LINE
The chaos of the city and all the motions that it entails is described by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life: Walking in the City bluntly as “a wave of verticals”. In observing all the individual paths of motion that all of New York City’s inhabitants have to offer, de Certeau seeks to visualize the intersections of individualism. He describes the mapping of physical motion, and in this line assignment I sought to do the inverse of this: motion that cannot be visually observed but strictly heard. As someone who has synthesia, I see the motion of music in a specific way that I felt was inspired by the assignment. I wanted to visualize and materialize the motion and movement I see when hearing music. I realize that the assignment was geared more towards the establishment of lines and symbols to represent a movement through space, but I have been meaning to illustrate the experience of my synthesia and I figured that this assignment was a good opportunity to do so! When I hear music, I see colors in motion so I listened to a variety of songs and used the color that I saw the most for the horizontal bar lines as the beat of the song and the smaller, dash marks as the color I saw the second most and the motion that the rhythm takes during the song. It was difficult for me to turn the three dimensional experience I have while listening to music into a flat experience, but the relation of the dash marks to one another is my attempt to represent the motion of colors that accompany sound. Each piece is titled after the song that was playing as I created the drawings.
NEWS
For my news project, after I listened to the interview and was struck by how much each of the artists mentioned the impact the newspapers’ tangibility had on them. Even though they all experimented differently in the medium, they all had something to say about the physicality of print and how that is distinctive to their interest in print news specifically. Alexandera Miir, while talking about the process of creating the sheer magnitude of papers she had done said “the coloring itself has a quality of certain energies. One marker fades in and out; people get tired and .. it was constantly new work on the walls. … There are moments where people get in the zone and the work becomes psychedelic and crazy and you see if you follow the project.” Off of this quote, I was inspired by the lifespan of a marker and I kept note of how many strokes it took till a marker was “out”. In discussing the locality of the paper, Nate Lowman said “ its local.. It's like the last local thing… you can have it. It's not the internet , you hold it and it gets your fingers all filthy and shit and its there”. I was particularly inspired by this quote and the fleeting nature of tangibility and the fact that touch is a way of knowing and sensing. This quote in particular inspired the headlines of my four spreads, touch me now, feel me now, hold me now, and love me now. I wanted to represent the coalescing of our senses when we are reading the newspaper and how it is overlooked that we also know by touch and the fact that we hold the paper can impact how we receive the news it gives us. Backing up this though, Sarah Charlesworth says “I feel if I have to read the NY Times online… I don't feel like I have a grasp on things like if I read it and flop it, change front pages”. Charlesworth and Lowman touch upon my guiding theme in my spreads: the importance of tangibility in understanding and reception.
WORLD WIDE WEB/LIBRARY
In the essay titles "The World-Wide Web", the purpose of the internet is simply stated as "a pool of human knowledge, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to sharetheir ideas and all aspects of a common project." This reading dissects the functionality and intentions of the web, as well as the experience of using it and the breakdown of the coding that goes into it. Similar to this is the reading published almost half a century before the invention of the internet. Borges discusses the hypothetical library that contains all of human knowledge, and I found it comedically ironic that "when it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books...there was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified" I feel like this line has a lot of relevance when reconsider in the context of the easily accessable internet which holds all that we could ever hope to know and more. What I mean by this is the fact that at the advent of the internet, the frenzy for information and knowledge was intense and everyone herelded the interent as the greatest invention to ever exist; it seemingly gave humanity a purpose (ie, humanity was justified).
