s t e l l l a s t y l z

aesthetics. travel. music. beauty. psychology. video. photography. me. http://grooveshark.com/#!/katekeros

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Pretty Girls & Bourbon

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Surfer chix 😜 (at San Onofre, California)

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Tony Albert Exhibition: “We Come in Peace”

     The Tony Albert exhibit at the Sullivan+Strump is a juxtaposing display of Aboriginal and Western culture in the playful yet meaningful arrangement of triangular card structures. Utilizing prominent symbols of Western pop-culture and anthropologically rich icons of indigenous Australian motifs, Albert examines the social and fundamental roots that resonate with different human societies. Interrogating the essence of culture, the exhibition surveys the impact of colonization on indigenous Australian traditions and values.

     Parading the cultural symbols as the rear sides of playing cards, the exhibition is constructed as a series of six triangle structures made of cards dispersed around a well-lit, empty white room. Maintaining consistency, all six structures retain the identical formation of a thirteen-tiered house of cards.; yet, each edifice utilizes unique motifs to get at the same over-arching theme of the discrepancy between Aboriginal culture and Western pop culture.

       The first structure at the forefront of the exhibition is “Space Invaders,” furnished with text of the title written boldly with large decorated lettering and surrounded by images of arcade space invaders. The backs of the cards that form the structure consist of vintage Coca-Cola and 70’s video game icons. The connotation of Western culture’s forced takeover of Australia is practically explicit in the piece’s title, both serving as an emblem of Western technological achievement and the direct invasion of place that erupted from Australian colonization.

       To the right, two house of card structures, “We Come in Peace” and “Mr. Bluebird On My Shoulder” sit on a white platform. “We Come in Peace” is colored with boomerangs on the backs of cards and portraits of an Aboriginal woman trim “Mr. Bluebird On My Shoulder.” Again, large bolded lettering states “we come in peace” on the front of the first work, appearing to personifying both an ironic and satirical take on Australian colonialism. A large Looney Tunes’ road-runner is pasted onto the second tower, surrounded by bulls-eyes, denoting the flee of Aboriginals as colonization pushed them out of their targeted land.

       Set in the back of the room is “Forgotten Heroes,” which, unlike the others, seems to draw primarily from Aboriginal values and culture. Firstly, the font scribing “forgotten heroes” is not of the bubbly, brightly patterned pop font as exhibited by “We Come In Peace” and “Space Invaders;” instead, the font is a simple serif, patterned with images of indigenous art of Australian animals. Likewise, the backs of the cards are of Australian historical context, showcasing images of nature, native animals, Aboriginal dot art, and tools of Indigenous peoples.

       The last cluster of works, are “We Can Be Heroes, Forever and Ever” and “I Am, You Are, We Are.” Drawing on the theme presented in the first works, “We Can Be Heroes, Forever and Ever” mines imagery from Western pop culture, specifically an icon of Spiderman. Both the title and the Spiderman icon embody cliché, overly idealistic archetypes. A more abstract piece, “ I Am, You, Are, We Are” displays a compellation of both Aboriginal and Western culture, and as the title suggests, points to the shared over-arching identity of Australian culture that both groups of people resonate with.  The name of the  “I Am, You Are, We Are” again maintains the bold graphic font and is constructed of bright cards of Western pop culture theme.

       The layout and grouping together of certain pieces is apparently assigned randomly and changed around often, as was informed to me by the exhibition curator.  If fact, the exhibition at Sullivan+Strump holds only six out of the 108 works of Tony Albert’s full room installation and the selection of the six installed was also allocated arbitrarily. As explained to me through the catalogue supplied, the exhibit seems to be presented in a didactic fashion as well as a “fine art” context; the exhibit is meant to be appreciated aesthetically as well as inform audiences about the contemporary legacies of colonialism and its implications on cultural identity.

