Monday, December 7, 2009
Ayah Bdeir - Portraits
Project in collaboration with "New Images of the Middle East/Images of the New Middle East" --> responses to music of Guy Manoukian, artist and composer, which seeks to modernize traditional middle eastern sounds.
Portraits from ayah bdeir on Vimeo.
Noritz from ayah bdeir on Vimeo.
http://www.ayahbdeir.com/category/work/interaction-design/
also: http://eyebeam.org/press/media/videos/electronics-on-canvas-les-ann%C3%A9es-lumi%C3%A8re-by-ayah-bdeir-eyebeam-open-studios-fall-- for other featured work from Eyebeam.org
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
more Mark Tribe - Carpark
A team of local artists, including Mark Tribe, were invited to launch this enormous project on the campus of Southwestern College in San Diego, California involving the everyday
use of cars and the numerous parking lots that surround the campus. Throughout a 6 or so hour period on a normal weekday morning, a dedicated team of 50 something volunteers and "professional" parking attendants stationed all around the various lots directing every single person that sought to park on campus into a specifically designated lot according to the color of their car. Organized into dark blue, blue, light metallic blue, silver & gray, black, beige, brown, metallic
rasberry, yellow, electric blue, white, aqua, green, and red, the campus soon became transformed, from the everyday mass of people in cars struggling to find the best space in the lot closest to their destination, to a working piece of installation art that created a more interesting, interactive, and thought provoking environment for the thousands of people involved. What a neat project to pull off!
use of cars and the numerous parking lots that surround the campus. Throughout a 6 or so hour period on a normal weekday morning, a dedicated team of 50 something volunteers and "professional" parking attendants stationed all around the various lots directing every single person that sought to park on campus into a specifically designated lot according to the color of their car. Organized into dark blue, blue, light metallic blue, silver & gray, black, beige, brown, metallic
rasberry, yellow, electric blue, white, aqua, green, and red, the campus soon became transformed, from the everyday mass of people in cars struggling to find the best space in the lot closest to their destination, to a working piece of installation art that created a more interesting, interactive, and thought provoking environment for the thousands of people involved. What a neat project to pull off!
I'm drawn to this piece first of all, because of its size and the obvious effort and organizational skills it took to create. Traffic has always been something I have been interested in, simply because it is something that I deal with on a daily basis, like most people, and it is something that is always changing, moving, causing, affecting, preventing, and creating. Especially in parking lots, driving a car and being in traffic can become something incredibly complicated. And for Mark Tribe to think of a way to completely break down the complexity of traffic patterns, and driving attitudes and personal decision making, into something as simple as the color of a car's paint job is kind of amazing in a way. And considering he did not even know how people would react upon entering campus that morning to park their cars, I think that Tribe made quite a bold statement about what it takes to completely change a system, a normalized way of going about doing such a routine action. Also, he suggests how it affects us and creates a spark for creativity, and even lightens the mood in what can be a really frustrating situation at times. Many people had really positive and excited reactions to the project. I know I would be excited to park my car with all of the other silver cars!
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Mark Tribe
Mark Tribe is the founder of the online resource for new media artists, Rhizome.org, that we are so fond of here in class. So, instead of using his wikipedia site to try and look for other artists, I thought that I would check out some of his own stuff....... Here is some of what I found:
Star Spangled Cover
This was a video projection/installation piece that he did in collaboration with New York guitarist Andre Lassale and Greg Tate. He videotaped Lassale doing a complete remake of Jimi Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner" that he played at the Legendary Woodstock (which is amazing as a single musical performance in itself, I know). But then, he created two separate copies of this video that would then be projected onto the same wallspace from two different projectors, except that one copy of the DVD would be completely out of sync with the other copy, creating this blurred and mashed up version of Lassale's performance that created a visually appealing and almost psychadelic moving image to go along with the audio of the song. And to make the installation more apporopriate, and perhaps more completely unified, Tribe projected these two videos against a background contemporary image of Yasgur's farm, the very farm in upstate New York on which the Woodstock concert of 1969 took place.
links to both video clips of the performance and installation here:
To me, this is quite a bold performance installation piece, even if it doesn't even come close to being as epic and intense as what Woodstock itself was for many. I think Tribe is making an interesting comment on what Woodstock meant for those who attended, those who didn't attend but lived to see the history attached to it, and even what it means to us today - this famous legacy of the 60's, hippies, anti-war movements, and psychadelic explorations, all culminating in the massive 1969 multi-day festival. By creating two separate projections of the same video, Tribe touches on this idea of psychadelic images, feelings, and experiences that people most likely were touching on themselves back in the day, especially during the Jimi Hendrix performance of the Star Spangled Banner. This installation reaches out to the two senses that probably rendered the most clear for everyone at Woodstock, sight and sound. And by projecting this video on top of a modern-day picture of what the Woodstock sight looks like today, Tribe is bringing the history of Woodstock back on a new and creative level, one that allows viewers to question the meaning of the past and how it relates to our culture and experiences today. The fact that people perform recreations of the songs performed back at Woodstock, which is obviously not surprising because they are utterly amazing, but the very fact that this happens, that we keep loving and listening to pieces of audio art from 4 decades ago says something about how we live as a society today. And, as someone who is a fan of old classics like Jimi Hendrix, I am quite fascinated by what Tribe has done here.
More work to come from Mark Tribe!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Tribe
Monday, November 9, 2009
more Jeff Crouse - Gearbox!
http://gearbox.mediashed.org/
Gearbox is tutorial and resource site that provides the public (well, people who sign up for membership) with loads of information on how to make cheap films using recycled or found items from your surrounding environment, in order to imitate professional, higher cost techniques for making films. Ex) using a fishing pole for getting a higher up, crane-type shot. This is an awesome way to put the power of art/film making into the hands of the everyday viewer! It also encourages people to really expand upon traditional and professional ways of making films or getting shots, while at the same time reusing and recycling stuff we don't have an everyday use for. Yeah!
http://eyebeam.org/projects/gearbox
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
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