1.) Presentation #1

http://www.nickbriz.com/oneliners/

Nick Briz by Aidan Danahy from Art 346 Digital Media UNR

Nick Briz is a pioneer in the genre of glitch art. I found his utilization of compression software very interesting and his work on the GLI.TC/H projects fascinating. His projects include humorous oneliners that comment on different parts of modern culture including secularism and the use of modern technology.

Presentation #2

A Study of Works Done by Michael Kontopoulos

Removal Studies

Discontent 1

Discontent 2

Discontent 3

Removal Studies (4) from Michael Kontopoulos on Vimeo.

I chose Michael Kontopoulos for his visualization efforts. Through his works, he tries to measure and quantify discontent. There are some projects nowadays that quantify happiness, and Kontopoulos states that if you can measure happiness, you must also be able to measure unhappiness, or discontent. His works are primarily analog, which make them interesting in a mechanical way.

2.) Reading "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television"

Why do you think he wanted to create the image of famous people, to have power?

Is such a perception really that powerful?

3.) Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell

Nam June Paik

http://www.askkpop.com/article/Exhibition-quot-X-sound-John-Cage-Nam-June-Paik-amp-After-quot/

This is a piece by Nam June Paik titled Cage in a Cage, a tribute to his friend John Cage

I find the ironic commentary in this piece intriguing, that the tv is our own cage.

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/nam-june-paik-cage-in-cage

This is Concrete Traffic by Wolf Vostell

I found this piece particularly interesting as a commentary on the ephemeral act of traffic, something that seems so concrete and unmoving, but never lasts.

http://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/faculty/material_matters/project_1_wolf_vostells_concrete_traffic/

4.) Lynn Hershman

Home Front

In Home Front, footage of a married couple is incorporated into a Gothic style dollhouse. Visible only through the window, a 33-minute unedited sequence shows the dissolution of an idyllic domestic scene into a disturbing and violent fight. Another window of the dollhouse features a 26-minute loop of footage of the couple recounting the events, each giving subjective, conflicting interpretations of their dispute.

5.) Laurie Anderson

Habeas Corpus

Laurie Anderson worked with a former Guantanamo Bay detainee to set up his telepresence in the Park Avenue Armory.The piece, entitled Habeas Corpus, projected Mohammed El Gharanis likeness onto a statue akin to Lincolns at the Lincoln Memorial for 7 hours.

6.) A Review of HyperNormalisation

HyperNormalisation

The documentary HyperNormalisation, made by british filmmaker Adam Curtis is a stunning

documentary comprised of found footage. It tells the incredible tale of how we arrived at such a

tumultuous era, where the government is powerless and aimless. Horrible news stories and

occurrences keep straying further and further from the norm. This film doesn’t try to interpret or explain

it’s clippings, but rather why we are unable to. It covers what is happening all over the world, not only

what’s big in the public’s eye, but how society has shaped and distanced itself to what is going on. It

highlights the contrast of the reality we live in and the reality we have created and shaped to fit our

demands. It covers the past four decades and how our current crises have evolved into what they are

now.

7.) Final Presentation

Presentation

Final Paper

8.) Lectures/Exhibitions/Screenings

Lecture 1

Criminal Abstraction, Jennifer Garza Cuen

On the first of November, I attended a presentation by Jennifer Garza-Cuen on the work that she has been doing. She attended the highly esteemed Rhode Island School of Design and received a Masters in Art History and a MFA in Photography. As for her work, she used her photography as a means of storytelling and manages to capture so much narrative in her artwork that each piece seems to read like a story. Even her presentation was set up in a way to be narrative-like, which was an amazing experience. Much of her work focuses on the aesthetic of the classic Americana, much on the focus of the entropy that can be found around the country. One of the projects she talked about was entitled “Criminal Abstractions”. Each piece seemed to be abstract in a confusing sense, but her explanation of these pieces made the work quite interesting. Each piece was a headshot of some criminal time has forgotten, found in an abandoned police station in Detroit. They had been left for decades as the once glorious city of Detroit crumbled around them. A mugshot is fundamentally used to identify a criminal, to make their imprisonment unique and specific to the crime they perpetrated, however, with these images, they no longer serve the purpose of highlighting one man's wrongdoings but instead are left to be absorbed into the story of the institution that held them. The mugshots are now indistinguishable from a landscape or abstract work of art, symbolizing the decay of not only the picture itself, but also the decay of Detroit as a city, the institution of the justice system and the US as a whole. Her methodology was fascinating to listen to and I hope to see more work of hers in the future.


Exhibition 1

Ludic Artifacts, Austin Clinton

On September the nineteenth, I attended the BFA Thesis Exhibition in the University Galleries South which was displaying the theses of Austin Clinton and Erin Wohletz, two seniors in the BFA program here at the University of Nevada. Both students had tremendous pieces on display, however I was attracted to a piece by Austin Clinton that consisted of a chessboard with special pieces and an audio component of some kind. As I watched my friends Mitch and Emma play the chess game, I noticed that each time a piece was moved, audio would play from a hidden speaker. I asked Austin about this project of his when I got the chance and he was kind enough to explain it to me. The chess pieces were unique, as he had designed them and 3D printed them. They were each custom and the webcam hooked up above the board was intended to read each piece and call out the move being made, such as “Knight to H3.” However, he explained to me, the webcam wasn’t able to pick out any of the individual pieces during a trial run in the gallery, somewhat due to ambient lighting. So, the webcam picks up movement and plays clips from chess announcers. I was fascinated with the combination of a traditional analog game with a modern era take, almost like combining an app with real life play. The match ended in a stalemate and we moved on to the other items in the exhibition, even sampling the homebrewed beer provided at the bar. However, that piece stuck in my head and I admire the creativity of the artist.