“in the sea, there’s no such thing as a little bit of rubbish”
inspiring photos of trash in the water. even i want to help them keep the oceans clean.
I found an interesting post on Rhizome about this interactive artwork called email erosion. It was created in 2006 and was designed to be interacted with by the general internet population. There is a cube-shaped sculpture formed from biodegradable (starch-based) Styrofoam in the center of a steel formation. The idea is to send an email to eroder@emailerosion.org. The “Eroder” will then spray colored water at the object causing it to dissolve in that spot and cause a sculpting process. the website shows a webcam view of the sculpture and should show what happens to the sculpture when you interact with it. It didn’t work for me, but the concept in itself is pretty cool. Interacting with a sculpture through email and creating an artwork in collaboration. It would be neat to try this again and see what happens maybe with facebook attached to it instead of email.
http://www.emailerosion.org/erosion.html
I recently stumbled across a project entitled Playing the Building which was designed by the artist David Byrne. The project is located in Lower Manhattan and uses the interior of the Battery Maritime Museum. ”The project consists of a retrofitted antique organ, placed in the center of the building’s cavernous second-floor gallery, that controls a series of devices attached to its structural features—metal beams, plumbing, electrical conduits, and heating and water pipes. These machines vibrate, strike, and blow across the building’s elements, triggering unique harmonics and producing finely tuned sounds.” Guests who visit are invited to sit down at the organ and “play” the sounds of the building.
found this project extremely interesting. The ability to tie an entire building into a musical instrument is astonishing. I wonder how it sounds and whether all the different keys are accounted for simply by using the parts of the building’s elements. It would be an experience, indeed to sit in the building and play this amazing instrument. It’s also quite artistic. Like Duchamp’s Fountain piece, a great deal of artwork comes from simply changing the purpose of something. An aesthetically pleasing building becomes an orchestrating masterpiece.
On Rhizome i stumbled upon this interesting site called “jstchillin” that was created by Mitch Trale. It’s referred to as an analog environment. It’s an entire 360 degree view of a yard, which appears to be somewhere in a suburban environment or perhaps a park in a southern location. It’s completely cartoonized, however. It shows the difference between what we think of as a common environment in the real world and what we may see online. You can use your mouse to spin around this scene and look up at the sky and down at the ground. In one part, there is a pill that says the word “chill” on it. when you click this pill it freezes the rotating scene and pulls up a comment by the author and a commentary by Caitlin Denny. You can also click on a rotating patch of grass that pulls you into a virtual atmosphere that is quite like the inner workings of the internet.
I think ultimately this interactive environment is trying to show the similarities between a scene that we would refer to as naturalistic and one we would refer to as calculated or technological. Sometimes we all get so caught up in virtual worlds that we don’t realize how much it is taking us away from the real world. So many things are transmitted via the internet now. Technology has captivated our world in ways it never before had.
On another note, i thought this was quite similar in appearance to the portraits we are making in class. the world looks almost vector-ized in the first environment on the site.
HTML Color Codes is an online exhibition organized by a woman named Carolyn Kane. The works address a central question: Are internet artists limited to a “ready-made” color palette? This question affects numerous artists from those working with film and photography to those working with mass produced, standardized paint sets. This question comes to our attention mainly due to “theories of perception that argue that color is a not ready-made object found in a paint set or machine, but rather it is an experience that results from a complex process of light interacting with the retina and human nervous system.” Chris Ashley, Michael Atavar, Michael Demers, dlsan, Jacob Broms Engblom, Elna Frederick, Morgan Rush Jones, Brian Piana, Owen Plotkin, Rafaël Rozendaal, Andrew Venell, and Noah Venezia are all the artists in this exhibition. Each of these artist did something different in their work, but ultimately they all dealt with HTML and color. Some of them tried to capture nature in a way that almost made it seem as though they were criticizing the inability to make something we may see that is natural- online. Elna Frederick did this in her piece called @=landscape. follow this link #mce_temp_url#
I think these projects are interesting because though sometimes we assume the internet has everything out there, it’s interesting to see what real things cannot be portrayed using the designated colors and programs online. The ability to see colors differently is interesting too in some of the more standard pieces that reflect that detail of internet and colors. Many of the pieces are interesting and they definitely critique the use of color in digital art. These works remind me a great deal of the gallery we had last year here called Color Placement, or something along those lines. The use of color specifically in any work is always quite intriguing.
This man Kevin Kelley had an interesting idea: “I’ve become very curious about the maps people have in their minds when they enter the internet. So I’ve been asking people to draw me a map of the internet as they see it. That’s all. More than 50 people of all ages and levels of expertise have mapped their geography of online.” He had several people submit maps that they imagine when they think about the internet. Kelley also has some interesting opinions on the internet itself which he describes as follows, “The internet is vast. Bigger than a city, bigger than a country, maybe as big as the universe. It’s expanding by the second. No one has seen its borders. And the internet is intangible, like spirits and angels. The web is an immense ghost land of disembodied places. Who knows if you are even there, there. Yet everyday we navigate through this ethereal realm for hours on end and return alive. We must have some map in our head.” I found this description of the internet quite interesting, and ultimately pretty accurate. I know I myself have spent ages just surfing the web with no real intent. The places we go must create some sort of network that shows the intricacy of the entire program.
I think that this project is really cool for finding everyone’s creative ideas. Many people don’t realize how much creativity they have in them until they begin projects like this that allow them to explore their potential. It’s also neat to see the different ways people approach things, from web diagrams to intricate works of art. It’s a way to gain peoples’ perspectives as well as have an interesting and fun compilation of thoughts.
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- Removed a lot of red from this one and also desaturated and used a sepia filter.
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- brightened this and added a bit of contrast.
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- Added a little saturation, didn’t do much else.
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- I removed a lot of red and desaturated this one quite a bit.
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- i added some saturation and contrast to this one.
