Lab Sketches

Found: Schaefer Hall, the POB Lab

Several of my labs in Principles of Biology consist of looking at slides of organisms through a microscope and then sketching out the cells and structures. My work might be somewhat informative and funny to look at, but I would not call it art because in my opinion. it's not good enough. It really doesn't have to be, either. I just have to show that I made an effort to observe the organism. I think that if I really put a lot of work into it, and wanted to use the sketches for some purpose other than to get a good grade, they could possibly be art, but that is not why I made them. My opinion is that not all illustrations are art. For example, a parent would not likely consider a diagram of a toy they have to put together for their child to be art. The picture is not made to make the viewer think deeply about its meaning. In my case, you can read my notes and know that these are rough sketches of leaf sections. I think what I am trying to say is that context is so important in cases like these. The type or brand of context I'm referring to is purpose, the reason why a drawing was made.

Blank Paper

Found: Campus Center

Be environmentally friendly. Go buy a composition book made out of recycled paper. They're available at the bookstore.

To me, a blank sheet of paper is a reflection of potential. This paper has the potential to be a medium on which to create a work of art. However, the paper itself won't be the art, but the art can not exist without it. So, even though it is not art, it is still very much related to it.

You don't see great works of art on composition notebook paper, but this paper can represent a big sketch pad or a canvas. It is there, just ready for some creation to be wrought upon it.

Pictionary Project

1st attempt. I finally remembered how to resize the images!

20 lines

This was an important part of my introduction to Photoshop. I never realized how detailed you can make your drawings. You can zoom in and edit pixel by pixel to get lines so perfect that the naked eye can't even appreciate the time it took to make them. That was my problem. I got too obsessive with making some of my lines perfectly straight. I strained my eyes and would spend thirty minutes on just one line. It didn't take to long to get inspired about what kind of line to make next. I drew some thick perfectly straight ones. I made one that looked like ugly colored paint dripping down from the ceiling. I drew a giant black block, absolutely perfected, as a sign of mourning. I kept within the one line limitation. I didn't draw funny designs or blobs or pictures. Just 20 lines.

Pink Fan

Found: Queen Anne

I keep this in my dorm on my desk. I turn it on at night to drown out the noise from out in the halls and that my other roommates make.

I decided that it was not art because I don't use it as a decoration. I use it as a fan. I'm not thrilled that it's pink either, but like I said, it does its job. That's not to say that no painted pieces of metal are art; just that this one isn't a metal sculpture.

Nail Polish

Found: Queen Anne

The medium is not the art. I haven't heard of an artist call their paint the artwork, even though it is what makes the art. It's a profound concept. This nail polish can represent finger paints, watercolors, or house paint. Before it's on the canvas (or nails), it's not art.

infobreath

Christopher Robbins used Carnivore for his project titled infobreath. The idea is that we live in a world where the air around us is abound with bits of information floating around through the wireless networks computers have created. These pieces of information are likened to carbon dioxide and oxygen, elements vital to the lives of plants and humans. When the cyber flower is breathed on, it picks up wireless signals that are in the area nearby it. A microcontroller that links the flower to a computer formats the signals and sends them to the computer, which projects them into the air where the observer is breathing on the flower. The signals are turned into letters and numbers that the observer can recognize. The plant searches specifically for information that one person is sending to another, making it look like there is communication between the plant and the observer.

To me, this project exemplifies another definition of art. It is taking something we can not see and turning it into something that we can visualize. We can also visualize the bits of information, the different symbols, as the elements that make up the air we breathe. Natural air contains a mixture of gases such as nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and carbon dioxide. Today, we could think of our air as also containing data provided by wireless networks.

"Carnivore Is Sorry"

-It's Mark Daggett's "apologetic snooping program." The wikipedia page lists Radical Software Group which I mentioned in the earlier blog about "PoliceState."

"Carnivore Is Sorry" is another client of Radical Software Group's snooping program named Carnivore. Daggett's program finds people that the network has been spying on and sends them an email that has a compilation of images from websites they've viewed. However, a feedback loop blurs all the images together.

