-conscious or evidently personal in the content of his works, Campbell focuses on the intricacies of the object world as a form of personal expression. In this vision of life, the window onto the world is the mode of expression, not the bare content it presents. Form and content unite in a special way, opening up a world of possibilities.

I’m extremely glad I got to see some of Campbell’s works, and while this exhibit at UCI is over, there are apparently 15 or so other Campbell exhibits being held around the world right now. Information about this can be found at Jim Campbell’s website here. Additionally, for information about the Beall Center for Art and Technology at UC Irvine, check out their website here.

-Jennifer

P.S.1 in NY (event #3)

NYC continued!

Saturday my friend and I went to P.S.1 (an affiliate of MoMa) and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Brooklyn Museum of Art didn’t have much digital art at all and was extremely packed as it was a Target First Saturday (= free admission) so I’ll just focus on P.S.1.

P.S.1 was absolutely amazing. It was only $2 to get in but worth so much more. I REALLY wish we had more time there; Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to go back. It’s a division of MoMa that’s in Queens. It’s a former elementary school which you can still see in the structure of the museum. It’s also HUGE because of that with three expansive floors. It’s in a really cool area too; across the street is a legally graffiti’d huge artist studio building that was having open hours while we were there (we went and checked that out too – very cool, but very little digital – GO TO P.S.1.

I kind of don’t even want to write about it because it’s so amazing and I don’t want to ruin it for anyone that might have the chance to see it. So I’ll be purpose vague and hopefully intrigue your interests.

There are a lot of video works there. But they’re not all just projected on screens. There are a lot in very unexpected places. I don’t want to say more about that. But I’ll talk about other, more traditionally projected video works.

There was a very wide variety. Mark Leckey had his “Shades of Destructors” DVD on view. It was very music video like, with sound very obviously in the foreground above visual storytelling. It reminded me a bit of Jen’s hypertext website.

Paul McCarthy’s 1975 42 minute video art, “Sailor’s Meat” was on view too. That was disturbing to say the least. I had no time to watch the whole thing but the moment I looked on to was a point in the piece where he had on a blond female wig and was picking up a piece of liver delicately with his mouth and moving it around on the bed. It was very sexual in nature. I wish I got to view the whole thing, or maybe not, because I’m sure it would have frightened the crap out of me, but that’s always fun too.

There was an installation called “Circle Jerk” that was very cool. It was all done in black and white. It used 16 mm film, projecters, guitar amps, Digi Delay and DigiTech looper pedals. Circles, strips of alternating white, and other basic shapes were projected on the wall, in varying dimensions each time you stepped into the room, while a very low and rumbly noise came out the guitar amps. Your own body interacted with the projections as well when you stepped into it. Very cool and effective.

There were so many projects with sound. Usually while listening/viewing one in one room, you could still hear remnants of projects you had already passed. One piece involved MGM lion (in their logo)’s roar, and another involved a feigned act of violence between two acting lovers. In the next room, separate from both those pieces, I could hear the two sounds: a roar, and screams, come together in a very interesting way as I viewed comic book like illustrations. Maybe that kind of element could be problemetic when presenting digital art but in this case I think it only added to the effectiveness of the pieces.

There was a lot more but I won’t even go into it. VISIT!!!

– janel

Chelsea District Digital Art (event #2)

I went with a friend to NYC this weekend and thankfully found a lot of media arts, even in our short day and a half stay there. Friday night we took the subway to Chelsea, and walked around looking for gallery openings. We did find a lot of openings. Almost all of them were more about tangible objects than any kind of media art. My favorite gallery we were able to go into was an installation of found objects with really interesting writing on top of everything. The arrangement of all the objects was very intense and ripe with potential meeting. There was no digital art in this one but we were talking with the guy in charge of everything and he told us that the NYC fire department had taken down a lot of their installation earlier in the day due to a fire hazard or such, and that they had to frantically rebuild it before the opening. But it was impossible to recreate it exactly, so they found themselves creating something different than they had expected. This way of thinking about the creative process I found really interesting. My favorite piece of writing that I read somewhere in the chas of objects was, “Does it lower the cost of art to put a heart in it?” I liked it, because I like when things, definitely including art, invoke your emotions. I like to see others emotions in art as well. But if art was just about emotions, and less about craft, would that make it cheaper? I thought it was an interesting question to ponder.

