Blog #9: More Installation Art!

This week, I am taking a look at a couple more examples of installation art and other multimedia artworks, all of which are not "Screen" (the piece I talked about last blog).

First, we have "Shadow Fugue", an installation piece from the VIDA: Art and Artificial Life International Awards, produced by Sion Jeong.  The piece is a series of plexi-glass rods attached by wire to small motors on the wall of the exhibit.  With these motors, once a person softly touches the system, the surface begins a "breathing movement", producing along with its movement an elegant light and sound accompanyment.  With its quasi-breathing movement, the rods create shadows on themselves, that appear and recede, furthering the illusion of a wall breathing in front of you, making subtle tinklng sounds and chanting voices through the motors on the wall.  As for a purpose, Sion Jeong saw this simple mechanism as one started by interaction, but then becoming an autonomous sculpture that self-regulates its movement beyond the initial touch, reaching multiple senses of the audience to intrigue them.

Next we have an installation piece that utilizes Twitter feeds to produce vibrant LED displays, "Datagrove". The piece uses luminescent "responsive" fibers, text-to-speech modules to read out Twitter posts, and sensors for detecting human presence, producing a soft undulating sound to react, as well as systems to collect the Twitter data being used.  The "social media whispering wall" was conceived by  Future Cities Lab in San Francisco, as an installation to integrate social interaction and sensing human presence in the structure.  It's purpose is to stimulate public discourse, by providing trending Twitter feeds and displaying and reading them out for those around to hear, while also reacting to the breeze through the responsive fibers, giving it the illusion of being an intelligent organism.

The last piece I will look at is also from the VIDA Awards, named "Hylozoic Soil", by Philip Beesley, an experimental architect.  This installation, using the philosophic doctrine called Hylozoism (idea that matter is inseperable from life as a property of matter), uses a lattice of transparent acrylic tiles, and a sensor network to control the lattice to react to nearby movement and move towards the audience members who venture into the piece.  The entire system thus emulates a similar behavior as seen in coral reefs, with opening clamping, and an organic sense about its activity in response to its surroundings, making it not only an interesting installation work, but an example of artificial life, being an inorganic structure giving the illusion of true natural behavior, as intended by the artist.

All together, these pieces are 3 examples of the vast varieties of installation artworks present today as the medium continues to take in other mediums and grow in popularity in exhibits and as temporary or permanent structures wherever they are commissioned.  Thanks for Reading!

~~~~Nathaniel Hendrix~~~~

Blog #8: Installation Art

For this weeks blog, I am going to take a look at Installation Art, which grew in popularity during the late 50s and early 60s.  Installation art is a style of three dimensional work that is generally site specific, as the sculpture or other objects are installed in a specific location and cannot be moved generally.

From the era in which this genre of art first started, one example of early installation art was Allan Kaprow's Words.

Allan Kaprow was one of the most influential artists involved in both Happenings and installations, and in this installation in New York, 1962 at the Smolin Gallery, Kaprow combined a vast amount of paper with random arrangements of words backed by music played by multiple record-players, creating a massive chaotic mess of surroundings for people to walk into and experience.

With this style, the purpose is to take the experience that spectators can have with art in its traditional mediums such as on a canvas, and then expand it to becoming complete environments or structures to envelope  people, or at minimum allow people to walk in and have the art around them rather than simply hung on the wall.  Kaprow subscribed to this line of thought whole-heartedly, moving art away from canvases and wall hangings, to expanding what mediums could be used to create art, removing it from a traditional pedestal.

The main limitation, or possibly even a strength, is that once planted down and installed, it shall never be imagined in the same manner again, creating many temporary works and structures that only exist in one place, and cannot move from that point.  Nevertheless, the medium that is made of many possible mediums is growing stronger due to the new fronts provided by technology and virtual reality in installations.  With these newer technologies, pieces can be moved more easily and replicate similar experiences, or even adapt to fit a different audience using dynamic visuals or interactivity with an audience, making the art more conceptual, with the final piece being less important when compared to the theory or idea behind the piece.

In more modern interpretations of installation art, digital media and technologies have been used to produce similar effects, but with the interactivity and dynamic reactions made possible through the technology.  One example that holds a similar goal to Kaprow's early installation is Screen by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a professor at the Universtiy of California Santa Cruz, who conducts research into storytelling through games.  In Screen (2003), people walk into a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, a massive room of virtual reality displays.  They begin the experience by reading and listening to the "Memory texts", random storylines, then the words become loose, and the observer finds they can interact and push these wods floating about then and across the walls.  This interaction with the words distorts their meaning and order, and can end with either the words being misplaced or simply collapsing to the floor if too many are removed at once.  Holding relevance to Wardrip-Fruin's interests, the whole experiences purpose was to introduce storytelling in a game-like fashion, and look at the reading, listening, and manipulation of the surrounding text to become a story that utilized multiple senses.

Overall, the genre that is installation art is an extraordinary one, capable of many new things since its conception in the 1950s and 60s, with new mediums finding a way to progress the possibilities of this style of art.

