Artist Entry: Ethan Ham

The Small Glass (after Duchamp)

Ethan Ham produced this rather interesting 'accidental' take on Duchamp's "Small Glass".  The iPhone itself is a working iPhone that was accidentally dropped, creating the shatter along the bottom of the device. Having worked at Apple and seen many phones come in looking exactly like this, I find the direct correlation to Duchamp's work very interesting.

This idea of non-art artwork is taken even farther with the fact that the piece is still functional. Despite the sprawling crack along the screen, it is still a completely functional device. To take the connection to Duchamp even further, Ham replaced the wallpaper of the phone with Duchamp's "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even".

The result of this very deliberate connection to Duchamp is to subject this - and other similar pieces of technology - to many layers of questions regarding its validity as a piece of art, and its significance in our daily lives. It also, amusingly, strikes me as comparing the iPhone to R.Mutt's urinal as a culturally important contraption.

Artist Entry: Jason Sloan

[cloud.s]v1.1

http://cloud-s.net/

What Sloan has done is to take the micro-blogging site Twitter and pull posts with the word 'cloud' on to a webpage as links arranged to take the form of a cloud. The page initially loads as a simple blue gradient similar to a clear sky. Then the text begins to appear in varying size and spacing across the page, stretching it out so you can scroll back through it. But instead of just having the text, each line links directly back to the original tweet it came from.

One of the fascinating aspects of this is that not only is the content generated by internet users, but it gives each and every author credit. In an environment where taking 140 characters or less without giving proper credit is (unfortunately) common practice, this is really pretty neat. It gives the work a much more interactive and explorative nature. Another interesting thing is that in network diagrams the internet is almost always depicted as a cloud. Also, cloud computing is a term that has grown out of our tendency to keep more and more of out documents on the web, so that eventually all we will need is machine with basic hardware and just enough disk space for an operating system.

So I think that this piece is very successful because it is on one hand so simplistic you can't avoid talking about the core of the piece (the internet and blogging), but it is also very complex with its links and the layers of meaning from the name and format. The only thing I can think of that could make this piece more dynamic would be the inclusion of more  blogging and micro blogging sites, but even that may over-crowd the work.

Okay, so here some images I'm hoping to clean up in class:

My sister

My Mother

A barn in New Hampshire

         

And several pictures from Japan

Artist Entry: Aaron Higgins

comp3(terra)




Aaron Higgins approaches his digital art in a way that I find absolutely fascinating. He considers the movement and layering of film the same way he would the movement of paint around a canvas. However, using video he can create a time-lapse painting that shows the evolution of the image throughout its creation. This takes fundamental concepts from traditional oil painting and provides them with new and dimension.


Overall I feel that this piece exemplifies Higgins ideas beautifully. In each frame of his video I can can see how the image could be a brilliant oil painting. What he has done is replaced the stroke of the brush with a very fluid and gaseous movement of mass and color. The sound gives the piece and interesting sense of scale and despite the small size of the video on the screen, it makes the piece feel as if it has an almost planetary scale.

This is my blog for Intro to Digital Imaging at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

I have dabbled with digital art for the last few years, and am looking forward to learning more. Mostly I have worked with some minor photo editing in Photoshop Elements 3 and Aperture, and I have done some digital painting through some online programs, Photoshop Elements 3, and ArtRage 2. Some of the tools I'm really looking forward to familiarizing myself with are 3D modeling and Illustrator.