        Though Bright and colorful, the exhibition plays with paramount and even dark themes of colonialism and how it’s impending culture was pushed onto Aboriginals as Australia whitened.  The exhibit expounds a condition in which humans in their natural state and home were forced into a foreign civilizing society.  Assimilation was not an option, Western culture boldly compelled compliance and many Aboriginals revised their behaviors to fit Western standards. Forced into a culture that values people and functions according to monetary value, Aboriginal culture is often sold out for profit and does not always maintain its original sacredness.

            The use of playing cards to tenuously sustain the structures symbolizes the fine line indigenous Australians face between maintaining sanctified glory in their cultural customs and selling out to mainstream culture for profitable gain. The choice to frame the works using playing cards, prominent symbols of Western game culture, also speak to illustrate the societal structures exerted on the Aboriginals by Western ideals. Even still, the term “house of cards” is an expression that implies an argument or structure likely to collapse because it is built on a shaky foundation. A structure of this method relies on strong balance as well as friction in order to stay upright, symbolizing the abrasive relationship between Aboriginals and colonials -often characterized by opposition and the difficult equipoise Aboriginals faced between maintaining their own culture and taking on that of the British in order to stay afloat in their own land.

            Overall I strongly believe that the exhibition fulfills an insightful and profound weight of artistic and educational appeal. The themes presented in the work acutely describe the struggles of the Indigenous people as Australia was more and more affected by Western culture post colonialism as well as seemed pertinent to modern difficulties of Aboriginals to strive to maintain sanctity in their culture as a minority within another, very different, culture.

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ITP Exhibit

ITP exhibit     •    ITP is a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch School of the Arts whose mission is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people's lives. Perhaps the best way to describe us is as a Center for the Rece I thought the exhibition was awesome and it is too hard for me to chose just 2 that I liked best. The smartest inventions that I saw were the app to help you get ready in the morning and the oyster card reader that donated extra change on the card to charity. I have a tough time getting out of the house quickly and often am late so the app to get you out of the house would be very helpful to me. I  thought the oyster card idea was genius and cant belive that no one has thought of it before and that so much extra change goes wasted! Aesthetically, I loved the puppet piece. I thought each of the puppets had such strong and amazing characters; I wanted to look at each and read about all of them. They were made of such cool materials and I could totally resonate with many of the characters. I also thought the magnetic instrument was cool. He was able to make an instrument using the vibrations that come off of a magnetic pull.. very cool. Another piece I liked was the fitbit mirror that was able to detect and project back to you your overall well being. I use fitbit and thought it was very innovative to create a visual representation of the way that we are feeling. Overall I really enjoyed the show. Thank you for assigning us to go!

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Class #12 Assignments:

  MAD Museum:

center for the collection, preservation, study, and display of contemporary handmade objects in a variety of media, 

The museum was founded in 1956 by the American Craft Coucil. Together with the philanthropist Aileen Osborn Webb as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. In 1985, the museum was relocated to 40 West 53rd Street and was renamed the American Craft Museum. In 2002 it changed its name again to the Museum of Arts and Design. And Finally In 2008, the museum moved to 2 Columbus

It includes: four floors of exhibition galleries for works by established and emerging artists; a 150-seat auditorium in which the museum plans to feature lectures, films, and performances; and a restaurant.

It also includes a Center for the Study of Jewelry, and an Education Center that offers multi-media access to primary source material, hands-on classrooms for students, and three artists-in-residence studios.

Architecture of the MAD Museum:

small, trapezoidal lot on the south side of Columbus Circle in Manhattan

1874 – John D. Voorhis, a carriage maker, builds the seven-story Pabst Grand Circle Hotel on this irregular plot. Designed by William H. Cauvet, the hotel was made of brownstone with a mansard roof.

1964 – A&P Heir Huntington Hartford  hires Architect Edward Durell Stone to build a museum for him at 2 Columbus Circle. Hartford has one of the world's greatest art collections with a Rembrant, Claude Monets, Manet, Turner, Salvador Dali to paint a painting called The Discovery of America by Chrisopher Columbus for the opening. Hartford poses in the lobby in Black Tie with a Camel.

