IM Hyperessay: Artist & work selection

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As previously mentioned, the artist I chose is Jenny Holzer. A conceptual artist living in New York. She mostly uses text in her works to express her ideas which sometimes includes feminist ideas. She stresses social consciousness or the lack thereof in today’s society, and her single liners are meant to trigger conversations about the issue at hand.

Red Yellow Looming – Jenny Holzer (image taken from https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/arts/design/13holz.html)

The artwork I have chosen is “Red Yellow Looming”. This was displayed alongside many of her other works in a similar theme, in Jenny Holzer: Protect Protect, in Whitney Museum of American Art.

MINIMALISM

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Minimalism was birthed out of the need to differentiate from abstract expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s in post war American Art. The whole premise of abstract expressionism was to have gestural and emotion-filled brush strokes on a fairly large canvas, like in William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko’s works.

Unlike for abstract expressionism, in minimalism the individual author is removed from the artwork as much as possible.

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU SEE. – Frank Stella

What Frank Stella shared about minimalism is the line that completely encompasses the purpose of minimalism. What you physically see with your physical eyes, is what you understand literally in your mind. It does not try to be what it is not, unlike the Old Masters paintings where chiarosuro is used to “trick the eye”. It goes straight to the point that the objects will just be what the viewers are meant to see and understand. The author is usually not represented by the work presented, or even reference his own train of thought through the title of the work. For example, Donald Judd’s works are all ‘Untitled’, and that does not reference anything to the way he was thinking when creating the work. The only point of reference is the year that the work was created in, leaving the viewer with only the actual work to appreciate and understand the premise of which it was created.

The works in the Minimalism realm (apart from the paintings) were mostly made with readymade objects and were not manipulated very much. Things like Plexiglass, aluminium panels became part of many Donald Judd’s works and remained one of his signatures. The only thing done to them were putting them together, and sometimes painting enamel paint over them. The works confronts the viewer with the materiality of the space- how the very simple materials and the collection of right angles have manipulated the way we look at the space differently. The viewer no longer just looks at the box itself but the space in which the space interacts with the material of the box itself. By using readymade objects and not manipulating the objects very much, it takes away the traditional notion of the ‘artist’s touch’ in many old paintings- the stylistic signatures of the artist are not present in the object itself. It somehow creates a impersonal distance with the works, and makes it feel factory made and clinical. The works were not created to connect with the viewer, it was just to interact with the space and the space in which the viewer is in.

Another step taken to close the gap between the work and the viewer and the space they occupy is the fact that the works are not on pedestals or plinths. By placing them directly on the ground, the viewers are able to experience it fully- they can walk right up to it (not necessary touch it- it is a gallery after all) and they don’t have anything anything separating the two. This is the phenomenology that was mentioned in the presentation. The viewers are able to study the work up close and observe how the work is presented and how it is experienced. The work is the space it occupied, not the illusion of space that paintings used to try to convince you about. The presence of the work is three dimensional, not a two dimensional work trying to tell you that it is three dimensional. This is a radical move that changes the way the works interact with the viewer.

The interaction between the viewer and the work itself also determines the way the work is interpreted and related to the viewer. The viewer cannot rely on someone else to interpret the work for them, but they have to take on the work themselves. For example, the whole series of Equivalent by Carl Andre is made of the same material- firebricks. The only thing that changes between the work is arrangement of the same number of firebricks. To interpret it properly, you have to physically confront the mass of firebricks and the way that it interacts with the environment it sits in, the wooden flooring and the white walls around it. While it is possible to see it through a screen (a computer/mobile device), you would not be able to observe the physicality and materiality of the firebricks, the way it sits in the gallery floor.

The problem with minimalism is that everyone thinks its so simple that anyone could have done it.

I could do that. – Everyone.

But you didn’t. – The artist.

But you didn’t think about it before. And you didn’t present it as a piece of minimalist art. And you didn’t live in Post war America to experience the wave against abstract expressionism. So no, you couldn’t have done it. 🙂

 

Final Project: Project Social Life

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For the final project, my group wanted to relinquish our control over our digital identity, and let the ‘world’ decide our day in our life. We managed to do this by allowing our instagram followers to send in suggestions for the project, on where we should head to, or what we should do next.

