Second Life Class April 24, 2008

Today we met for class in Second Life. It was quite a success and I really enjoyed it. We were first supposed to meet at the LSU Campus on Second Life. For some reason I was unable to transport to this location but heard it looked very much like school, with the quad and bell tower included. At the second location, we met with Second Life artist Elros Tuominen. He was quite interesting and so was his work. He is well known in Second Life as an artist and is very inspired by music. The third location and second gallery was my favorite. In this gallery you can walk into the pieces and they fall apart. The fourth location was almost like an originally gallery itself. It had paintings hung on the wall that were reenactments of actual events in real life, just done on Second Life instead. There was also a can of Campbell’s soup that you could get into and jump up and down in that spammed the screen every time you jumped. One of the girls in class got stuck and could not figure how to get out, it was quite a funny moment. Second Life was a very interesting environment to go to class in and I would love to do it again, especially if we can meet with the artists and ask questions about their work.

Readings for April 22 April 22, 2008

1. Christiane Paul, 204-211

Digital Art and the Future

In this section of Christiane Paul’s book she describes the future of digital art. She says that art will always reflect on the specifics of cultural change, and the technologies have always been an important part of this transformation of our culture. Since our daily lives are continuously changing with new things so are the ideas and projects of artists. Many artists are now involving science in their projects and are helping with research in different ways. One artist that interested me most was Brandon Ballengee. He positions him self as an artist, not a scientist, for a scientist could not do what he is doing. For the past ten years he has been observing amphibian declines and deformities. With his work he produces images of the amphibians (frogs) and also will occasionally take people on field trips where they can experience first hand what is happening to these animals. You can watch a video on the website below to see what he is actually doing.

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/bioart/

2. Geert Lovink, “Tactical Media: The Second Decade,” October 2005
http://laudanum.net/geert/files/1129724590/index.shtml?1208184143

This article by Geert Lvoink was mostly about a group called The Next 5 Minutes. Tactical media originated in 1989 after a political change in Europe, to the festival The Next Five Minutes in Amsterdam.  People meet at this event every couple years and then split off and go on with their lives.  It is not until the next event that ideas and projects are shared because they do not have a mailing list or anything that brings them all together.  Most of the people who do end up meeting seem to have other priorities than just producing tactical media.  This lack of contact leads to new ideas to be talked about in further years, furthering processes and findings in media.

3. McKenzie Wark, “A Hacker Manifesto Version 4.0,” Ja. 2006

http://neme.org/main/291/hacker-manifesto

In McKenzie Warks’ article she argues that a new class division is created between those who produce the art, the hacker class, those who come to own it and the vectoralist class. Hackers according to Wark are producers and productions of works. The hackers come up with new ideas that cut across already produced materials and make something new out of it. He says that anyone who creates something new out of something old or already made is a hacker. Hackers are liable to become hacked in a way. If someone else ends up producing their work it is no longer just theirs, it belongs to those who produce it and eventually those who buy it. Hackers are the original artists but eventually get nothing out of their work they make.

Also:

http://www.theyesmen.org/

Rong April 18, 2008

Rong is a game online that I found that reminds me of the early game Pong. Pong was created by Nolan Bushnell, with Al Alcorn for Atari in 1972. It is basically like a game of tennis. You hit a ball back and forth across the screen to obtain points. Rong is just the same, except you have different color pads to hit the ball with. It gets faster and faster with each hit and eventually maxes out with 15 points to move on to the next level.

Here is the website for you to play.

http://www.jeffwofford.com/rong.html

Readings for April 17 April 17, 2008

1. Christiane Paul, 196-203

Gaming

The gaming industry has been an important element in the digital revolution and has become a billion dollar enterprise today. Games are an important part of digital art’s history in that they explored many of the paradigms that are now interactive art. Games come in many different genres, such as strategic, shooters, and action/adventure. Early games such as Dungeons and Dragons have expanded to become more visual and sophisticated online games. Many of the most successful video games are first person shooter games. An example of this would be Counterstrike or Doom, both of which I have played. When playing these games I was more interested in playing Doom. I think this may have been because I had played it for a long time and you were killing monsters instead of people. As of today, I enjoy playing Diablo, but I am not as obsessive as my boyfriend is about playing it. Lately he has made it a goal to reach level 98 on his character, which is the second highest level you can have. It takes lots of time and many “Baal” games to reach this goal and he has spent many days trying to reach this goal when he has free time. I will be glad when he finally does reach his goal because then maybe we will actually be able to hang out together.

2. Sherry Turkel, “Video Games and Computer Holding Power,” #34, The New Media Reader

In her essay she describes the power that video games have over a person. She says that playing a video game is unlike television because it is something you do rather than something you watch. Yes, you may be committed to watching your favorite show every week but with a video game it is free to play whenever you want. It keeps you playing day after day. Men and young boys are the most attracted to games. Playing a video game lets them get away from their daily stresses of real life.

The Yes Men April 15, 2008

We watched the movie The Yes Men in class recently and I found it quite interesting. It is about a group of guys who are activist pranksters. In the movie they pretend to be a couple of business men from the World Trade Organization. They go to meetings and create products and try to sell themselves as well as their products and ideas. My favorite part of the movie is when they go to a college and try to sell the idea of making hamburgers in third world countries from feces that humans in first world countries produce. Many people become upset and very angry about this idea. Some are even grossed out, especially after the fact that McDonald’s served them burgers to eat during the presentation. Many of the projects they work on are very funny and interesting at the same time.