The building at Two Columbus Circle, designed by Edward Durell Stone, opens as the Gallery of Modern Art. It displays the collection of Huntington Hardford, heir to the founder of A&P Supermarkets. 

June 2002 – The Museum of Arts & Design is designated as the site developer of 2 Columbus Circle by the NYC Economic Development Corporation.

Post Digital:

Term  that points significantly to our rapidly changed and changing relationships with digital technologies and art forms.

Digital technology is clearly here to stay, and the phrase Post Digital looks forward not to its end, but to its ubiquity; in fact, to the point where it becomes so ubiquitous that it ceases to be interesting.

In The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age Mel Alexenberg defines "postdigital art" as artworks that address the humanization of digital technologies through interplay between digital, biological, cultural, and spiritual systems, between cyberspace and real space, between embodied media and mixed reality in social and physical communication, between high tech and high touch experiences, between visual, haptic, auditory, and kinesthetic media experiences, between virtual and augmented reality, between roots and globalization, between autoethnography and community narrative, and between web-enabled peer-produced wikiart and artworks created with alternative media through participation, interaction, and collaboration in which the role of the artist is redefined.

In Art after Technology  Maurice Benayoun lists possible tracks for "postdigital" art considering that the digital flooding has altered the entire social, economical, artistic landscape and the artist posture will move in ways that try to escape the technological realm without being able to completely discard it. From lowtech to biotech and critical fusion - critical intrusion of fiction inside reality - new forms of art emerge out of the digital era.

 The notion of postdigital is emerging as a term that describes the exploration of our relationship to the computer age as a dominant paradigm in a time of global mixing, intertwined economies, population certainty and planetary limits.

The postdigital is a paradigm but an understanding of postdigital does not aim to describe a life after digital, but rather attempts to describe the present-day opportunity to explore the consequences of the digital and of the computer age.

While the computer age has enhanced human capacity with inviting and uncanny prosthetics, the postdigital may provide a paradigm with which it is possible to examine and understand this enhancement.

   “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital”

Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital, at the Museum of Art and Design in New York, is a collection of fantastic shapes and visions realized by artists using the tools of modern design and manufacturing.

 The  show offers museumgoers the opportunity to ogle some of the more stunning achievements of digital design since 2005, the year when Patrick Jouin and Materialise began employing 3-D printing as a commercially viable manufacturing method.

computer assistance has allowed for the creation of previously impossible-to-make forms.

The exhibit focused on experimental uses of materials and technologies in art and industry, rather than products designed for the mass market. 

The show as a whole is a reassuring affirmation that our creative industries are not just taking changes in the means of production in stride, but using them to more fully realize their ideas. For a closer and more intellectual look at our shift toward the digital, there’s the exhibition catalog, bolstered by first-person accounts from the designers.

  Fully Articulated 3D printed Gown for Burlesque Icon Dito Von Tesse by Michael Schmidt

  Designed by Schmidt and generated by Bitonti, the floor-length nylon gown was made using selective laser sintering (SLS), where material is built up in layers from plastic powder fused together with a laser.

The rigid plastic components are fully articulated to create a netted structure that allows for movement. Spirals based on the Golden Ratio were applied to a computer rendering of Von Teese's body so the garment fits her exactly.

Draped over a nude silk corset, the black-lacquered dress is cinched in at the waist and exaggerated at the shoulders, and embellished with 12,000 Swarovski crystals.

Personally, this piece was my favorite work of art at the exhibit. I was mezmorized at both its beauty and delicate intricacy. The style and elegance of the dress floored me but knowing that the dress was fabricated using 3D printing technologies only served to further mezmorize me.

Michael Schmidt

wardrobing and jewelry designer who has garnered the attention of the world's top entertainers, stylists, photographers and directors for his expertise with a variety of innovative materials and techniques.

