Pages

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

TEXT!FAIL



For this assignment we had to make three drawings in Illustrator, using only the keyboard.

This is what I excreted.

I ended up wasting a lot of time trying to make textures and communicate shading just by editing line by line with the area type tool.

About half an hour before I had to stop working, I figured out how to free-draw lines and layer. My life would have been a thousand million times easier if I'd figured that out about three days earlier.

Wurrs tha Studio?

Last week Peter Hanley raised the fascinating question of where exactly an artist's studio is. With the growing popularity of digital art, the answer to that question has become increasingly ambiguous for some. Does the computer count as a studio if it's the place in which the art is generated?

Hanley's answer is no. According to him, the studio is the place in which concepts are conceived. (Which, I assume, is why he still considers the traditional idea of a studio -- a room in which art is made -- to be, well, a studio. He even said that he, as a digital artist, was jealous of his traditional artist friends' physical studio space.) According to Hanley, the computer is more of a surface for the art creation -- it's like a desk or an easel. In this age of digital art the mind is the artist's studio, because that's where the art is conceived.

I actually really like this concept. There is no anchor to art now. When a studio was, well, a studio, art was a static act. Now, if I wanted to, I could take my tablet on the train with me and do an entire painting, digitally, in transit. Yes, i could have conceivably done that with traditional paints, but computers allow this action to be socially acceptable. People don't stare at you and think you're an eccentric for just using the computer on the train.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Bauhaus



One of my favorite aspects of the Bauhaus movement, which Professor Glahn emphasized strongly, was the collaboration between students and teachers. In the Bauhaus school, students were not apprenticed to their teachers. They were not simply following their teachers' directions and connecting the dots and coloring in the lines for them. They were taking an active role in the conception and creation of the art, alongside their teachers.

It deviates completely from the old master-apprentice. In my opinion, it is a much more effective way of teaching art. I believe that it is easiest to learn art by discussing and actively doing, rather than by submitting and following. How can one learn to be creative if they are not given the change to exercise their brain?





The other aspect of Bauhaus art that fascinated me was the fact that the way a piece functioned was important. In Bauhaus art, it is imperative that the viewer - any random passerby on the street - can see how it works. (Bauhaus art was largely functional - buildings, windows, interiors, etc.)

When Do We Lose Ownership?

In class we watched a news story about the 2007 Virgin Mobile ad scandal, and a TED video about the openness of the internet and its effect on our perception of boundaries. The latter addresses the former -- although unintentionally.





In 2007, Virgin Mobile Australia ran an ad campaign based entirely off of a picture of Alison Chang - a teenager from Dallas - that they had found on Flickr. Virgin Mobile never alerted Alison and her family to the fact that they were using Alison's picture for their campaign, nor did the Changs receive any royalties for the use of the picture, the case being that, because the picture was posted on Flickr - a public website - the picture was part of the public domain and therefore did not require legal clearance for its use. The Changs sued Virgin.

The TED presentation addressed this same idea/issue: once a picture or work of art hits the internet, who owns it? Everybody has access to said work, and everybody is open to interpret it however they choose. The presentation also asked "Is this a good or a bad thing?"

I believe that there is no straight answer to that question. There are times when borrowing another's work that one finds on the internet is a good thing, and there are times when it is not.

I believe that things like AMVs and films made of stock footage are a legitimate and necessary art form. I say "necessary" because I believe that this new "mixed-media collage" media that has sprung up as a result of high speed internet is teaching us to interact with each other as artists and to be creative in a whole new way. It teaches us to interpret, rather than to pull something out of nothing. If all we did was create, rather than interpret from time to time, than the art world would be a much more cold, isolated, and frankly boring place.

Also, I believe that issues of copyrights are a generational thing. I believe that my generation has become so accustomed to things cut-and-paste interpretations like AMVs and "*Insert TV Series Here* Abridged" and even things like Chad Vader that we usually assume right away that the person doing the mash-up is not responsible for the creation of the raw content.

However, I believe that Virgin Moblie went too far when they used Alison Chang's Flickr picture for their entire ad campaign. For one, there is the issue of money. It's her face, and Virgin Mobile made money from it. She obviously deserves a cut. The ad campaign also violates Alison's basic right to privacy, unlike AMVs and "*Insert TV Series Here* Abridged." Frankly, it's creepy.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

AMALGAMATING ADVENTURES!!!



Our first assignment for this class was to walk/ride/bike and take pictures and gather things while adventuring. Either as a result of poor time-management on my part, or just as a result of my rampantly hectic class schedule, I didn't have time to take 25-30 new pictures of new adventures...so I improvised!

I gathered about 10 pictures from my own home over the weekend, could not make it to Center City (or anywhere interesting, for that matter) before our next Wednesday class. I was worried that my photos would all be dull and cliche snapshots of my cats in my back yard. I was frustrated, because I have been on some amazing adventures in my lifetime! In fact, it is probable that I've been to many more interesting places than most Americans my age.

Then I realized that nowhere in the assignment does it say, specifically, that the 25-30 snapshots had to be from the week between our first two classes. (I feel as though that were the implicit assignment, but, well, there's no textual evidence!) So, this first batch of photos, objects and drawings is a composite snapshot of my past adventures.

This gathering-of-past-adventures was actually very helpful to me. It's a mix of both my most domestic, everyday adventures (noticing the lights and textures around my own home deep in the bowels of suburbia) and my most extreme, distant adventures (in Budapest, Vienna, Moscow, Yaroslavl and St. Petersburg.) Gathering these things have shown me that, although my life at this moment is nothing more than frantically throwing art together for classes and studying for quizzes, as a whole it is full and beautiful, and NOT A BIT TAMED!