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.

Artist 4: Charles Long

The Amorphous Body Study Center

With this project Long, is trying to promote a better understanding between the body and the mind. Our culture has become "an information -based state" and has and the body's active role in culture has become less important. We have less physical contact because we communicate over electronics such as the computer.

Long created an installation study room for people to physically come together and "communication is redirected towards the physical." The room is filled with several amorphous sculptures, each of which is surrounded by seats. Headphones are connected to the sculptures so people can sit together and listen to music and they can work on and develop some of the sculptures as they listen. All of the music was created by the British pop group Stereolab.

Source: Gallery 9

When we communicate and listen to music on the internet we are connected to other people in a virtual network. We never see the bodies of these people and we aren't even aware sometimes that we are connected to others. Chances are that when you are listening to a song on iTunes or a video on YouTube someone else is also listening to or seeing the same thing. We are connected by what we hear or see. Long takes these connections and puts them in the physical world. In his amorphous study room people are connected by the headphone wires that connect to the sculptures. The sculptures are symbols for the sites that connect us on the internet. In this physical space people can see and physically interact with others who they are connected to and the body is given back its active role.

Artist 3: GH Hovagimyan

Love Songs From my Computer (2003 TAM Digital Media Commissions)

This web-based sound art is composed of several quicktime movies, each of which repeats one of the following words: love, hello, dream, feel, happy, sell, want. They can be played one at a time, two at a time, or even all of them at the same time to create either simple music or a confusing jumble of sounds.

Hovagimyan says "The synth voices can do things human singers can't like sing the same word very rapidly for a long period of time without taking a breath and without making a mistake.We recognize the form of singing but with Love Songs from My Computer the form becomes something else, it's not in the pop song milieu. It's an art work."



Source: The Alternative Museum website

Assembled Cinema (2005) - Project in development

"You walk into a room and a film/video is projected on a wall. The scenes played are not in any particular order yet they make sense. What occurs is that a computer is picking sequences in a random order and playing them. Your mind and your imagination fill in the story."

This project is still in development, so there are no photos of it, but I find the idea of it very interesting. The viewer has to make sense of the pictures even though they are random. The computer makes the sequence so the story has no order, but the viewer may think the story was created by a person and so has some important meaning or message.

Source: http://nujus.net/~nujus/gh_04/gallery11.html

Artist 2: Golan Levin

Opto-Isolator (2007) with Greg Baltus

"What if artworks could know how we were looking at them? And, given this knowledge, how might they respond to us?"

The Opto-Isolator is an interactive sculpture of a mechatronic blinking eye at human scale. The eye responds to the gaze of visitors with a variety of psychosocial eye-contact behaviors. It can look viewers directly in the eye, appear to study the viewer's face, look away as if it has stared for too long and it blinks precisely one second after the viewer blinks.

A lot of Golan Levin's work is interactive and requires the viewer to perform some action in order to create and see the digital images. The Opto-Isolator is similar in that the eye needs a viewer to lock eyes with and recognize that the eye seems to be staring back. It is different because it turns the viewer into the viewed, the artwork is actually looking back at us and is aware of our presence. The psychosocial eye-contact behaviors such as blinking and stariing give the mechatronic eye human traits. We have emotions and feelings that trigger these behaviors and the act of making eye contact with another person can also trigger all kinds of other emotions. The Opto-Isolator seems to have these same emotions because we can look it in the eye, which is something we do to figure out how someone is feeling or if they are sincere. We communicate with our eyes and so it is as if viewers are communicating with the mechatronic eye. If artworks knew we were looking at them, I imagine they would respond with something like, "Why are you staring at me?" When the Opto-Isolator feels it has stared at us for too long, it can look away and make us think "Why is that eye staring at me?"

Eyecode (2007)

(Levin has many more works which do not use eyes as the main piece, but involve other interactions such as stomping and talking, but I find these two works about eyes to be particulary fascinating.)

"Eyecode is an interactive installation whose display is wholly constructed from its own history of being viewed. By means of a hidden camera, the system records and replays brief video clips of its viewers' eyes. Each clip is articulated by the duration between two of the viewer's blinks. The unnerving result is a typographic tapestry of recursive observation."

This reminds me of the first artist I looked at, Ken Goldberg, and his project, Demonstrate, because it also films people and places them in the roles of the observer and the observed. In Demonstrate, the roles are fulfilled by different people in different places - observed in the plaza and observers on the internet. Eyecode films the observer and turns him or her into the observed. Demonstrate allows people to come and go in and out of the view of the camera, but Eyecode keeps the person there even after they have left. The viewer's eyes become part of the artwork and in just looking at Eyecode, someone can contribute to the artwork's change and display. It appears as if the many pairs of eyes on the wall are looking back at the viewer, but in fact they are looking at the artwork itself. So, when you look at this, you are looking at the eyes of people who are looking at the eyes of other people who were looking at the wall of eyes...

Source: http://www.flong.com/

Letter Selection G M E

I chose the letters G and M because they are my initials and since my first and last names both start with G, I chose E because it is the last letter of my first name.

As I was researching, I looked up the history of alphabets and was particularly interested in the Egyptian heiroglyphic alphabet. The three letters I selected are all found as heiroglyphs, but since the Egyptian alphabet is phonetic the different sounds of the letters as we use them today are represented by different symbols. M was represented as an owl or a wavy line. Hard G was a pot stand and soft G was a swimming serpent. Short E was a vulture and long E was two reed leaves.

Some interesting stories about the letters:

G - The Phoenicians, and the other Semitic peoples of Syria, used a simple graphic form that looks like an upside down V. The symbol was named gimel, which was the Phoenician word for camel possibly because the upside down V looked like the hump of a camel.

E - The hieroglyph evolved into the Phoenician letter called “hé,” which roughly represented the sound of our H. The Greeks could not pronounce the first sound of the letter name so they dropped this part of the name and the Phoenician ‘hé’ became E.

Egyptian Heiroglyphics

http://www.studioarts.net/calligraphy/c2.htm

http://www.fonts.com/AboutFonts/Articles/Letterseries/LetterM.htm