Artist Research

ROBERT SMITHSON

Robert Smithson (1938–1973) was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City. He was an American artist famous for his land art.
His early exhibited artworks were collage works influenced by "homoerotic drawings and clippings from beefcake magazines", science fiction, and early Pop Art. He primarily identified himself as a painter during this time, but after a three year rest from the art world, Smithson emerged in 1964 as a proponent of the emerging minimalist movement.Crystalline structures and the concept of entropy became of particular interest to him, and informed a number of sculptures completed during this period, including Alogon 2.

In 1967 Smithson began exploring industrial areas around New Jersey and was fascinated by the sight of dump trucks excavating tons of earth and rock that he described in an essay as the equivalents of the monuments of antiquity. In1968, Smithson published the essay "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects" in Artforum that promoted the work of the first wave of land art artists, and in 1969 he began producing land art pieces to further explore concepts gained from his readings. In his essay "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" Smithson documents a series of temporary sculptures made with mirrors at particular locations around the Yucatan peninsula.
Smithson's interest in the temporal is explored in his writings in part through the recovery of the ideas of the picturesque.
After that, Smithson became particularly interested in the notion of deformities within the spectrum of anti-aesthetic dynamic relationships which he saw present in the Picturesque landscape. He claimed, “the best sites for ‘earth art’ are sites that have been disrupted by industry, reckless urbanization, or nature’s own devastation. For him, however, it was not necessary that the deformation become a visual aspect of a landscape; by his anti-formalist logic, more important was the temporal scar worked over by natural or human intervention. Other theoretical writings explore the relationship of a piece of art to its environment, from which he developed his concept of sites and non-sites. A site was a work located in a specific outdoor location, while a non-site was a work which could be displayed in any suitable space.
In 1971 he created Broken circle, Spiral Hill for the exhibition for the Sonsbeek'71 art festival at Emmen, the Netherlands.

Spiral Jetty from atop Rozel Point, in mid-April 2005. It was created in 1970 and still exists although it has often been submerged by the fluctuating lake level. It consists of some 6500 tons of basalt, earth and salt. Spiral Jetty is an example of a sited work, while Smithson's non-site pieces frequently consist of photographs of a particular location, often exhibited alongside some material (such as stones or soil) removed from that location.

 Broken Circle

 Spiral Hills

MUSEUM TRIP

Second Life Project

An Ideal Me....

Not Me...This is an abtract of me.

This is just something really fantasy. I like this outfit

And this is me.

Artist Research 12

JENNICAM by Jennifer Ringley

      Jennifer Kaye Ringley is an Internet personality and former lifecaster. She is known for creating the popular website JenniCam. Regarded by some as a conceptual artist, Ringley viewed her site as a straight-forward document of her life. She did not wish to filter the events that were shown on her camera, so sometimes she was shown nude or engaging in sexual behavior, including sexual intercourse and masturbation. This was a new use of Internet technology in 1996 and viewers were stimulated both for its sociological implications and for sexual arousal. The JenniCam web site coincided with a rise in surveillance as a feature of popular culture, particularly reality television programs such as Big Brother, and as a feature of contemporary art and new media art. Ringley's desire to maintain the purity of the cam-eye view of her life eventually created the need to establish that she was within her rights as an adult to broadcast such information, in the legal sense, and that it was not harmful to other adults. Unlike later for-profit webcam services, Ringley did not spend her day displaying her naked body, and she spent much more time discussing her romantic life than she did her sex life. Ringley maintained her webcam site for seven 
years.

Artist Research 11

Spectropia by Toni Dove
       Toni Dove is an artist who works primarily with electronic media, including virtual reality and
interactive video laser disk installations that engage viewers in responsive and immersive narrative
environments. Spectropia is a hybrid of sci-fi and film noir, with elements of time travel and telepathy. The
story opens in the future where Spectropia, a young woman in her twenties, lives in the salvage
district of an urban center known as the Informal Sector. It’s a black market subculture of
salvage and barter where knowledge spans only a person’s experience and recorded history is
forbidden. This culture of consumption floats on islands of garbage; saving anything is
punishable by law. Spectropia is addicted to the illegal activity of collecting artifacts from the
past. Her companion, a cyborg creature called the Duck, (part human and part wireless robot)
runs a black market business in retro objects—their livelihood. The Duck is a babysitter bot, in
loco parentis, programmed by Spectropia’s father, who disappeared in time while searching for
a lost inheritance. Using a machine of her own invention to search the past for her father, she
discovers William, a man from 1931 New York City after the Great Crash. Spectropia is
accidentally transported to NYC in 1931 when her machine short circuits and she finds herself in
the body of another woman, Verna de Mott, an amateur sleuth. A mystery and a romantic
triangle unfold across centuries as two women in one body drive one man crazy.

