"Climate Shifts" 2007-8

Climate Shifts 2007-8

by Christa Erickson

Christa Erickson used an RSS news feed of news, weather and time to highlight and compare how different focuses and concerns manifest at various locations around the world. She used weather and headline news to establish differing local group psyches of "political, environmental cultural, and temporal influences" (Erickson).

Projected overhead onto the underside of an umbrella, she used a light pollution projection for background to locate the current, local news headlines. The 12 sections of the umbrella top were assigned hours of a clock with projected hands that spin and show current times at the different locals.

I surmised that Erickson meant to communicate she was covering the world in time and space. Her installation is attractive, inventive and thought-provoking. It creates a positive feeling about issues we are not always comfortable considering. An umbrella infers coverage: perhaps covering the news, covering the globe, covering the hot topics of the day. Those of us under the umbrella are included. There is a kindness about it. Umbrellas imply safety: a place where we can safely look at not just our differences but our commonality. We all have weather after all.

The elevated location of the umbrella forces us to look up and suggests a positive future for all of us under the umbrella. The distance away from the viewer gives us space to think while, at the same time, space to separate ourselves and take a look at how other people view the shared world.

One addition I think would add another little element to her "glimpse into the collective" would be a computer to enter the viewer's home address with a projection of "You are Here" so that we can place ourselves into the world she has projected.

This project was funded in part by a Fellowship from Sculpture Space, Utica, NY, an artist-in-residence facility. Erickson generously included her programmer's name, Raed Atoui, as a contributor. I appreciate her doing that as it seems to be over-looked by many of the new media artist

Reference:

Erickson, Christa, Internet available at http://emedia.art.sunysb.edu/christa/artist.html

Net Art Generator
1999
by Cornelia Sollfrank

According to the start up screen for Cornelia Sollfrank’s Net Art Generator, “a clever artist makes the machine do the work!” The Net Art Generator software evolved from Sollfrank’s Female Extension, her 1997 project which produced 289 different net art pieces by fake female artists. In order to expose her perceived bias for male artists in the Art World, cyberfeminist Sollfrank flooded the Extension competition hosted by Hamburg Art Museum Gallery of Contemporary Art of Hamburg, Germany with fabricated female entries (Tribe and Janna) . To facilitate production of the large number of individual and unique works for each of the bogus entries, she created a complex net art generator by combining four generators commissioned from different computer programmers. She combined their different solutions into one version with all of them available on a start up screen. Each generator culls images and text from existing HTML materials selected from different search engines and randomly combines and reassembles them into collage art (Media Art Net).

While Female Extension deliberately evokes questions about societal favoritism toward males, Net Art Generator begs more subtle questions about art in general. Are machines capable of producing real art? If machines can produce art, is the art as valuable to us as art from humans? Do we value the artist or just the product? Since the original images are appropriated by the art generator who owns the art? Who gets credit for the art work? Does the randomness of the images eliminate any possible meaning or message? Have we reduced “art” to selections of pleasing images or even not so pleasing images? What is art?

Answers to some of my questions may lie in the results of the Extension competition. She didn’t win. Not one of the 289 fake creations she entered placed in the top three. Sollfrank used her loss to three male entries to claim bigotry toward women. I suspect her products were inferior to the winners. I expect the judges were highly qualified to make impersonal, objective evaluations. I expect it was a diverse panel with judges like Feminist Valie Export participating (Tribe and Janna). I suspect they looked for qualities absent in Sollfrank’s work, possibly substance and well-thought-out creativity.

She may have won if she had presented Net Art Generator as her entry. The software she produced may be the real art as opposed to the art produced by it. The software is creative and powerful. Although it leaves questions of authorship open for debate, it is a time saver. The images have depth and interest. I still don’t know if they qualifiy as anything more than commercial art.

For me, fine art should have meaning or evoke emotion. Perhaps less restricted thinkers experience their own emotions out of randomness better than I do. For me, the art generator may be better employed as a “jumping-off” point where the software image could be deliberately manipulated to produce thought and meaning behind the products. As a time saver, I can see using a generator to quickly look for interesting textures and color combinations, backgrounds. As a final museum quality art product I agree with the judges decision: the images fall short of a Gallery competition winner.

References:

Media Art Net. [Internet]. Cornelia Sollfrank, Net Art Generator. Available at http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/net-art-generator/images/7/

Tribe, Mark and Renee Janna, New Media Art. [Internet] Cornelia Sollfrank. Available at https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Cornelia+Sollfrank

ASCII History of Moving Images

http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/film/

Vuk Cosic created ASCII History of Moving Images in 1998 by reformatting seven historic, well-known film movies; each from a different genre, each with a different twist on the computer language he applied to the clips. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters were used in place of pixels which gives the viewers the illusion of more three-dimensionality (Wikipedia). The variety of shapes and sizes of the characters gave the film images a textural quality while maintaining a simplified, flattened appearance of historic snippets of Lumiere, Eisenstein, King Kong, Star Trek,· Blow Up, Psycho and Deep Throat. First shown in Stedelijk in October 1998, you can view the seven clips at his Official History of Net.art Volume III (ljudmila.org)

He generated the film images out of monochromatic, neon green ‘light’ characters, reminiscent of computer terminals of the 1980s on a black screen background to keep the antiquated feel to his project. His fight was to keep this and other aging media alive. He used ASCII to evoke “not only a peculiar episode in the history of computer culture but a number of earlier forms of media and communication technologies as well (Cosic). It successfully represents the translation from one time to another, from one format to another, from one media to another (Shulgin).

ASCII History of Moving Images is an excellent example of Cosic efforts “to point out the radically new nature of media, staging as opposed to hiding its new properties”. As and engineer and artist (an “enginartist” perhaps), Cosic pushed the limits of standard application of computer products. As he puts it, “ the basic idea was not to accept the off-the-shelf products because it implicitly means the acceptance of the limits of the Engineer’s creativity” (Cosic).

Cosic stated his treatment of two out of seven of his film remakes. For the 1930s film Luminere he chose to superimpose digital over the image and then translate into ASCII. He applied a mosaic filter, a “Mondrian-like abstraction” for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. While he did not state his reasons for the rest of his selections in this project, I believe they were eye-catching (Blow Up), familiar (Star Trek) and erotic (Deep Throat). The addition of Deep Throat was a surprise but, let's face it, sex sells. Cosic actually states that it's not about the art, it's about money. More than that, it's astonishing how well the sex scene carries through pixelation using ASCII characters. Our minds seem to be able to fill in all the important parts.

One more interesting effect he added to over the screen was a "scratch". I loved the special effect the scratch line helped capture. I think it was the finishing touch to elicit the feel of very old films. It adds the same antiquated feel or familiarity we get from the Star Trek and Psycho clips. Perfect for online art, he lives up the the coined net.art label that has been attached to him.

References:

Cosic, Vuk, The Official History of Net.art, Volume III [internet. Available at http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/film/

Cosic, Vuk, Untitled Document [internet]. Available at http://www.wuk.at/kunsthalle/archiv/1999/SiQ99/e7.htm.

ljudmila.org. ASCII Architecture [internet] Available at www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/film/

Shulgin, Untitle Document [internet]. Availabel at www.wuk.at/kunsthalle/archi/1999/SiQ99/e7.htm.

Wikipedia, Vuk Cosic [internet]. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_%C4%86osi%C4%87

Wasting the Bay

Wasting the Bay revision

Wasting the Bay