Yeas and Nays (Artist post #10)

Christian Croft: Yeas and Nays (Artist post #10)

Digital artist Christian Croft has designed a new, innovative and exciting way to get people more involved in their government. He created a widget that can connect to any cellphone, which connects calls to a website of supports of the democratic process. On the layout of his site called “shiftspace.org” there is a video in which Christian Croft himself goes into detail about how to use the widget, making call to his own senator and displaying the MP3 recorded by the widget that he created himself, on the website so that his answers (or lack thereof) are displayed for all of the yayers and nayers to see. “Yeas and Nays is a space that transforms any webpage into a means for contacting Congressional representatives. Using Yeas and Nays, a citizen can connect via phone to speak with her representatives, and the resulting shift keeps a record of the call located on the website that informed it.”



The site has 10 easy steps for using the widget:
1. Install the space through the settings>Spaces tab by typing ‘YeasAndNays’ in the ‘install a space’ text box.
2. Initiate the space by pressing the [Shift] key, move your mouse over the [+] icon and click on the YeasAndNays icon.
3. The YeasAndNays widget will appear on the screen where you summoned it.
4. Enter your zipcode in the widget to look up your corresponding Congressional representatives.
5. Choose the Congress person you wish to call and enter your phone number.
6. Check the box that says you agree to YeasAndNays generating a call that bridges your phone to your Congress person’s office. Then choose whether or not you want to record your call so that others can listen to it on ShiftSpace.
7. Have your phone ready and click the “Call Now & Connect Me” button. Your phone will receive a call almost instantaneously.
8. An automated YeasAndNays phone menu will greet you and instruct you to press 1 on your phone keypad to connect to your Congress person’s office.
9. Once your call is bridged, talk to the representative about your issue. Try to use information on the webpage and refer to your talking points to support your cause.
10. After your call is finished, the YeasAndNays shift will update and tell you that your call is completed. If you chose to record the call, then you can listen to an mp3 of it now.
11. Your YeasAndNays shift is automatically saved once your call has been completed. At this point, other ShiftSpace users can see your shift and listen to your phone call to your Congress person.

I personally think Christian Croft’s ideas are interesting and decided to write about it because of how it responds to the general lack of interest that the public has in current politics. Crofts widget is a cool way to keep people connected and interested in what is going on in the public sphere, as well as making contacting and making your voice heard in this democracy.

Mouchette- Artists I plan on Incorporating-5

Mouchette- Artists I plan on Incorporating-5

The journey that Mouchette takes us through on the website is that of a thought process, and that is what I plan on making my final project structured around. Mouchette.org is an interactive website created in 1996 by a pseudonymous character, an Amsterdam-based artist who calls herself "Mouchette". With her innocent salutation and claims to be "nearly thirteen"[1] greeting us from the introduction page, what initially appears as a personal website of a pre-pubescent female artist, evolves into darker themes in the subsequent pages. Mouchette is loosely based on 1937 book by Georges Bernanos and the 1967 Robert Bresson movie, Mouchette. The storyline is about a French teenager who commits suicide after she is raped. An online quiz comparing the “Neo-Mouchette”[2] to the movie angered Bresson's widow, so she threatened a law suit against the artist behind the project. The quiz was taken down after that incident.[3] [4][5] The creator of the website has been closely guarded secret[3]. While the use of taboo subject matters are what initially "provokes heated reactions"[3], the manipulation of cyber identity[3] and the ability of the creator to maintain anonymity for so long are the significant reasons this website has garnered its “international reputation”[5] in the Internet Art community.

SHU LEA CHEANG (atleast from the website)- Artists I plan on Incorporating-4

This montage was created based on the true story of Teena Brandon, a 21-year-old woman who in 1993 was raped and later killed for passing as a man, fascinated film-going audiences when Hillary Swank portrayed her in "Boys Don't Cry" (1999). A year earlier, the Guggenheim Museum in New York commissioned Taiwanese-American artist Shu Lea Cheang to make Brandon, a Web-based art work (the first commissioned by the Guggenheim) that explores Teena Brandon's story in an experimental, non-linear way, conveying the fluidity and ambiguity of gender and identity in contemporary societies. I found it on the Shu Lea Cheang website. I plan on incorporating several collages, to some extent like this one, in order to portray different stages of life. I plan on creating links to minor parts of the collages that connect the piece back into a part of the larger scope of the project.

Juha Huuskonen- Artists I plan on Incorporating-3

Juha Huuskonen- Artists I plan on Incorporating-3

I really like the constant interactions apparent within Juha Huuskonen’s work in the piece entitled “doublecell.” The piece is really cool because it consists of basically one frame which repeats itself based on user interactions within the piece. I like the fact that in concept it seems very simple that really isn’t. The interactivity drives the piece, and urges the user to continue on further and further. I got almost obsessed with finishing each interaction within the series. I spent a lot of time connecting the battery cells they just keep repeating. Something that I didn’t notice about the piece at first was the little revolving circle that moves faster as the user responds to the piece.