Artist Research 10

Vices And Virtues by Bruce Nauman
        Nauman's Vices and Virtues for the Stuart Collection consists of seven pairs of words superimposed in blinking neon, which run like a frieze around the top of the Charles Lee Powell Structural Systems Laboratory. Seven vices alternate with seven virtues: FAITH/LUST, HOPE/ENVY, CHARITY/SLOTH, PRUDENCE/PRIDE, JUSTICE/AVARICE, TEMPERANCE/GLUTTONY, and FORTITUDE/ANGER. Atop a laboratory where engineers erect and then stress parts of buildings to test their resistance to earthquakes, this cataclysmic list of moral opposites, created long ago, takes on special significance. The virtues flash sequentially clockwise around the building at one rate; and the vices circulate counterclockwise at a slightly faster rate. At brief intervals, both the seven virtues and the seven vices flash together. The progression of the two repeating cycles playing off each other allows all possible combinations of the words to be displayed. This complicated performance, generated by the mechanical sequencing of a simple moral dichotomy, dramatizes the instability of any ethical judgment. As Nauman implies in this work, we may know the difference between faith and lust, or hope and envy, but in real experience these vices and virtues are never experienced purely. They continually show themselves in new and baffling combinations. The letters are seven feet high and placed over glass windows six stories up. Each letter is a combination of two colors, with a total of fourteen colors and nearly a mile of neon tubing. This work, first proposed in 1983, was completed and erected in October of 1988.

Artist Research 9

Electronic Superhighway by Nam June Paik
    Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean-born American artist. He worked with 
a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist. Paik is credited with an early usage (1974) 
of the term "super highway" in application to telecommunications. Nam June Paik then began participating 
in the Neo-Dada art movement, known as Fluxus, which was inspired by the composer John Cage and his 
use of everyday sounds and noises in his music. He made his big debut at an exhibition known as Exposition 
of Music-Electronic Television, in which he scattered televisions everywhere and used magnets to alter or 
distort their images.
    To design this monumental map of the United States, the artist Nam June Paik arranged 336 televisions on 
a scaffold and overlaid it with almost 600 feet of neon. Fifty DVD players send multimedia simultaneously 
to screens populating each state. Walking along the entire length of this installation suggests the enormous scale of the nation that confronted the young Korean artist when he arrived. Neon outlines the monitors, 
recalling the multicolored maps and glowing enticements of motels and restaurants that beckoned 
Americans to the open road. The different colors remind us that individual states still have distinct 
identities and cultures, even in today's information age.

Artist Research 8

Matrix II by Erwin Reld
    Erwin Redl in Gföhl, Lower Austria is an Austrian-born artist currently living in USA. As artistic
medium he uses LEDs. His work includes installations, videos, graphics, computerart and electronic music.
Matrix II is the premiere showing of the artist's theatrical scale light-emitting diode (or LED) artwork since
it was acquired by MCASD in 2007. This room-size work offers viewers a space that seems to recede in
all directions, as if the walls were mirrored. Floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall, the room is filled with
grids of phosphor green LEDs, creating an immersive web of light.
    The work consists of thousands of tiny LEDs deployed in a dense grid that fills the entire volume of the
museum’s largest gallery. The faint glow emanating from each of the LEDs combines with all of the other’s
to saturate the gallery with a light-presence that seems almost physical and appears to extend beyond
identifiable limits. The experience is so unlike the real world that our senses normally encounter that a visit
 to “Matrix II” can be quite unnerving in a benign, even cleansing way.

Artist Research 7

 Incidence of Catastrophe Gary Hill








Gary Hill (born in 1951, Santa Monica, California, U.S.) is an American artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. One of the pioneers of video art, Gary Hill has exhibited his video and video installations worldwide (Artfacts 2007). He is represented by Donald Young Gallery of Chicago.
    Incidence of Catastrophe reaches beyond these parameters in depicting the synesthesia of reading and the dreamwork of the text. Inspired by Maurice Blanchot's novel Thomas the Obscure and the experience of observing his child acquiring speech, Hill's heuristic tour de force grounds the viewer in the activity of becoming the text through a succession of evocative scenarios and motifs that detail a gradual descent into language and its labyrinth of representational configurations. Literacy is seen as soul-sickness; the final image of a drowned man before a wall of words expresses the abjection of the body in Western society's semantic culture. Hill's "writing" on Blanchot is so relentlessly revelatory, each layer of amplification so remarkably well positioned, that it inspires hopes of vital new relationships between artistic and critic l practices in literature and video.
          

