Collaborative Virtual Space

[An image of our projected space. Yukimi interacts with the projection as it shifts haphazardly.] This installation became an intriguing exploration in how aspects of cooperation and randomness can create new artistic interpretations and perspectives. We had little influence over one another’s choices, so the project ultimately generated a genuine meld of individual expression and aesthetic. Although this kind of spontaneous meshing proved challenging to implement, it had relevant implications for our unit, dealing with spaces caught somewhere between material and virtual, as we were mitigating between and fueling our own unique conceptual approaches made virtually and our physical actions within a tangible space.

Grid Project – Artist Statement

Birds of flight and their anatomy are deeply woven into stories of faith, morality and freedom as well as many culturally specific metaphors. Feathers exist as perhaps the most commonly mentioned and depicted animal appendage when humans seek to describe our own condition. This widespread attraction to the usage of avian features in culture and ideology creates potential for many interpretations of a feathers meaning, as well as ambiguity. The history of feathers pertaining to religion and symbology prompted me to approach assembling the scanned images in a way that represents my own elusive take on god’s presence (or lack thereof) within a cosmic landscape.

Visually, I wanted to capture a vast, obvious movement in my project, which contradicted the qualities of my small and nebulous material. While a feather’s veins create a solid, linear pattern that moves with purpose, the wispy, hairlike after feathers posses no set directionality or form. I was however drawn to the high transparency 0f after feathers, their see-through quality allowed for digital layering without sacrificing authenticity of the object. One surprising outcome of scanning was the painted, surreal appearance of certain images — they occur as altered, yet authentic captures of nature.

Utilizing a series of squares (grid) initially felt like a limitation, and I struggled to eliminate their straight lines and shape them into a more organic environment— that of birds and galaxies. Eventually I found myself bringing back specific digital edges, however. These areas don’t attempt to hide the digital nature of my piece, and in fact accentuate it in some cases. I feel this relationship between biological nature and geometric virtuality is an interesting aspect of my image.

Scale was a prominent factor in my decision making throughout. I sought to create a landscape inspired by immense, often overwhelming galactic satellite images. The idea of inch-long after feathers representing a 5 million lightyear wide space intrigued me to explore how size is perceived within various contexts.

Jason Fulford: Raising Frogs for $$$

Jason Fulford is a difficult artist to pigeonhole, conceptually. Aesthetically, however, the work he shares is easily recognizable. I enjoy the large scale spectrum and perspective he deals with, while maintaining certain visual restraints. His photographs are all perfectly square for example, usually depicting inanimate objects. He rarely photographs people. He provides space and context for the viewer to freely interpret his work, with a heavy focus on the editorial authorship of his photographs.

Often, Fulford’s work appears amateur and easy to reproduce. This may be a conscious decision on his part to effect the viewer in a natural, one-on-one narrative. Without the use of expensive lighting, effects, or other manipulations, he speaks a language that is familiar to us on a personal level.

Overall, if there was one concept that permeated his body of work, it was that of association. Within his first and last books in particular, he explores the way our brains create meaning through association and sometimes cause lapses in logic along the way. “Raising Frogs for $$$” focused greatly on associative tendencies and how design within a book page can increase their sway on our imaginations. Furthermore, Fulford influences viewers to see associations that would never otherwise exist, wherein image A equals image B, image B equals image C, and our minds will see associations between image A and C, where we would never have intuitively made associations before. He plays with our instinctive concepts of truth through design relationships. This kind of psychological twist drew me to his work more than the quality of his photographs themselves.

I enjoyed Fulford’s process of creating semi- linear narratives from chaos. When he laid them out on the floor, his photos at first seem displaced in time and place, with little obvious ubiquity. By simply organizing them in a different way, he creates a narrative that flows from one to the next, eventually returning to create a circular relationship. While simply two randomly chosen photos from his body of work would most likely share nothing in common, experiencing them together with others in a sequence creates new associations. Additionally, I see Fulford’s method of display as a way to stack meaning from one image to the next. He himself describes his most recent compilation as a “a book of bad pictures”. I.E, individually they don’t provide a very effective, founded point, but when laced together, do create narrative complexity, and opportunity for unique interpretation.

