helvetica

From Typocalypse: another opinion on the ever controversial font, Helvetica. The flickr set has comments on other common typefaces, too.

The Rather Difficult Font Game

http://fontgame.ilovetypography.com/

Contemporary Means of Torture

Hey Everyone!

I just wanted to throw out a concept I had for the next project and see what people thought. It was something that Claudia Pederson, the speaker from Monday night's lecture, brought up. She was discussing the Iraqi artist, Waffa Bilal, and his newest work, which was an interactive online voting piece called "Dog or Iraqi". People voted on which one - the dog or the Iraqi - would be waterboarded in an undisclosed location in Upstate New York. Bilal was voted to be waterborded and he made a video documenting it. This net art piece made me think of another artwork featuring waterboarding that I had read about this summer.

Steve Powers, a graffiti and conceptual artist, created an installation piece on Coney Island. An audience member puts in a dollar, peeks in a window, sees a scene of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner being waterboarded. The people in the scene are animatronic dummies, but the blindfolded prisoner struggles and convulses as a hooded man pours water over his face.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/arts/design/06wate.html?_r=1&scp=4sq=Waterboarding&st=cse&oref=slogin

I am very curious about this exploration of such a horrendous torture technique in art. I think I would like to comment on it in my next project. Let me know what you think.

Thkx
Franny

Mail Art at Oberlin

All you could dream of knowing about Oberlin Mail Art: http://www.oberlin.edu/library/art/mailart/Default.html

Art librarian Barb Prior put together this website after curating a mini-exhibition on our mail art collection in the Spring. Enjoy.

typographical do's and don'ts

This page offers great hints and tips for design students: style tutorials for graphic design students by Elif Ayiter.

"Elif Ayiter is an artist, designer and educator, specialising in the development of hybrid educational methodologies between art&design and computer science." She was my graphic design teacher actually back in college, in 1996.

http://www.papress.com/other/thinkingwithtype/resources/crimes_scale.htm


also at the bottom of this page...

http://www.papress.com/other/thinkingwithtype/index.htm

there is a link that says "TYPE CRIMES LECTURE!" download it. its hysterical

Too late?

Here is my Gleaners post. I apologize for how late it is!

I saw this documentary as ultimately a film about how individuals resist negative change, not by calling for an end to the corrupt system itself, but by creating new sites of discourse within the structure, ultimately proving that power does not just flow from top to bottom in any given system.

This way of creating new sites of discourse within a structure is what Varda’s film and new media have in common. Both are responding to a revolution: in the gleaners’ case the industrial revolution and in new media’s case technological or digital. In both revolutions, the result seems to be the alienation of humanity as the result of mediation by a new force (machine or digitization). Gleaners and/or new media artists can come together in a post-machine world and reap their own benefit from the new non-human process. There is a sense that both gleaners and new media artists are on the fringe. Working outside of the system, gleaners refuse to participate in capitalism and instead almost revert to a hunting/gathering modus operandi. Working outside the museum/gallery system, many new media artists try to reach audiences directly and avoid the pitfalls of the art market. Ultimately it is this subversive, anti-capitalist drive that unites gleaners and cutting-edge artists.

Z-Trip Obama Mix

http://www.djztrip.com/obama/

its aight

Gleaning

Even though it was just a quick scene in the beginning, the shots of people in the museum, taking pictures of the portrait of the Gleaners, was a pivotal part of the message for me. What are these people doing, after all, but gleaning the image for themselves? Of course, their version is not the original painting, which makes me think about the gleaning of images that makes up film. Is this film just a series of images gleaned from Varda's journey? What makes these images Varda's? Especially when the shot is of postcards, or the art of someone she met, or of abandoned potatoes in a field. How is her act of claiming these images for herself an act of gleaning? Who owns these images? How can we even suggest that one can "own" images, in this case?

Varda's alienation of the audience

A few weeks ago in French Non-Fiction film class I saw one of Agnes Varda's films, L'Opera Mouffe which mirrored this film in many ways. In Mouffe, Varda is much more poetic and this film fits less so in the documentary genre then Gleaning. However, as confusing at times as both films seemed to be, it is apparent that Varda has a deep interest in (H)umanity. Her films are enjoyable and interesting but they still fail to address a larger theme or goal. It's either that I cannot pinpoint what Varde is trying to achieve as a filmmaker or maybe she is just making art, developing a technique without a mission or a focus. It seems as though her projects and films aren't whole to me--they definitely have a technique but they lack something at the same time. Or perhaps she does this on purpose--leaves her films so open to interpretation that its her goal for the viewer to "complete" the film themselves through their own interpretation. I feel like Varda can get away with this because she focuses on Humanity, a subject everyone is familiar with but what happens when other artists start to leave their work so open to interpretation that they start to alienate their audience?

Video Screening This Week

Fellow classmates,
I will be hosting a screening of the video works I am looking at for my honors project. They're examples of early experiments in new media, so if you're interested, you should totally come. It won't last long, and there will be cookies, if I'm not too lazy. I've posted the details below. - Martha

VIDEO SCREENING: John Baldessari's early video works

Wednesday October 8 at 4:30 in Classroom 1

Works shown:
"I am Making Art"(1971)
"Baldessari Sings LeWitt" (1972)
"I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art" (1971)

Optional discussion to follow.

