Monday, November 23, 2015

Gallery Response:

A couple of weeks ago, we had our art exhibit. Although I didnt have a booklet with all of my photos I felt really good about the two framed ones I had up. People came up to me to ask me questions about my photos and I very much enjoyed answering them. I dont like to give too much away about my pieces but I was proud nonetheless of our whole class for creating such cool pieces. I especially liked Colt Duncan's works as I know him to be very interested in and adept at photography. It was a very cool exhibition and I was glad to be a part of it.
   Miriam Beerman: Expressing the Chaos           

        In Jonathan Gruber's documentary, Miriam Beerman: Expressing the Chaos, Miriam Beerman comments on the subjectivity of art and how she believes it is not fair for an artist the explain their intentions with a piece of art. This is because she believed that by telling the audience what her intentions were, she was limiting their experience as well as perception of the art. I find this to be similar to Edward Vessel's study on the brain's reaction to art. Vessel found that each person has a different perception of what art they like and what art inspires them. By limiting the audiences perception of the art by telling them the artist intention, you are limiting the brain's activity. The brain is forced into a box in which it is unable to think out of.  I believe that the artist interpretation is only meant to guide the audience's perception. I do believe there is a place for it in art, however i also believe that in experimental arts, the artist has no right to sway the audiences perception of a piece toward or away from an emotion that is naturally evoked by the piece.
Pat Commins By Mark Lofgren













https://flic.kr/s/aHskpUTXwx

https://flic.kr/p/Atzsrb

For this project I chose Pat Commins as my subject. I did so because we are friends but mostly because he is leaving after this term and I thought it would be fun to commemorate pats last term here. I took a relaxed approach to taking my photos of Pat as I wanted to give them a kind of candid and amateurish style to them. Robert Frank over exposed his photos whereas I chose to let them stand on their own other than minor detail editing. I found it fun to accomplish my task in this project as I generally hang out with Pat anyway. Problems I ran into were my limited experience with downloading photos from my phone, limited photoshop experience, and trying to choose the right photos out of the many I took.
Edward A. Vessel Talk:

           Edward Vessel works in neuroscience and he focuses his work on the responses people have toward art and the behind the scenes brain activity that occurs. Using an fMRI machine to record brain activity, Vessel seeks to understand how people and ergo the brain derives pleasure and inspiration from artwork. While I am not very knowledgable on this topic, it is very interesting nonetheless. While other researchers choose to look at the similarities between individual brain reactions to art, Vessel uses the fMRI machine to portray the differences each individual has to art work. In his article, Art Reaches Within: Aesthetic Experience, The Self, and The Default Mode Network, Vessel describes the results for his experiment, "Analysis of the behavioral responses revealed that responses were indeed highly individual: there was little agreement between observers regarding how moving each painting was. This means that, on average, each image was rated as highly moving by one subset of observers and rated poorly by another subset of observers." Indeed, reactions to art between individuals are very different. Thus, proving the old adage, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

            I did a presentation on Charlotte Moorman, acclaimed avant-gardest and cellist. My main point was that her art was executed in order to establish a union of man and technology in the face of that same technology growing out of our hands.
             There are many reasons for Marshal McLuhan to include a photo of Charlotte Moorman in his book, Understanding Media. Moorman’s pieces, especially when collaborating with fellow artist Nam June Paik, fused sculpture, performance, music, commerce, and art. Paik’s use of Moorman and the TV Bra, for instance, was his way of humanizing technology by forcing it into a fusion with the human body and incorporating it into art performance (Fogle, Douglas). While Moorman and the cello were earthy and fleshy, the TV Bra was a pair of essentially electronic pasties which were wired and and devoid of emotion. Together these two aspects turned Moorman into the perfect artist for the McLuhan age, an era when technological gadgets were not the universal bodily prostheses that they are today.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Sound Project

I took a couple of cartoon shows from when I was a kid and put them together.