Self-Assessment -- Final Project

Saint Mary's is a tightly-sealed, if not claustrophobic, campus; the lives its residents entertain while there begin to feel like the entirety of the person's repertoire and then the majority of their identity. As I approached the end of my sophomore year, it struck me that my very recently ended relationship-- the longest relationship I'd ever had, clocking in at 15 months-- had become the epicenter of my life at SMCM, and in following, not far from the epicenter of my life. Before I sound too gushy, I assure you that my case was far from unique. Long-lasting, all-consuming, almost stiflingly-close relationships haunt the campus like our egret haunts our pond--- still, unceasing, and occasionally looking physically stuck in the mud. Long-lovers flock here, and somehow, St. Mary's tends to just keep couples plastered together. And indeed, the repercussions of that stifling closeness made itself clear enough after the breakup: as David and I did the unthinkable as a "set in stone" couple and pulled our egret-legs out of the muck, I realized this entire campus is steeped in memory, both tender and angry. Maybe it always will be. What else is to be expected when such a great chunk of time, one might even say a critical impression period for one's memory of a place, was thoroughly consumed by a first love? When I broke up, I lost a boyfriend, a lover, a confidant, and above all, a best friend. Memories of each of these facets just loom and loom.

In my final project, the GoogleEarth assignment, I focused on these persistent memories; I wanted to make a way to convey the feeling of this permanence after this great loss, this unignorable surrounding of memory to emphasize the importance of the real relationship preceding them. Mainly using SketchUp, I began to create what I titled in my project an "acropolis," an array of monuments mostly in a Greco-Roman style of architecture to place in the literal place a memorable event occurred. (I chose this architecture since I felt it seemed sufficiently out of place, sufficiently stately to give great dignity to the event, great size to stress its magnanimity, and old age since it is, well, out of commission.) I wanted to contrast the flat surface of the photographed map, the unavoidable objective life anyone can be told about and see for himself, with the 3-dimensional, absurdly large, clearly nonexistent monuments to nonverbally describe the feeling of the event. I focused upon making these monuments instead of making too many paths and too many unique placemarkers or overlays (I did these for the sake of experiment and what they could plausibly be worth) since I felt I could convey enough through the creation of the buildings. The designs of the buildings were intended to convey something specific about the feeling of the event and memory; for instance, a place of religious discussion is demarcated by a basilica, one with many many pillars and levels for its complexity and grandiosity. The site of our silly dinner date is marked by an equally-silly looking gazebo (or so I hope). The site marking the traversal between our residents halls has a steep set of stairs only leading from my dorm to his, intending to convey nonverbally that I felt burdened and overactive in the relationship.

I think I achieved clarity in these constructions; they loom satisfactorily over the otherwise flat environment. Each tells only a small amount on its "plaque" about what happened, when, and what it's made of in an objective tone: I did this to stress the metaphor to the site of an ancient city and to stress the inability to tell a very personal story with anything but nonverbal means, so the monument itself may be looked to. There are more things I would have developed giving the time with my project, such as more specific monuments with more readable shape and form, more paths, a better overlay. For the rather simple aim of the memorial project, I satisfied my anticipated plan. The monuments, to me and for my personal memory, reflect what happened, what I felt and what I feel now. For the sake of subjectivity in psychogeography, the map was quite a success.

Art Event -- "How to Tell a War Story"

Earlier this semester, I attended "How to Tell a War Story," a lecture and presentation by Richard Emory Richardson of Perdue University. Richardson shared with us his interest in the representations of war throughout history and up until today, in Western culture and otherwise. His interest, it is clear, springs from his intimate involvement in art and war. Richardson was positioned as a governmentally sanctioned artist in the Vietnam War, meaning that he was sent to the same locations as the troops to document battle and quotidian life in the settings surrounding the battlefields. Richardson's artwork is filed and hidden by the US government, but may one day be on display with work by artists completing a similar job of recording image and event.

Although Richardson's story is compelling, the majority of his presentation focused on artwork outside of his own personal domain. He began with a quote from the novel "The Things They Carried," referring to the idea that a story immortalizes the past, specifically in the realm of war. He introduced us to George Siegel's sculpture intended to commemorate the Vietnam War, portraying Abraham sacrificing Isaac; although the work was rejected as inappropriate by the commissioners, it stands important as a stage-setter for the war portrayals. Although many may be literally and visually suggestive of a traditional idea of battle, many use other imagery and other ideas (like the sacrifice, or even a certain amount of contempt in the comparison) to convey something more honest, more personal, more affected than a "dolce et decorum es" sort of ideal.

He goes on to explore the advent of war photography, and its power of realism in representing the events outside of romanticized notions. He discussed the imagery and impact of photography from the Spanish Civil War, from World War I and II, but most specifically discussed the beginnings with Matthew Brady and William Henry Jackson in the Civil War. He pointed to the differences in degrees of realism the two photographers chose to represent, and how this difference created a rift in their relationship: taking advantage of the camera's ability to represent anything in the world as a still from real life, he took to arranging fallen bodies and firearms to create pleasing compositions; Jackson, a "true realist," criticized him for this.

His focus shifted to portrayals in paintings. This included a more familiar repertoire, such as Picasso's Guernica, Goya's work, and some imagery by Velasquez and Manet. However, the majority of his focus was on more obscure works; this seems appropriate, since he seemed to imply that more publicized and better-known notions of war were often less trustworthy and interesting as the more covert and more personal ones. One of these works was by Henry Moore, an English artist who portrayed the English of WWII who retreated to the underground passageways and tunnels to avoid the blitzkrieg. His portrayals gesturally and expressionistically represented the huddled figures, the distortion in the close quarters, and the fear therein. Richardson also focused on the artwork of veterans, all from the twentieth century, and ways in which they used artmaking as ways to cope with the post-traumatic stress and horrific memories of the world wars, Vietnam and Korean Wars, and so on. One artist, Rick Haines, created mixed media displays with toy soldiers in various poses beneath vases of flowers, attempting to convey the feel that war was similar to child's games. Others used textile art in creating abstract flags, or ceramics to construct shattered bones.

All in all, the presentation was engaging and telling of the historical and contemporary idea of war without frills or badges of honor.