Fulford relates his approach to that of poetry, where the poet utilizes ambiguity in his/her rhetoric to allow space for a variety of interpretations. I agreed that ambiguity is a challenging element to balance within art. Not enough essentially sterilizes imagination/ contribution of the viewer, while too much can lead to confusion and a different sort of banality. Music theory cropped up in this discussion as well. William Empson’s 7 Types of Ambiguity claims music is “ambiguity as a system”, an idea which runs parallel toFulford’s own artistic approach.

When asked why he photographs scenery and inanimate objects as apposed to humans, Fulford explains that by omitting the presence of a “protagonist” within his photos, he allows viewers to fulfill the role themselves. This empathic nature of his work is arguably the core variable of all successful artworks. Whether it be empathy expressed for the viewer, empathy that the viewer is able to express for the artist or empathy expressed for a third party. I am inspired by the slowly evolving levels of empathy within Fulford’s work. While individually, his images often appear bland and impersonal, within a sequence, they stack meanings to create rich and unexpected storytelling landscapes, and through doing so, illuminate facets of the shared human experience.

Sharon Hayes Lecture Response

An innovative artist, performer, organizer, and arguably, historian, Sharon Hayes comes across as a woman with an extensive knowledge base at her disposal, as well as a great awareness of her own lack of knowing. In her work, she focuses almost exclusively on historical events, movements or social issues, which she herself has experienced in a concrete, visceral way. This “write what you know” approach starkly contrasts with a vast number of her contemporaries, certainly including last weeks visiting artist, Laura Parnes.

Haye’s work, always informed by or pulling directly from historical documents and events, specifically those addressing feminist and queer politics, attempts to pull her viewers into evocative, alternative redefinitions of the past. These ‘respoken’ works exist within a revolving, nonlinear landscape of past, present, and future. Similar to Kurt Vonnegut’s iterations of time in his relativistic postmodern novel, Slaughterhouse Five, Haye’s creates opportunity for her viewers to become “unstuck in time” and open a conceptual space for new interpretations of the past, along with the potential for new futures.

Hayes open’s by skimming through her earlier works, beginning with “Pier 54”, a feminist play on the previously all male project, “Pier 18”. She discusses the motives behind the organization of women, but also critiques their methods of articulating these motives. Clearly, she isn’t the type of woman who moves along the grain, even when discussing a movement she fundamentally supports. She also isn’t afraid to laugh at herself or the people she associates with. This mentality, a combination of skepticism, grey-scaping and  humility,  is key to understanding Haye’s artist statement and work.

Still from Haye’s interactive video piece which “Respoke” text from the the Patty Hearst kidnapping in 1974

“Sex, Power and the Media”, a lecture hosted by feminist writer and media activist Ann Simonton, provided Sharon Hayes her first “cliched awakening” moment. Hayes ponders this idea of awakening and the event for at least 10 minutes before moving on. Later, it became apparent that a majority of her work attempts to serve a similar purpose as the Simonton lecture. Each piece addresses a moment in time within a political or social atmosphere, sometimes using a direct citation, and seeks to pull viewers into a moment informed by the past, but yet entirely relevant to present day, and evoke an ‘awakening’ response to this resurrected moment.

Hayes articulates the distinction between reenactment of events, and her own method, “Respeaking”. She seemed to imply that reenactment mostly serves to rehash concrete historical facts (or at least our most commonly accepted versions of them) in the physical world, Hayes seeks to generate controversy, new ideas, “fissions” within a particular timeline that branch off from what we know to be true into the unknown world of what might have been.

Documents vs. documentation is another distinction she addresses, where documentation has the feeling of disassociation and de-personalization from the past while a document (such as photos, tape recording, broadcast etc.) have the potential to nurture intimate relationships with the viewer. This description of historical ‘document’ made me curious to find out more about what elements have made particular objects so evocative to us, decades and centuries after they were conceived. But it is certainly a question as complex as the classic “why do we love the Mona Lisa so much?” conundrum. It is also an inquiry that can be answered using methods from a myriad of disciplines, some contradictory. One could argue that the mathematical principles Da Vinci inscribed are the key, while another could implore Freudian psychology for the answers. Nonetheless it is a topic which I hope to explore further in the future.

