getty

If you didn't know, Gettyimages is a great place for stock photos. You can type in something like "woman saving cat stuck in tree" and the turnout is pretty spot-on, no matter how specific you are. Also, the way the site's designed--mostly as a browser for companies and corporations to easily find and buy an image--is some insight to our own project about ideas of authorship, copyright, etc.

good luck on projects

http://www.gettyimages.com/Home.aspx

Let's try to never be on this site

http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/

Seeing other people's mistakes reminds me of things to check for myself in my work. Plus, it's fun to have these pointed out, since it reminds us that all of these images have, in fact, been photoshopped extensively, and what to look out for in a professional piece.

Photomontage

I found this slightly hokey website about cut and paste when I was trying to find a particular piece by John Heartfield. It has some basic history and some good photomontage examples to look at, if you're interested

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/davepalmer/cutandpaste/hillen_big2.html#

Appropriation and Authorship

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherrie_Levine

Sherrie Levine is a pretty cool artist who dealt with notions of authorship.

Check it out.

Crash

William Gibson, in his interview, was critical of the post-human state our society has come to today. However, he didn’t advocate fighting against it or returning to more simple, idyllic times. His tone was one of sad acceptance of post-humanity as the result of a distinctly “human” impulse—to create new, faster technology to supposedly better our lifestyles. One element of the film that I think reinforces his tone of critical acceptance is the setting. Gibson, the interviewer, and the filmmaker are all in a car that remains in motion, passing everyday moderately decrepit semi-urban landscapes. Such a choice of layout only seems natural in light of J. G. Ballard’s apparent influence on Gibson. While I was watching the film, Ballard’s novel Crash came to mind (I can’t remember whether Gibson mentions the novel explicitly or not). Crash chronicles the exploits of two men’s pursuit of sexual fantasies through engaging in and reproducing car crash scenarios. Throughout the novel it is clear that commonplace sexual practices cease to interest the characters. The only way they can achieve full gratification is through the mediation of their own sexualities through the car. In a way, the car becomes their own post-human prosthesis, an extension of their sexual beings. They spend much of the novel merely driving around, playing voyeur to the world inside this man-created machine that has taken over their sexual identities. I can see how this would greatly influence Gibson’s idea that digital technologies mediate our interactions with the world. Engaging with the world either from behind the wheel of a car or behind a computer screen both have results of alienation from humanity albeit perceived connection. Ultimately the artistic choice to hold the interview in a moving vehicle, conveys the impossibility of escaping a mediated interaction.

Post Human

I thought our discussion about post-humanism as a a process rather than a binary state was very interesting. Is there a point though, when post-humanism will terminate? Is there a point at which humans will be so driven by technology that they are no longer human?

The Car, Time, and Space

The thing I retained the most about the documentary was the format. There's something to be said about a large portion of the film taking place in a car. And the backseat of the car for that matter. I found the film quite disorienting--usually a car is used to take a person from point A to point B. Rather, the car was used to explore notions of time and space (we traveled back to Gibson's adolescent life and we also went to the east coast, the west coast, the woods, the city, etc.) The fact that we (the viewer and Gibson) use a relatively primitive vehicle to do this is interesting. Of course it would have been really corny to have Gibson in a simulated spaceship or time machine or something like that but I thought the car in relationship to time communicated well the idea that our notions of the future, progess, and technology are founded upon former advancements making the Future very possible and real. Also, the filmmaker could of had Gibson driving in the front of the car or in the passenger's seat but having him in the backseat said that technology will happen to us even though we often think of it as the other way around.

Post-Human?

I've been thinking a lot about our discussion of the post-human condition as it was put forth in the interview. I have a friend who has been talking to me about his own thoughts of post-humanity for a year now, but they had all involved a sort of "going back" to a primitive state. However, the term as Gibson uses it suggests something else- a dystopian future where humanity has put an end to natural selection and taken control of its own evolution. More and more, the things that I use on a daily basis are far from being natural- synthetic fibers in my clothes, and plastic everywhere, not to mention the amount of silicon chips in my phone, computers, etc. What does this mean for art? In my friend's version of post-humanity, going back to a "primitive" state meant a return to "primitivist" art. But if post-humanity really means a continued augmentation of the human body and human experience*, it is hard to guess at what art in such a world would be. Of course, the mind jumps to digital art, which complements our new digital lives, but I think that answer might be too simplistic. I am thinking more and more that maybe bio art is the answer; art that comments back on what we have become. This is not to say that I think post-humanity is necessarily evil- I am in fact a big proponent of much of technology. Yet, I do think that we are moving in a path that is hard to turn from. As Gibson put it, we have only ever existed in a mediated state; how can we imagine anything but?

