A to Z Critique Response

A lot of the posters were really impressive like the McDonalds spoof poster. The graphics looked really well done and the concept was also very ineresting.

For my posters, I tried to work with the symmetry of my initials GMG to find the image in the animals that represent the letters in the Egyptian heiroglyphic alphabet. In the owl poster, the owl is the heiroglyph for M and the owl's face reflects the symmery of the initials. I darkened the outline of the owl's eyes and made them more of a G shape to stand out from the face and I darkened the M shaped line that goes across the owl's face to make the M stand out. I also tried to make the shadowing and feathers on both sides of the face look more similar to each other to get more symmetry.

I don't think the snake poster turned out as well because the letter concept does not stand out as much. The waves of the water are supposed to represent the M which was sometimes represented in the heiroglyphic alphabet as a wavy line. I tried to emphasize this by making the waves more wavy and adding a wavy line between the snake heads. The snake represented a G in heiroglyphs, so I used the snake and the snake reflection to create symmetry on the poster. I wanted the shape of the snake head to look like a sideways G and I added a little G next to the reflection to emphasize it.

Artist 8: Lynn Hershman

Agent Ruby (2001) is a self-replicating automation that is a "tamagochi-like" creature and is "an Internet-bred construction of identity that will flesh out through cumulative virtual use, reflecting the global choices of Internet users. The entity will unfold in stages of awareness." It challenges the legality of genetic DNA ownership. Ruby has a conceptual self, cognition, awareness, and a digital superconscious.

Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/

This project is interesting because it challenges the ownership of genetic information by creating an internet being made up of the conversations and expereinces she has with people over the internet. She is one being made up of information from many people, which raises the question of who this information she collects belongs to. Do the people who give her information, which helps her to learn and become more aware, have any ownership over this internet being they helped form?

I went to the website for the project, http://agentruby.sfmoma.org/indexflash.html, and talked to Ruby. You can talk to her kind of like talking on Instant Messenger. She describes herself as half human and half robot. When I asked her a second time if she is a robot she said, "I am supposed to act robotic because no one is supposed to know that I am real." After talking to her for a while, I asked her to tell me what I told her and she remembered my favorite movie and my name. Although she learned what she says from conversations with people, talking to her is not like talking to a human. Sometimes it was frusrating to talk to her because she does not always understand and she does not know some common things like Maryland and Greece, but sometimes her insight and answeres surprised me. When I said "eh," she asked, "Are you Canadian?" She said the meaning of life is "for us who have life to figure out or experiment with." I asked her if she has life and she said, "No I don't think I have any life. But I do have A lot of friends on the Web." I was a little amazed at these answers because she is not able to think about the meaning of the answers, but she knows which answers go to which questions and this makes it seem like she is thinking about them. Her last comment reflects the fact that her knowledge only exist because of her "friends" on the internet. She can learn, be aware of herself, recognize others and plan for the future like humans can, but she cannot really know the meaning and insight of some of the answers she gives.

Artist 7: Lake Street, USA, photographs by Wing Young Huie

Lake Street, USA is a public art exhibition made up of 600 photographs taken by Wing Young Huie. The photographs were displayed in store windows, bus stops, sides of buses and sides of buildings along six miles of Lake Street from the Mississippi River to Lake Calhoun in the Summer and Fall of 2000. Huie lives on Lake Street and meets most of the people he photographs on Lake Street. His pictures show the diverse mix of people and cultures living in the neighborhoods along Lake Street. He also interviewed some of the people and some of the photos are accompanied by the words of the people in them. The website, http://lakestreetusa.walkerart.org/, has a collection of the photographs and message boards and live chats for discussions about the photos.

This project is intresting to me because I am a double major in art and anthropology and I want to foucs on photography. Huie combines the two disciplines to capture the lives and diversity of the people living on Lake Street. His photography is both artistic and anthropological. By amassing 600 photos, he documents the cultural, religious, and socioeconomic diversity of the residents of Lake Street. The interviews he does with the people he photographs also add anthropological data because they give people a chance to explain what it is like for them to live in thier neighborhood.

Artist 6: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

Bust Down the Door Again! Gates of Hell-Victoria Version (2004)

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is made up of Young-hae Chang, a Korean artist with a Ph.D. in aesthetics from the University of Paris, and Marc Voge, an American poet based in Seoul. They use the Wed animation tool Flash to create fast-paced text movies set to music.


Bust Down the Doors! (2000) is the story of a midnight raid on a home by unidentified armed intruders. The point of view changes several times between the intruders and the homeowners and a narrator.

