MATX Homework- Upload an sketch to the web
vaughn whitney garland
MATX Homework- Upload an sketch to the web
Second City
Video and Sound Installation
2010
Vaughn Whitney Garland
Below is a description of a installation piece I am currently working on. The installation will have two running projectors, which will be screened on two adjoining walls, and will include a sound piece looped in with the video projections.
The right wall projection will have "The Second City," which is a collection of 688 google street map images I screen captured from my computer of the road from California City CA to failed, abandoned expansion into an adjoining sister city called "The Second City". Second city is a city completely designed and built with intersecting road and road names but never produced buildings or city structures. The images used in this part of the project will be a combination of google street views which I have re-taken through apple screen shot. I manipulated the digital reality of the image by taking the screen shot when one image moved into the next as the google car traveled down the road on my computer screen.
The almost 2 hour video is built out of 688 google street view photographs that have been manipulating within the process of captuing the image from the web. Each image is manipulated and abstracted by screen captuing consecutive google street view photographs. Each image is taken as the forward arrow keystroke advanced the former image into the next image following the progression of the car as it collects data by traveling down the road between California City to the Second City. As the screen advances into the next screen shot in Google Street View I "took" a picture of the picture, which captured and revealed the transference of one image to the next. I have not manipulated the color of the image in any way. The colors you see in each photograph was the same in the original photograph.
I hope that manipulating the image by removing it further from its reality I have removed the viewer's realness from the image to a point of dissolution. I hope that I may comment on the construction of the images by revealing a separation between the viewer's identity of a place and the identity that place carries in the digital environment.
The images I have collected and manipulated from Google Street View begin from a digital image taken and collected by a camera on top of the google car. Then, the image is further removed through image manipulation on the computer and further removed from reality through the linking and overlaping into a video. The only real part of this event was the google car traveling down a abandoned road. We, the viewers, were never there. Yet, the photograph give us a false hope of our own travels down this landscape.
The left wall projection will be a collection of text taken from chapters 7, 8, and 9 of Huckleberry Finn. In chapter of 7, 8, and 9 of Huckleberry Finn two things happen that are extremely important in dealing with identity. Huck meets and befriends Jim, a runaway slave, and they both find a dead man floating down the river in a runaway house. In both of these interactions Huck is face what what he thinks is real and what is not, first with meeting and identifying with Jim and second with coming across the remnants of a former life in the dead man's loss of identity. For Huck, and for the reader, Jim is seen as the individual revealed and the dead man is seen as the individual hidden.
The sound will be a collection of audio bites from Stanley Kramer 1959 movie On the Beach. In the 1959 movie, Kramer establishes the presence of a radiation fallout that has cover and destroyed every part of the world except one town in Australia. Even knowing the loss that is about to happen the town's occupants continue to go on with the daily business. For the installation I will have removed almost every speaking role in the movie and only rely on the background music and sounds of what is happening in the movie. This, i hope, will add onto the notion of a personal removal of identity.
The installation will take place only in a designated environment and will not be manipulated for the web. The only ways I hope to document this project is through three steps.
Part of the installation will be digital photographs of some of the google street screen shots. These prints will hang in the same installation environment but in an adjoining space beside the video installation.
The gallery installation screens will be roughly 9 feet tall and 12-15 feet wide.
Critique Philosophy for Spring 2010 MATX Lab
I believe that the critique process is a very important part of my philosophy on work, art, and life. In the critique setting I hope to openly develop conversations with my peers that ac knowledges and respects the level of exchange taking place between the audiences, yet recognizing the object of the critique as the sole point of study. Since the students and faculty in the Media, Art, and Text (MATX) program come to the critique process with different types of knowledge skills the most important facet of the critique process should be respect for the level of knowledge already attained by the student’s background. My belief throughout the past year stems from a desire to promote respect for all participants that wish to take part in the conversations happening through our MATX classroom. In fact, I believe that a desired respect for the process and each other is critical to the success of addressing strengths and weaknesses within each other along with a continued respect for our esteemed disciplines.