Artist Research 6

1000+ Avatars by Gracie Kendal
    Gracie Kendal is a second life artist. She tries to create as many avatars as possible. These portraits illustrate the idea of anonymity and personality.This is kindda special because she wants to define the online identity.People like avatars mostly through movies, video games. An avatar is a virtual representation.Moreover, second life is a place to offer people the freedom to express their own dreams and explore changing identity. People use those avatars to escape from reality. 
 This project includes many different portraits, which represent different personalities and lives. I think each of the avatar has its own meaning, maybe presenting an ideal person such as fabulous, beautiful, modern, sexy, strong, powerful,.. or abstract person such as evil, ugly, weak,.. to give them freedom and a boundery that is not yet accepted in real physical life.

    

Artist Research 5

 Third Hand by Stelarc
        This is a mechanical human-like hand which is attched to his right arm as an additional hand. It is made to the dimensions of his real right hand. This is cast in latex from his right hand. It was never permanently worn over the mechanism because for performance purposes only the visual motion and operation was important. This Third Hand was made of Aluminium, stainless steel, acrylic, latex electronics, electrodes, cables and battery pack.
        I cannot believe when I see it. There is an robotic hand to attach t real human hand. I see many different pictures of this project. It is so cool. Whenever Stelarc' real right hand moves, the robotic hand follows exactly the same. This project kindda prove that robot can be a equipment to help people. 

              

Artist Research 4

London Wall by Thomson & Craighead

     London Wall is a physical manifestation of the invisible city all around us; a poetic snapshot of social networking traffic from within a three-mile radius of the Museum of London. Over a ten-day period, publicly available status updates from popular websites like twitter and facebook will be selected then published as a vast array of typeset posters revealing the idle mutterings of ourselves to ourselves as a form of concrete poetry. London Wall is a clunky cottage industry, where the artists manually manufacture a collision of public electronic space with the public physical space of the museum.
    All of the words or phrases or sentences put on the wall are all things people need and think of every day life. It is really pratical and connective to human lives. This is like a part of life. 

          

Artist Research 3

Collage "Retroactive 1" (1964) by Robert Rauschenberg
      Robert Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. Rauschenberg was keenly interested in the iconography of American popular culture.
      He connects tightly with Abstract expression without losing the latter's expressiveness. He designs a stressed collage by using any types of material such as like house paint, and techniques such painting with a tire dipped in ink. This groundbreaking technique contributed to the course of modern art and creative expression. The works are sometimes called Neo-Dada. In this collage, he uses the current events that can be gatherred from newspaper and magazines. The mana in the collage is John F. Kennedy speaking at televise news conference. There is also a picture of astronaut. he overlapping, and seemingly disparate, composition creates a colorful visual commentary on a media-saturated culture struggling to come to grips with the television era.

Artist Research 2

 Catalog by John Whitney

     John Whitney, Sr. (April 8, 1917 - September 22, 1995) was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation.
    His Catalog project is kindda incredible. He uses dots and lines to connect everything together. He also adds music and motion for those lines and dots. The picture is moving gradually and eventually changing the shape. They tends to create a new image whenver they move. The music is relaxable and enjoyable. And of course, the movement makes art quite different and even more powerful.
    I know that is why he is called the father of computer animation. Nowadays, whenever computers are in resting time, they might be changed the screen to those moving art objects. It is now so popular. And it also distributes some unique beauty for computers.

Artist Research 1

 The Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney

       

         Matthew Barney (born March 25, 1967) is an American artist who works in sculpture, photography, drawing and film. The Cremaster Cycle is an art project consisting of five feature length films, together with related sculptures, photographs, drawings, and artist's books; it is the best-known work of American visual artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney. The project is filled with anatomical allusions to the position of the reproductive organs during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation: Cremaster 1 represents the most "ascended" or undifferentiated state, Cremaster 5 the most "descended" or differentiated.

