Final Idea 1

Art Nouveau is a possible direction for my final project. The art movement is concentrates on the style and decorative arts. The forms are organic, normally floral or other plant inspired motifs, as well as highly stylized flowing curvilinear forms. I could incorporate the art form through an animation or projection.
The animation would consist of bring the images alive, adding motion, layering, and narratives to the work.

----------

Inspirational Artists:

Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939)

Maurice Pillard-Verneuil (1869-1942)

Henri Meunier

David Cappiello

Henri Privat-Livemont

Critique

During the critique of my projection project some good points were brought up on the elements I added:

Creating the scenery and projecting the graffiti
Tricking the eye with architectural elements
Sound level activation (talking graffiti disappears-silence graffiti reappears)

Some even better suggestions came about to craft a more successful project:

Motion sensor (to control the appearance and disappearance of the graffiti)
Props (such as trash bags to create juxtaposition between the illusions of objects with real objects)
Audience interact (blackboard effect—they can create their own graffiti)

Interactive Billboard

In 2007 Adobe installed an interactive installation to showcase Adobe Creative Suite 3. The installation demonstrated some of the capabilities of the software. Instead of using a mouse or keyboard, visitors interacted with the installation by simply moving in front of the large screen.

The installation was located at Virgin Megastore in Union Square, New York City. At first the screen showed a blank canvas with simple slogans for Adobe CS3, but when individuals walked by the screen all kinds of graphics appeared. The motions of the people were tracked by an infrared camera so their entire body was used as a brush.

Technological advances used by Adobe for their interactive billboard would lend well with my graffiti projection project. Instead of the images automatically showing up on the screen and disappearing with the sound level, the graffiti and architectural elements could appear by the motion of the individual across the screen. While no one crossed the path in front of the screen a realist image of an alley or side building would display.

link to video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-NRdyUx8Lc

Nikolas Schiller

Nikolas Schiller is a prominent digital map artist who lives in Washington, DC. He is mainly known for developing Geospatial art, which is the name given to his collection of abstract maps created from aerial photographs of D.C. He has created an interactive website around his numerous abstract maps produced within the past years. It wasn’t until March of last year that Schiller removed an exclusion protocol that allowed for his website to be accessed from all major search engines. When I first learned about Schiller’s art you had to know his whole name before any search engine would being up the link to his website.

Lately he has been know to attend voting rights demonstrations in D.C. wearing colonial outfits to emphasize the fact that District residents are colonists who suffer from taxation without representation.

The work I find most interesting in Schiller’s collection of abstract maps is his Mother Nature projections. One of his first commission pieces Lady Liberty on a quilt of the Pearl River Delta, 2005, Schiller incorporates the patrons’ native country Hong Kong were the Pearl River Delta is located. The NASA satellite image of the Pearl River Delta is used as the backdrop of the whole image. On the body of the model Schiller uses the same modified aerial photography he’s used in his other D.C. based rendered art. The finished image has a contrast between the past and the present that makes it successful. This art has some similarities and differences with the projection project were working on. It is similar in that, the map is projected onto another object to create something unique, interesting, and reminiscent of a figure. The differences are that the projection is not an actual projection on an object, but a printed 2d surface.

Jon Haddock

Walt Disney Productions v. The Air Pirates, 581 F.2d 751 (9th Cir. 1978) (RGB Grid)

Haddock creates images that are made up of numeric values that represent the levels of red, green, and blue in each pixel of the source image. The values run from 0 (black) to 255 (white), since the value of black takes up less physical space than the value of white, the source image would still be visible in a matrix of values.

This work is an example of appropriation to open source in new media art. Artist have always been influenced by other art, so much so that some artist will imitate one another, but in new media art appropriation of sources transform from coping to sampling, emerging as an alternative creative piece. Permitted by technologies of mechanical reproduction, artists start to use found images like Haddock, but changes the status of artistic originality in the face of mass-produced culture. Hancock does this by altering the image of a Walt Disney Production into an inverse image and columns of numbers.

The simple breakdown of the image into numeric values reminds me of the elementary elements one needs to build from to create art. Having an understanding of the image as values, change the way the viewer looks at the work. It is no longer viewed as a recognizable image, but now is compared to its source image and slowly read to see the connection between the two.

Danny Rozin

Interactive artist, Danny Rozin works in very particular artistic surroundings, making mirrors from unreflective surfaces. He accomplishes this by using a tiny camera that gathers light and shape data, before sending it to a computer that processes it and uses hundreds of tiny electric motors to shift tiny blocks of material into the image in front of the device. In Wood Mirror, Rozin uses blocks of wood to compose this ghostly image, imprinted upon the wooden pixels like a haunted trace and just like a real mirror, subtle gradations of shade are achieved by both the natural grain of the wood and the angle at which they are displayed, casting shadow. Since building the wooden mirror Rozin has experimented with a number of other materials.

The main concept of this project and others like it was the idea of everything around us acts as a mirror, or perhaps more precisely making everything around us into a mirror onto the world. By using a naturally unreflective surface to create reflections, Rozin highlights human beings interest in technical accomplishment, but the fact that every object can reflect in some sense the image of those who have crafted, used, or sold it.

“The nature of reflective surfaces and reflections is what is at stake here - but what’s more, it’s a stunningly impressive piece of craftsmanship in its own right and if anything can be said to reflect the image of those that created it, then this surely reflects well on Rozin(http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featured/the-amazing-wooden-mirror/1425.)”

In Wood Mirror, Rozin proves visual feedback by the creation of the viewer’s reflection though the visual input of the camera, much similar to the idea of our current text animation project. The projects reflect the artists who created them as well as the viewer’s that participate in the interactive animation through input text and visual feedback by moving objects around the page.

Nam June Paik

Examining the clips from Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, I made a connection with Nam June Paiks’ installation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum titled Electronic Superhighway continental U.S, Alaska, and Hawaii in the way it’s viewed and the mood it can provoke.

In 1995 Paiks’ piece Electronic Superhighway was a stunning example of his cultural criticism. With this installation, Paik offers commentary about an American culture obsessed with television, the moving image and bright shiny things. Paik argues that the flashing images “seen as though from a passing car” with audio chips from The Wizard of Oz, Oklahoma, Martin Luther King Jr. and other screen shots, expressing that our picture of America has always been influenced by film and television. Walking along the piece suggests the enormous scale of the nation and reminds us that individual states have distinct identities and culture, even in today’s information age.

Much like Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, “Dakota” the viewer is drawn into the work trying to read every word or hear every sound.

“[…] it was amazing! my favorite thing in the whole museum. So bright and u get sucked into it. I stood there for 20 minutes just looking at this trying to catch all the clips.”missbananasplit121 (comment from youtube.com)

Also, both artists heavily control how the viewer reads the text or sees a clip by the way it’s displayed. For instances, Chang’s animations emphasize some text over others with sound or speed that they appear on screen. The same can be said for Paiks’ piece because the audio and visual clips were specially picked and blended together so that a viewer will acquire the artist understanding of the work.

In creating my version of a Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries animation, I will take into consideration the methods both artists used to successful guide their audiences.

Links

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rdeB_VsYIE (Video of the installation)
http://americanart.si.edu/collections/interact/zoom/paik.cfm (interactive picture of the installation)