Julia's Blog

“Art in the Age of Digital Distribution”

jz8nz — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:01:52 +0000

This article discussed the influence of digital technology on art. It’s said that “painting is dead”, and new forms of “painting” are now available on the computer. I thought Lichtenstein’s imitation of a comic book picture was quite amazing. The entire picture was created using little tiny dots. Although this Pop art culture may be taking over the old forms of art such as painting, it doesn’t mean it is any worse or any better. The art is not only different, but can now also be globalized thanks to the internet. The internet has allowed artists, companies, and people alike to share their ideas, works, and information to anyone with the means of receiving it in any corner of the world.

This article also made me think about a piece I saw in the Modern Museum of Art in New York City. There is a work that is plain, with a line going through it. Though I didn’t think this was hard, let alone art at the time, I now see that perhaps the painter was trying to mimic what is being done with technological art. A lot of the pieces created on the computer are geometric, and this work was emulating that aspect.

“You Tube Boob Tube”, “The Secret World of Lonely Girl”, “Of Abundance and Redundance”, & “Commercial Break”

jz8nz — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:46:06 +0000

“You Tube Boob Tube”

This article discusses the credibility of You Tube. You Tube has become a place where anyone can upload a video of themselves doing anything. It ca be funny, artistic, a song or movie, a tv clip, or just something plain stupid. It has become a place where people can advertise themselves in a good or bad way. You Tube has increased accessibility to things like TV clips, music videos, music, and videos, but at a price. The advertising industry has changed dramatically, and people are less willing to take the time to watch ads now when they don’t actually have to. The other problem that YouTube has is “plagiarism”. Many video uploads use previously copyrighted material like songs, pictures, or clips from TV shows and movies. But this also brings up the question of what plagiarism is. It’s hard to distinguish what is and what isn’t plagiarism since so many of the posted items have been altered in some way, which follows under the acceptable use policy. I think this will be a big topic of discussion for artists and society members alike in this new technological era and as the technology continues to expand.

“The Secret World of Lonely Girl”

The story of Rose, Beckett and Flinders is quite interesting. They created a “show” by looking up what people watch, and using their own camera and set to create what people wanted to see. They did this through the life of Bree, a teenage girl with a lot of problems. It’s hard to believe how much success they had with these webisodes. This story is a prime example of the creative possibilities that YouTube holds for people.

“Of Abundance and Redundance”

This article discussed the hardships of finding originality in the art world today. So many things created today are mimicked from previous works, or bits and pieces are taken from them and transformed into something “different”. This is due to the fact that many artists feel that originality no longer exists or is rapidly dying. Producers are now more focused on producing what viewers want to see, rather than what they want to make and choose for the viewers to see. This has contributed to the failure and depreciation of many of today’s artists.

“Commercial Break”

The Chevy Tahoe was the main piece of interest in this article. Chevy created an ad campaign on You Tube, which I thought was a brilliant idea. Even if the ad got a lot of negative responses, it still generated a lot of positive ones, and people even made new ones themselves. This is brilliant because it attracted attention, which is really the advertisers only goal. I thought the idea was genius because Chevy brought the consumer into the product, like when a teacher plans an interactive activity in a class. It also significantly increased Chevy’s sales. Overall, I think this was a genius plan by the company.

Project 3

jz8nz — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:13:50 +0000

“The Porcupine and the Car” Response

jz8nz — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:07:45 +0000

“The Porcupine & the Car” by Bill Viola was an article that was kind of similar to the last one. It talks about how each new thing created came from a previous idea or work. I particularly liked the example about the process of music being formed. Music needs to start as a simple beat and it builds and builds until every aspect is put together and it becomes a song. It is a difficult process to create music and Viola stressed the point of deciding how much to add or how much to take out. This fact made me think about the clutter of information we get in the world today. With the internet and tv and radio, we get a constant flow of information. I thought it was interesting that Viola pointed out that the same aspect is applied to art. He said with video, you build one big piece, and chip away at it until you get what is necessary for the piece to work. Viola then continues to say that now it is very easy to be considered an artist because of all the technology and methods available to us, much like the abundant flow of information. Obviously this is an issue that will always be controversial and debated, but I think the point he is trying to get across is that even with this overflow of information, art should be considered the simplifying or sculpting of the jumble. Though I understood most of his comparisons in the article, I did not see the relevance of the story of the porcupine and the car.

