The Artist I chose for this week is named David Wicks. I researched quite a bit about his works and his life. He has a website that tells a lot about the different types of works he has done, and a lot of his stuff is pretty interesting. He’s an artist from California though he has travelled many places creating his artwork over the years. Here’s a quote from him about his work, “I create work to explore new ideas and new territories. This became clear to me as I reflected on a series of installations I created in the demolished neighborhoods of Shanghai in 2006. Since then, I have been creating work in a range of media, from print, to more installation, to software. timespentalone.com marks my first serious attempt at an online work.” (http://thingsiam.com/) He does much work with digital art and flash videos as well as interactive art online. The main piece of artwork i’ve studied of his is the piece he mentioned called timespentalone.com. He describes this work on rhizome.com as follows:
“Time spent alone is a series of projects conceptually linked through their being conceived in solitude and intended for display in the isolated social space of the internet. They are daydreams, worries and solitary trips. As a website, the state of Time Spent Alone is never fixed. It grows as viewers contribute to the Destinations section, and as I find new ideas to add to it.”
Timespentalone.com is interactive and allows the viewers to work with the artwork. It’s actually a compilation of four projects that Wicks has put together that make you think. It’s actually quite intriguing how some of the links work. I wish I could read more, for instance, is very viewer interactive. He uses Google maps very often in this work. I think he does this to bring the real world into his website of virtual dreams. Likewise, he uses the project “I See What Was Left Behind” and the photos posted there to bring the world into this website. Having done the traveling that he has in his life, I think he is trying to bring some of that exploration into this website. He also is probably trying to use this site as an outlet for his fears and dreams, like he described in his quotation about the work.
I’d say that the work is pretty strong and successful. It uses interesting digital techniques and involves the viewer in interesting ways. It raises questions and causes the viewer to contemplate the dreams of the artist and definitely has more meaning than simply an aesthetically pleasing surface. The use of the maps and the photographs is also intriguing and pulls you into the virtual world as though it were a real world itself. Overall, I’d say that Wicks created a fantastic work with timespentalone.com. It’s really impressive and inspiring.
To see the work, go to the site www.timespentalone.com. I would have posted a picture, but it doesn’t give me anything to copy because it’s all animated. It’s really amazing though.