Known for creating elegant yet edgy clothing and accessories, his list of clients includes Madonna, Cher, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Fergie and the Black Eyed Peas, Janet Jackson, Deborah Harry, Dita Von Teese, Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, Steven Tyler, Ozzy Osbourne and many others.

In 1991, Michael Schmidt was nominated for an Emmy Award for Costume Design for a Variety or Music Program, "Cher... At The Mirage"  CBS.

  Liquid Glacial  “Smoke” Coffeetable

Resembling a frozen sheet of ice, the table is essentially a swirl of water on vortex legs. 

CNC-milled from polished plexiglass,

illustrates the functional role of digital design. 

I was immediately gripped by the “Smoke” Coffetable. I thought its simplicity and unique water essence was incredibly innovative and cool looking. Where the legs spur out from the table, it appears that there are mini tide pools which I also thought was awesome. It looks like it could dissolve into a puddle at any second. Would love to call this piece my own!

Zaha Hadid

an Iraqi- British architect

Her buildings are distinctively futuristic, characterized by the powerful, curving forms of her elongated structures

won the Pritzker Architecture Prize  in 2004 and is known worldwide for her theoretical and academic work.

 Her projects build on thirty years of exploration and research in urbanism, architecture and design.

Liquid Glacial Smoke Coffee Table is a wonderfully playful and organic outgrowth of her previous work.

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Joshua Foer on Memory

Joshua Foer

Freelance journalist with a focus on science

was meant to write about the USA memory competitions and decided to train for it to get a better story but ended up winning the contest in 2006

2006 memory champion

set a new USA record in the "speed cards" event by memorizing a deck of 52 cards in 1 minute and 40 seconds

  http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_can_do.html

  Moon Walking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

sold to Penguin for publication in March 2011

the book describes Foer’s journey as a participatory journalist to becoming a national champion mnemosist under Ed Cooke, British Grand Master of Memory

delineates the capacity of the human mind

investigates the scientific basis of memory creation and historical attitudes towards memory

explores mnemonic tools for improving memory : some of which are techniques of Roman rhetoricians and tannaim of Judea

PAO system for memorizing numbers and cards

Mind Mapping –a notetaking teqnique

method of loci: data is stored in a sequence of memorable images that are decomposable into their original form.

supports that practicing these methods can make anyone’s memories better

the hardest obstacle is psychological barriers

"Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?”

"If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.” 

Atlas Obscura

site of curious and wondrous travel destinations

celebrate a different way of looking at the world

My favorite place discovererd on the site was the Mosaic Tile House

large-scale artwork-in-progress

tiles of every color

almost every square inch of the home is covered in mosaic tiles

Cheri Pann and Gonzalo, a husband and wife team, are responsible for this local masterpiece

Cheri is an artist who creates oil-paintings

Gonzalo creates canvasses

Cheri creates the tiles and Gonzalo shatters them and distributes them over every square inch of their home

captures the effervescent essence of Venice

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The Refusal of Time

     William Kentridge is a South African artist who works in prints, drawings, animated films, production, and, more recently, multi-media installations. Noted for his remixed  aesthetic, Kentridge constructs his art by filming a drawing, making changes to it, and then re-filming it. Born and a current resident of Johannesburg, William Kentridge finds much of his inspiration from South Africa’s socio-political atrocities committed during the Apartheid. Kentridge’s work is incredibly expressive: his form often alludes to uncomfortable and poignant content meant to resonate with the viewers.

     This is the case with William Kentridge’s installation, The Refusal of Time, considered one of Kentridge’s most complex and ambitious works to date. The installation is a thirty minute meditation on time, space, the effects of south American colonialism compromised of five separate video channels that are projected around a remixed room with a automaton at the room’s center. Probing explorations of time, history, culture, globalization, and human understanding of all mentioned, Kentridge skillfully integrates moving image, sound, sculptural elements, and theater to provide the viewer with an immersive time study experience His multimedia work synthesizes a number of visual and filmic themes, performance art, and incorporating Kentridge’s oeuvre of his stop-motion animation of charcoal drawings, paper cutout figures, original live-action film, and remixing techniques of reversing image and speed.