Art Event -- Arth SMP

On May 5th, I attended the SMP presentations in Art History by April Morgan and Erica Maust.

April's presentation was curatorial, an examination of artwork of St. Mary's students past. In her consideration of the artwork, she searched for a trend or change in curriculum that was documented in the history of the college as well as identifiable in the artwork. She stated that there was a tangible shift away from skill focus and towards an emphasis on idea, conceptual development, and diversity of source. This is a similar trend in the liberalization of the college evident throughout the past ~30 years that April examined. Out of all of this work, she selected a relatively small number of pieces that she considered representative of this trend and displayed them in the 3rd floor beanbag lounge in the library. As she mentioned in her presentation, the emphasis in pieces was on portraits and landscapes, but she chose a refreshing array of artwork in addition to this general standby for 2D art-- she included drawings, paintings, and a small amount of sculpture and even a video presentation.

It amazed me that April could base a whole SMP off of artwork only from this school, but I was surprised further that she could find as much as she did to talk about. (I suppose my concept of SMPs is still relatively highfalutin.) I found it interesting, however, that the works she was exhibiting showed a less-than-expected trend towards and not away from realism. Although it is typical that the exploration of further idea over skill and craft would lead to greater and greater nonrepresentationalism, the pieces April chose did not show this trend in the least-- indeed, paintings on a whole became less stylized, less painterly, etc. This begs the viewer to look further at the idea that must be nesting behind these works instead of using identifiability as the cornerstone for the concept of a focus on idea.

Erica Maust's presentation centered around a more cultural approach to art history. In her presentation, she introduced us to UNESCO, a worldwide organization dedicated to designating sites and manmade structures as historically and culturally significant. The designations made by this organization publicly peg these places, most often allowing them to become attractions for outsiders and tourists. Erica was interested in how this affected the culture and memory tied to these sites when they are closely connected to a community. She focused on two small towns and sites in Mexico, Palenque and Calakmul, which both consisted of indigenous populace and an ancient Mayan construction.

The consensus indicates that the inhabitants felt invaded by UNESCO, that they'd been impacted economically and felt personally affronted by the thrusting of their place into the public realm. Erica opened her presentation with an adage in Spanish reading "lo que es de todos, es de nadie," or that which is everyone's is no one's. This sheds interesting light on the idea that one collective people in these places must have over time began calling the ruin near them "theirs," and identifying with it... I hadn't before considered the impact it would make on their personal lives when the site was designated culturally or historically significant and made public. It makes sense that publicizing the site would feel as though the site is metaphysically taken away from the surrounding inhabitants. I find this an interesting study of heritage, its nebulosity, and the factors surrounding it; I also find it interesting that Erica focused her art history project not on what an ancient work of art can do for its contemporary viewers, but what the contemporary people can do to it and those involved with it, its "loved ones."

Artist Focus -- Jason E. Lewis

In his work Nine on The Thought Shop, Jason Lewis presents the viewer with a unique form of narrative. He introduces the viewer with an extensive, to the point introduction, explaining that the images and the text are representations of the artist's life. The viewer is to click and drag to move the images within the grid, which causes the text to shift and the images, in their individual and movable cells, fade and shift to become other images. Lewis states that his ambitions in this project are to bring into focus the idea of a nonlinear life, one marked by "demarcations, shifts in place, shifts in community, shifts in attitude" that act in persistent memory as cornerstones to new "lives," as it were. These important memorial demarcations are well-photographed but enlarged or slightly abstracted images of landscape, faces, maps, objects, trees. As the participant moves through the images like one of those puzzles with the sliding tiles (what ARE those things? do they have a name?), the pictures fade rapidly and randomly into other images. As they are moved, the text in the one empty spot always occurs in the same order. At first, I was hesitant to move in too random of an order, in case I messed up the narrative in the text; however, the more I moved around the image tiles, the more I found that the phrases presented themselves in the same chronological order no matter how I arranged the images.

It's a legitimately interesting idea of memory and reality that Lewis deals with in this project; in presenting the story in the same chronology but the "memory" images in a highly variable combination each time the viewer interacts with it, Lewis confronts the viewer with a very tangible sense of objective memory one can realistically bestow on a listener (the text) and subjective, mutable memory thought accessible only to the thinker (the images). I'm reminded of the Cubists attempts to capture the process of sight in their paintings; the presentation of fractured image, according to some of the writings of Braque and Picasso, were to infer the fact that we take in objects bit by bit, with each bit magnified and specialized in its own way. Although cerebrally, this process makes sense, the Cubist paintings lose a lot of this notion when standing on their own. In a way, Lewis's work achieves a concept of thought and memory process better and more conveyable than the Cubists were able to achieve. I think it's the fact that the temporal dimension was introduced is what sets this work apart in terms of readability; as the story progresses in the set way, the non-negotiable way, the images change, ebb and flow like clouds. It is the fact that we can chart the change, that we ourselves utilize memory to explore this consciousness, that we can understand the dual processes of thought. It is owing mostly to the new media setting that this is really conveyable.

Personally, I like the fact that different arrangements have significantly different emotive messages. When we rearrange the images, the change and form their own gestalt, which has its own emotion and its own message regardless of the repetitive text: some are calm and serene, some seem cold and unfamiliar, others a little intimidating. In this way, I can see why Lewis chose to consider his piece "poetry" in the intro description.

Artist Focus -- Cory Arcangel

DATADIARIEZZZZZ seems to be the most well-known work of Cory Arcangel's, if not his only work of which to speak. The work, according to the introduction page, is the result of Cory's own computer hacking. Somehow, Cory placed the memory of his computer (his computer? our computers?) and plays it back in the form of visual colors and shapes. The viewer can choose the data from a given day in January of a determined year and view all the data left from the actions of the day.

The intro page prides Cory Arcangel's project as a work of art taking little to no effort or rumination. It gladly acknowledges that Cory Arcangel cannot realistically be considered even an artist, web-artist or otherwise. I suppose there's a certain interest in the "phenomenon" that a series of visually appealing nonrepresentational, colorful videos were produced "accidentally" by a non-artist. Perhaps we can file this under the movement of quotidian art, under that ultra-modern and ultra-liberal concept of art as accident, art as incidental, art as almost everything. I suppose some might view Cory's videos and remark upon the visual appeal, even a sort of poetry to the change of colors, shapes, distributions... an emotive response to the flow and the color, as if we're reading something personal from, as the website titles the work, a diary of a non-human. Yes, it would be possible for the viewer to squeeze visual and poetic value out of this sort of work.

