5 Artisit's works that interest me

(in no particular order)

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1. Joseph Hyde's Remember Me

Remember Me is a photobooth. inside the booth lingers a picture on the moniter of the last visitor. that image fades and you take your picture. The booth then asks you to rememeber a face it shows you in the moniter. that face is a picture of someone else thats been in the booth. that face changes to another confusing the user. the booth then displays differant people thatve been in the booth before. they ask you 2 question about the orginal strangers face you saw. the booth then asks the user to create a quesion. Your picture is used as a late face to remmeber and then you question is asked to later users. the user then walks out and a strip of photos from his visit prints out. This work greatly mimics my ideas of personal photo recognition. a photo being not as much used as a picture but more so as a link to a memory. the work also bring up concepts of facial recognition. i've often wondered if id recognize myself in the photo so quickly if i didnt remember the moment the photo was taken

2. Kevin Seifert's Model of Harmony

This is a work done in flash. it's a visual representation of sound. Each sphere is assigned a note. Different aspects can be changed such as type of sound and visualization. One consistency are the notes. there are always 12 notes. This piece "can be a visualization tool for songwriters or students of music. Or it can simply be a stress-reduction toy." My interest in this piece directly comes from my introduction into the sound program "Logic" this semester. i find the relationship that such programs draw between audio and visual fascinating. the range and scope of how sounds are visually represented are rather broad. I was curious to hear what a musician had to say about the piece. me being musically inclined myself i asked my roommate who is presently in the local rock band "Marion." (guitar, vocals, keyboard, songwriter)He found that the 3D layout was rather confusing and complicated and found no correlation between the 3D layout and the notes. "I don't know why anyone would want it." He preferred the 2D layout much more so. This inspired my own thought on creating a real 3D space in which each ball creates a different note correlating to their placement in that space. I feel this specific work is more effective as a "stress-reduction toy."

3. Maurice Benayoun's Crossing Talks

Crossings Talks is a virtual plane that consists of square rooms set up as a grid. The manner in which people talk dictates the slide of the grid and the tilt. in order to stabilize their virtual world the users must communicate. Alot of my own intrests in art deal with digital representation of ones self and how others preceive that. this piece caters to that but also brings to mind the use of unstable communication devices such as my cell phone. My cell phone is used to help me communicate, but my phone is old and service is poor therefore i spend most of my communication time trying to hear others, yelling into the phone, or repeating "what?" i spend more time trying to stabilize my environment then i do using it as a form of communication.


4. Ga Zhang's People's Portrait

In this work Ga Zhang project a persons face in a highly populated and visible area, for example Times Square. I feel this invites people to consider a strangers face. first people try to recognize the face and relate to it, relate to features and perhaps compare it to others they may know personally. Then people might consider what that stranger might think seeing their face projected in times square followed by relating to their own face and then considering their face being projected. Finally people will reflect upon their own face and what they look like to themselves and what they look like to others. This piece can work on many levels. that is one that i found that might relate to my own work and i feel inspires some new work.


5. Masaki Fujihata's Global Interiors

Global Interiors bring to mind fascinating concepts of virtual reality and digital self representation. One thing that has intrigued me in the last year or so has been Avatars. A sort of icon for an entire person. As i've mentioned more then once in this blog entry, i have a great fascination with digital representation. Masaki Fujihata's work takes place in a virtual environment. users are assigned an object that becomes their avatar. The users face is mapped on from a video taken at the booth they're situated in. they can control said avatar via a trackball. The works purpose seems to work as almost a reminder of what virtual space is. virtual worlds bring about alot of inspiration and questions to mind. questions such as; "how do we choose to represent ourselves if the possibilities are endless?"(SNs, icon, avatars, colors, patches on bags) "how do we act in an environment that we 'exsist' in but are virtual?" and finally "how do we interact with others in a virtual space knowing others are also avatars living in a virtual world?".