I also believe that the critique has a language all to its own. I believe that that language can promote critical dialogue between theoretical philosophies and cause the practice of making to join in the act of making. At no point should the dialogue be removed from the object being critiqued. In fact, the object being critiqued should at all time be the focus of inquiry and not become second hand to the theoretical situations that may or may not define it. Since the MATX program takes a similar stance in structure I believe that the critique process should be the foundation of this program in every aspect. In the MATX program students and faculty should be free to learn from each other through constructive dialogue. Furthermore, since our own program finds itself at the forefront of its independent studies of Art, Text, and Media I believe that our communal philosophy to engage in the work, presented by students or faculty, should be considered of utmost importance.
In order to engage all works of art equally, and I use all works of art specifically here to encourage that we take a step away from continued main focus of online poetry and involve the studio arts equally into our curriculum, we must encourage respect for all types of work which find presence in our own disciplines. This is why I believe strongly that not all of our focus in this program should be paid to what lives on the Internet. I believe that there are so many more exchanges of ideas coming from the studio visual arts that do not find their way to the Internet. Due to their importance as reputable pieces of contemporary art, and their interdisciplinary construction these projects should also be acceptable for further critical discourse in our lab critique. This is why I will continue to press a discussion of the projects that refuse the online environment and yet are seen as symbols of the multimedia/digital process. I also find it problematic that we force our projects to live outside themselves and will continue to look at the work of art for what it is not what we want it to do.
It is prudent to establish the immense broadness of the nature of our own backgrounds and schools of thought. Yet, since, the nature of this program is to find points that may cross from one discipline to another it is vital that the theory of making a work of art be thrashed out equally as with the practice of making. In fact, since the critique in my discipline is the most engaged, cultivated, and accepted type of sophisticated and critical conversation where theory meets practice the critique structure allows for a unique type of knowledge that is even beneficial to the act of making.
I believe that in order to foster the type of discussion sought in the critique construction all participants should respect the levels of knowledge when are brought to the discussion. Members of the critique process should build onto the dialogue already taken place and not pander to a suggestion that in order to understand each other the conversation must start from the beginning. Leaning of any type should begin where the level of understanding shows the way. This is why the critique process is so very important for it focuses the discussion away from the general conversation and onto the individual project in depth. Within the critique structure the individual project becomes the item of evaluation; so, the individual who creates the project becomes the focus of attention and assessment. At this time in the critique process the criteria of the critique becomes a learned and shared discussion from one person to another. The individual who receives the critique is expected to come to the critique ready for an highly developed, complex, and often difficult conversation which might uncover realizations or problems hidden throughout the making of the work. The critique is successful when it reveals what the artist, or the discussion, has not considered beforehand.
In other words….
I believe in art, life, and love.
I believe in the history that many before me felt the same way.
I believe in you.
I believe in me.
I believe many suffer daily and that this should be our greatest concern in life.
I believe we do not know as much as we think we do.
I believe laws of arrogance follow fools while kindness trumpets the wise.
I believe in an education and good health for all.
I believe that the brilliant and the humble are those who labor with children.
I believe the most important quality for humankind is respect.
I believe our greatest weapon is questioning authority.
I believe that individual freedom is always possible but rarely sought.
I believe offering happiness to others gains intelligence for all.
I believe art is a daily activity and continues to empower.
I believe we must sometimes be cheesy but never tawdry.
I believe humor is a human right, as much as justice.
I believe in goodness.
I believe in honesty and truth.
I believe facts should at all times be tested.
I believe in chances.
I believe in the struggle.
I believe in the song, the sound, and the noise.
I believe in the cry.
I believe in beauty as much as I believe in shame.
I believe in nature.
I believe not in the dominance of the earth, nor the wickedness of our hands.
I believe that the soil we tend is a gift like I believe the air we breath is not our own.
I believe not what we consider to be God but that a God does exist somewhere, somehow.
I believe progress is undermined by power.
