You Move You Interact - Digital Art Installation (Artist Post #7)

Joao Martinho Moura

http://www.vimeo.com/938611

I found this project by João Martinho Moura while doing some research online about various installation projects in order to get some ideas about our next class project. What interested me in this specific installation that Moura created is the way in which he uses the audience and people within the gallery to interact with the piece. The piece itself is a type of living environment, and the audience partakes and interacts with whatever is going on inside of the piece. This is very similar to the piece that we viewed in class by our very own professor, Patrick Kelly. “Cast” also interacts with the viewers in that they see themselves inside of the pieces- which presents a type of echo on what humanities “noise” does to the environment, with an implied harm and warning of what it can cause. Obviously both projects are different, but they definitely utilize a fundamental link with information from the outside world. The interface of Moura’s installation looks very complicated, however. The way in which each person who views the project is immediately shown to be an outlined form within the project, makes me think there must be some sort of camera and mask combinations going on within the coding, not to mention complicated script which allows the shapes to morph continually according to the sizes and shapes of the data taken from each person.
As an Interactive Media Artist born in Portugal, Moura’s focus as a software designer has more and more frequently been in the area of multimedia and information systems. He worked on numerous projects in fields of education, media, entertainment, telecommunications and health industries, in Portugal, Israel, France and the United Kingdom. His interests are focused in intelligent interfaces; digital art and music, all of which are clearly visible in the installation piece entitled “You Move You Interact.” I really enjoyed the ambient music involved with this piece and how the sounds seamlessly flow with whatever actions the players make while viewing and experiencing YMYI in its entirety.

Uh Oh HOT DOG! (Artist Blog # 6)

Pablo Genoves

This was an artist that I also discovered on the Alternative Musem site. Although I had seen a few pieces of Genoves work before in some of my previous art classes, I never really knew much about him and his distinct form of medium. What is striking about his work is that it looks (at least to me) to be more sculpture based as opposed to something done completely digitally. Particularly in his piece entitled Hot Dog I felt the depth of what seemed to be to be sculpture because the hotdog and hand itself had a variety of visible textures. I was tricked. It turns out that Genoves uses the computer to come up with these pieces and not clay, plaster or papier-mâché.
Pablo Genoves produces a combination of a great many different artistic disciplines and an intersection of realism and fantasy. The convergence of either familiar appropriation in addition to his own original images with photographs of previously painted canvases and transforms them digitally. These works have the false and somewhat confusing appearance of painting reproductions or sculpture pieces done in a physical studio as opposed to something done on a digital canvas.

Genoves’ work leave me wonder just how he completed his final pieces of art. It makes me wonder how he became interested in the teqnique of changing the way we view elementary sculpture and photography and why it was that he chose to utilize digital media in order for changing the original artwork into something completely different. It seems as though, through his work, he is making a statements about the different mediums in art and how they each add something differently. Obviously for him this must mean that he feels the most freedom in the medium of digitalized artwork as opposed to more conventional ways of producing the painting reproductions that he started out with. He engages the audience in a discussion on the great cycle of art, and how far it has come over the ages. It reminds me a lot of the project mentioned in class in which someone took photographs of photographs and claimed them as their own artwork, merely because of the slight change.

FOR NEXT CLASS
Pat says:
Utilize the camera mode, play with the idea of the viewer and how they are incorporated into your project.
Three new animations

FOCUS ON THE CONCEPT OF THE VIEWER!!!