~~~~~Nathaniel Hendrix~~~~~~

ISTA 301 Blog #7: Videogames as Art?

For this blog, I am going to be answering the questions provided relating to videogames as "Art", and discuss a bit of the viewpoints involved.

1) This portion deals with the article found here(http://northcountrynotes.org/jason-rohrer/arthouseGames/seedBlogs.php?action=display_post&post_id=jcr13_1185605234_0&show_author=1&show_date=1) 
This article is a discussion between Roger Ebert, Clive Barker and Jason Rohrer on videogames and "Art".

The notion tossed about the most in the article is the distinction of the various forms of art possibly considerable as "art", whether the experience is a guided journey or has facets of interpretation available, and what these mechanisms do to the works classification as a work of art or simply an experience with no value beyond entertainment.  Personally, I agree that an initial flag that must be triggered for something to be art is that it must carry some form effect upon its audience, and must do something for them (very vague on purpose), whether that be emotional, superficial, intellectual it does not matter, as long as the effect is profound.  Then, the work must prove some sense of value to the person as a valuable experience created by someone else.

I refrain from using any specific criteria due to the massive possibilities to list what makes art, but it is essentially arbitrary, it is in the eye of the beholder what art is considered, since as Ebert speaks of artistic intent and feels that art's message must be incapable of being influenced by any other than the artist, there are art movements accepted as high art such as Dadaism which put the value of art into the interpreters and the different interpretations possible.  There would be no study of English and literature if everything was only viewable as the writer intended and nothing more, there would be less depth to everything unless the writer could manufacture every complex connection or tie explicitly in the text.  Thus, to say something is "high" or "low" art as Ebert and Rohrer do is arbitrary, as is asking if it is art, because that could change from generation to generation, from person to person based on the type of experience they have with the works, as well as personal opinion.


2)  Works of "art" that have been significant to me in a capacity similar to that discussed by Rohrer and Ebert include: the book "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Crowded House's song "Four Seasons in One Day".

The first was a book that I read first when I was in middle school as a side read, I simply read it because there was a copy present in my house that I could read, so I did so.  The entire time I read it, I understood a great deal of the contextual issues at hand, with the focus being on Siberian work camps holding those who had broken the Russian laws.  Covering a single day as the title suggests, I found this book to truly move me (naturally I read it later on as well when I could actually comprehend every facet of the story and actually interpret some of the latent content present).  I have been so interested in the emotions expressed by the main character, relating to loneliness, the loss of hope, the wearing down of everything that makes you human through a punishing environment, and yet the subsequent rescuing of all that he was slowly losing within himself through seemingly light turns of luck, enough to save his mind from collapse.  Even more, the experience led to my interest in the history surrounding the time period (Cold War/Post-War), and still holds a place on my bookshelf with few other books on it (I don't generally read that often).

The second personal example I have is that of music, Crowded House's "Four Seasons in One Day", a song which contests to be my favorite, introduced to me early in my life by my parents, and still has an effect on me today when I hear it.  It relaxes me, I sing along and I ponder the melancholy lyrics, though I am incapable of explaining exactly why this song is so important to me, other than in value tied to my childhood and the presence it has had in my life as a favorite of mine.  However, I find it moving, and it is an aesthetic experience of art in musical form. Perhaps it is the philosophical or fantastical imagery created in the lyrics, or an interest in the bleak over that which is forced positive, but I love it, and I think it is Art.

The aesthetic experience is simply that which governs some sort of emotion or reaction out of you, positive or negative.  From there, interpretations are made further to assign value or artistic value to the work or thing, which would create "art", though "art" can be so broad as to avoid the possibility of a standard answer.



3)  After having played Jason Rohrer's game "Passage" (http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/) for the first time without having anything to prime me for the experience, I have to say I was slightly intrigued by the overall mood of the game, the music was melancholy and 8 bit, meaning it was very simple and nothing extremely elaborate to create a mood.  The game itself is very simple as well, as a character you move, probably run into the female counterpart character, and from there continue to move forward with extreme tunnel vision to the right as a number in the upper right goes up (by 1 when you move forward alone, and by 2 when with female counterpart and moving forward).

With this, I feel that the point of the experience is tied to the progression of the game and how the game reaches an ending.  As you move forward in the game, time passes, and the sprites of the characters you control warp and age in a natural manner, from adulthood to death it seems, with the female character dying first and the male character slowing once the female character dies (becomes a tombstone).  With a title like "Passage", the game seems to be a representation of the path of life, with some movements and paths blocked due to the unity of the characters making your size greater and less able to move through the lower parts of the world.  Boxes also exist which increase the points you have, as well as age, possibly symbolizing life events or rewarding the venturing from the straight shot forward provided by the path at the top in which you start.

Aesthetically, I enjoyed the game, the feel was cluncky and old do to the style, but it was interesting, and left me thinking a little bit about what the hell I had just played and why I played it a second time right after the first playthrough.

~~~~~Nathaniel Hendrix~~~~~~