Artist Event #2: Boyden Gallery Event with Craig Saper

Artist Event #2: Craig Saper

>Craig Saper

I attended a Craig Saper workshop in Boyden Gallery. Based upon a lecture he had given earlier that day, the workshop involved entrepreneurial ideas, specifically with regards to marketing and creating ideas. Three concepts that he stressed were "Big Tent" and "Circus Tent" theories. The Big Tent was a interactive, interface, information, peer connection and revision tool that would connect people. An example of this was the augmented reality app, in which programmers and artists alike would share ideas to create a virtual reality that would be accessible to an iDevice. The Circus Tent idea was a medium of avant-garde artists who combined speculation ad scholarship to promote new ideas. This includes thinking like an artist, but not being an artist with a defined medium. One of his ideas was that 'electricy' would replace literacy. After this, we were asked to brainstorm ideas, and from that the group discussed how they would use these ideas. 

This means that the artist now has to learn how to be an artist and yet survive in a world in which globalization and universal technology exists. What do people need? What do people want marketed? Creativity at it's base is the most important skill when thinking how to succeed in this world. I personally agree.

Personally, I thought the workshop was interesting and idealistic. To promote the concept of being an artist, while doing something else is the liberal arts ideal. I don't think anyone can just be an artist in this day and age. I know networking is huge, audience is huge, collaboration is huge. These ideas were represented within the lecture albeit sugarcoated in fancy terminology. I think if anything, my only critique would be to increase networking and the brainstorming session within this lecture. We only got to about two or three people's ideas. I know I have many entrepreneurial ideas that I would've loved to share. That being said, I have taken the lecture's ideas to heart and have started to work with that with the forming of the Art Club.

ARTIST POST: Web designers.Artist Post: Khoi Vinh

ARTIST POST: KHOI VINH

Today I am going to be talking about Khoi Vinh who is the web designer (formerly) of the NYtimes.com and various other projects such as http://www.subtraction.com his blog site and Behavior, a design company. Vinh is a vietnamese immigrant who moved to Gaithersburg MD at the age of three and a half. He is a successful graphic designer, and among the honors he received, was said to be one of the top 50 web designers in 2011. He is responsible for the style of grid designing, which he published a successful book: Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design

Here are some of the examples of gridding in web design:

I also looked up design concepts for the NYTimes in order to show you how he employs them directly:

To delve into the artwork, Khoi Vinh tries to create a different layout from the website design in order to have a relationship between the viewer and the times. The times somewhat mimics the newspaper, however Vinh tried to go for a more internet-friendly work.

To critique the work, I feel that the NYtimes, though designed well, is not nearly as user friendly as it could have been designed. Had I been designing the page, I would've had entire sections hyperlink to the article, and I would have different categories for things such as Headlines, Breaking News, Entertainment, etc. while keeping the layout relatively simple. The webpage is a bit too cluttered for my liking. The purpose of a website, in particular a news website, is to draw attention to articles, while also being easy to navigate. I feel Vinh's work partially accomplishes this.

SOURCES:
http://bigthink.com/the-voice-of-big-think/design-of-the-times-khoi-vinh-and-nytcom
subtraction.com
https://twitter.com/khoi
http://www.nytimes.com

Sketch Plans

Sketch 1

Supplementary Events

Digital Poetry: Boyden Gallery

http://www.stephaniestrickland.com

Stephanie Strickland was the speaker for the Voices reading. She started off by reading some of her poetic work, both from printed selections, and from her newly published book Dragon Logic. She showed the audience the computer program meant to mesh Emily Dickinson’s work with the work of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. She then segwayed into her Digital poetry by reading verses akin to ‘technology is seduction.’ The digital poetry was represented by pictures of water combined with stanzas of poetry meant to appear and disappear as the pixels of the videos of water moved. 

(This is a screenshot of the Melville/Dickinson) Digital Poetry Project

Her works tries to harmonize the natural world with the digital world, define digital poetry, and  connect the digital world to literature.

The idea of digital poetry was very interesting. To combine digital art with poetry, while also making a computer formula that will work with the timing of the images in conjunction to the movement of the poetry stanzas was fascinating. The only thing I had an issue with was the fluidity of the images. I felt the text should have changed it's shape more to match the digital images of the water.

Here's a couple of articles where she discusses her electronic literature, art, and writing:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/182942

http://www.stephaniestrickland.com/essays

What I think is particularly awesome about her work is that artists could use this idea of Digital Poetry and bring it too a new level. What if you created a work of public art that allowed viewers to manipulate the water and watched how the stanzas matched what they did? What if you did this with, instead of poetry, music. There are so many possibilities to do with this idea. Overall, I loved the presentation in Boyden Gallery, and I want to try my own spin on Digital Poetry!

LOST

Here is LOST :)

Reaction: Internet Loneliness

Raw Reaction:
This scares me. I know when I ask myself, "What are the most important inventions of all time," my mind immediately jumps to things like, Fire, Agriculture, Writing, and then... The Internet. It's odd to think that igen'ers live at the beginning of such a revolutionary time. We now have access to a fabric of the real and yet intangible. AI, the Internet, the uncaring impassiveness, and the reliance on the media, in particular the internet scares me. The reading itself challenges that. The reading itself, particularly the structure, how it forced you to focus on many things at once, very much like the internet was rather witty. I didn't realize it was intentional. In a way the author is mimicking how one interacts on the internet. He brings about some scary and relatable points, particularly with how the internet is a disguise, and that we exist as both, a person and an internet persona.

Analyzing a Paragraph:

"Access to computers and the Internet completely changed the way that I consumed information and organized ideas in my head. I saw information stacked on top of itself in simultaneity, no longer confined to spatiotemporal dimensions of the book. This information was editable, and I could copy, paste, and cut text and images from one place to the next, squirreling away bits that felt important to me. I suddenly understood how much of myself I was finding through digital information."

The paragraph opens to discuss how consuming information occurs. How multitasking and immediacy is now expected, basically because of the internet's expectations. Reading, having to wait to know, having to process information in a slower way is rather irksome. Having information that you can scroll through, change, and alter is an incredibly immediate and empowering thing that the internet provides. It chips in the the human psyche and survival process. For me personally, since I have done so much work online, I grow impatient with hand-drawn medium. There is no "control Z" if I make a mistake. There is no immediate editing, especially with more permanent mediums. I prefer the immediacy of digital art. In a way that scares me. 

This is a crazy image. I couldn't find the artist, but I feel this is an incredibly serious and amusing internet. We do, as a society, need to protect ourselves from the "easiness" of the internet. We reveal way too much to the internet because we can't see the people accessing it. It's scary. It's unhealthy. You can do things you can't command Z. 

This work too, "Facebook Bliss" is also incredibly powerful.

How the artwork works is you press the bliss button and it mimics increasing friend/notification/message requests. It represents our narcism on FB. Facebook is making us lonely.

http://www.anthonyantonellis.com/bliss/

"  What happens when the power runs out, when we get disconnected? Where will we have left to go?"