     The multi-projection environment incorporates sculptural and kinetic elements, forming a truly boundary-pushing immersive art experience. The video projections in the installation touch on studies of the nature of time by Albert Einstein and Henri Poincaré, who both faced the notion that time is relative, not absolute. Throughout the exhibition, Kentridge refers to these scientist’s experiments with the measurement of time and a number of other historical accounts of theories of times –displaying his own rejection to the imposed certainty of sense of order, understood as time.

         The video projections draw from choreographers, filmmakers, and stage designers, creating animations and live-action sequences totaling the 30 –minute work of art. The exhibition is layered in soundscape by South Africann composer, Philip Miller, which is emitted from various megaphones around the room. In the center of the installation is a large kinetic sculpture –a “breathing” organ-like automaton. The “elephant” was inspired by a 1870’s copper pneumatic mechanism that was meant to pump air to calibrate Paris’s clocks; this vision reminding Kentridge of a passage from Charles Dicken’s Hard Times describing a factory machines moving about resembling the head of an elephant swallowed in madness. He saw this image as a metaphor for technological developments of human culture as well as the mania triggered by the impossible and vain attempt to control time – a concept that inspired deep reflection within myself.

     In The Refusal of Time, artist William Kentridge explores the ways in which time has been utilized as means of control. Human nature’s yearning to make sense of values that govern us led to systems of measurement to be exact and standardized – but yet still remain complex, elusive and arbitrary. Noted physicist, Peter Galison concludes that presently, time and the rational frameworks which it is understood to be a part of are vestiges of an "obsolete science,"a mere illusion. Kentridge's installation contemplates Galison's notion and also displays time as physical and spatial, therefore demonstrating that time does not stand alone but is interconnected with space and other human forms of measurement.

       Director of SFMOMA, Neal Benezra sums up the experience of Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time nothing that it “offers viewers a powerful multisensory experience that builds upon Kentridge’s history of creating humanistic, politically urgent, and truly extraordinary hybrid work.” I would highly recommend this installation, suggesting a thorough introduction to Kentridge’s themes to further appreciate his work.

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Emily Short and Interactive Fiction

Emily short

Emily Short is the pseudonym of an interactive fiction (IF)

best known her use of psychologically complex NPCs, or non-player game characters

She has been called "one of the most renowned authors in the IF community"

she is widely respected as an authority in the field and has presided over numerous IF contests. 

her work has been described by reviewers in terms that range from "mesmerizing" to "frustrating

author of over fifteen works of IF in addition to being chief editor of the IF Theory Book  the XYZZY awards is an annual popular-choice award for interactive fiction.

  Interactive Fiction (IF)

a software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control charaters and influence environment

basically, interactive fiction tells you the beginning of a story then it puts you in charge and lets you decide what your character should do. You type commands for the main character to carry out, and the story replies by telling you what happens next.

Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as video game 

Part of the player’s role is to help the main character overcome obstacles to his progress: solving problems, working out what is going on in the story, discovering ways to reach new locations and tools.

part of the player’s role is also to help the main character make decision

IF is like a story  in that it may have multiple endings, subject to your choices. 

  interactive fiction reached its peak in popularity from 1979-1986 Text adventures are one of the oldest types of computer games and form a subset of the adventure genre        The player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output. Interactive fiction shares much in common with Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) rely on a textual exchange and accept similar commands from players as do works of IF Versu, the system for interactive fiction with dynamic, AI-driven NPCs currently under development at Linden Lab

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Ryan (2004)

 http://www.nfb.ca/film/ryan/

Story by Chris Landreth

an American animator working in Canada

was an engineer at first and then moved onto animation as his second career

 in 1994, he was hired to define, test, and sometimes even abuse computer graphics software products.

uses standard CGI animation in his work, with the added element of what Chris calls Psychorealism

often puts a surrealist styling into his work

Karan Singh described Chris Landreth’s use of psychorealism as, "the glorious complexity of the human psyche depicted through the visual medium of art and animation.”