About the artist:
Throughout his career, John Baldessari has defied formalist categories by working in a variety of media—creating films, videotapes, prints, photographs, texts, drawings, and multiple combinations of these. In his use of media imagery, Baldessari is a pioneer "image appropriator," and as such has had a profound impact on post-modern art production. Baldessari initially studied to be an art critic at the University of California, Berkeley during the mid 1950s, but growing dissatisfied with his studies, he turned to painting. Inspired by Dada and Surrealist literary and visual ideas, he began incorporating photographs, notes, texts, and fragments of conversation into his paintings. Baldessari remains fundamentally interested in de-mystifying artistic processes, and uses video to record his performances, which function as "deconstruction experiments." --text courtesy of Video Data Bank

The Gleaners

The first obvious parallel that I drew between this movie and new media is that with this photoshop project, each of us became a gleaner. We rooted through the online detritus of images and selected other people's leftovers to create new meals of imagery...Bringing it back to notions of authorship, isn't there a sense of releasing an image to the wind once it goes online? It becomes a possession of whoever takes the time to get into their online car, drive down the information highway, and pick it up from the website-field. And outside of new media, perhaps we're reaching a time where if we want to truly "own" anything, or to truly protect our ideas from being gleaned and reworked in other pieces of art or other people's lives, you would have to hide that idea under your mattress and keeps the lights off in your room so nobody would ever see it. Anytime you release an idea into the world, others begin feeding off of it, changing it, and using it for their own purpose--or ideally they do, if the idea is any good.

I think gleaning also relates to advances in technology and individualization in modern society. Gleaning was once a bonding activity for French women--now gleaning is a largely individual process for those who live alternative lifestyles. The type of people she interviews makes it clear that gleaning is not a mainstream activity, not like it used to be. My instinct is to blame technology for this--after all, a field can now be harvested by one man in a tractor, and the rest of us are all going to our isolated office jobs at our singular computers. The demise of gleaning represents the ways in which we can hide ourselves from the real world and real human interaction when we escape into the computer.

Unrelated to new media, I found the movie very compelling. The filmmaker had a curious eye and brought forth very diverse ideas and opinions about gleaning, a subject that sounds banal at first listen. So i end this post with a quote from her, when she describes the nature of harvesting with machines:

"Some people are quite pleased when the machine malfunctions."

Thank you, I'll take a walk in the cabbages.
Kelly

The Gleaners and I(a.k.a. the new media artist)

I’ve actually seen this French documentary before. We watched in my French class two years ago, but I didn’t think about it in the context of new media art or issues of authorship/ownership. When I looked at it through this lens it really struck me that this is exactly what I have been doing in this class – gleaning images from the internet. We take what is available, what is left over, what hasn’t been protected properly. It’s a different type of gleaning (artistic, personal, individualistic), but gleaning nonetheless.

Another interesting aspect of the documentary that I picked up on was the fact that the gleaners were always outsiders, the other. Even people that didn’t glean from necessity were seen as eccentric. Even in a country where gleaning was an established tradition for so long. Is there something inherent in gleaning that makes it an activity for those outside of the mainstream? Does this also apply to us as image-gleaners? It is something to consider.

An interesting side note: I saw this article in the New York Times today about Gilbert and George. Thought it brought up some intriguing examples of “photographic ensembles”. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/arts/design/03gilb.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=design

-Franny

Monday, October, 13

Claudia Pederson and Nicholas Knouf

Monday, October 13, 8.00pm + after party
128 Forest St. formerly named "Orchard St. Kindergarden Studio"
http://contrary.info/esc

Claudia Pederson: On computer games and Wafaa Bilal (Wafaa Bilal's recent exhibition at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, Virtual Jihadi, was closed by the University's administration a day after its initial opening.)

Claudia Costa Pederson, PhD candidate at the history of art and visual studies department at Cornell University. Her interests center on exploring the intersections between play, creativity, critical theory, and social activism. She is currently working on her thesis that investigates digital games as devices for critical inquiry into the relationships between theoretical and scientific thought, art and technology, and institutional powers and social energies. She is also teaching a writing seminar this fall on contemporary art and technology.


Nicholas A. Knouf: on Fluid Nexus (Fluid Nexus is an application for mobile phones that is primarily designed to enable activists to send messages and data amongst themselves independent of a centralized cellular network.)

Nicholas A. Knouf is a PhD student in the Information Science Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. His work explores the interstitial spaces between information science, critical theory, digital art, and science and technology studies. His current projects include a mobile phone messaging application that works independent of a centralized network, and a robotic marionette that provokes non-speech sounds as a means of encouraging the expression of the unspeakable.

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Glean wit it, Rock wit it

Dear Blog,

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

I think that it is interesting how an action that is many times associated with worship and prayer (bending down) is also an action used in times of desperate need.

It is great how gleaning has also become a act of charity which reverses the idea that gleaning is an act to be looked down upon

I also found the stuff about salvaging very interesting. My dad loves to pull stuff out of dumpsters and off the street and put it around our house. I used to be super embarased about it but I came to appreciate it. Also, I wrote my college essay about my dad dumpster diving.

Love,

Asa