Uncanny valley

Uncanny valley

David Claerbout - The Shape of Time vs postcard

Movie still of the video installation "The Shape of Time" (De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, 2009) of the Belgium artist David Claerbout compared with a postcard of the same photo.

Comment: it is very interesting to talk about the moment when photography being taken, the length (time) inside "the moment" when we normally don't even think about it.

the video and film works from David Claerbout

Untitled (Carl and Julie), 2000

This video shows a man and a girl seated in the shade of the loggia of their holiday house.

The girl is busy drawing, she has her back turned to the spectator. The man looks at the camera.

When a visitor enters the room, he passes by a sensor which causes the girl to turn her head, noticing the visitor's presence, then she continues drawing.

Photography from Niki Lee

Numark's press release:

In Parts, the artist departs from the snapshot depictions of cultural identity for which she has become internationally known to explore how more intimate relationships affect personal identity. As in her previous work, Lee appears in each photograph, which is shot by someone else. Now, however, she carefully stages narrative scenes in which she appears with other performers, typically male companions, who she subsequently cuts out of the picture. The viewer is left to guess the parts that are missing -- the identity of the missing person and the missing holes of the narative story. Although Lee is recognizable in each image, she appears slightly different, emphasizing the artist's interest in the fluidity of identity and the role of personal relationships in one's sense of self.

I believe there are a few key characteristics of the Parts series that should be noted:

1. Lee is present in each image.
2. Lee does not shoot the photograph. Someone else does.
3. Only a portion of what appears to be a male companion is visible in each image.
4. The environment in each shot is different.
5. Lee has chosen to provide three white borders around the image, calling to mind 4x6" prints from Ritz Camera.

Relational Architecture: Building Digital Anti-Monuments

“Relational architecture” is one of my favorite digital media works of art in the public space. The large-scale projection project allows viewers to play with their own shadows displayed on the façade of the architecture. In addition, the artist uses many pre-recorded photo portraits, which were taken in the respective host cities projecting them on the wall under strong light. So basically the viewer wouldn’t see anything before they see their own shadow “uncover” the existing images.

reframing alters perceptual memory ---Barbara Probst

Deep Time of the Media

Deep Time of the Media
Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means
Siegfried Zielinski
Translated by Gloria Custance
Deep Time of the Media takes us on an archaeological quest into the hidden layers of media development—dynamic moments of intense activity in media design and construction that have been largely ignored in the historical-media archaeological record. Siegfried Zielinski argues that the history of the media does not proceed predictably from primitive tools to complex machinery; in Deep Time of the Media, he illuminates turning points of media history—fractures in the predictable—that help us see the new in the old.

Drawing on original source materials, Zielinski explores the technology of devices for hearing and seeing through two thousand years of cultural and technological history. He discovers the contributions of "dreamers and modelers" of media worlds, from the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Russian avant-gardists of the early twentieth century. "Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated," Zielinski writes. He describes models and machines that make this connection: including a theater of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, and the eighteenth-century electrical tele-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others. Uncovering these moments in the media-archaeological record, Zielinski says, brings us into a new relationship with present-day moments; these discoveries in the "deep time" media history shed light on today's media landscape and may help us map our expedition to the media future.


http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10601

"Falling girl" from Scott Sona Snibbe

Falling Girl is an immersive interactive narrative installation that allows the viewer to participate in the story of a young girl falling from a skyscraper. During her miraculously slow descent, the girl reacts to the people and events in each window. Daylight fades, night falls and passes, and at dawn, when the falling girl finally lands on the sidewalk, she is an aged woman bearing no resemblance to the young girl who started her fall minutes before.

Captured on an interactive wall, the silhouettes of viewers viewers appear in apartment windows to juxtapose against the ever-present central image of the girl in silhouette falling slowly as she gets older and older. In this way, viewers participate in this tale about the shortness of our lives and the petty concerns that often occupy us.

The project is a collaboration between interactive media artist Scott Snibbe and choreographer/filmmaker Annie Loui.

comment: I like the process of artwork making, and the way how the technology and literature combine together.

Alex Prager's "Despair"

Yang Fudong's black and white film

"first spring" is the black and white film made by Yang Fudong, although it is made for the commercial Prada, it sill continue showing his style, which is about the memory and mix between the modern society and old time.

black and white film project from New York Time magazine

comment: this semester: I have been working with black and white 16mm film, that's really exciting, and it is so different from the digital video camera.
here is the project which I like a lot, it uses a traditional way but express the contemporary emotion.

art from Sarah Sze

“Sarah Sze uses a mixture of found and everyday objects, placing them in very unusual ways.  These force a interaction between the object and the viewer.  The spaces and patterns that are formed and the negative spaces left also form a narrative.  Lots of strings run around the room everywhere, forming tracks and boundaries and also act as a guide to which direction to take.Grass blades grow through baskets.  The sound of running water can be heard.  Space is a consideration, both enclosed and boundaries.  A string impedes  a fan’s oscillating movement.  It makes me reflect on the way that small nuances can effect bigger issues.

large scale installation from Pipilotti Rist

This wonderful piece is made by Pipilotti Rist in MOMA, it is a large-scale installation.

This is related to the class which I am now taking from Kurt. I have been through the impact of the scale for the viewers and its relationship with the architecture and spaces.

