"Get Rich or Die Tryin’ turned into Got Rich and Stopped Tryin’ again. "

on the subject of an amazing post by friend, art/music enthusiast and badass designer Shanetron, ...well hell, i dont think i could say it much better, i guess you should just check it out. everything seems to borrow from each other in this day and age of the internet, and instant connectivity. hello, its the age of information, and we're overloaded

I'm proud to announce the opening of my Senior B.F.A. Show. apparently, this is the most important night of my undergraduate career! are you ready?! you're probably more ready than i am...

Tanner Young Says Goodbye to College Joys, a Senior Photography B.F.A. show by Tanner Young is a collection of photographs, new and old, from the ongoing project "An Excerpt of Various Photographs Strewn About the Room"

opening reception:

Saturday, April 3rd 5-10pm

Millworks Gallery

106 N. Main Street

Akron, OH

show runs through april 24th

hope to see you there!

Douglas Crimp's The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism

The idea of photography’s inherent postmodernism is something I have been thinking about for awhile now. Beginning with the limitations and inherent qualities of photography, a photograph tells us of a specific time, a specific place, and most of all, a specific reality. Yet ultimately, in the age of postmodernism, we realize that what we bring to a visual object, our own subjective reality and understanding of the world, is ultimately what shapes our experience of said object. For example, in Robert Frank’s photograph Indianapolis, 1956, we see a denim clad, African American couple on their motorcycle, frowning.

In this day and age, the importance of this photo is lost on us (or at least on many in my generation), as the peculiarity of the photo lies in the fact that, in the 50’s, to own a motorcycle and attire like this for a black couple was very rare. The couple in the photo must have been fairly well off, yet still they frown. Upon being told this, our perception and understanding of the photograph changes, because our understanding of reality (retrospectively) changes.

What’s more interesting is chicken and the egg activity of the publicity image. As John Berger states, “The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her at the price of the product.” Without the subject to steal from, the publicity image is nothing, yet without the publicity image, the subject has no idea upon which to base her look.

At any rate, the inherent postmodernism of photography has by now been brought fully into the light with the work of Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Andy Warhol, among others. These days, the appropriated image (as opposed to the artistically composed) is a common part of the artworld vernacular. Yet, these images don’t show us a ghost of reality; what we see in the appropriated image is a reflection of our understanding of the world we live in and how it has been constructed for us and by us. the appropriated photograph strips away all artistic intention and leaves only the social connotations of the image for us to view. the appropriated image shows us how powerful an image is, even without artistic intention or composition. it shows us fully the post-modern activity of photography.

Roland Barthes' The Death of the Author

The Death of the Author serves as a bridge between The Intentional Fallacy and The Expressive Fallacy. While it acknowledges the fallacy of the supreme idea of the author’s intention, as Wimsatt and Beardsley do, he takes it a step further and acknowledges the fallacy of the supreme idea of The Author. To steal from my summary, “the text is a tissue of quotations from centuries.” Basically, the point Barthes in making with this, and overall, is that, as we—ourselves—are the product of many ideas and environments, so too is the personality of the author, the personality that is doing the writing. It follows from here then that if the author is a subjective being made of experiences and the same histories the rest of us share, then his “text is a tissue of quotations,” and as such he holds no authority over our own, the reader’s. in short, “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”

What I find interesting about this is the idea of a shared and constructed history. In modernism there is an idea of universiality of a cultural path; the common view is that all civilizations are on the same cultural path of development and some are at different stages of it. While this is solely western construction describing its own cultural history and ultimately (universally) false, what is true is that true history is universal. Not subjective, written and noted history, but objective history, as it happened outside of subjective experience. Getting back on track, objective history is what constructs us through way of subjective experience which blend together in a unique subjective individual, and through intentionality, our (subjective) consciousness is added to the objective world (history) through way of language, writing and action. As Merleau-Ponty says, our body is a “ground zero,” existing in the physical, objective world, yet housing and expressing our own inner subjective consciousness. What I’m trying to get at is that objective history and reality shapes us, our subjectivity, and ultimately that constructed subjectivity puts back into the physical, objective reality (history). We construct objective history with our actions and the passing of time, and yet this objective history is what constructs us.