I believe the loudest voice we have is through joining hands.
I believe we challenge the notions of the day in hopes to open the door for tomorrow.
I believe that invention is not always the answer.
I believe that turnips and tomatoes are best eaten straight from the garden.
I believe in community.
I believe in practice.
I believe in patience.
I believe perfection leads to many headaches.
I believe I do not understand anything.
I believe I am okay.
Second Critique Project
The Bunny Book
PDF flipbook made from
open source images made
available from the web.
Book length is 37 pages
(including front cover)
2010
Vaughn Whitney Garland
Premise of Project
After several discussions in the lab course, it became clear to me that the students in the class would benefit from a more detailed dialogue about the use of new technological formats and processes in the arts, and the problems that arise in interpretation. Over the past several months, in order to develop a conversation, I started a project that would focus interpretation of an art object on a discussion about that object, as opposed to a critique of the object itself. My hope was to engage students in the class by starting a debate about how to classify a visual work of art that would only be documented as an aural discussion. I chose to assemble images and text into a book format only visible on the computer. Even though the book looks lifelike on the screen, it will not exist in material/physical space. The book will only be viewed through a computer program: as a PDF flipbook
The purpose of creating a book is two-fold. First, my project calls attention to the significance the MATX program has placed on the concept of the book, and how the introduction of digital texts has redefined the book. Secondly, the work comments on the reliance of the visual “look” or “feel” of a book: even though this format is digital the book is not. So, why is it that when we look at this grouping of images that mimics a book’s format, do we expect that it exists (or will eventually exist) as a physical object?
Do all things need to be documented in order to have a place in the world? Or, more specifically, must a visual object be documented visually, whether through physical means or digital? Since I do not consider this project as an object, how can I justify its need for documentation? If fact, what I think is the essential documentation is the discourse that might be created by people encountering the object, not the object itself. Like Tino Shegal’s recent Guggenheim NY exhibition where there is no tangible object nor document, what is left is the conversation, the experience. I am increasingly interested in this idea, the relationship between an object and the documentation of that object. How may one discuss what is not there? What is left is the abstract thought. What we do not have is the object that plays the role of vessel. Does that make the project invalid?
Given the history of books as printed objects, my project also references concepts of reproduction and originality. This digital book was created entirely using “fair use” or open source images. Conducting Google searches and “appropriating” information from online sources is common, so questions of origin and author are still viable subjects of inquiry. Is my project solely mine, or does it belong to every person who contributed open source images that I appropriated? These are questions still left to be explored.
(Below is a letter sent to studio peers describing the second critique project. I also included a PDF that will not be presented here in this document.)
“Howdy, this project (the pdf file attached below) is specifically intended to evoke questions related to contemporary uses of multimedia artwork. With the project, I want to address multi-media platforms, their definitions and uses, and how they can be employed to make art. Furthermore, I wish to start a dialogue about image “sourcing,’ a subject that has interested me over the past several years. I would also like to address the possibilities of image linking through the creative art process.
That said, I hope this critique will be less about the outcome of this specific project and more about the issues that it raises, including: clarifying the definitions of current multimedia movements and artforms; developing a dialogue about the myriad and eve-expanding options of presentation; and using image sources and platforms to explore various types of multimedia artforms.
About my piece:
I have made a book!
Actually it is a digital image collection.
Over the past several weeks I have worked nonstop on collecting information and images from open source databanks online. Most of the images you will see during this work are taken directly from Wikipedia, or other open source databanks. I have also used a small collection of my own images, and a percentage of images from online sources that encourage image use and have given the rights of each image. Every image is constructed or manipulated in some way-- even down to the paper grain in some cases. I am very interested in the way our brains collect information online and how the mode of collection depends upon hyper-textural stimuli. The information sources that you see in the images are paths my own mind took while creating the image. I collected these images solely through Google searches and online databank searches. In the exercise of collecting data the search for one image would then lead to another search, and then another, etc, until a page of the book was finished, according to my own aesthetic appraisal. Each page maps my own image/information searches in a visual way.