At first when we came up with the idea, we wanted it to be a two team event, where we allowed each other’s team to decide what we should do. Eventually, we did away with this two team idea because of the confusing and unnecessary logistics that we would have to deal with, instead of focusing on the essence of the project, which was to relinquish our control over our digital identity. Another idea we had was to use our personal accounts for the project, but after much deliberation we decided that spamming just one group of our friends (we all share different groups of friends) was unfair to them, and would be quite rude. So we decided to create a brand new account for this project: a fresh slate of digital identity that the followers could shape. All five of us shared our trailer (inspired by Carla Gannis’ Until the End of the World) via our personal instagram and tagged the Project Social Life (PSL) account: the people who were interested would hop over to the PSL account to decide our fate for the day. This was a win-win situation where people who were interested who be able to follow this fresh account, where the five of us share a digital identity, and people on our personal accounts wouldn’t be spammed unnecessarily. More than 110 people viewed our very first story, and almost 50 people followed through our entire journey throughout the day.

I think it’s interesting that all five of us share the same account- all five of us were using the same account to document different parts of our day, but all of it was going under the same name. The digital identity of this account was undergoing very different changes throughout the day- from the font that we chose to use, to the way that we film or what we chose to film/document, all of this was getting shaped by five of us. What’s intriguing is that some people may be more dominant in the account than others, and would sway the digital identity closer to their personal digital identity.

We tried getting back our control over our digital identity but deliberately ‘ignoring’ certain requests that we got from the people following our adventure via Instagram. Some were pretty ridiculous like climbing a tree and exchanging tickets for the number of the staff at the arcade, and we were really hesitant about them. This experiment only goes to show how much we value our identity in public, even though we will probably never see the strangers on the street again.

Overall, this final project forced us to get to know each other as a group, as well as our limits on what lengths we are willing to go to for fear of our digital identity.

Art of Networked Practice Online Symposium: Hyperessay

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I attended Symposium Day 1 and 2, and it was really quite eye opening. The Art of the Networked Practice Online Symposium was an event, a gathering across the globe that presents the artistic works and technological breakthroughs that incorporates art as a practice. The symposium was completely free and brings people from across the gobe together. Granted, many of us were there because of Experiental Interaction, it was a beautiful act of connection because all of us were there for a specific goal- to share and to learn more about this. The Adobe Connect sessions were extremely informative, and it is the practice of the third space coming to life right in front of me, and people with the same passion sharing their hearts out. Through the two days, the DIWO and third space are very strongly demostrated and communication is talked about a lot- how it has been used in art, and how we can use it as artists.

We have all one subject, in fact, mine is communication and the difficulty to communicate at all.” – Annie Abrahams 

I found this quote particularly interesting. Through the live performance that we witnessed via Adobe Connect, we saw the entire performance play out throughout the different parts of the world and somehow still sync pretty much seamlessly through the whole maybe 30 minutes. The communication was beautiful even before the performance started- we witnessed the performance participants chatting to each other about when to start the performace, and I personally saw how in a sense, there were two ‘worlds’ in the same platform. One on the webcam and sound end, the other world on the chatroom. I believe Annie Abrahams also highlighted this point briefly when she was in the symposium, but seeing the worlds play out separately was interesting, especially when the topic on the chatroom can be completely unrelated to the webcam side, yet it can influence what happens on the webcam as the presenter still have access to the chatroom. Moving on the actual live performance on Day 1, it started off with the blacked out screens on the webcam, and the performers saying different amounts of time at the same time. It was completely random, and we didn’t quite know what happened behind the screen, yet we had an inkling of who was talking based on the blue outline that glows when someone’s microphone was recording some sound. Another part of the performance I found interesting is when the different performers said things like “excellent” and other sentences and phrases that were related to the political climate in their own home country. I loved how this part worked out because there were points in the performance where the performers sounded like they were replying each other, even though it was supposed to be coordinated to sound like that. It was unintentional, yet it added so much character into the work.

An interesting point to note is that Annie Abrahams later found out after the performance ended, that her microphone was wonky and may not have contributed to the work as much as she wanted, but she just went with it. Perhaps this was the glitch that we speak of, and how the glitch may actually shape the performance work to an unexpected way, but it wasn’t necessarily treated as a mistake. The glitch was great.