This is a program that takes seemingly meaningless data and turns it into a digital masterpiece that looks like abstract art. It has a lot of meaning in it. If only we could figure out what those images are and where they came from...

Response - Growing Up Online

1) Before Myspace and Facebook, "social networking" was a much less sophisticated concept. Online chatrooms, instant messaging, and dating sites have been around longer. However, they didn't have all the games and applications. They didn't resemble a personal web page like myspace does. Social networks themselves, visualized as webs or groups where all members are interconnected, were obviously much smaller until the advent of Myspace and being able to accumulate "friends."

2) How do you explain Facebook to...

Friends - It's a website that you join where you make a profile of yourself with pictures and stuff and you find your friends on there and talk to them.

Parents - It's a website that you sign up on to get an account and you can put pictures on it and send emails and do games and quizzes and keep in touch with friends.

Grandparents - Ok, so you go on the Internet to this website called Facebook. You join it almost like a club. You can type in information about yourself and put pictures of yourself up for people to see. You can search for other people you know that have joined the website and you can send them emails.

A teenager living in 1950 - Why bother? They wouldn't believe me. "There's this machine that's kind of like a television and a library and a calculator and it can show you anything you want. It's called a computer. You just have to type in what you want to see. These places you see are called websites. There's one website called Facebook. It's like a club because you can sign up for it and so can all your friends that have computers.

3) Visiting a stranger's Myspace page...
This page has a lot of personality quiz results on it, telling me that this person would rather indirectly show people who he is instead of writing it or demonstrating it himself. He views himself through others' eyes. His background is a repeating photograph of a city on a canal at twilight. It doesn't appear to have much symbolism, but rather it seems to show that he likes landscapes. The colors of the boxes are plain gray. They aren't very exciting, and there's too much boring text from quiz results to really interest me. The display name and his friends deter me because he seems like one of those nerdy introverts who is trying to be cool. To me this page is not an expression of his own self. The pictures also offer little. There aren't many of them, but there is one album devoted to pictures of flowers and trees, and they demonstrate no skill on the photographer's part. The pictures of the profile owner do not show him to be a very engaging person. I would not be tempted to get to know this person.

4) Facebook compartmentalizes everything. You have to click on some button or link to get to most information that you might want to view about a person. You can't create your own layout for your page because Facebook dictates where everything goes. While it's more compartmentalized, it's very unorganized.

5) On Facebook you have fewer oppurtunities to convey your message because everything is so compartmentalized. Using this site as a medium isn't very effective at putting your message out front.

6) I thought the documentary presented all facets of the issue quite well. Obviously, the Internet is great for keeping and touch with friends and for education. But, as other technology such as television, it can be used in excess and for the wrong purposes. The fears it shows are very real, and not everyone understands the consquences of being careless on the Internet. It showed me that I actually tend to agree more with the parents.

Coins

Found: Wintergreen Ski Resort. Change from the token machine in the locker room.

This is another question of functionality versus aesthetics. Even though the coins have these illustrations on them, I don't consider them to be art in the sense that they have any noteworthy merit. They aren't something you would stick in an art museum, but they might go in a history museum.

I also considered this point of view. Maybe the images themselves are art, but the coins they are on are not.

Are Containers Art?

This water bottle came to my attention because it is a plain container. There are some containers that people consider art. Pottery, vases, and china are often considered to be works of art. However, this plastic water bottle was not intended to be decorative in any way. It is purely utilitarian.

I remembered from the reading "What is Art" by Bart Rosier, a section began, "Only when objects recovered from prehistoric contexts, or ethnographic contexts, are placed in the art museum and presented as art do they become works of art. But then they are placed outside their context, or maybe even outside any context."

The example the author quoted to clarify his position was this:

"Until now, African pottery, wooden carvings and textiles had been viewed
essentially as handicraft because ... they had not been created as art, to be
appriciated for their own sake. Even after 'primitive' African art inspired Picasso,
Brancusi, Braque, Modigliani and Henri Moore earlier this century, it was its
magical and mystical quality that counted most. But at the Royal Academy,
objects made by African hands are seperated from their cultural context and
can be judged simply as art."