*By augmentation of the human body, I mean those technologies that extend us into Gibson's post-human realm: eyeglasses correcting sight, cell phones extending our voices and ears, computers extending our memories, etc.

Internet: The Cities of the Technology Age

One of the most interesting concepts I took away from William Gibson’s interview in No Maps for These Territories, was the way the Internet has fundamentally and inextricably become part of our world, our reality. Gibson compared the invention of the Internet to the invention of cities. He suggests that the Internet has begun to change our lives in the same way that cities completely changed the way people lived ten thousand years ago. It will infuse the most basic parts of our lives. The way we take in information has already changed dramatically – I think this is what the stylistic form of the documentary was commenting on. Television and subsequently the Internet have made the shear amount of available information increase exponentially; the faster we can digest it, the better. The flashing images, the car constantly moving forward, people moving backwards and forwards out of the frame of the window – all reflected the vast amounts of information we experience everyday, whizzing past us.

no myths for these countries of the mind

My title is a quote from the beginning of the Gibson film, which came after the official title, No Maps for These Territories. The idea that we no longer have any myths for these new technological areas of thought and perception is extremely interesting. With mythologies, we construct value systems, patterns for perceiving the world, an overall structure to a culture. The fact that we are now moving into uncharted waters points to the perpetuation of isolation and alienation; a structureless future; chaos. Without these myths, we step forward on the path towards becoming post-human. We drop Grecian heroes in order to embrace the Warholian 15-minute celebrity, who is soon forgotten, and all sense of interconnectedness and community is transient in our increasingly mobile society.

Examining Bio Art

Fall Exhibition at CEPA Gallery to Feature Four International Artists
Exhibition Dates: September 19, 2008 – December 20, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, September 19, 7 pm - Midnight

BUFFALO, NY – CEPA Gallery is pleased to announce Trans-Evolution: Examining Bio Art, an exhibition exploring the intersection of art and science. All featured artists will be present at the public opening reception on Friday, September 19 at the Market Arcade at 617 Main Street in conjunction with Curtain Up! The exhibition will present solo projects by artists internationally recognized as pioneers in the field.

Paul Vanouse (Buffalo, NY) will exhibit his latest body of work, Latent Figure Protocol, a multi-media installation centered around a live science experiment that manipulates DNA samples to create emergent representational images.

Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of the Tissue Culture and Art Project (Perth, Australia) will present Victimless Leather and NoArk, two projects that document advancements in science utilizing living tissue.

Elizabeth Demaray (Brooklyn, NY), will display a commissioned sculptural installation entitled Corpor Esurit, or we all deserve a break today, featuring a colony of ants subsisting on meals from McDonald’s for the duration of the project.

Visit www.cepagallery.org

No Maps for these Territories - William Gibson

"I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here." - William Gibson

THE LUCE NEW MEDIA LECTURES - THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2008

All lectures take place @ NOON @ THE CAT IN THE CREAM. PIZZA AND SOFT DRINKS WILL BE SERVED!
ALL LECTURES FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Matt Coolidge of the CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION
Matthew Coolidge is the Founder and Director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles, a non-profit art/research organization that employs a multimedia and multidisciplinary approach to increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived. He serves as a project director, photographer and curator for CLUI exhibitions, and has written several books published by the CLUI, including Back to the Bay: An Examination of the Shoreline of the San Francisco Bay Region (2001), and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America’s Nuclear Proving Ground (1996). He lectures widely in the United States and Europe on contemporary landscape matters, and is a faculty member in the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts, where he teaches a class about “nowhere.” Coolidge received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2004, a Rockefeller New Media Fellowship in 2005, and in 2006 was honored with the Lucelia Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, an award given to one artist a year under 50 who has made a distinguished contribution to American art. The work of the CLUI has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and other institutions around the world.
http://www.clui.org

Forwarded by
Julia Christensen
Luce Visiting Professor of the Emerging Arts

Ways of Seeing - BBC TV Series - 1972

WAYS OF SEEING (final episode - advertising) 1/4
WAYS OF SEEING (final episode - advertising) 2/4
WAYS OF SEEING (final episode - advertising) 3/4
WAYS OF SEEING (final episode - advertising) 4/4

The film and the book offer useful tools for thinking critically about art and the media. No longer groundbreaking, but the philosophies and observations of John Berger still apply today.

some links

http://www.djspooky.com/
http://www.piperboy.com/
http://www.piperboy.com/playground/scrapbook.htm
http://www.flyingpuppet.com/
http://potatoland.com/

Failure

"Every failure is a masterpiece, another branch of the rhizome"
Deleuze and Guattari