Furthermore, the uses of text is purely visual and stand as parts of the image and nothing more; text is part of the visual rebus that links one image to the next. The most important aspect of this book is that it is purely ephemeral and not intended to by tangible; I do not want to print this book nor put it online to exist into perpetuity. This is a work of art that I present to this class only and is NOT meant to be placed back onto the web. It serves as a catalyst for consideration and discussion. The format you see is exactly what I want for this project, nothing more.
My questions to you.
Please look over the definitions of multimedia art below that I have also sourced through Wikipedia and try to define what type of project I am working with here. As you can tell by the list below there are many different ways to classify a multimedia art piece, especially those that are created through multimedia environments. I would like to know from you where you think this project resides in terms of the definitions below.
Furthermore, since I do not want this represented online after it is created I would like to know what you think I should do in order to document my project or even if a document is needed. Would a document exist only to serve as evidence that this book existed? How would we define the documentation? Are there instances when I would need to put a document of this project online and what that document will look like? Hopefully we can come to a conclusion of what this project is and how it might be handled but I ask that we do so by using the language already defined by the list of terms below. If you would like to add more information to the list please feel free. Hopefully we can all attribute to this discussion.
Cheers,
Vaughn Garland”
Multimedia Art Definitions
Mixed media
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_media
Multimedia artist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_artist
Electronic media
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_media
Electronic art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_art
New media art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media_art
Digital art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_art
Computer art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_art
Internet art or “Net Art”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_art
Virtual art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_art
Cyberarts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberarts
Information art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_art
Systems art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_art
Interactive art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_art
Cyberformance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberformance
Tradigital art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradigital_art
InfoVis Art
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_visualization
Net-poetry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net-poetry
Hypertext fiction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_fiction
The Remaining Conversation
The class conversation, held on the evening of April 22 2010, was documented through an audio recorder. After finding out that the conversation was recorded and meant to be uploaded to the internet, one student chose to decline participation and asked that the recording not be made open to the listening public. To respect the wishes of the one participant, I made the decision to erase the audio record of the lab discussion. Furthermore, due to the MATX lab conversation held on 4/29/2010 by the course instructor, who felt uncomfortable with the project’s audio capture, I have now erased all students’ written comments logged on the Course blackboard environment. What is left of this project is this present document.
Final Theoretical Introduction for e-portfolio 5/2/2010
Over the past two semesters my interest in how the visual art object corresponds with its relation to the external language used to interpret, state, and or describe it. This interest has compelled me to examine the role of the object in comparison to the role of the language. Does the object rely on the documentation? Is the documentation a true knowledge source for the object? Is one documentation style more significant than another? Where would the document rest in juxtaposition to the object? Finally, can the document call for the death of the object, or vice versa? The question of the reliance of the object to the documentation solicits an inquiry into the notion of what is object and how the object might chance according to the language used to describe it.
It is my aim, and my hope, to illustrate that the document and the object are two separate articles of data that may at sometimes exist concurrently, but not always be limited by each other. I am more interested in objects that are in some ways become disassociated with their language: whether it be website that is hard to navigate, performance art like Tino Sehgal, who have created objects without the presence of a physical object, or imagery/sculpture where the attached apparatus of data given is not easily located. For Example, when one would conduct a Google search of the Mona Lisa, does the “Mona Lisa Restaurant” support the painting’s meaning? Does the website titled “Monitoring Agents using a Large Integrated Services Architecture (MonA LISA)” define what the Mona Lisa is? Or what if people put primacy on the document? Is seeing a postcard of the Mona Lisa equated to seeing the painting in person? Sometimes, the documents distract from the source.
Over the summer it is my aim to rework my website to build an online environment that, by function, is removed and disjointed from the idea of object. I want to focus on how one may be challenged by the notion of an object’s reliance on language or vice versa. It is my hope to submit a website for my eportfolio review that will challenge the notion of object and document.