Co-produced by Copper Heart Entertainment and the National Film Board of Canada

nominated and won the 2004 Academy Award for Animated Short Film and the 25th Genie Aware for Best Animated short

the short uses computer generated animations as descriptive qualities to illustrate the character’s personalities, their thoughts, desires, troubles and as metaphorical extensions of their own minds.

peoples' psychological traumas are represented by twisted, surreal lacerations and deformities

Computer animation software used in Ryan is build upon the rules of linear perspective, yet these rules were broken in subtle ways to express how the characters see the world.

A nonlinear projection system was developed in the film that allows animators to create multiple points of view and combine them in various ways to achieve desired affect

Ryan is an animated interpretation of an actual interview with Larkin

Ryan Larkin (1943-2007)

Canadian filmmaker and animator

used to be a rising star in the world of animation

creator of several short films, at least 2 of which have secured his place in the history of film making

animated the 1969 Oscar-nominated short Walking, as well as Syrinx (1965), Cityscape (1966) and Street Musique (1972). 

 lived on skid row in Montreal following a history of drug and alcohol abuse in his later

apparently emotionally fragile

Ryan offers to explore how different states of mind affect our perception of the space around us

My personal take on the film was that it was incredibly well-made but I wasn't that into the plot or dialogue of the film. Although i did find it interesting to focus on a real animator who fell of the band wagon after a drug and alcohol problem, I would have liked to see a bit of an alternate uplifting ending ilke in the true story of Ryan Larkin who was able to drop many of his bad habits to further his animation career after his skid row incidents. I thought that the use of digital manipulation was mind blowing and really told the stories of the characters, developing them far more than if they were normal animations, however I was a bit weirded out by many of the chosen character manipulations and exaggeration of mental issues. I guess this was the point, so the filmmakers in that way fulfilled their goal, but nonetheless I didn't love the actual film nor would I recommend it to anyone for any reason but to check out the animations.

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Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"

Eli Pariser:

the chief executive of Upworthy

Upworthy = a website for "meaningful" viral content

political and internet activist

his career as a political activist began when he and David H. Pickering launched an online petition calling for a nonmilitary response to the attacks of September 11.

half a million people had signed the petition.

concerned about the development of web personalization

personalization of information content based on relevance to a specific internet user

developed the concept of a “filter bubble” which he defines as a danger that people do not get exposed to viewpoints different from their own

 In 2013, Pariser joined the board of advisors for tech startup state.com, creating a network of structured opinions

Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

web based on relevance

internet is meant to  be a connection to the outer, greater world

ideals that it could be a great way to disperse information online

instead though, are editing what you see based on relevance to you

invisible algorithmic editing of the web

used by Facebook, Google, yahoo news, Huffington post, Washington post, New York Times

different search results will come up depending on who you are, what computer you are using, what kind of browser you are using,

personal tailoring

no more standardized Google

different people get different results

this type of personalization moves us very quickly toward a world in which the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see but not necessarily what we need to see.

problem because all of these filters and algorithms create a filter bubble where you get your own unique universe of information that you live in online

what’s in your bubble depends on who you are and what you do

you don’t have control as to what you see or, more importantly, what gets out

it is important to hear other people’s viewpoints

its important to have a balance between your information – between dessert information i.e. Justin Beiber and information vegetables i.e. political news

algorithms do not have embedded ethics

they need to show us things that are important, challenging, other points of view as well as relevant or fun

need a better flow of information

we need the internet to connect us all together, introduce us to new ideas, different perspectives, and it won’t do that if it leads us isolated in our filter bubbles.