Orange Grass - Not Art

Found: Behind the Medical Center on campus

This was from a spot marked on the ground with orange spray paint. It looked like someone was planning to dig a trench to run wires or something, so they marked a few spots around the building. It drew my attention because it is bright orange. The purpose of the paint is to draw attention. It is meant to be noticeable so that whoever is digging knows where they should be working.
I was driven to use these little objects because they bear some irony. Normally, something that has been painted is considered art. However, this is not art, strictly because of its purpose. It is for work, most likely excavation of some sort, for very utilitarian purposes.

Google Earth placemark

What is the purpose of art?

There is definitely no single purpose. It's just something that we do. It is unique to us as humans. No other organisms create art, yet to many of us, it is just as much a part of life as eating and breathing.

To me, the most important purpose of art is communication, or expression. The artist is trying to tell the viewers something. A photograph of a national park may be a way of communicating the beauty of nature. A painting full of angry reds conveys the artist's emotions or the emotions he wants to elicit from his viewers. The list can go on and on about communication and symbolism.

Art can tell a story. A sequence of photographs is like a step by step narration. Detailed paintings can describe busy settings. Paintings or sculptures of the Stations of the Cross in a church tell the story of Jesus' Crucifixion.

Art is visually appealing and stimulating. It can be used as decoration. It can spark conversations.

It is a visualization of an experience.

For the hobbyist, creating art is just a fun experience, meditation, and relaxation.

Radical Software Group's "CarnivorePE" - "PoliceState"

The federal government has a history of tapping into its citizens' personal lives, especially their travels through the world wide web. RSG developed a software program similar to what the government uses to track people's actions. However, this program, named CarnivorePE doesn't track identities, just general Internet traffic. Various artists, called clients utilize the program to create technologically based works of art. The one that grabbed my attention was PoliceState by Jonah Brucker-Cohan. In this piece, the artist uses CarnivorePE to track Internet searches containing key words such as bomb, and plane crash that one might envision the government tracking to keep tabs on "terrorists." These key words activate 20 toy remote controlled police cars that respond to each term after it has been translate to its respective police ten-code. The ten-codes trigger a sequence in the police cars causing them to move around a certain way, spinning, going in reverse, etc. They are all tuned to the same frequency so that they move together. In the background, sirens go-off and a police officer's voice can be heard giving the message over a speaker.

The artist's vision was to reverse the concept of police response to make the toy cars dependent upon the terms that we as a nation have come to be so paranoid about. To me, it shows how we have become enslaved to our paranoia about the "war on terror." The authorities are actively searching for evidence of terror, and when they find it, they must act. The dance of the police cars is quite comical and makes a satire of the government's surveillance.

Here is the link for the PoliceState project

Matthew Barney (Part 5 of 5, "Art:21")

Matthew Barney - A sculptor, filmmaker, and performer, he is probably most famous for his five part "Cremaster" series of films that depict biological conflict and evolution through history, violence, and sexuality. The clips from his films shown in the documentary indicated how extravagant and complex his work is. Barney plays many roles in his films wearing elaborate costumes and makeup. The most interesting characters to me were the horses in "Cremaster 3." I could not find a picture of them, but they wore full-body latex suits designed to make the horses look like corpses. They made the animals look extremely grotesque, but also highly intriguing.

Bruce Nauman (Part 4 of 5, "Art:21")

Bruce Nauman - I don't really know what to say about him. His work is some of the strangest I've seen. He watches infrared videos of one of his rooms where mice come in and out every night. Their entries are so subtle that he advises you must not watch anything so you can be aware of everything. In other words, watch everything so you can observe what you seek when it is least expected. The only thing I saw from him that I would try to call art are his stairways. They are long and unecessary, set on gentle slopes that people could easily scale without them. But of course, they still do. The heights and lengths of the steps are uneven, so when someone walks on them, they can't produce a rhythm.














Untitled, 1998-99