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.