An example of Haye’s resurrection of photo documents / text that instill a permanence in people’s minds when recollecting periods or events in history which she inserts into contemporary contexts.

Although Sharon Hayes is undoubtably focused on the history of particular social and political movements, her focus is not on representing any single, absolute truth from or about the past, nor is it to pull the modern day viewer into a time machine. Instead, Haye’s seeks to articulate and deconstruct the ways in which we conceive of time, pulling back the curtain which we inevitably place between now, then, and later, and creating opportunity for new interpretations, as well as new awakenings of the conscious.

Virtuality, Historical to Contemporary

Response to Nicholas Mirzoeff – Virtuality: from virtual antiquity to the pixel zone

Virtuality: the illusion of image or space that doesn’t exist within tangible reality.

In contemporary times, virtuality examples include: television, computers, cellphones, etc. These virtual tools link us on a global scale and have incredible impacts on the world’s economic political and cultural landscapes, including of course, the art world. Over time and with greater usage of these technologies, distinctions between real and virtual have become more ambiguous. What is reality, what is virtual? We can think of virtual reality interactions as having degrees , or levels of of virtuality, based on their closeness to a truly virtual environment. One way of articulating this idea is by looking at information transfers between people and their devices.

Today, we live in a constant flux between virtual and real, often with little concept of which we are experiencing at any given time. This can present new challenges for artists to create within a competitive virtual sphere, as well as opportunity for more globalized, dynamic and complex interactions among diverse people.

Mirzoeff coins the term Virtual Antiquity. which he argues is a type of virtual reality that has existed since long  before advent of computers, telephone, etc. Neoclassicism, an art movement of the mid 18th century which sought to resurrect ancient Greek and Roman artwork, is his prime example of a movement which tapped into virtual antiquity, essentially transporting the viewer to a time and place that existed long before he was even born.

Mirzoeff quotes the famous 18th century poet Goeff, when he claimed to be completely “transported out of reality” upon viewing this fragment of a classical statue known as Apollo Belvedere. This is an example of a perceived virtuality created by a tangible object, different from modern day tech. Thomas Jefferson reacted similarly when he saw this neoclassical painting “Marius and the Gaul”, writing that he “lost all ideas of time, even the consciousness of his own existence”.

~Apollo Belvedere

~Marius and the Gaul by Jean–Germain Drouais

Panorama: word itself refers to the format of a the painting, the edifice it hangs on and the painting itself. Mirzoeff argues that this emphasis on the paintings form creates a kind of architectural virtuality. 

Diorama: Illuminated watercolor paintings that create an illusion of 3D space, and change with perspective.

Panoramas and dioramas were thought to be so realistic that teachers would send their students to seek them out to study from “nature”.

Poet William Wordsworth called  them “mimic sights that mimic the absolute presence of reality”.

 

Steroscope:

2D images that stack to create 3D illusion. usually depicting foreign cities or landscapes that the viewer would most likely never be able to visit in reality.

Viewers had similar experiences to Jefferson and Goeff, but they new exactly where they were visiting virtually. It seemed to foreshadow the coming of film.

The main contrast between these historical examples and modern day technology is technology is interactive, and can exist on an abstract platform, as apposed to a tangible space.

Feather Study

Birds of flight and their anatomy are deeply interwoven within stories of faith, morality and freedom and their related culturally specific metaphors. Birds are perhaps the most commonly mentioned and depicted animal when it comes to articulating the human condition. This nearly ubiquitous usage of avian features in art and ideology creates great potential for many interpretations of a feather, as well as some ambiguity. This great visual and linguistic history also prompted me to approach editing and assembling the included images in a specific way.

Visually, I wanted to capture a slow, but obvious movement in my project through the use of bird feathers. A feather’s veins create a solid, linear pattern that moves with purpose, contrasting with the wispy, hairlike after feathers which posses no directionality or definitive form. I was also drawn to a feather’s high transparency. The see-through quality allows for layering of many objects while maintaining some clarity of form. One surprising quality that emerged was the painted look of the scans — they appear surreal, apart from nature. In specific images, the feathers occur as assembled and cropped, conjuring the idea of symbols that exist within a greater story. The lower contrast, hushed atmosphere (seen in images 1, 2, and 3) attempts to create a secretive, partially obscured narrative for symbols to exist within. Alternatively, the other half of my images (including image 4) posses brighter environments that could suggest clarity and totality.

