Line Project Artist Statement
My line project was inspired by the reading Walking in the City. The author of the reading said that observing the city was a important aspect of living in New York City. “Linking the city to the concept never makes them identical, but it plays on their progressive symbiosis: to plan a city is both to think the very plurality of the real and to make that way of thinking the plural effective; it is to know how to articulate it and be able to do it” (92). After the reading, I started to think more about how to document down my daily life with lines drawing. There must be a certain rule inserted into the lines I draw. I started to observe my everyday life and created different rules to the scene I observed. Every single of my line drawing had unique rules to it. For instance, in my third line drawing the short lines represented how many cups of coffee were being ordered at La Colombe on the day I went. The short lines on the fourth line drawing represented how many Youtube videos I watched that night. And the other lines constructed a TV screen.
Associations between the technical and fictional/philosophical readings
Both of the reading had a connection to archiving information. WWW talked about how to archive our information online. On the other hand, The Library of Babel talked about archiving our history on books. It was interesting to see how the digital age had grown. Back in the days, people were documenting down information on books. With the invention of the web, people could now document their informations on the internet. “The World-Wide Web(W3) was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project” (792). Technology had made people storage of knowledge more convenient than ever.
The Art Happens Here: Net Art's Archival Poetics
One artwork that interested me the most was Miao Ying’s Blindspot. This artwork drew my attention because it was using a Chinese dictionary. I had this inner Chinese connection with this artwork. The artwork was simply a Chinese dictionary with some words crossed out. The artist’s idea behind this artwork was that he searched every words on the dictionary on google.cn. If the search resulted in “according to local laws, some search results are not showing”, Miao would cross out the word on the Chinese dictionary. This was an insane amount of work to do because China is known as conservative country with a lot of internet censorship. This artwork fits into the large narrative of Visual thinking class because we are learning a lot of web in class. The artist uses the web as a foundation to create his ideas in mind. He wants express his voice in China by showing it through his artwork. His artwork allows more people to know how censored the Chinese web is.
Find more information about the art on https://anthology.rhizome.org/blind-spot !
Another artwork that interested me in this exhibition was Morehshin Allahyari’s The Distributed Monument. This was a really cool artwork because the sculpture was constructed through 3D painting. It was a sculpture of one of the 12 relics destroyed by ISIS in 2015. It was exciting to see how developed 3D painting was. The detail on the sculpture was fascinating to look at. The overall figure was precisely created through technology. It looked identical to the original relic that was destroyed. This artwork relates to our Visual thinking class because this class focuses on how to use different mediums beside photography to create art.
Find more information about the art on http://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/feb/16/morehshin-allahyari/ !
The last artwork that interested me was YoHa’s Lungs. This artwork stood out because it was a software poem memorial. The duo artist created artwork through coding. “YoHa wrote an application that calculates the workers’ total lung capacity, then plays back around that displaces a volume of air equivalent to their final collective breath.” I think this artwork really showed us how art can also be coding. The artist used creative strategies to show the artwork through coding. This artwork relates to Visual thinking because we are learning a lot about coding, specifically HTML and CSS. This artwork reminds me that art can be anything today. If you have an interesting idea that you want the world to know, you can choose it to express it through coding.
Find more information about the art on http://yoha.co.uk/lungs !
The Last Newspaper Artists in Conversation Audio Response
In the sound archive of The last Newspaper Artists in Conversation, Sarah Charlesworth gave insight on representation and world of photography in contemporary culture. As “photography used in newspapers inform our perspectives on world events and eventually on history,” each work seems to address a problem or story, serving as an adjacent element to the text. However, this was the work of 1976, and things have evolved. As we now enter an era where everything is fast-paced and readers don’t spend so much time reading texts, but looking at photos, I want to use photography to catch reader’s attentions, and have texts as the add-on to the photos for explanations. I want to indicate this shift in power from text to photo, and to illustrate this shift, I want to design my pages with more photos than word descriptions. In this project, my newspaper is a photography newspaper. It is different than other newspaper because it emphasizes on photos instead of texts. This newspaper is like an archive of my latest work. I explained what I have been recently photographing such as the Supreme drop, the Gunna concert, and the new café in Soho. Moreover, I made my newest digital photography project as the front cover. I did a forgery image of Karl Lagerfeld’s photograph work for a Chanel Campaign. I thought it deserved to be on a front cover Karl Lagerfeld’s recent death shock the whole fashion and creative world. I wanted to pay respect to one of the most influential artist in this century. Lastly, I included a “photographer of the day” section, which was a short biography of myself.
Color
The two main colors in this image are orange and blue. The most interesting part of this image is that the two opposite temperature colors split evenly in the middle. The left side orange takes me back to the past and the right side blue takes me to the future. Orange is the mix of yellow and red. It reminds me of the personalities of both colors. It has the energy of red as well as the happiness of yellow. Orange in this image provides a sense of warmth as it strengthens the image with more energy. The orange also reminds me of a more classy atmosphere. The carpet makes me feel like I am in the renaissance era. On the other hand, blue strongly contrasts the color of the orange. The blue in this picture gives me a colder feeling. The blue here reminds me of the future as it feels like I am on a journey to the future. The escalator looks futuristic with the add on of blue.