Pepperminta Pipiloti Rist

one of my favorite female artists

Paradise- Zhou Yi

3D animation projected on white marble from Carrara with white rose carved on one facet.
In Terrazza di Saturno, 2006

Krzysztof Wodiczko Perforates Polish Pavilion with “Guests”

Entitled Goście / Guests, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s exhibition greets visitors to the Venice Biennale’s Polish Pavilion with the words of political theorist Hannah Arendt: “Refugees driven from country to country represent the avant-garde of their people.”  Obviously, Arendt is not referring to “avant-garde” in the artspeak sense that you and I may be accustomed to. Rather, she suggests that the state of displacement is one that will be experienced by entire populations, rather than small persecuted groups. The proclamation comes from Arendt’s 1943 article, “We Refugees,” which calls for a resistance to assimilation and predicts the gradual dissolving of European borders and segregated nation-states. In the context of the Biennale, whose very structure upholds the model of the nation-state, the invocation of Arendt is bold, if not contentious.

Effie Wu Project Super Smile

Super Smile, 

Duration: 4'48", 

Date: 2007

Is Effie Wu a good fairy or an evil witch? Neither nor. She is the charming hostess who welcomes you into her home and before you can even bat an eye, she's got you hypnotized and trapped with her **Super Smile**. You willingly float along as she moves from room to room performing her chores: there is no escape. And the moment when it is too late to do anything about it anyway, you realize suddenly that you have become part of Effie Wu. A delightful proposition.

Death and the Powers ---opera of the future

Death and the Powers ---opera of the future /MIT Media Lab

When the eleven robots glide gracefully out on the stage of the Harris Theater to take their curtain call with the cast, composer and conductor of Death and the Powers—and bow their triangular heads in unison—-it’s hard to maintain any lingering objection to Tod Machover’s envelope-pushing, thought-provoking and brilliantly executed opera, a work that raises serious contemporary themes while mostly refusing to take itself too seriously.

Ten Thousand Waves

"Isaac Julien's new nine-screen installationTEN THOUSAND WAVES is to receive its world premiere at the Sydney Biennale in May, followed by its Chinese premiere in Shanghai to coincide with Expo 2010 and its UK premiere at the Hayward Gallery, London in October.

TEN THOUSAND WAVES features Maggie Cheung, Zhao Tao, Yang Fudong, and poems by Wang Ping as commissioned by Julien and was shot on location in China. The work poetically weaves together stories linking China's ancient past and present. Through an architectural installation the work explores the movement of people across countries
and continents and meditates on unfinished journeys."

Comment: the first i saw this large scale installation was in China 2010 before my arrival in America, and second time was the beginning of the 2011 in Miami. Julien as a western people, using the different perspective to describe the news that couple of fishermen died in the accident. he used the special Chinese poetry ways and images in this work. The surrounded videos and sounds provides viewers fantastic imaginary worlds.

Julie Rrap

"Sunbaker is almost like the innocence of the Australian landscape, the sun-worshipping body, and then there's this type of (Pearl John) body that's like it's washed up on shore," she says.

"Nonda and I got quite interested in this and we started to talk about the only people who can arrive (in Australia) now are like dead bodies because then they're not going to cause any problems. We had this whole rave then about what Australia is now, about Tampa and detention centres."

YES Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono's activities as an artist span a truly broad variety of genres: art, music, film, and performance. Her work over the past four decades has taken her around the world, in which process she has come to influence a great number of people, starting with John Lennon.

Back in November 1966, she exhibited her "Ceiling Painting" (or the "YES Painting") at the Indica Gallery of London. Viewers had to climb up a white ladder in the center of the room, from where a magnifying glass hanging from the ceiling allowed them to view the word "YES" written in tiny letters on a framed piece of paper affixed to the ceiling. In fact, the work brought Ono and John Lennon together for the first time - some say that she used the work to seduce the already-married Lennon. There is a famous episode in which Lennon, having climbed up the ladder and read what was written, said, "I would have been quite disappointed if it had said 'NO,' but was saved by the fact it said 'YES'," The two married in 1969.

"Grape Fruits" by Yoko Ono

"Grapefruit: Yoko Ono in 1964". The first survey of this kind, the exhibition will give an in-depth and comprehensive look at a pivotal year in the career of this internationally acknowledged artist. In 1964, two significant events took place: the collection of her instruction pieces, in the book Grapefruit, an important foundation for Ono’s body of work; 

George Herbert Easter Wings Pattern Poem 1633 (concrete poetry)

Description	English: Image of "Easter Wings", a "pattern poem" published in 1633 by George Herbert. As a pattern poem, the work is not only meant to be read, but its shape is meant to be appreciated: In this case, the poem was printed (original image here shownA) on two pages of a book, sideways, so that the lines suggest two birds flying upward, with wings spread out.
Date	Published in 1633
Source	The Noroton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edition, edited by Margaret Ferguson, et al., p 331, New York: W.W. Norton & Company (1996)
Author	George Herbert (1593-1633), the poet who not only wrote the words but designed the look of the words on the page
Permission (Reusing this file)	Not necessary, image is of pages originally published in 1633; the immediate source (Noroton Anthology) merely reprints the original image

"A Little Fable" by Kafka

"A Little Fable" is a short story written by Franz Kafka between 1917 and 1923. The story, only one paragraph in length, was not published in Kafka's lifetime and first appeared in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer (1931).

Plot introduction

A mouse laments its fate, stating that the world, which was once so large and frightening, has grown smaller and forced it into a narrow chamber where he must run into a trap. A cat retorts that to change its fate the mouse need only turn around, and eats it up.

The story

"Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

Popular culture

A comics adaptation of the story, illustrated by Peter Kuper, is included in Give It Up!.