David Humphrey Lecture Response

David Humphrey began his discussion with a disclaimer: “I prefer my paintings to be silent”. He briefly discusses how much he finds the concept of an art lecture problematic for the artwork itself and its viewership. Art, he says, should articulate itself, without a narrating voice or caption. Nonetheless, he proceeds to pull up images of his own work and describe them, beginning with histories behind his concepts and the process of their inception. This paradoxical introduction sent his audience into a slightly disorientated state, a quality which Humphrey prizes heavily in his body of work.

Humphrey mentions his medium usage, following a timeline of oil to photography to sculpture to installation to acrylic while frequently highlighting his collaborative works. These collaborations range from depictions of figures in oil layered over children’s finger paintings to ‘Ode to Disney’ modern landscape installations with Adam Cvijanovic. The latter were a dynamic, somewhat jarring series illustrating events in Walt Disney’s life, most notably, when Disney unintentionally caused the death of a teammate during a Polo match. These works in part served to show viewers an intimate look into Disney’s career and psyche.

Throughout the 90’s, Humphrey explored photography- oil hybrid works. The use of photography was meant to undermine the inherent “personalized” statements of paintings such as “I want, I feel, I imagine”. Humprey felt that these perceived I statements pulled away from the core ideals of his work during that time. His first manifestation of these photo-paintings utilized images from his childhood and young adulthood, where he sought to paint over memories (which had often been all but forgotten) and instill a sense of permanence into momentary snapshots of his life and the lives of those close to him. After many paintings of this kind, however, Humphrey realized that he had deconstructed emotive memories into paintings for which he felt little nostalgia or affection. Subsequently, he switched to using photographs from before he was born, memories that couldn’t be as influenced by his alterations, but could instead be created from a tabula rasa state. Additionally, he would paint friends and family on top of screenshots taken from classic films, in effect individualizing a mass media phenomenon which had been previously experienced by millions, and lacing together different types of memories, one being formed in reality and the other from cinema.

Humphrey continued a similar deconstruction of mass media through the study and influence of popular advertisements, focusing especially on pornographic and pinup type images. Tools of persuasion, be it general composition, storytelling or color can be found in ads from around the globe, some proven to be extremely effective. Humphrey sought to tap into what makes these ads so stimulating by recreating their compositions in the form of oil paintings. The concept of disorientation was core to his approach as well, where small changes or omissions from the original advertisements would throw viewers into a destabilized, cryptic environment. Many of these works pulled from the visual cues of Annunciation, a classically Christian composition involving two main figures, often saints and other Christian notables, in theatrical poses. Perhaps Humphrey intentionally juxtaposed playboy themes with Annunciation scenes to draw attention to religious hypocrisy and/or intolerance.

‘Anthropophelia’ was another concept that Humphrey investigated during the early 2000’s. He found interest in cross-species interactions, as well as humanity’s obsession with anthropomorphizing everything around them, from the personification of the sea, i.e. Poseidon, to humanoid teddy bears. Humphrey felt compelled to dissect notions of categorization and disassociation which people apply to the natural world and animal kingdom. What makes a ‘kitty’ inherently docile, or cute? How have we projected our humanity into some living things, and rejected others which occur as alien to us?

One of his most recent series of works centers on control and nostalgia for the loss of it. Again, Humphrey makes a point of disorientating the viewer so as to recreate a sense of childhood, lack of knowing or control over your own environment. This approach results in a kind of artificial nostalgia, and prompts the audience to recollect what it means to be new to the world, lost in a state of both wonder and fear.

Influence Map

Influence Map #1

Background image – Emmanuel Coupe

Influence mapping: A way to lace together artists, movements, musicians, etc. that influence or motivate you artistically. A good reminder of what you love within your own work and how it’s been informed over time.

Introduction

Welcome. My name is Lucas Gandy and I’m currently a first year Fine Arts student within Cornell University. This site will be devoted to the discussion of diverse topics of interest within the art world, with a special focus on virtual art, technology and ideas. I hope to inform my own work by cultivating relevant perspectives within it and provide a space for open discussion.