Digital Media Art 214.01: February 2014

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Artist Blog #2: Charles Csuri

In Paul Hertz's essay Art, Code, and the Engine of Change, he prefaces his essay stating, " we swim but do not know the meaning of water". Hertz is alluding to the way in which many people take for granted the aestethics behind digital art. Computer technology is so pervasive in our everyday lives it is easy to be oblivious to the ways digital art is created. While it is easy to go on photoshop and play around with the endless effects/filters you can apply to different images, its important to understand where they came from and appreciate how they were made. One pioneer who is known for his tremendous advancements in the medium of computer art is Charles Csuri.

Charles Csuri is an artist and computer graphics professor at the Ohio State University. Not only an artist, Csuri had been an all american football player at Ohio State as well as serving in WWII. Celebrated as an all american football star, Csuri could have played professionally but instead choose to pursue his love for art. He began to exhibit his painting in NYC from 1955-1965 where he began to gain noterioty. His research activity in computer animation and graphics has received international recognition and acclaim as well as being known as "father of digital art and computer animation" by Smithsonian.

The artwork above is known as the "Sine Curve Man". This piece was a collaborated work with Csuri and James Schaffer in 1967. During his early years Csuri was interested with the geometric transformations of images and the ways images could be manipulated. The sine curve man was created by superposing many images of a sine curve to create the image of a man. This picture interested me having had to made sine curves on my calculator in many high school math classes. I found it interesting that Csuri's simple sine man was so revolutionary to digital media. The transformation of the sine graph linked the computer together with art and paved the way for other digital artist to drawn from.

Its funny to think this simple transformation had such an effect on the way we use digital art today. Csuri innovated the ways in which artists could conceptually manipulate images digitally on a computer. One of the effects which I enjoyed using with in my first project was the warp tool. Taking an arbitrary dull image and applying the warp tool really had a tremendous effect on my work and helped to make my desired effect of a vortex-like shape. Like i said before, its really fun to play around on applications like photopshop and illustrator without even knowing how these options were made. At least now I have more appreciation for these effects and there foundation.

Final Project #1

Photo Correction Exercise

Original:

Color Corrected:

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Artist Blog #2

Katriona Beales is a freelance digital artist from London, England. She is not famously known in the industry, but rather a small-scale self employed artist. She manages to stay afloat working with multiple galleries around London through artist educator freelance work as well as commissioned work. I particularly liked her work because of its approach on todays technological world. Karolina explains, " At the heart of my practice there is tension between fascination and wariness with new technologies… I am intensely excited by the simultaneous nature of display, consumption, and production that these interfaces (types of media) encourage but at he exact same time, I am wary and perhaps even frightened at moments." Beales goes on to say that she does not feel safe knowing that she can be located at any time by the simple GPS facility programmed into her phone. The rapid growth of technology that has been introduced into our everyday lives has conjured recent debate on whether such technologies have been beneficial or harmful? While Katriona believes the pros outweigh the cons, she believes there needs to be an awareness of the ill effects or excess of too much technology in ones life. Most of her artwork deals with this topic and especially the act of viewing such technologies and how our bodies interact with it. Beales most intriguing artworks include "Constant Screen' (2012) and 'Disembodied Gaze' (2013).

Both of these pieces are 'a reflection on our subjective response to information overload and excess' says Beales. The 'Constant Screen' is specifically a reflection of our interaction with the screen and the viewing experience. The video contains multiple windows playing several differently things. Some show a security cameras recording a certain place while other show eyes peering into those certain places and viewing whats happening. Beales attempts to show that even though technology has the ability to show endless information, (such as a security camera footage from a specific place) the act of viewing this footage has an affect on us physically. The eyes in the video look distracted, and tired almost as if they have been given too much information and cannot process it all.

Disembodies Gaze attempts to offer the same type of feeling of reflection and our experience with viewing technology. This piece consists of a single digital photograph which has been manipulated to create hundreds of versions of the same photo. Similar to the way we used text edit to change the text within photos, the image of an eyeball has been manipulated in hundreds of different ways. Alongside a constant loop of these images is an extract describing the act of watching a film in a cinema. Beales work contrast the act of looking at digital technology with the cinematic experience. The detached eye brings attention to the way we experience both digital and filmic world (through the eye). In a unique way it sheds light on how we do this as well as the risk of 'detaching' our eye from technology with too much of it.

In a way Beales artwork makes her audience step back and take a literal 'look' at what they are doing while working with digital art. In a Brechtian way Beale 'estranges' her audiences and influences them to think outside the box about the process of the art rather than its (face value) or artistry.

Overall, Beales states, " technological utopias and dystopias exist at once and together ". While she is more pro-technology she doesn't show much bias in her artwork. She understands there are both pro's and con's but allows the viewer to decide what he/she thinks by portraying the way in which we interact with todays technology.