So, if we construct an objectivity that constructs our own subjectivity, this objective history becomes, in essence, an essence, an entity. An entity which does exist outside of us, but exists as the sum of us. It is an entity which reaches into us as we reach into it, and is ultimately the ether that connects us all. I want to reiterate that history can indeed be subjective, as it exists in history books that are rewritten and re-interpreted, and this subjective form of history exists in all of us, in our personal history and personal view of history. But objective history exists in the realm of passing time, in what happened simultaneously everywhere at one precise moment in time after another and after another. For example, the web 2.0 is an entity which exists as a product constructed entirely by us, yet the information input to it from different people ultimately reaches and affects us. We then in turn are changed, and input more data, which changes the web 2.0 and all other users, and so on and back and forth, vice versa, etc in a incessant cycle. Yet if we take the internet in its entirety, it is an entity, an objective entity made up of facts(and not facts) which is ever evolving as (and with) us.

Those Defining Moments...

it's so hard to look upset when you're wearing a lobster bib. stupid sobby lobster and his soggy friends.

iPad

a month or so ago i mentioned apple's anticipated computer tablet format. well folks, they just announced it: The iPad

coming in 16, 32 and 64GB, its basically just an oversized ipod touch. honestly, i was expecting it to be a bit more like a tablet computer, but as mentioned previously, its main competition asnd purpose seems to be the Kindle as well as providing a portable screen format for the printed(ing) press to move to.

you can get yours now, but ill wait until summer when they come out with the 128GB and these models are a little more obsolete....aka cheaper.

Camille Utterback and Digital Interactivity

The Myers School of Art really has a great program. Had the chance to attend a (few) lecture(s) from Camille Utterback at school today dealing with her work, her work process, etc. Utterback has been working with (and dare i say pioneering?) digital interactive media since the late 90's. Her work deals with translating movement in visual imagery. One of her more recent works, Abundance, was commissioned as a temporary installation for the city of San Jose by ZER01, for their 01SJ Biennale. i thought that her work looked familiar, and indeed it did; part of the show toured the country as Superlight, one stop being at MoCA Cleveland. And (surprise) the School of Art was able to get the curator to give us a lecture in conjunction with the show.

At any rate, Utterback's work, as i said, translates movement into visual imagery and in turn creates a social interaction between people collaborating together within the visual space to experiment, explore and figure out the way a piece works. Most of her work resembles Abstract Expressionist paintings (in scale of the projection, abstractness of line and the expressive quality of movement), but her most recent piece i find the most interesting. Aurora Organ, was commissioned for the an atrium in the mall at the City of St. Louis Park. (Fuck You, Aurora!!....sorry, i've been on an alkaline trio kick.) The piece translates touching hot spots on the atrium railing into color patterns on corresponding tubes hanging over the stairwell int he atrium. definitely an interesting step from Utterback's 2D projection approach up until now.

Camille Utterback, untitled interactive sculpture, The West End from Steve Dietz on Vimeo.

While her work is interesting, however, there is another approach to this digital synesthesia (synesthesia being a neurological disorder characterized by the mixing and confusing of senses, see Dr. Cytowic's The Man Who Tasted Shapes) that i find more interesting. Utterback's work translates visual movement into visual imagery, but taking a more far-reaching approach was (is) David Rokeby's Very Nervous System all the way back in '88, that translated body movement into song and sound

this is by far one of my favorite interactive pieces to date. that may have something to do with my involvement in music long before the visual arts...

On another (last) note, while Utterback's work deals with social interaction, there are also interactive artists who deal with programming and installation that elicit an emotional response. mostly what comes to mind is fellow ZER01 commissionee Bruce Charlesworth's Love Disorder, which i had the pleasure of seeing at MoCA's Superlight exhibit.

LOVE DISORDER documentation 2009 from Bruce Charlesworth on Vimeo.

LOVE THIS PIECE!!

The Thing that i find most interesting about this piece and similar pieces is the fact that at its base, this is all programming. its a computer generated response to your presence, and yet it elicits and fills you (and is filled itself) with emotion. The computer reads your movement, proximity, etc, nothing more, and yet it moves you to feel something. This is an interesting idea, and one that is only beginning to be explored. im very excited to see the future of digital and interactive media within the realm of art, as its just beginning to peak and really get exciting.