Installation

Installation art; a sculptor-based genre of artworks that are usually designed to alter the perception of space and are often site-specific. Because of it's close associations with sculptor, installation art received more acceptance from critics whenever allowed to be showcased within a museum, perhaps this was so seeing how the concepts of sculptor was so familiarized among art critics of that time. Installation art also exploited a sense of time and space, since instillation often required the use of video projections, it also associated what is called time-based media which involves video, sound, and linear/nonlinear time frames.

Nam June Paik explored this concept through Electronic Superhighway in 1995, and Video Jungle in 1977.

Shigeko Kubota was known for incorporating historical art references into her work, such as Duchampiania: Nude Descending a Staircase, 1976, which is an obvious nod to one of Marcel Duchamp's more popular works. The physical structure of the piece resembles that of a staircase with each with a monitor projecting a visual within.

Floating Parallels

As said in the last paragraph for Chapter 2; video art had developed into a profound medium for expressing innovative and experimental narratives. It has since then been viewed as a newly established genre within the art world, one of several mediums. 

Coming into Chapter 2's conclusion, one artist's work reminded of a presentation that was held in class several weeks ago. It was when it mentioned Anna Gaskell, an American photographer who is best known for her "ellipital narrative" series, including her 1997 project; Floater. 

Reading about the contexts about Floater reminded me on the work of another artist, whom worked on several feminist projects including a nude woman tied to the bottom of the water floating still as the wave currents moved steadily. It is to much regret that I can not remember the artists name nor the title of the work I refer to. Reading on this has had me thought about comparing the two works as well as their meaning. 

Personal Narratives

Bill Viola experimented with videotape electronics in his 1973 project; Information, where he used a self-interrupting error to perform a sequence of images he organized remotely, such as the images shown below.

Viola believed that video is a personal medium that helped explore expressive thoughts and philosophies. He explored mystical concepts which heavily influenced his work, such as I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like in 1986.

 The video seeks into the connections to all living things, as well as a mystical journey into Visola's self-aware philosophy.

Shock Value

Some artists such as Ana Mandieta and Chris Burdan express their work through more extreme techniques. For example, In Mandieta's work during graduate training in the Intermedia Department mainly consisted of performances of her distorted in shards of glass, or imprinting her body on sheets of paper while coated with animal blood. All of this was part of a collection of videotapes she titled Body Tracks in 1974. 

Mandieta's work resolved around the visceral connections with her body and nature, Chris Burdan made his work intentionally to startle viewers with their vivid imaginary. In his work: Through the Night Softly  in 1973, Burdan is seen crawling on a floor of broken glass with all his limbs tied together. In 1973, he had his friends witness him nearly being lit on fire in his project Icarus. 

It is said that Burdan's shocking and risky intentions express psychological insights into his relationship with the art world.

Manipulation of the moving image

While working into the television medium, artists had also attempted to experiment more into the technology of the camera itself, creating new works of expressive imaginary that in turn would be usurped by mainstream media and advertising. Artists such as Ed Emshwiller, Dan Sandin, and Kieth Sonnier would all take part in manipulating the camerawork in order to create exotic photographic works of art. Sonnier used an old Scanimate to make image collages including Painted Foot:Black Light (1970), Color Wipe (1973), and Animation II (1974). These abstract shapes and colors portrayed on the screen act as a metaphor to properties of physical paintings seen in classical forms of art.

The husband-wife team that was Stenia and Woody Vasulka worked on projects such as Home and Golden Voyage, 1973, both were made through manipulating the colorizing and electronic imaginary methods used withing video functions.

Other related works include:

Woody Vasulka Art of Memory, 1987

Objects, 1978

Transformations

Inspired by this, artist Nam Jun Paik preformed a similar technique in his work through a device named The Paik/Abe Synthesizer, which was designed for manipulating video image and colorization. This would eventually produce one of his works: Butterfly, in 1986.

A New Medium

"Artists were free to let their imaginations run rampant" as written by Lucy Lippard. Ever since Marcel Duchamp's Fountain  the idea of what truly makes art "Art" has since them been challenged and redefined. To this day we no longer see it exclusively in the form of classical mediums like paintings of well illustrated prostrates or gorgeous landscapes. In a way it has become a more emotional medium, revolving less on how something looks and how it makes the beholder feel, or feel reminded of which. This concept was heavily implied with the performance arts of which would be orchestrated on stage, but by around 1960, ninety percent of people could view these events at home with the availability of home entertainment through television sets. As new media was being introduced to a wider audience, Marshal McLuhan published his book: Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects, which was designed to help explain to new generation on how media impacts their way of living.

Famous artists from the postmodernism era produced several works in the form of video art, such as Andy Warhol who worked on the series Factory Diaries: Paul Johnson, 1965 and Chinese Dinner on Couch, 1965, including Outer and Inner Space in 1965.

Nam June Paik created video related projects not for any commercial purposes, but more on personal expression. which is evident on Zen for Head, 1962. It was to enact La Monte Young's performance score; Draw a straight line and fallow it.

Products of Postmodernism

The mid 20th century was the era where postmodernism took place, which was an era that unlike modernism, focused less on the consents of constructing fully original and innovative ideas, and instead works on expanding concepts that  have been used before, while also containing the attitudes of skepticism and irony. This, of course, would influence the ideologies of performer artists as well as their work. For example, The Wooster Group would reanimate classic theatrical texts while infusing them with new media, and imply the chaotic context of contemporary global culture into the mix as seen in one of their stage projects, Jump Cut in 1997.