I'm conflicted when I view this, however. In the last word of the previous paragraph, I specifically used the term "work;" perhaps we should be asking ourselves as viewers as this piece, this experimental and almost flippant arrangement of html, can honestly be considered the result of labor and care as the term "work" implies. I am troubled when the intro page readily backs the fact that Cory is not an artist in the most familiar and conventional term, but that (in suggestion) his website should be acknowledged as art. 19th century art critic Aurier said that to create art, an undertaking of transcendent nobility, should be to represent “the highest and most truly divine in the world … the only thing existent – the Idea." Like so much other contemporary and modern art, I see no divinity in this work, no great idea, no weighty undertaking. I will consider Datadiaries a web experiment, but I will give it no adjective higher and more respecting than "cool." It is certainly clear that Cory Arcangel is no artist; therefore, I am hard pressed to call his production art.

Artist Focus-- David Crawford

In Crawford's project, Stop Motion Studies, the artist took series of photographs of common people occupying public space. His focus upon the riders in the Tokyo subways was the major stop motion study I watched. In the study, Crawford focuses upon one person or one group of people at one time, then collects approximately 5 or 6 pictures of the subject in a quick succession-- enough to infer motion when placed in order and played forward. Crawford did just that in arranging these similar but subtly different images in an order and allowing the accessed image to play in a loop. Perhaps the images are not ordered, but dispersed and placed alongside one another to appear to be moving in a subtly differentiated but nevertheless repetitive way. In any event, the result is a montage of images that appear to play back the actions of a specific individual or group on the subway over a span of time.

To play back this tiny series of actions on loop, the total series in each case documenting probably less than thirty seconds of action and interaction, gives the illusion that the actions are repetitive over a long span of time. Other stop-action films and photomontages use photos taken over a span of time (such as every minute, every ten minutes, every hour) for an extended period time, then play them back chronologically to allow us to see a grand sort of change and pattern in the larger world. Essentially, stop motion functions to show larger change "in real time," in a way comprehensible in an incredibly reduced period of time. It makes the macroscopic microscopic so we can better understand it. This work of stop-motion, however, shows the movement and the progress of just a moment across an infinite span of time--- herein, it essentially does the opposite of what a typical stop-motion film does, making the microscopic macroscopic.

It seems to me that this is Crawford's genius: he gives us the opportunity to not just indulge in a sort of voyeurism to better understand quotidian people in their natural habitat, but to boil down this experience to one moment and freeze it, allowing us to explore the moment so much more intimately. It's an almost Impressionistic version of the flaneur, exploring a frozen (yet actively moving) moment in a frame to understand the state of their lives, of Paris better. I think the way Crawford lets us explore the multitude of different expressions and actions captured-- humorous, dramatic, serene, and so on.

Artist Focus -- Pac Manhattan

In this collaborative project, a group of young adults organized efforts, costumes and rules to recreate the game of Pac Man in a real life setting. Essentially, one player donned a "pac man" esque costume, then entered the streets of Manhattan to "eat" all the "dots" of a predetermined section of streets and avoid being eaten by the ghosts, who were acted by 4 different players. The players active on the street are not acting of their own volition: they are given direction via walkie-talkie for direction and action by a remote player. This player is able to track the progress of the Pac Man on a gridlike map, seeing where he has gone and where he can go.

In a manner very similar to the game, contact with the ghosts would lose lives/the game, and reaching a certain point would allow the Pac Man to gain the ability to "eat" the ghosts. The act of "eating" things was modified in the real world setting by tagging (ie, a ghost tags Pac Man or vice versa). Instead of eating the "dot" that allows the Pac Man to eat the ghosts, the Pac Man touches the sign at the predetermined intersections on streets. The Pac Man does not exactly "eat" or tag dots as he travels through the street maze, but they are automatically deleted as he travels once over any one of the paths necessary for finishing.

While it is far from rare for me to get excited over a work of art, really interesting or stimulating works have been rather hard to come by at least in my previous experience in the New Media department... However, this work caught my interest and kept it. It was immediately attention-grabbing and clear in the message and motive (breaking the game out of the context of the screen) and actually had a readable sense of humor. All these things make for a rare combination.

But even so, can it really be considered a new media art project? Unlike most of the works discussed in this project, from music to interactive games and narratives, this work does not occur on the internet. The records of its occurrence are on the internet, sure, but the internet is not its natural habitat. The players don't live in the digital realm, either, but literally run around to complete the project. In most ways, I can see how this project would be considered a performance art piece. Let's not forget, however, that the project is wholly dependent on the use of technology in the hand-held screens and communication from player to Pac-Man. Without the communication, the work would be chaotic, slow, and relatively anarchistic... with the role of tracking devices and communicating devices, the work becomes most like the game. Not only is there a game board and moving, interactive pieces, but there is a controller who has omnicient control over the entire grid. This can only really be possible with the role of new media, which most solidly categorizes it as such.

Psychogeography Response /// Alternative Map

I find it interesting that “This American Life” describes alternative maps, specifically those created by Denis Wood, as “more like novels, trying to describe everyday life.” Sure, some of these maps describe lifestyle observations within the landscape that can be organized and presented: this might include the map of Jack o’ lanterns around the neighborhood on Halloween, or Toby Lester’s map of ambient sounds. In these creations, these men are mapping aspects of their lives pertinent specifically to their lives, making their creations into personal novels, in a way. But many of the subjects within the maps seem distant from the lives of the mapmakers. The maps of street lights, water lines and hydrants, and power lines jump to mind. As the This American Life article mentioned, “Mapmaking means ignoring everything in the world but the one thing being mapped, whether it's cracks in sidewalks or the homes of Hollywood stars.” Thus, if the maps of the areas had every single different element being mapped under a different layer in Photoshop, the artists have turned off the visibility of every element but the visibility for the mundane-seeming element we are presented. But why are these mapmakers outlining these details of their personal space and not any others?

