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I started off with this (1)^st part of my long(er) term project because I am a bit enamored by this Swedish DJ, Ehrling. Check him out if you have the time.

 Ehrling, Give Me Summer

As I mentioned in class today, the hyper-real is present in my work because I am working off more or less popular audio-visual equalizers. Either way, there is a formal style to them. Sit through not just After Effects YouTube tutorials, but any Youtube pedagogy will tell you what looks good and bad. Depending on their desire to convince you to comply with whatever standard to better their expertise? or industry, they will say things like, “it looks terrible…but if that’s something you’re going for, that’s up to you.”

When we typically combine the visual and audio, we have things like movies, music videos, and light shows. I’m very interested in the latter two – I don’t know about you, but I’m an extremely visual person when I listen to music. Listening to a wholly bodily consuming song transports me to another part of the universe or point in time, and often I have the urge to create something that is that personal world. While I have explored this to some extent through painting, drawing, sculpture, mixed media, video, and coding, I am still trying to express the visceral through a medium that is engaging and not completely messy or unmessy. (I don’t really like the word ‘balance’ because I feel that its connotations are limiting)

Thanks for reading all the way to this +150 but -350 word blog post if you were intrigued enough by my presentation in class today.

final inm project

i see this project as a compromise of my artistic and technical abilities and ambitions -

this is the first time the medium i've used is completely web, so not counting adobe suite

i think some people see the web moreover technology as something that can augment or devalue art,

i think the former, but just like any medium, it takes a while to master it, to get it to do what you want it to do to fully illustrate your artistic vision

sooo clearly this project diverges from my initial idea of group dynamics - i'm gonna try to get into game engines this summer so i can implement that - but it does stem from that same social situation. it is some form of a game, that aims to dispel societal stereotypes, but if my skills were at a higher level, i would have liked to gone further with it

like i was trying to continuously automatically play the videos but my computer couldn't take it, and i think it wouldve been cool if i had used images of my own created through some kind of software, and i would've liked to keep score maybe but time

i hope you guys enjoy it, and i hope to build off of it in future projects 

On Kawara

On Kawara interests me because he frames time, existence, and consciousness in a way that I have not encountered in my adventures in artist reports/papers. I guess you could say I adhere to a lot of modernist or deeply self-expressive works or straight up strange participatory ones

and On Kawara’s pieces are just, no where in between those. I guess they’re more participatory because its asking viewers to really engage with them on a more or less philosophical level, but at the same time, you do feel this objective kind of self-expressiveness, when you consider yourself, amongst millions of others who have their own unique self-expressiveness. Questions that I’m really reaching when I continue to think of this artist’s work because its kind of out of body: am I important? How do my cognition and emotive capacities compare when I’m compared to 10 others? 100? 1 billion? 

Am I just supposed to not think of how colossal this universe is and just live in it? Do we want to notice how big or small our environments and how that affects our everyday thoughts and actions? Some people more self-conscious than others, but also others are just brought up differently so they don’t really care who notices them? Well, I’d say Kawara did a pretty good job then

"social transparency" projects

1.) Malcom's decorate me with chocolate syrup and other sugary sundae liquids

2.) Madeira's hot cocoa

3.) Noah's talking about his cereal and eating habits while eating a bowl of it

4.) Sara's taking medications

5.) Hannah's crocheting

6.) Johnny's cutting up avocado and serving it on chips

i thought it might be cool to do something easter themed

i originally was just gonna have everyone eat the candy (including me) and we could all hear (not listen)

but then then you realize what time and day it is and everyone’s wearing sunday dresses

if I had longer time I probably would’ve hidden them more thoroughly within the studio => more collaboration

i wasn’t really sure when to end it, which is why i wanted others to go before me

I think maybe I should’ve waited a little bit after after all the eggs had been opened, instead of ending it as soon as they were

but then it gets awkward with everyone waiting for something else to happen and youre standing there with a sign and your glasses are slipping off your nose and all of these cameras are pointed at you

I thought it was really interesting that we acted as participants/viewers/documenters

I think it made a huge difference that we were part of the interactive pieces and taking pictures/filming at the same time

I think we would’ve interacted more with the pieces if we weren’t supposed to be documenting because we wouldn’t have been so focused on doing it

Yeah we were kind of constrained by our devices

Because even when you film/photograph a live event, you still want to look above and away and take in (drink in) the performance

I guess it’s a bit voyeuristic