F@usto: Verson 3.0 1998, was a performance piece orchestrated by La Fura dels Baus, an international performance group in Barcelona. The performance was designed to showcase disturbing imagery designed to help illustrate the tale of a formal agreement between man and the devil.

Performance of the Feminists

As video recorded performances became a widespread phenomenon for new media artists, feminists had also taken interest in expressing their philosophies into the visual media. One such project was a multimedia performance depicting a graphic tableaux titled To Have No Power Is To Have Power, made by German artist Ulrike Rosenbach in 1978.

The image here was designed for the intention to "attempt in making feminist traditions through resistance to hegemonic representations of women."

Orlan (originally named Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte) was a french multimedia performance artist who would often alter her body through recordings of her surgical operations, by doing so she has made numerous self portraits of her many different appearances including the samples from below.

The Obscure work of Bruce Nauman

Coming back to artist Bruce Nauman, who made his work without the intention for any interactions with an audience, but more to expand on personal qualities, and presenting "live sculptures" using his own body.

One of his works that was showcased in page 49 of Rush's New Media art, describes Anthro/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera).

One of Nauman's work caught my interest in researching, that being the preformance video: Clown Torture. It is said that Nauman often portrayed clowns in his work as it invoked his interest for erratic human behavior and language. The video provided below shows him in some screens moving  his limbs vigorously in random directions while yelling and pleading for help.

Vector Triptych

My vector triptych portrayed some of my personal interests in life in an abstract point of view. from left to right, the letters start from K,S,and A for specific reasons. Each letter was modified in such a way that visually revealed certain aspects that I appreciate in experimenting with  art and how I view selected objects that play a major role in my lifestyle.

The first one started out as a K, and was originally set up in a way that looked like a star, I later changed this to look like what's supposed to resemble written scribbles that are commonly seen on sheets of paper. This was to invoke my interest in drawing by hand. The reason I went with a K was from my online nickname as Kazzy, and is the name I use when showcasing my artwork online. The color was set to a shade of green since I often use that color as my theme.

The S was of course, the initial for my last name, and the name used in my family. Where the K was shaped into harsher and jagged lines with grit (meant to reflect my own work), I made the S into rounder and softer lines. This represents a culmination of my families work in a united form. My mom was a painter and my dad works as a munition, the curved shapes and flowing nature of the shape shows the smoother and calmer nature of their work, in contrast to mine. The set color in mind was a shade of magenta since that is the color that has always come to mind when thinking about the family name.

Lastly, the A is an obscure case, as it represents our home, where our work and memories are made. A is the first of the 26 letters in our alphabet, to me, A is a letter that is often looked up to as a goal to reach, or a place to reach. After working at a long day at work or at school, home is then our destination, our top priority to reach. The colors were a mix of colors that represent the shades of the sky during an outstanding unset out our front porch.

The Art of ASCII

Born in 1966 in Blegrade, Vuk Ćosić was best known as one of the earliest pioneers of net art, or "internet art," which is digital mediums of art made primarily through the internet, rather than the traditionally being display in a museum much like classical works of art.

 Ćosić's most notable works of art mostly involved using software to convert regular images into full ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), that consists of simple characters such as zeros, exclamation points, percentages, commas, periods, ect. They act as the "pixels" of the image in order to successfully mimic the depth, shadows, and texture of the original image. Ćosić often tried to recreate scenes from multiple sources of popular visual media, including ASCII History of Moving Images which is a scene taken from Alfred Hitchcock's film, Psycho, as well as a fully animated scene from The Birds.

ASCII History of Moving Images

The Birds

Ćosić's emphasis on remaking entire scenes in ASCII indicates his interest into what gives art a "historical" aesthetic, as taken from his quote in Mark Tribe and Reena Jana's book New Media Art: “My works and experiments with moving ASCII... [are] carefully directed at their full uselessness from the viewpoint of everyday high tech and all its consequences. I try look into the past and continue the upgrading of some marginalized or forgotten technology.”

Another of Ćosić's related works; ASCII History of Art for the Blind was a specialized webpage that would read out each ASCII character verbally through an recording. 

Private Preformance

Artists such as Raushenberg would express their art publicly through performance theaters, by taking full advantage of technology through the use of projections in combination with actor's moment and gestures. This collaboration would soon bring artists and engineers to form the EAT community in 1967, intended on experimenting with art and technology. This group would soon produce unique works including Robert Whitman's Prune Flat.

Other artists, however, intended on keeping their work private, such as the American Painter Carolee Scheemann, as she conducted "private actions" including Eye Body in 1963, which were described as "bodily still lifes" that would anticipate body and performance art. It's a series of photographs where she wold apply herself with paint, glue, fur, feathers, garden snakes, glass, and plastic as she "re-created mythical goddess imagery, using her own body as the sculpture."

Eye Body,1963

Private media-based performances would later be preformed by multiple artists, including Bruce Nauman, who would preform his projects in isolation, such as Neon Templates of the Left Hand of the My Body Taken at Ten Inch Intervals in 1966, and From Hand to Mouth in 1967.

 Neon Templates of the Left Hand of the My Body Taken at Ten Inch Intervals, 1966

From Hand to Mouth,1967