To create a map of something is to honor it, in a way: this something is a mark or series of marks on a landscape important enough to be comprehensively outlined. That a map exists to document where this aspect of the landscape can be found implies that someone is interested in looking for it. A map, after all, carries the connotation of utility. So, in essence, these artists are placing special emphasis on their chosen focal points to imply a user who needs this information or is specifically interested in this information. Perhaps this is nothing more than a Dadaist, Surrealist exploration of Baudelaire’s idea of a “flaneur,” as the Wikipedia article on psychogeography suggested. From my experience in my Modern Art History class, this would imply that the artists are playing the part of an objective eye, a roving and observing gentleman in the context of modern urbania--- but one who assaults the everyday understanding of a map with the presentation of the absurd (but perhaps arbitrary) element or one who forces the viewer to understand the landscape in a psychologically-troubled, perhaps obsessively-counting, paranoid sort of manner. (The Surrealists were big on troubles of the mind.) While I can see the confrontational pursuit and potential impact of the early psychogeographers, I hardly think these contemporary mapmakers carry the political and socially-upheaving attitudes of these earlier artists and those of the Dadaist affiliation on a whole.

No, I think these specific artists are perhaps attempting in creating maps (and, therein, paying homage) to their selected elements to force the audience to consider the wealth of complexity in any given location and the impact it has on our lives and others’ lives. Sure, one might look at the maps of power lines and think of the electricians and construction workers who must know a map like this rather intimately—but I also see a map like this one and think of the real importance of the element, even to myself. While it’s easy to consider things like road maps the only documentations of important aspects of our surroundings, these maps document paths and locations of elements essential to our daily lives. Even if we have no intention of using the map to follow on foot to see the different locations, we might see the map and marvel at (or just chew over) the prevalence of that element, the organization, the dissonance from the landscape we’re used to.
This refers only to the newer manifestations of this idea… clearly, there is a rift between these newer maps and the older forms. It seems to me that the most all-encompassing statement for both manifestations is that “By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies.” For the older artists, like Debord, this involved combining what he called “hard ambiance,” or physical reality, with “soft ambiance,” or a cognitive/emotional association or sensory association. It seems that newer artists pursue the same basic combination of information, but they tend to present a pointedly unorthodox element of objective knowledge that can more subtly and comprehensively imply a subjective knowledge. Debord and his associates stopped the creation of their psychogeographic maps due to the observed “relativity” of the landscape, in which idea or emotion could never be fully expressed to another by any means of retelling. Perhaps this modern manifestation was a way to solve this problem.



So how can I meld the subjective with the objective to create an interesting, engaging, off-beat alternative map of St. Mary’s? How can I ignore every part of the campus but the part I am most interested in?

-I could create the naturalist guide to St. Mary’s. Not a totally subjective account, but not completely objective either. Documenting animal spottings, good hiking and biking trails, good smells, pond smells, hard trees to climb, easy trees to climb, best places to find edible plants, where to watch out for poison ivy, etc…

-After a painful breakup last week, I could create a map of all that nonsense just to put it to rest… where we met, where we did this and that, how we broke up… but isn’t is boring when art projects are too esoteric?

-I could map out the different chairs and benches around campus--- all the different public places to sit. Maybe that’s a little too pointedly knocking off of Denis Wood’s work, and maybe it doesn’t mean enough to me… but I do entertain a minor fondness and fascination with chairs.

-That’s all I can think of for now.

Artist Focus -- Matthew Richie

Matthew Richie is presented as a highly cerebral artist, creating complex works of art in physical in digital media to reflect structure and classification within the realm in which he is concerned. He has created interactive interfaces able to produce different outcomes based on the different paths taken within the large number of different characters and settings developed. His completed product of this sort is The New Way, a complex system involving 49 characters, broken into 7 groups of 7, able to interact in a likely-infinite number of different paths. The object of this, however, not about the numeric possibilities, but was created to represent "the story of origins, or genesis and fall, as a metaphor for the construction of art" (Richie, 1995).

Is it that simple? Richie describes his actions slightly differently on The Hard Way introduction page, describing the process of its story to represent the "nature of information" and "a model of thought, an algorithm for consciousness" (Richie, 1996). On both the SFMOMA page and the introductory page for The Hard Way, Richie puts his work in the context of the slogan/idea "everything is information." What could be meant by or understood of these conflicting definitions or methods for understanding this work?

My experience of The Hard Way was relatively brief, browsing through the initial plotline and the first initial characters I could choose as my own. Richie introduces the experience as being one of the Watchers, or fallen celestial entities, as they interact with the Watched entities later. The choices of Watchers are represented as blipping shapes, which can be clicked for a profile and chosen or not chosen. The different Watchers are different sections of the brain involved in unique cognition or operative skills. He goes on to embody these brain representations with paintings, elaborate stories one must scroll horizontally to read (I find these difficult to understand the first way through), and so on. In this, he introduces a strange dichotomy of emotion and biology behind art-making and cognition. If this work is about making art, these Watchers must portray the different specific mental functions an artist might choose to work with (rational, irrational, carnal, etc) and the emotional implications therein. A similar concept is true if this is to be interpreted as cognition as a whole.


more thinking to come.

For the Alphabet Project - Update

The exploration of the alphabet, when it boils down to it, has three aspects that, for me, are interesting and artistically poignant enough to work with on a poster project.

(How convenient that there are 3 posters to be done in all!)

Ever emanating the rascally Paul Gauguin, I think the three temporal forms of the transformation of the alphabet are the most fascinating, as they're all contained in the finite source of any given character and its recorded past: the all-encompassing title "Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?" comes to mind when looking at our language through a letter, fleeting in form and timeless in impact. Each letter can be explored for its role in the past, present and future, and each of these periods carries a sort of philosophy with it, a focus that I'd like to explore a little further.