We kept walking and FINALLY we found some digital type art. We walked past the doors of the CedarLake gallery, which was closed at the time, and were astounded. They had a very cool digital display of various dancers that you could see through these huge rounded windows. The windows had windowframes, which split the dancers into interesting viewframes. Sometimes the entire window was just the projected image of one sole dancer. At other times there were two or more dancers projected. And at other times, there were two images, but one was the mirror image of the other. We walked up closer to the door, and saw their logo sign, which was a very, very digitally enhanced image of a man crouched up like a fetus with lots of individualized raindroplets surrounding him. I really wish I had my camera with me at that point. We all (there were 3 of us) loved the image seen through the window. I picked up a postcard from the MoMa promoting their “Sleepwalkers” public artwork by Doug Aitken that would be projected on a whole city block of midtown Manhattan later in the winter. It sounds similar to the CedarLake project, and like something that I’d really enjoy, so I hope I do get a chance to come back for that.

We also saw inside a closed gallery two videoscreens seated on top of each other. The one on the top had the image of a hawk swivelling his hips back and forth until it faded to black at the end, which wasn’t the end since it was looped. Below it was the image of football players, running around on the ground on all fours in circles repeatedly, fading to black as well before looping. I still haven’t come to a decision about what these two images were supposed to say about each other or in general, but it was very interesting to think about. You could tell there was some kind of connection, because the hawk and the football players seemed to ridiculously remind you of the other.

We walked further and outside a nightclub called Crobar we saw a huge grid of small TV screens with various faces, not particularly attractive ones, projected. I didn’t really understand what purpose these faces outside the nightclub had, but perhaps that was part of it all: the curiousity that would draw you into the club to seek some kind of answer.

We walked a lot further to Exit Art, a place where we were told a lot of Smith students had interned at in the past. They were closed too, but displayed in the windows were the COOLEST and most whacked out installations I have ever seen. They were all done by a man named Peter Caine, who was actually doing some maintenance on them in the window when we were viewing them and walked outside to talk to them about us. He was about 5′3 and adorable and I was in love with him for about five minutes straight. His fabulous work made me smitten. There were about 8 or 9 installations viewable but my favorites were “First Christmas,” “Crucifixition,” “Hanukkah Harry and Muslim Mary,” and “Melt.” They all were very absurd takes on familiar holiday time stories or motives, executed by objects attached together mechanically. They moved back at forth at various speeds and some objects rotated as well. Lights were used interestingly. My favorite lighting was in one scene with a bike wheel that had been manipulated to turn at a certain speed, on top of “snow.” The moving shadows made by the rotating spokes were beautiful. We asked Peter about his process in creating the installations and I loved his answer: “Yeah, they kinda just happen. I’m just having fun for the most part.”

It was a really fun night.

– janel

Moitri’s 1st Event: Mt. Holyoke College Art Museum

The first event that I wanted to go to was to Mass MOCA, but traffic was bad so my friend and I drove to the museum in Mt. Holyoke instead. It was a cute sized museum. It didn’t have any interactive media art, but it had a nice collection of paintings and sculptures if you want to take a look at some of them:

• Jane Hammond: Paper Work
• Looking Beneath the Surface: The Quabbin and Hetch Hetchy Canyon
• Heads and Tales: Portraits and Propaganda on Classical Coins
• Asian Art from the Sackler Foundation

There were paintngs there that were based on black  ink. This is where black is used to creat other colors. For instance my friend who is an artist was telling me that he would never use black paint and white paint to make gray. He would use something else like blue and orange perhaps, because using black just makes the entire painting have a dark “layer” over it, which I really liked. I liked it because the black makes all the other colors look brighter. It makes yellows look like gold.

There were these other paintings that used colors that weren’t produced by mixing other colors. The paints looked like paintings done by a child. I don’t mean to say that the quality of the painting looked immature, but the colors looked very familiar. Something similar to what I did when I was a child. It was nice to see those colors up on a gallery wall.

Later on my friend and I were talking about how to present a piece of artwork. We discussed that for something to be good art, the art work should create a sense of chaos or some sort of uncomfortablness in the viewer. But then for something to be really good art then the chaos that the piece created should be resolved as well by the artist. Then the viewer can leave with a sense of relief and will be satisfied with the art work.