When I experienced doublecell: “Bob meets Barbra” I was drawn into it. I spent quite an amount of time just working with the tiny aspects of it until I realized just how much time I had actually spent working on it. I think this would be a great way of getting people interested and invested within my final project piece. I want it, overall, to be a piece that is user based and that responds to the users choices. I plan on utilizing game style interaction like Juha Huuskonen does in doublecell: “Bob meets Barbra” within my piece in order to further get the user involved. So that my final project will be one in which the user is constantly involved and not one that they merely look at and experience. Ii think I’ll probably incorporate these minor visualizations through interactions with buttons in my piece.

Final Project- Artists I plan on Incorporating-2

Artists:
M. River & T. Whid
Art Associates

When I first dicovered M. River and T. Whid's work, it made me laugh. I really enjoyed their projects because of how they incorporated realism and drew me into their world. It makes the viewer part of the project, part of the peice. While I don't plan on incorporating camera footage of myself into the video, I do plan on making interaction through things like buttons and settings that M. River and T. Whid use in many of their projects.


MTAA (M. River & T. Whid Art Associates) is a Brooklyn, New York-based conceptual and net art collaboration. MTAA is also a real-time performance played out on the Internet, in physical installations, through print media, documentation, and miscellaneous ephemera. Using aspects of conceptual art, popular culture and real-time performance, MTAA’s work seeks a new manner of dialogue between artist and audience. Find MTAA's online artwork and documentation at MT Enterprises WorldWide. (http://mteww.com/)

Revise and Resubmit. (Artist Post #9)

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL (Artist Post #9)

I plan on incorporating part of the ideas that I found while researching this author into my final project. I think he is also relevant to our class however, because of the way in which he completes his work. Kerry James Marshall is a contemporary artist, a painter to be exact. He has done a great many variations of work and conceptual ideas. The one in particular that I felt went along with some of the stuff we were doing in class is entitled “Momento.” On the SFMOMA site, I saw a video in which he was discussing the creation of his work and how he came to the final product after much reflection. “Momento” is mainly a piece of artwork that is based significantly around the time period in which it was first created. When Marshall first created it, he made it as vivid and extravagant as possible. After looking back on his work he realized that the piece was not what he wanted. He even states in the video that he was unhappy with how “ostentatious” the piece seemed to him. The original had a variety of colors and even gold glitter. It is a piece depicting the family life in the 1920s of a black family and what they hold dear to them. In the video, Marshall reflects upon his choices to incorporate so many colors into his artwork. He was reflective on the time period he was trying to convey within the piece and then found that he would be happier creating the piece in black and white, using grayscale to still have impacted colors. I think that this holds particular significance to what we recently discovered in class during the critiques of our final projects. Artwork can always be changed, tweaked- and made different- to better convey the fundamental ideas that made us start drawing- or in our case, flashing.

Final Project- Artists I plan on Incorporating-1

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL ON HIS USE OF GAMES AND PUZZLES

http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/videos/351

I like how Marshall’s visual artwork plays tricks on viewers because of the illusions he embeds within the work. It’s apparent that the viewer will have to eventually work through the piece mentally and change how they interpret each part of the piece. I think it would be useful to incorporate techniques that Kerry James Marshall does as well as more interactivity. I think the drawing tool, or something close to it will be useful to the project.

Artist Kerry James Marshall discusses the ways the visual vocabulary of children's activity books influenced his murals for SFMOMA's atrium.
0. Total running time: 1 min. 24 sec.
0. Featured Artist: Kerry James Marshall
SFMOMA Release Date: February 2009

Talk About Time Based Media! (Artist Post #8)

William Kentridge (Click this to see a video of him at work!)

A perfect example of the collision between digital, time based media and physical traditional forms of media, William Kentridge shows how the two can be fused together to make something altogether breathtaking. I found this artist on the SFMOMA site under the multi-media tab. I became interested in his work because of its relevance to our class. His pieces are extraordinarily immaculate, meticulous, and time consuming. I can’t even fathom how much dedication it take for Kentridge to create just one of his pieces, let alone the huge collection that he has been able to display on the website. But enough about my speculation on just how amazing Kentridge is, I’ll tell you about his work.
What he does is creates images on a sheet of paper using charcoal. He then uses a camera to snap two frames of each image he creates physically on the paper by hand. Each time he creates a new image he takes two frames, afterwards he goes back to the same drawing and alters it, but only slightly, and takes another two shots with the camera of the new image. Sometimes the alterations are as slight as simply erasing marks from the previous drawing by hand. In one piece in particular entitled “Tide Table”, he is able to capture the fluidity of the ocean beating against the rocks of the shore, and a person crossing against the wind and waves on stepping-stones in the water. In the video provided on the website of him creating his work, one can only assume that the painstaking and arduous process must be somehow therapeutic for him.
I really admire his dedication, and I enjoy seeing how the incorporations of both types of media create something unique. As the pictures move, I am able to see a progression of his drawings over time, and am reminded that he’s drawing each one only through the faintly visible eraser marks.