Where did our letters come from?...
---I really liked the concept of letters being born of pictographs and heiroglyphs from ancient civilizations, and I was fascinated further to think that these basic forms can disperse into different letters in different cultures. Symbols for objects or ideas are collected by the rudimentary civilizations, then contorted and twisted and tilted and squished into something more basic: the written form of an object becomes the written form of a sound, of an utterance of the mouth--- in this grand process eschewing bits and pieces of the original form's objective meaning, but still echoing it just slightly for those who really know how to read them.
I found it beautiful, to use that audacious and wonderful term, that most of the civilizations producing early alphabets and series of pictographs attributed them to the divine, that this kingly gift was a way of communicating, of consolidating ideas, from eternalizing conversation with God. Letters, for the most part, were soaked in spirituality in form and in philosophy; in the same way that our letters and even some of our basic enunciations are linked to the past, I wanted to indicate that the spirituality behind them and the link to God that they emanate is not lost. To do this, I want to embody the pictorial form preceding letters in one of my posters.



"Who" are our letters?...
---I also can't ignore that one today doesn't see letters as praying figures or Godly suns. The most beneficial alphabet system we've been able to design is boiled down, as I mentioned above, to the symbolism of sounds, of vowels and consonants. With these, we can write anything and identify sound with image, filling it with value. It is so engrained in our understanding of letters today that seeing a letter fills us with the understanding of their pronunciation.

R R R R R R R R R

O O O O O O O O O

A A A A A A A A A

For this reason, for the more present understanding of letters, I want to focus on their ultra-secular connotation of sound. I might arrange shapes of mouths creating different pronunciations of a vowel around the letter itself as a minimalistic, modern representation of the letter.


Where are our letters going?...
---Will be the fun one. I might take a letter, consider a different connotation we have with it (outside of its pronunciation, which I understand is a simplification of how we understand letters today), then morph it and shape it into a pictograph again. A "T", for example, might be equated to a t-shirt, since the object and symbol reflect one another. Perhaps as language progresses, the "t" might assimilate to object so that the symbol literally stands for the shirt... then, perhaps, the symbol of a shirt is directly connoted to mean a male who might wear the shirt, or perhaps the cotton that went into the shirt (as opposed to whatever material might be used for other clothing material), or perhaps for "clothing" on a whole. This progression from alphabetic into heiroglyphic and into pictographic form of representation is perhaps suggestive of a regression in the future to a more rudimentary society (which needs a less-sophisticated written language), which may not have any real proof to validate this extrapolation of progress. However, the conceptual idea is to make more real the progress of the past letters,to suggest the ability of letters to morph and alter thanks to the needs of the civilization at any time. The "T" is by no means static.

Artist Focus: Roch Forowicz

Refreshingly simple in concept and execution, the most prominent work of Roch Forowicz, "looking," is just that. In 2006, the young Polish artist set up a video camera outside the window of his home apartment and consequently set up the online project which broadcasted the content he caught on film. The material is organized into what the artist calls "parts," including 7 in all; they are medium- to low-quality documentations of situations occurring outside what the artist insists is the same window, each lasting several minutes in length. They have titles of what seems to be the main "point" or situation within the film clip. The scenes are relatively monotonous and grow a bit boring for the average viewer, but they surely were chosen for their intrigue, being out-of-the-ordinary situations (such as "Death in the city," the first part, which includes police officers hovering over a body of a man laying on the ground) or being strangely personal and almost intrusive (such as "Classic Bench," the fifth part, which documents two men sitting on a bench, conversing and commenting on things and characters that pass them by). In the artist statement on the website, Forowicz assures the visitor that this site was not intended to be voyeuristic (not about "crime [or] love"), but the power of simple observation to appreciate the "drama" occurring in ordinary life, particularly when we take for granted fabricated dramas to bring us entertainment.

I realized that the majority of my impatience when observing Forowicz's work likely stemmed from the fact that I was expecting the fabricated sort of drama. I was attuned to constant thrills and exciting details that were made available to me through a screen, with characters that were knowable and change rapid enough to demand (not just politely suggest) my attention. I was hardly even willing to look at a potential crime scene with a (likely) dead body laying on the ground for the monotony!-- surely this was not a problem with the content presented, but my conditioned patience. If the contrast was what Forowicz intended to become painfully clear in "looking," he achieved it.

I feel strongly that "looking" is successful on other fronts in a wonderfully fresh, plain way in comparison to other artists who attempt the same feat of naturalistic observation. Vito Acconci in his early projects of following people with a camera seemed more to be bringing more attention to his own strangeness, the ridiculousness of his actions with any message he wanted to make about publicity of appearance somewhat brushed over. Forowicz doesn't intend to decorate his observation with unacceptability in his actions. He observes, and allows others to observe by placing his findings on the most accessible source known to us currently, the internet. He advertised himself with fliers, as well, so his website might get better publicized. In this light, his objectives for this project are refreshingly simple: he wanted to make the private public and the transitory frozen and duplicated. It is effective as a haiku and, given the patience, quite satisfying.

little thought...

Maybe I'm giving too much thought to this layout and connotation of a poster form. Maybe I should focus on making an artwork that just so happens to be as small and as disposable as a poster.

But even then, I admit I'm a little paralyzed by this project. Most of my thoughts on the alphabet and its parents are not really as emotion- or opinion-driven as most artwork tends be. Why not just write my thoughts? The idea would be clearer.

Back with further conceptualizations later. Hopefully I've exorcised all the misgivings out of my system and can just focus.

A culmination of thoughts on the Alphabet project after the snow days...

I assure you that this isn't the first I've given this project any thought. I'd be in for it if this was. I've let the idea wash around in my mouth for a while and allowed it to grow before formally posting a blog entry... perhaps I'm just not used to the blog format enough to comfortably post thoughts as they occurred.


The idea was to concern the procession of an English-language letter back to Greek, Roman, even Phoenician or Semitic roots in history. Our alphabet is far from static, having evolved from pictorial symbol through a series of abstractions to produce the letter we have today with a relatively rich genealogy behind it. The idea, to be frank and subjective, is relatively interesting but rather finite and unapplicable. Sure, the letter "A" may have "evolved" from a previous form. That form may once have meant this or that and has become refined and restructured to symbolize the sound made at the beginnings of "apple," "avery" and "awning" combined. I guess one might be interested to know the history and the implications of its pictorial state, and one might be gently reminded of it whenever reading or writing letters. It's viable. But for a poster? Let's think more about this.