Overall, I liked the experience of the museum even though I didn’t see any media art. I learned about the use of colors and how to present a pice of work that’ll not only stirr the viewers emotions but also put it at rest.
|Moitri|

MASS MoCA

So…Clara, Janel and I made the trip to MASS MoCA on Saturday, and it only took us 3 1/2 hours to get there! Ick! It was entirely my fault because I drove in the wrong direction for about an hour. (In defense, I can only say that I didn’t realize Route 9 and Elm Street are one in the same. I thought Route 9 started at the bridge off Main Street…) In any case, we made it there, and we had a pretty decent time. I had never been to MASS MoCA before but have oftentimes wanted to trek out there for various installations and films. I had it in my mind that we wouldn’t be able to see everything in the museum because it would simply be too massive for the amount of time we could dedicate to it. I guess I was disappointed to learn that I was wrong. I was frustrated that the one sound art piece we could see is literally impossible to find or even know of unless you are looking for it (and have enough sense to ask where it is). We had to search for the underpass where we could see/hear the piece we were looking for, Harmonic Bridge, so I imagine it gets skipped over by a good majority of the museum’s visitors.

To describe the piece, I think I’ll leave it to MASS MoCA:

Entering the space under the bridge, one becomes aware of a turning eddy of sound in the midst of intersecting streams of traffic. Cars pass by heading north or south on Marshall Street and east or west on the Route 2 bridge, but this linear motion is counterpoised by a rolling, humming C as calming as the rhythm of ocean waves. Although cars stream by, pedestrians lose the impetus to move forward, derailed by this cool pool of sound with its mysterious, chant-like hum. Harmonic Bridge presents an aural cross-section of North Adams, a slice of the city in the key of C, comprised of the fundamental note and its overtone series.

The full description is available here.  At first, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the sound and the piece in general, but the longer we stood next to the box that the sound emanates from (I think it emanates from the box), the more and more I really found myself mesmerized by it.  It was literally a mesmerizing experience.  The pitches had such unique tones, and it was fascinating to think that they were the result of patterns of traffic.  Also quite fascinating: the fact that the listening experience we had can never be replicated or heard again because it was entirely contingent on the traffic and the air and several other elements during that specific period of time, and in that specific place!

I probably have more to say about our trip to the museum, but I figure I will play off of what Clara and Janel have to say.

-Jen

another interesting event…

If any of you can manage a trip to Providence (about a 1:45-2 hour drive) the sonic focus events look very interesting.

sonic.focus is a project that examines complementarities and antagonisms between sound and image in contemporary culture. Starting with film & video screenings on October 20th and 27th, the events will culminate in a conference and performance series to be held at Brown University on November 3 and 4, 2006.

two events

Beat Streuli at umass university gallery

Beat Streuli: Cities 2001-2005
Wednesday, September 20 – Sunday, November 5
Swiss-born artist Beat Streuli (b. 1957) has developed a substantial and impressive body of work in photography and video that documents the transient pedestrian activity of urban life.

Gregory Crewdson at umass

Documentary screening and talk by the photographer Gregory Crewdson. Wednesday, October 25 6:30 pm; Herter Hall, room 231, UMass

HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE FACULTY ART EXHIBITION

HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE FACULTY ART EXHIBITION
October 5-25, 2006
RECEPTION: Thursday, October 12th, 4:30-6:30 pm

Hampshire College’s annual faculty art exhibit will be held from October 5-25, 2006. In a departure from the way the show is ordinarily organized, this year the exhibit is curated by Hampshire photography professor Kane Stewart. There will be two separate but concurrent exhibits: a group show featuring the work of eight current faculty artists in the large gallery, and a memorial presentation of work by Faculty Emeritus Nina Payne (1932-2006) in the smaller adjacent gallery.

Participating faculty artists include Bill Brayton (sculpture), Kara Lynch (audio/video), Judith Mann (watercolor), Jean Marie Casbarian (audio/video), Abraham Ravett (photography), Robert Seydel (multi-media collage), Michelle Turre (digital media), and Susan Landau (painting). There will be a reception for the artists on Thursday, October 12th, from 4:30-6:30 pm. This event is free and open to the public.

Nina Payne, who died during summer 2006, was a well-known writer and poet, in addition to being a visual artist. Though she is better known for her poems, her intricately detailed, hand-sewn collages and assemblages have been shown extensively, memorably in an exhibition at the Fine Arts Center Gallery at the University of Massachusetts ten years ago. Among the work on display at Hampshire will be a selection of her poetry and written work.

On Sunday, October 22nd, at 2 o’clock, there will be a memorial service in the gallery for Nina Payne. Friends and family as well as longtime Hampshire colleagues will share reminiscences of Nina and read from some of her work. Again, this event is free and open to the public.

Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 10:30-4:30, and Sunday, 2-5. For further information about the exhibits or the artists, call guest curator Kane