The second day was interesting, with Matt Adams. He shared about Blast Theory and some of the works that they have been doing. One of the works that caught my attention is I’d Hide You (2012). The work is a relatively simple concept- it was designed like a game, so the runners try to capture the other players on their camera while trying to be out of sight. As online viewers, you choose which team to be on, and you enjoy the privellege to speak to the players themselves. Somehow, you are also emotionally implicated into the game as you follow the runner and you communicate with them. This would impact the outcome of the performance, whether you try to sabotage or support the runner. This work takes vlogging (video-blogging, usually about their daily lives by Youtubers) to a whole new level, and makes communication with the video makers deviate from the usual. On Youtube, you can upload video and people can comment on it, or you can do live videos where people can immediately respond to. While on live videos viewers can shape the outcome of the video since the people can see the comments live, I’d Hide You makes the viewers emotionally connected to the runners since this is a fast paced live game. The communication to and fro the viewers and runners change the way the game can turn out. The DIWO is strong, as the runners interact with each other and with the viewers.

I am slightly bummed that I missed the last day’s session because I saw friends posting about happenings, but all through the internet I will be able to catch up on it via recording. :’) Overall, the entire symposium contributed to the redefinition of communication and technology in my mind. Technology is no longer just a part of the world but we can really incorporate technology into our lives and in our art, and this motivates me to somehow go into this direction as we continue on in this journey called life. The DIWO concept played so much into this symposium, and this symposium wouldn’t have been possible without the third space and DIWO.

Alter Ego: Choose

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For this Microproject, we were asked to express our alter ego. I imagine myself to be able to afford the time of day to choose which mode I want to live my life in, whether it is in black and white, in full colour or in slow motion. In my video, I explore my ability to take my time to choose what I want in life rather than just being forced into the life I lead now.

For this project, I know we are able to use sound to our advantage but in my case, I chose to use the lack of sound to express my point. When you are choosing something, you don’t necessarily want the extra voices in your head to affect your choice. Thus, I left sound out out this.

I chose to do a screen recording to show that maybe, in an alternate universe, humans  will be able to choose the mode they would like to live in on their own brain machine things.

 

an angry woman is vindictive beyond measure, and hesitates at nothing in her bitterness.

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An angry woman is vindictive beyond measure, and hesitates at nothing in her bitterness. -Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

This quote seems relevant to the work we analyse this week. Annie Abrabrams’s Angry Woman (2013) is a work done over the third space, where she invited 22 other women of different nationalities to be on an online platform where they all vented their anger, demonstrating it in different forms such as yelling, speaking throughout, or staying silent. They spoke in different tongues, which makes the work that much more interesting because the viewers don’t necessarily understand the language, yet are still able to comprehend the level of anger they experience. In other words, the emotions transcended the language barrier. We see it through their tone, their facial expressions and their body language.

So, how did Angry Women use the medium to its advantage?

So instead of dwelling on the frustrations of the network connection, she finds inspiration, and perhaps more importantly, she sets up compelling situations that allow her and others to make critical observations about connection and disconnection. –Randall Packer

This work is done online, through an social broadcasting site like Adobe Connect. Through Angry Woman, we see Annie Abrahams still moving through the work, even as some of the participants get frozen up because of the bad connection. It somehow works to her advantage, as the faces get frozen when the participants are looking particularly frustrated. According to the article by Randall Packer, she asked the participants to purposefully switch their webcams off, which created a ever changing collage of videos happening simultaneously, and makes the composition of the collage continually changing. Without the medium of a online application like Adobe Connect, this kind of work wouldn’t have been possible. Annie Abrahams uses the glitching network as part of the work, and it adds to the work rather than distracts from the work. She manages to show the community of angry women and weaves them into a cohesive narrative to show the process of the women getting worked up and cooling off (in Take 4 I think). In a way, the women’s energies bounce off each other and they react to each other’s actions, making the work out of the artist’s control, and that’s whats interesting in Angry Woman.

I am my desktop

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This is my desktop. I am my desktop. Disorganised, multi-tasking all the time. I always have my telegram chats up on the side, ready to reply any chats from my friends. I guess that would be the more intimate social interaction that I have, not so much of Facebook and Instagram. I then have my Spotify, playing my worship songs as I do my work on my laptop. It usually keeps me more calm while doing work. This tab kind of shows how much I rely on the songs to keep me going through the last nights. The next tab behind is the Chrome window, where I do most of my research and work on. On my actual desktop lies my to-do list, lurking with my deadlines, and the files that are important to me. Also, Photoshop is always open in the background because I guess I use it too often for it to be switched off.