The proposed outlet for exploring this idea was to create three posters for three different letters of the alphabet, of our choice or based on the letters of out names. Now, for me, posters are very specific artistic outlets. A poster is made to hang on a wall, often temporarily; it might be framed, I suppose, if it was signed or particularly special, but in general a poster is a low and very disposable object typically not thought of as art. Art has a weighty connotation of self-sufficiency in idea, and posters, on the other hand, are typically not created for their own sake. They attempt to convey a persuasive message as they hang temporarily: the most common posters that come to my mind are...

--advertising posters. These give information and attempt to present subjects (being a music venue, a show, a product, even an idea like a public service announcement) in an appealing way.

--bedroom posters. These make more apparent something the owner likes or identifies with. These might feature rock bands, motivational images/text, souvenirs from places like Yellowstone or Oxford, movie posters, reproductions of art, humorous displays of text and image (like the Ten Commandments of College which mostly involve beer pong).

--classroom posters. These give information as reference; the wall is a convenient place to see them and use what's on them. (ie the periodic table, a diagram of a biological system or process, lists of literary devices, the color wheel)

Any poster I made for this project, I reasoned, would have to do something like one of these, and more specifically, be read as one.


At first, this combination of idea and outlet baffled me. Honestly, it even annoyed me. A poster, one that advertises or displays interest or information, does not seem like the first media of choice for exploring the subject matter. How utilitarian the poster is--- and how unexpected is the rather obscure idea of alphabet genealogy! It is easy to imagine placing the entire alphabet and the entirety of its 4 or 5 predecessors on a poster in a diagram form for a linguistics class, but that takes care of only one poster and is insufferably boring... and unfortunately, we must focus only on one letter per poster, and I feel that an informative poster of any one letter would be rather trite if not surrounded by its 25 brothers. I suppose personalizing posters with someone's first initial could make it a poster of interest that one might hang in their room, but realistically, the market for nerdy, female linguistics students seems too small to make a poster and expect it to be convincing. And the idea of making an advertisement poster out of any of these letters is, well, absurd.

I knew I'd have to twist this idea and the make clever use of the poster medium to make this project convincing.


My first idea for my first letter, "T," is based on the persuasive/informational posters seen specifically in the Green Bean cafe in Goodpaster Hall. Sponsored by Equal Exchange, the coffee stand uses posters to nudge customers toward more environmentally- and socially-conscious choices in their coffee consumption. Going in the same vein of informertisement (to use my own linguistic liberties), I might make a poster advising users of the English language to be more conscious of what's in their letters and what the current-day results experienced before reaching the state in which we experience them. I could illustrate it with a tea bag in a mug of water, the leaves disseminating into a brew with mature flavors (in the form of "mature" symbols floating to the top).

Do you know what's in your "T"?

har, har, har.

Artist Focus: Olia Lialina

Olia Lialina studied film and film criticism before extending her hand to new media art production, which culminated in the project “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” (1996). In terms of technological prowess, “My Boyfriend” is relatively low, utilizing techniques very similar to those we have already learned in HTML involving tables and links. The viewer enters the production with the simple white text “my boyfriend came back from the war. after dinner they left us alone.” on a black background. If one clicks the text, one is led to a new, compound image of two pictures, a window and two figures in opposite ends of the screen, both in cruddy quality and black and white against the black background. If one clicks the image of the two seated figures, one is led to a string of links involving text and image (beginning with a close-up of a woman’s face) which exist in a table with now-visible bars separating cells. As the links are clicked, new images and text—which seems to be snippits of dialogue—appear in new boxes or replace them with new cells within the original cell. This growth of cells and change of dialogue text and images creates something of a fractal pattern, leading the viewer forward until all the clicking leaves the majority of the cells blank, with only the original cells (with the window and seated figures) and the last cell with the artist’s information in the bottom right remain.

“My Boyfriend” has become a wildly popular work, with multiple imitations in multiple new media (and even “old” media, like gouache), and for a clear reason: this artwork is not like other works comprising the field of new media art. Not only does it store the majority of its apparent worth and meaning in its visual elements (unlike works like “Telegarden” and “BorderXing”), but it appears to be art-like instead of a potential error or mess of color, like “Jodi.org” might be perceived to be. For a quotidian, non-art-based viewer, “My Boyfriend” is a welcome, organically-artlike change from the I Can’t Believe It’s Really Considered Art! material the contemporary field has been producing. That it is visually appealing certainly doesn’t imply, at least for this viewer, that the work suffers from a lack of deeper thought of which more overtly conceptual work may boast. Lialina outlines something that is far from a linear conversation, far from the soap-opera-esque material the subject matter may otherwise produce. It involves temporal and spatial change in the process of clicking through the links and reading the images and dialogue clips, much in the same way a typical conversation may progress; but since the information that is clicked into is so obviously disjointed, the viewer is gently but firmly advised to read the conversation as something greater than literal. To me, the conversation being outlined is very psychological, the run-through of a very fresh memory and the things seen or focused upon when each phrase was uttered. They change in size related to proportion of importance; they progress not based on when they were said or whom they were said by, but as the situation was experienced mentally later. Once the thought of a phrase has been considered, it is left blank instead of dangling. To me, this implies that the conversation has ended—there is nothing left to be said, nothing overtly undecided about the situation for the characters that experienced it. It is only the viewer left to decide what the result of the conversation was, which keeps the experience compelling. It is specifically through the devices of expansion, of disappearance and the act of clicking, accessible only through the medium of HTML and the internet, that the story gets the meat of its importance.

Artist Focus - Jodi.org

Jodi.org, created as a dual project between Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, is a prime example of conceptual art of the new media persuasion. Other projects and artists of my concentration have been wholly performance or idea-based, the web becoming the main means of disseminating that idea or situation, though containing no real visual content of its own. Although the work contained in Jodi.org is certainly unorthodox, it reflects a certain return to previous creations in that its visual aspects, as coupled with the behind-the-scenes aspects of thought process, contain meaning to better the viewer’s understanding of the work. When one enters the main website wwwwwwwww.jodi.org (as addressed by the Mark Tribe directory), one is confronted with a mess of text and image in occurring in varying sizes and overlapping without any apparent order. Some of the text or image links to a different page, which displays new patterns of broken script, image, animation and line. It is recognizable that these websites seem to be distortions of typical ones, a representation of one that loads poorly no matter how many times the page is refreshed. One feels as though they are feeling a path through the dark from one unknowable location to another.