“The Ecstasy of Influence” Response

jz8nz — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:42:30 +0000

I thought this article brought up an interesting perspective of plagiarism and how society views it. I am actually learning about this in economics right now, more so focused on the patent and copyright aspect. Research and development in any field of work generates a benefit to society as a whole because it allows others to build off of the work and continue to improve it. Letham spoke similarly when discussing the works of Shakespeare and Bernstein and how they elaborated from previous texts. I’ve read both Pyramus and Thisbe and Romeo and Juliet, and though they are similar in many ways, they are also vastly different in their style and deliverance. I also think the quote, “You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?” rings true. In class, we are given examples of what our projects should look like, or to give us inspiration for our projects. The ideas we develop and pursue for our individual project, if it is similar to an example, is not necessarily plagiarism but building off of a previous idea and adding our personal element to it.

Project 2

jz8nz — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:13:24 +0000

For my project, I personified myself as a woman with 1940′s style, a platinum blonde with blue eyes, and a soldier. The 40′s picture I took in black and white, and added in the red lip tint that was so popular of the time. In the dumb blonde picture, I wanted to portray my ditzy side. I bought a blonde wig, and used photoshop to make my eyes blue, tint my eyebrows lighter and make the background pink. Now I know never to dye my hair blonde… In the third picture, I used my friend’s ROTC gear and took a picture in light that makes me look like I’m in an investigation room. The shadow on my face was really intense, so I used the brightness/contrast and shadow tool in photoshop to lighten up my face. I thought using the camera was kind of difficult, and had some trouble making adjustments to the lighting. Overall though, I thought this project was pretty fun.

Project 1

jz8nz — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:46:47 +0000

Project 1

The original of this photograph was of two men, Watson and Crick, who discovered the double helix of DNA in 1953. The original image was never on the cover of Time magazine, so I removed the cover picture and placed this image on it and changed the date. Watson and Crick worked with a woman named Rosalind Franklin, who did most of the work that lead to the discovery of the double helix. She was the one who took the picture of the DNA strand that allowed people to see the shape of DNA. It is said that Watson and Crick stole Franklin’s work, and credited themselves with the discovery. In order to give her the credit she deserved, I decided to place her head on Watson’s and place the image on the cover of Time magazine. It was a lot more difficult to do this than I thought it would be. The images were different qualities and had a very different grey scale. It took a lot of fooling around to get it to remotely look like it was from the same image. I used the polygonal tool to remove her head and place it on his, and the clone and stamp tool to fix up the sharp edges and make her face look like Cricks. This project made me realize just how much work it is to digitally reconstruct an image.

“Reality Bytes” and “Altered States” Responses

jz8nz — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:16:42 +0000

I thought Woodward’s articles were brought up some really interesting points about the influence of Photoshop and digital imaging on photography and contemporary art. I took a Photo I class in high school where we developed film in a dark room, and mixed chemicals, etc. It was very, very different from what we are doing in this class where we are editing everything on the computer. I can see why there was such great commotion over Kodak ceasing to produce black and white paper. It is crazy how big of an influence companies like Apple and Adobe have over digital imaging and the new era of photography. The time it has taken for this new era of photography to evolve has been extremely rapid. Photoshop only came out 16 years ago, which is a very short period of time for a movement of such great magnitude. When Photoshop and digital imaging were newer, it was more popular to transpose images onto one another and make them seem surreal. Now people spend a painstaking amount of time putting multiple images together that are flawless. Like in our project, artists want to make their pictures look as real as possible with as few traces of digital imaging as possible. The ability to do this has “virtually eliminated the line between realism and idealism”. As Gutschow said, you no longer need the perfect moment, because you can just fabricate the one from 20 perfect moments.

Response to “Railway Journey”

jz8nz — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 04:23:26 +0000

Railway Journey was a bit harder for me to understand and relate to than Intention and Artifice. The main point I got from this article was that a new technology dramatically changed the way people perceive space and time. Like how digital imaging lead us to question the truthfulness of a picture, so the railway system changed the standardization of time and space. People are no longer lingering, but care only about getting from point A to point B, which was made possible by the incredible speed of the train. In the 1800′s, the railroad was the symbol of modernity and was a marker of the changing technology potential of the time. Today, I think our symbol would be the computer, since there has been such a surge of technology and change with its integration into society.

Response to “Intention & Artifice”

jz8nz — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 03:56:51 +0000

This article made me think a lot about the images I see every day. Where photography was once a depiction of truth and a direct physical imprint, it can now be altered to depict whatever the artist wants to depict as the “truth”. Technology has completely changed the way we perceive an image. Now, images have human bias and unrealistic depictions of nature. Digital imaging can be cool and useful in art, and can be used to enhance a photograph in numerous ways. But at the same time it can create an unrealistic “reality”, such as airbrushing supermodels. Another thing this article opened up my mind to was all the different ways you can spot that an image has been altered. By checking inconsistencies in details such as shading, light, time, viewpoint, scale, angle of shadows, deletions, texture and gradient, etc., you can spot whether or not a photograph was altered. This information gave a lot of insight into what we are going to be doing with the images for our first assignment.