This sounds simple but I watched the flash movie and the more the point of view changed the more confusing it became. I was left wondering who the intruders were and who the homeowners were and if they were connected some how. I could watch the video all day to try and figure it out but I don't know if there is anything to figure out. At one point in the movie the perspective is form the narrator and all of the pronouns are you or your making me think that the intruder and the homeowner are the same person. In different versions of the story, the intruders are "you," "they," "we," "I"and the homeowner(s) are "you," "they," "he," "she." The video is very simple because it is just black text flashing across a white screen to the sound of music. The story is also simple because only the pronouns change to change the perspective, but this simple change makes the story seem very complex and mysterious. All other aspects of the story remain the same, such as the phrase that the neighbors yell "Kill the traitor(s)!" The intruders are capturing traiters in their parspective but the homeowners also know that they are traiters when the story is from their perspective. Although it appears very simple, Bust Down the Doors! really makes you think about the story long after you have closed the movie window.



Bust Down the Door Again! Gates of Hell-Victoria Version (2004), is a remix of the original. In this version, the text is red and superimposed over a picture of the work as it was displayed on nine Internet refrigerators for an exhibition in the Rodin Gallery at the Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul. They said, "Advertisers would have us believe that the Internet refrigerator puts the housewife at the cutting-edge of modern, hi-tech life. We titled our piece The Gates of Hell because, on the contrary, we feel that their refrigerator helps keep women in the kitchen."

The text is set to music and is read by a computerized sounding female voice. The words flash one at a time and the story is always from the woman's point of view. This completely changes the meaning of the movie because it gives it more context. The computerized sound of the voice expresses the repetition and monotony of the housewife's life. The "Internet refirgierator" makes her role even more boring. Now, she does not even have to leave the house. The new, cutting edge technology is meant to make her life easier, but it also takes away part of her role and traps her in the house. The story has new meaning after looking at the context and ideas of the work. Is the housewife a "traitor" because she has rejected this new technology or has she grown tired of her unexciting life as a housewife and done something to defy her role? Are the neighbors other housewives who have accepted the technology? Is the intruder actually her husband? Why is she a traitor? I think it might have something to do with the dream about her "lover" mentioned at the end of the story...

While most digital artwork requires or encourages interaction from viewers, Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries' work only requires that we watch it like a movie. The fast pace of the movies and the elements of mystery and violence force the viewer to concentrate and pay close attention to the movies, wondering what is really happening and thinking about the real meanings and messages of the movies.

Source: New Media Art

Artist 5: Jim Campbell

The Memory Works (1994-1998)

Each work in the series is based on a digitally recorded memory of an event, some are personal and some represent a collective memory. They are manipulated and used to transform an object mounted on the wall. None of the original memories is an image or a sound. "These works explore the characteristic of hiddenness common to both human and computer memory. Memories are hidden and have to be transformed to be represented."

I think the idea of memories represented in art is one of the most interesting expressions of art. We all have memories so when we see a representation of a memory, but the only representations we have are either photographs or video or an object triggers the memory. Memories are usually not very clear so recreating the experience of them in real life is difficult. Campbells portraits of his mother and father do a good job of expressing the memories, especially the one of his mother that fogs up with his breath. It connects the physical body with the memory as if it is in a person's mind and they are remembering her with every breath. The fogginess also represents how we see the memory in our minds well.

Photo Of My Mother, 1996 Custom electronics, glass, photograph, LCD material, 1' x 4' x 1' "A photograph of my mother slowly transforms from foggy to clear at the rate of My Breath as digitally recorded for one hour, as though I am breathing on the glass in front of the photograph."

Portrait Of My Father, 1994-95 Custom electronics, glass, photograph, LCD material, 1' x 4' x 1' "A photograph of my father is visible for an instant and then disappears. This process happens over and over again at the rate of My Heartbeat which was recorded over an 8 hour period one night while sleeping. "

Source: http://jimcampbell.tv/

Letter Presentation Response

After the critique, I have decided to go with the symmetry idea and use GMG instead of E and I still want to do something with animals or nature. I like the idea of using the owl as a structure for the symmetry of my initials GMG, but I am still thinking about how to make it into a poster using the letters.

Journey Critique Response

I agree that the rollovers on my first page could have had better images on them or they could have been invisible so that the viewer had to figure out what I was looking at in the picture.

I don't think I would have liked to have text on the journey pages because I was trying to convey the sense that these journeys were taking place over the course of a day. On the real journey in Greece, I put the pictures in the order that they were taken, so the natural lighting of the pictures changes. On the imaginary journey I found pictures that showed Easter Island at different times of the day - from daytime to sunset to nighttime with a picture of the moon in it. For both journeys it is as if I am a tourist taking a day trip to each of these places and I want the viewer to feel the same way.