All web users have experienced a glitch at some point; sometimes even common pages like Facebook display temporary glitches where the orderly, gridded content of the network is distorted and expressed in different fonts, sizes and arrangements. I find myself weirdly terrified of glitches, or so classically-conditioned to click “back” or “refresh” when I experience one that I experience a mild wave of dread and displeasure when I see one. We want the internet to be a clear, organized, unfailing container of information and to be a portal to other sources of clear information, so the speed and alacrity of our reception of new image and information is second only to our thought processes; this desire to “assert” (or at least expect) order over this tool demands that we despise any and all problems that may arise. This keeps us from appreciating the intrigue and (dare I say it?) beauty in a poorly loaded page, in disorder in the realm of order. The website itself, if seen in HTML form, has a pictograph of a hydrogen-bomb tucked within the otherwise-accurate code: thus, the action of the makers to create this disorder by planting a literal (in its pictorial form) and figurative (in the form of its translation to HTML’s language) bomb in the code was quite deliberate. Although the exact outcome of any given website with an encoded “bomb” was surely unknown to Heemskerk and Paesmans, the exact outcome is not as important as the act of distortion and the result that one experiences emotionally and cognitively when feeling their way through the website.

For me, this project emphasizes the abstract quality of the internet: although what we see in a website is a projected image, a space in which we literally move around (with a mouse or keyboard) and navigate within, it has been created based on a gobbledygook (as perceived by the untrained reader) of text and symbol , or simply of 1’s and 0’s. In essence, the internet is like an illusionistic painting: it may be created of paint, a raw material that simply has color, but that is meticulously arranged to create an image that appears to be like real life, and able to be interacted with. However, as painting progressed, intentional defects in the application of paint (such as abandoning perspective, life observation, etc) led to the creation of paintings that acknowledged the media behind it and shattered the illusionistic aspect that many modern artists felt distracted from the idea behind work. Jodi.org does for virtually-realistic websites what abstraction did for painting: it forces the viewer to realize the material behind it, and the aesthetic possibilities therein. Personally, I find the ability to observe a glitch as not only mildly emotionally jarring, but exciting: the colors, the new patterns, the almost-humorous absurdity is very eye-pleasing, in a way that few new media artists allow their work to be.

Artist Focus: Bunting and Brandon

The work of Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon is another dramatic change of pace from that of my previous two New Media Artists; it seems that, after this much investigation, there is little thematic or formal that unites this art form as a whole. Bunting and Brandon, both in collaboration and working separately on different projects, assert themselves as highly confrontational and rebellious. Using the internet as the main means, these “artivists” (to use their self-introduced moniker) make websites to present statements about specific governmental restraints and introduce ways for the visitor to thwart them. The project mentioned most exclusively is "BorderXing" (2002), a site introducing methods one could use to cross European borders covertly, since such unauthorized travel is assumed to be illegal.

The website opens as a simple grid (so simple I could likely identify the HTML used for it: it seems to be nothing more than a table with links). This grid includes abbreviations for a series of European nations along the X and Y axis, and where any two tangential countries converge via X and Y in the body grid, a link indicates if these borders have been crossed or not. When either sort of link is clicked, a new site opens, curtly informing the user that this information is for authorized “clients” only, then proceeds to list the users that would be authorized to see this sort of information. The list of eligible viewers was curious to me, as it did not present them alphabetically, but in a jumble of obscure and familiar nations. I was unable to access any information about crossing any sort of border, although clients from Qatar, Antarctica, or Bahrain (to name the first 3) would have been; thus, I have to take the Mark Tribe wiki-site’s word for it when I say that the presented information on border crossing, like the grid and list of eligible visitors, is simple and unadorned. This simplicity and matter-of-fact attitude, this subtlety in presentation begs the viewer to dig more deeply into the presented site and to actually consider it a work of art with a meaning behind it. It would almost seem that this work attempts to make a statement about the internet on a whole: the information made potentially available to any viewer is a potent means of connecting physical places (a rather obvious interpretation of the title "BorderXing"), but the inaccessibility promised to almost every visitor is crippling, making the web experience almost oxymoronic.

It is clear, however, that Bunting and Brandon intend to convey something more. Bunting’s collaborative project with Rachel Baker, the website “SuperWeed,” introduces information about pesticide-resistant plants that can be cultivated at home and released into the wild to prevent further success of GM-products. This work is much more overt in its political intentions (“By releasing SuperWeed 1.0 into the environment long before biotech companies have a suitable fix, you will contribute to large losses in [GM products'] profitability”). If this serves as a definitive example of the intended attitude behind Bunting (and his collaborator’s) work, then one can assume that BorderXing is a similar attempt to use cyberspace to infiltrate (and comment on) the physical world and the restraints around it. the wiki-site made an interesting comparison of works like these to "hacking," web-introduced methods to disrupt the typical functioning of the interconnected physical world-- perhaps to start a chain-reaction change for the betterment of rebels or for the worse of the administrative parties.

Considering all this, I can’t help but think that BorderXing is somewhat oxymoronic itself in its attempts to belligerently react against border control. The site is stated to be endorsed by famous, one might even say bigwig organizations like the Tate Gallery in London and Fondation Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg; this certainly does not support the anticipated attitude of defying social constructions to make a statement. How can this work be truly combative if it is supported by government-endorsed museums? Are Bunting and Brandon simply trying to assert themselves as artists and not as terrorists?