        Biologically, the cremaster is a muscle that raises and lowers the testicles. Barney uses the descension of the cremaster muscle as a symbol for the onset of male gender (which appears about nine weeks after a fetus is conceived). The five films progress from a state of undifferentiated gender (a fully ascended cremaster muscle, represented by the floating Goodyear Blimps and other symbols), through the organism’s struggle to resist gender definition, to the inevitable point where maleness can no longer be denied (complete descension of the cremaster and release of the testes).

        The film also reflects many of Barney's biography. The film is not only trace of formation of seual definition but also the creative process of astist.

         

Artist Research

Tony Oursler (born New York City, 1957) is a multimedia and installation artist.
Tapes, Installations: 1977-1989
  Tony Oursler is known for his fractured-narrative handmade video tapes including The Loner, 1980 and EVOL 1984. These works involve elaborate sound tracks, painted sets, stop-action animation and optical special effects created by the artist. The early videotapes have been exhibited extensively in alternative spaces and museums, they are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix.His early installation works are immersive dark-room environments with video, sound, and language mixed with colorful constructed sculptural elements. In these projects, Oursler experimented with methods of removing the moving image from the video monitor using reflections in water, mirrors, glass and other devices. For example, "L-7, L-5", exhibited at the Kitchen NYC 1983, used the translucent quality of video reflected on broken glass.
Projection: 1991
   Oursler began working with small LCD video projectors in 1991 in his installation "The Watching" presented at Documenta 9, featuring his first video doll and dummy. This work utilizes handmade soft cloth figures combined with expressive faces animated by video projection. Oursler then produced a series of installations that combined found objects and video projections. "Judy", 1993, explored the relationship between multiple personality disorder and mass media. "Get Away II" features a passive/aggressive projected figure wedged under a mattress that confronts the viewer with blunt direct address. Oursler’s works seem like animate effigies in their own psychological space, often appearing to interact directly with the viewer's sense of empathy. These installations are consistently disturbing and fascinating and lead to great popular and critical acclaim.
Signature works have been his talking lights, such as Streetlight (1997), his series of video sculptures of eyes with television screens reflected in the pupils, and ominous talking heads such as Composite Still Life (1999). An installation called Optics (1999) examines the polarity between dark and light in the history of the camera obscura. In his text "Time Stream", Oursler proposed that architecture and moving image installation have been forever linked by the camera obscura noting that cave dwellers observed the world as projections via peep holes. Oursler's interest in the ephemeral history of the virtual image lead to large scale public projects and permanent installations by 2000.
Public Projects: 2000-2009
   The Public Art Fund and Artangel commissioned the "Influence Machine" in 2000. This installation marks the artist's first major outdoor project and thematically traced the development of successive communication devices from the telegraph to the personal computer as a means of speaking with the dead. Oursler used smoke, trees and buildings as projection screens in Madison Park NYC and Soho Square London. He then completed a number of permanent public projects in Barcelona, New Zealand, Arizona including "Braincast" at the Seattle Public Library. He is scheduled to complete a commission at the Frank Sinatra High School in Astoria, New York.
2010 exhibitions
   From October-December 2010, the Lehmann Maupin Gallery hosted Oursler's exhibition entitled "Peak". The exhibition is timed with Oursler's Valley, the inaugural exhibition of the Adobe Museum of Digitial Media.

The LONER: The Loner is a psychosexual journey through the dark landscapes of Oursler's insular narrative universe. The tape's paranoid, tormented protagonist — who is represented by such objects as a spoon and a water-filled sack — wanders through a hostile dreamspace of macabre obsessions and sexual alienation. Incredibly, Oursler renders this unlikely anti-hero as a sympathetic, totally believable "character." The artist's somnambulant, pun-laden narration and astonishing visual inventiveness add black humor to the surreal proceedings; for example, a bar scene is populated by an outrageous "cast" of found-object grotesques. Oursler's classic happy ending, in which The Loner "would live a wonderful life," rings with an ironic desperation.

http://www.tonyoursler.com/individual_work_slideshow.php?navItem=work&workId=19&startDateStr=Oct.%2019,%202000&subSection=Public%20Projects&allTextFlg=true&title=The%20Influence%20Machine

Influence machine: Installed at Madison Square Park, captured voices and images of ghosts, both contemporary and historical, creating a seance experience that recalled 19th-century sound and light projections. Oursler experimented with video, smoke machines, a variety of soundtracks, and several sculptural elements to explore the historical and current impact technologies have on our daily lives.