The Yes Men continue to work on new projects every time they get a chance. You can find more information on them at http://www.theyesmen.org/.

Second Life and Congress? April 7, 2008

I was watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart today and he had a piece about second life and congress. It’s quite interesting and makes me wonder how it will be when we have our class meeting in Second life in a week or so.

Here is the site to see the video.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=165604&title=avatar-heroes

Lázló Moholy-Nagy April 7, 2008

We discussed Lazlo Moholy-Nagy in one of our first classes, but I soon found myself looking at more of his work in one of my other classes, History of Photography. Moholy-Nagy played a key role at the Bauhaus school in Weimar and Dessau as a painter, graphic artist, teacher, and advocate of avant-garde photography. During his years at the Bauhaus he urged investigation into the “new culture of light” so that “the strongest visual experiences that could bbe granted to man could be made available through the understanding and use of photography. His photographs reflected aesthetic ideas of the Bauhaus: pure forms, functionalism and unconditional dedication to the modern idea. While at the Bauhaus he also experimented with work bridging the gap between sculpture and engineering. He created “Light Space Modulator,” which is a kinetic sculpture. When in a darkened room, a hidden light source in the base creates ever changing plays of shadows. We can see the different effects in the video below.

Readings for April 1 April 1, 2008

1. Roy Ascott, “The Construction of Change,” #10, The New Media Reader
2. Christiane Paul, pp. 154 - 164

In this section Paul talks about telepresence, telematics, and telerobotics. Telepresence is obviously not only connected to digital technologies but inherent to any form of telecommunication. Telecommunication art has a long history. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy used the telephone to order paintings from a factory and described to them how he wanted them. They used a graph to plot points and created the paintings exactly like he wanted. Telerobotics also has a long history in art, many were created in the 1960’s. One of the first telerobotics projects that was on the Internet was the Telegarden by Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana. This project consisted of a small garden and a robotic arm that was controlled through the website. With this, visitors could visit the website and monitor and maintain the garden as well as plant their own seeds. This project inspired more and more projects, including Mori (Ken Goldberg) and Teleporting an Unknown State (Eduardo Kac).

3. Ed Shanken, “Tele-Agency: Telematics, Telerobotics, and the Art of Meaning” at http://neme.org/main/620/tele-agencyor look for title in http://artexetra.com/

In this article, Ed Shanken talks about Agency. Agency is something that is distinctively human. It has an intelligence with an agenda, a purpose, rather than a program that can learn it is taken to another step. He describes two models in agency in telematic art. They are active-active and active-passive. With this either humans are involved or they are not involved.

For March 6 March 6, 2008

Readings for March 6th:

1. Christiane Paul, pp. 132-137

Sound and Music

Paul says that Computer-generated music was in many ways a driving force in the evolution of digital technologies and concepts of interactivity itself. The evolution of digital sound and music was shaped by early musical experiments that pointed to new media. We can see this in Pierre Schaeffer’s work musigue concrete. In this he composed material from existing sounds, sounds that he found and placed them together to create a musical composition.

Digital sound and music can be placed into four different categories, 1. Pure Sound - for instance an installation or performance, 2. Audio-Visual installation environments, 3. Internet-based projects - for real time or multi user mixers, and 4. Networked projects for public spaces. Golan Levin created Telesymphony, which was a creation of soundscapes through the use of a cell phone. This soundscape that was created was by the choreographed ringing of the audience’s cell phones. The audience was asked to register their phone number at a webkiosk before entering the concert hall. New ring tones were automatically downloaded to their phones and once everyone was seated the piece began. Below you can see what it is all about.

Readings for Feb. 28 February 29, 2008

Readings for February 28 are:

1. Christiane Paul, Digital Art, pp. 124-25, “Software”

It is difficult to say what is digital art and what is software art. Sometimes the software itself is the art. With software art, the artists is primarily writing “code.”

Lynn Hershmann Leesonm, Agent Ruby, made in 2002, is one of the most famous women working in new media today. She is a palm pilot program that has a face and can talk to you. She has many different facial expressions and can produce quite a conversation. To see for yourself visit http://agentruby.sfmoma.org/indexflash.html.

2. Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, read Chapter 7, “Internet Art” through the section on Software Art.

The definition of Internet Art has always been a tactical one. When comparing tactical art to hacker art, tactical art had to be political where hacker art did not.

Is all Internet art political? Is all art political? there has never been any art that was not political, even art for arts sake is political.

Digital art has developed by sharing an interest in shredding code. Examples of this would be Jodi (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. In this work, Caracas, it shreds continuously. It has something to do with military warfare, deconstructing websites to show you their inner workings.

http://oss.jodi.org

Etoy was a website that was sued by etoys who sold toys. The Etoy site was set up long before Etoys even began. In order to stop this, Etoy put hacks on their website where they could not conduct business and ended up filing bankruptcy. From then on Etoy became a corporation in order attack other corporations. To do so they use different kinds of tactics, like Floodnet, which is a software that dials up the company to cause a jam in their system where they can not come into contact with anyone.