Artist Focus 2: Alexei Shurgin

Strange, nostalgic and humorous, Alexei Shurgin's work is unlike that of many other new media artists. The Russian-born artist is best known for his creation of digitized music on a now-outdated operating system, which upon first glance does not seem particularly like fine art. His sound files consist of both digitized, popular American songs and Russian ones, either self-composed or covering an existing but unfamiliar one. The culmination of these efforts culminated in its most popularized form, the cyber-punk "rock band" called "386 DX" (1998). The songs are collected on a CD, sold through his website, and are downloadable in various forms. Shurgin has played these sound files live, experimenting with the music media in ways varying from playing them in British pubs to orchestrating the sounds in san Diego and stationing speakers to play in Tijuana, and so on. Shurgin also had a habit of collecting websites and deeming them "art" by his own award system, on WWWArt Award. Although most of the websites aren't any longer accessible, the introduction in the website and the taglines in the various link give visitors to the site a good idea of Shurgin's perspective on this new art. One should approach this medium of computers playfully, monopolizing on the availability of communication and image and their blurry art / non-art line to deem creations "art" upon personal persuasion.

To what extent is 386 DX art, except in the sense that Shurgin deems it so? It is an interesting identity game he plays with the audience by calling his personal productions those of a "band:" is he trying to make a statement on the interaction between man and computer as an exchange, like what humans have? Maybe. I don't know how far that line of thinking would take me. More immediately appealing is a statement the Mark Tribe website made about his work: that there is "evidence of the distinct Pop art sensibility" in his work. Hearing an early-video-game-esque version of Smells Like Teen Spirit is, when I think about it, somewhat reminiscent of Lichenstein's cartoon paintings: the subject matter is unavoidably familiar, but the kicker (if you will) in terms of its artistic merit is the substance behind the product, the process of creation. Making a comic book panel into a large oil painting blurs the lines between fine and low art, and transforming gritty Nirvana songs into silly mechanized sounds composed of complex codes writted for the operating system diminished the emphasis placed on a computer's left-brained information processing importance for its elusive right-brained creative potentials. Covering a Nirvana song in the same musical media as Kurt Cobain and his band chose would have significantly less thematic interest.

Thinking of our exploration of HTML, it seems amazing that the cold feel of writing codes for the computer can be translated into something that not only makes sense, but can be aesthetically pleasing and maybe (with enough experience) clever, ironic, or playful. My experience also made me realize how difficult the coding would have been to create these songs, matching tone to beat, synthesizing, and so on. I imagine it almost like weaving a blanket out of threads by hand: we take for granted the craftsmanship of blankets when we can buy them and come by them so easily. When presented in an art context, however, we become immediately aware of the concert of laying threads strand by strand, the intricacy, the care behind it. Perhaps that's what Shurgin is trying to do in the art aspect of 386 DX: to make us realize a common thing's complexity when placed in an art context.

Ken Goldberg - Artist Focus

The work of Ken Goldberg, most prevalent in the mid- to late-nineties, features an innovative focus upon the interactive potential within the blossoming internet. Namely, his work entitled “Telegarden” (begun in 1995) allowed everyday web users to log on and subscribe to the project, allowing them to participate in the cultivation of plants in a community garden with clicks of the mouse. The alterations of a user manipulated a mechanical arm over the garden, controlling light from a sunlamp and likely other elements that would alter the welfare of a garden, such as water levels. The user could see images of the flowers they were being cultivated in the lab setting of Austria, a location likely far removed from the setting of one’s home. Although Goldberg has allowed the public to know that the robotically-controlled garden does exist and is manipulated as advertised, the website is designed to lead a user to question the reality of his interaction.

Goldberg’s work, particularly Telegarden, is intimately relevant to my relationship to the internet. I’m perturbed and fascinated by the numb, human-free interaction he explores in the project, considering the relevance and actuality of any given press of a button when using certain web devices. In making a garden that lives or dies by the control of electrical impulses from around the globe, I think of the dozens of interactions we make in quotidian internet life that involve clicks and types for the user and relevant emotional or quasi-physical changes in another place. More specifically, I remembered the anxiety I felt when I first typed in my parents’ credit card number as I bought a CD or book off of amazon.com—how was I to know beyond any doubt that my entering numbers into this little box would get money out of their account, put it in another person’s account and eventually get me my purchase? How was I to know that they’d take the right amount, that they wouldn’t clean out the bank account and leave us high and dry? There was no way of knowing, and my first purchases were quietly and sheepishly anxious. If I was given a picture of the “bank account” (even though I knew it was technically digital in its raw form, which is also perturbing), I doubt I would believe it was the one that belonged to my parents for the first few goes. This sort of reality-anxiety faded with time, as it went unshared by other internet users and as I my efforts (typing in the numbers) were rewarded with the promised result (the package arriving in the mail). However, I think that anxiety about our separation from our internet-actions can really be embraced when we never receive that physical proof that we created the changes we “watched happen,” and especially when that interaction involves another living thing. We’re almost always more conscious of our actions on the internet when we’re interacting with another life: for this reason, I also thought about dating sites and AIM as related to this project. We can interact with living things with typed words or even recorded podcasts, and given the expectation of an eventual physicality of our internet interaction (a meeting of a member from a dating site, or even the reference to an internet conversation with a friend), we will treat it like a physical conversation. However, in the event that a human interaction stays on the internet, honesty is never promised. We are all familiar with times in which these interactions are either false or misleading. I can contact someone from match.com via email or Skype or AIM, establish a relationship and eventually meet him, but I can also get a message from a 80 year old man from Iceland who claims to be a 20 year old from Annapolis. Goldberg, I think, monopolized on this life-to-life interaction to test our acceptance of effectuality across the internet: we could make a farce of his project and overwater and under-light a plant to death, essentially laughing over watching it die, but I think a certain humanity makes us think twice about destroying even a remote life—and we debate if we can really have such an effect. Do we cultivate flowers when we talk to a stranger on the internet? Or do we just get verbal and pictorial responses as the only reciprocation to our one-sided interaction?
The work also makes the viewer ponder a great amount about the breadth of the internet’s capability, especially for the early age of its power. It, like much other contemporary art, causes the viewer to question its stance as “art” at all, but I satisfyingly, I think this project is more like ideal art than some others I’ve explored. The message and connection that comes from its intimate, engaging interactivity is tangible; it is a project for its own sake, since it does not require the monetary funds from users that some web-plant-tending business site might require. All in all, the work of art is satisfying and compelling. I’d love to see more of his work, given more time.

sample post with image

this is a sample post with an image!

link to my website

link to the analogous movement project