WHITNEY RESPONSE
“Five Words in Green Neon”, 1965, Neon, by Joseph Kosuth With the original intent of experimenting with the abandonment of traditional and old-fashioned considerations of taste, Five Words in Green Neon “makes language its content by collapsing description and image into each other”. It is matter of fact and plain, its title is all that it is: Five words that are represented in green neon. Considered in the 21st century context, this work has importance as one of minimalism that is striking in its simplicity. I was interested in the simplicity of this work as well as its vibrancy that initially draws the spectator in. Did the Kosuth intend to have the viewer to be stunned by the works simplicity? Because if so, I don't think it is successful in the context of art history at this point in time as there are a myriad of other pieces which also emphasize process over product in a way that is more evident to the viewer. However, perhaps this was his intention: to be overly simplistic so that the viewer is prompted and essentially forced to draw conclusions about the nature of the work and the justification for its simplicity and basic structure. In the context of our class, this work functions as a gateway to the concept of a possible lack of deeper meaning. As we are creating art and visualizing the world in an artistic way, perhaps there is simultaneously both more and less than meets the eye as there is in this piece. I am interested in the motivation and inception behind this piece, specifically, why did Kosuth chose the medium and color, I wonder if there is any meaning behind that or if it is simply because it was available to him at the time of the work’s creation.
“Super Mario Clouds”, 2002, handmade hacked Super Mario Brothers cartridge and Nintendo NES video game system, by Cory Arcangel Described by the artist with the original intent of asking the question “how many elements can be removed before the ability to discern the source is lost?”, Super Mario Clouds is strictly that: just the “iconic clouds” from the original game. The original intent could be seen as trying to distance art from the notability and recognizable nature of itself and observing if the reception is still one of praise or not because of the stripping of the object to its bare bones. In the context of our class, this piece seems to function as a coding example; perhaps something to inspire us to become better at coding? Asking the question of how far does the original object need to be altered before it is both separate and able to be considered distinctly new and original. I was interested in this piece because I recognized the clouds and was wondering what the point was behind this work? Why do all this coding and deconstruction on a video game to then refer to it as an art object?
“Ambiguous Icon #5 (Running, Falling)”, LED lights and custom electronics, 2000, by Jim Campbell Campbell describes this work as an experiment to see “what can be portrayed in low resolution and still have meaning?” My interest in this piece comes from the fact that it took me a couple of minutes of standing in front of it for me to really see what was happening in the image. I assume that this is part of the purpose and how the message really is in the medium. The difficulty in deciphering what the image is leads to the viewer spending more time with the piece, and thus establishing a greater sense of meaning/connection with the work as a hole. Why did he make it so difficult to see, is it so the viewer has time to contemplate this difficulty? Perhaps. This work functions within the context of the class as something that is again broken down into almost unrecognizable parts and then presented as a whole, making the viewer think about what it really means to have a whole object and how the deconstruction of something can yield a new, artistic interpretation.
SHAPE
I chose to take pictures and trace images of things that I have on me every day, my jewelry. I was interested in the simplicity of the shapes and the pairing of curves and angles. This is seen most clearly in the tracing that is red and white which was of my dangly circle earrings and the green and yellow drawing which is of a chain link bracelet. I wish that I had been more thorough in shooting because I didn't have another piece of jewelry which photographed well, so I shot one of my high platform shoes. The colors, though seemingly somewhat arbitrary, were chosen due to their vibrancy and how they honestly couldn't be more different from my silver jewelry and my black shoes. i wanted to just have my shapes be vibrant and completely distant and removed from what the actual object was.
COLOR
Look at the image from left to right, the intesity of the light and the warmth of the orange hue decreases as you span across the picture.At the outermost corner is where the light source is coming from, however the glow radiates throughout the frame nd lessens in intesity the further from the light her body is. It is a woman posing naked on a black backdrop, bathed in a mango hue. I took this image at the beginning of this semester in an attempt to combine my nude study from last semester with the digital medium that I had started working with again. She lays on a black piece of paper and the only light source is at her feet, just out of frame. I covered the light with an orange gel filter in an attempt to mimic the warmth of a campfire glow. It is an amber that is timeless and recognizable as the warmth of fire light that I wanted to simulate. "Ambrosial to the end, amber is a reminder that color can be so much more that what meets the eye." This quote sums up what I was attempting to do in this photograph, create a fiction that is identifiable as something else, when in reality it is a led light masquerading as firelight.