Sgay

As an MAT student at MassArt, we were required to create this blog.
However, I have a professional website/blog that I maintain and update more regularly.
Please visit HeySgay to see what I am currently up to

- Sarah

This paper discusses how transference of presence and the endlessness of the internet have extended our collaborative possibilities as artists. With multi-media social networking, our visual culture has brought our everyday uploads, whether it be video or photo, to an aesthetic worthy of appreciation by artists and average Joes alike.

How the Internet Has Enhanced Our Collaborative Opportunities as Artists

Today in class Fred showed us some basic engineering techniques using Legos.

I have to admit, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed building from scratch. I’m not sure if it’s because I played with Legos as a child…and I couldn’t remove that sense of “play” from my mind. I understand that “play” is a necessary element for creating in general…however I couldn’t seem to make my mind focus on the problem solving opporunities on hand. I just wanted to play with the blocks! Somehow, starting from scratch and building my way up was easier…because as I would encounter my problems, I could see where my hand went “wrong”. Whereas, with the Legos…I would get set back with the shapes the blocks created..

I’m not sure I am making any sense…but..I’m trying!

Meeting Gina Kamentsky today was very exciting and inspirational for me. Generally, I am not usually one who thinks in a sculptural way…however, I found her work to be tremendously inviting.

I think a lot of times sculpture can turn me off because I am a fairly animated person, and sculpture’s static presence seems very foreign to me. Gina’s work has a tremendous amount of life in it. It’s fragile and responds to human connection…much like we do…even the way her pieces move….can seem very human. The casualty of their gestures…

I also really enjoyed learning about Arthur Ganson. I hope to make time to go visit his work on display at MIT. I had no idea such cool things even existed so near to us!

I was looking his work up on youtube and came across this wonderful piece he made: Another House Fly. I love how the machine not only gesticulates like a house fly (rubbing it’s little paws together….) But also has the physical comedy of the house fly buzzing around the light. I thought this piece was pretty hilarious and impressive.

All these amazing automata artists remind me a bit of another New Media artist, Bryn Oh. Oh also makes sculptures…however hers don’t exist in our physical world. She creates them in Second Life (a virtual social network.) Something that makes her work tremendously unique is how you interact with it. With artists like Ganson and Kamentsky, you also interact with their work…but Oh transports you with hers. She stages her sculptures in virtual worlds she creates, where you can bring your Second Life character to visit. The scale of her work within Second Life ranges from Island size, to microscopic. You can use your Second Life avatar to traverse the incredibly dreamlike landscapes she creates. 

Here is a youtube clip of one of her virtual worlds: Carousel of Dreams and Sorrows

Some of her work can be a little too gamer/ goth for my personal aesthetic….but I really appreciate the environments she creates and the range of scale she plays with.

Also, for a random good time, please enjoy The Most Useless Machine Ever.

The other idea I had for the research project stems from an artist by the name of Kutiman.

He is known for collecting videos on youtube and mixing them together to create one cacophony.

http://thru-you.com/#/videos/1/

His collaging of videos bridges a gap that I don’t feel many artists cross. He uses a space like youtube which is completely user generated…and creates an original piece of work. Only when his hand enters the picture can these original works become a collaborative piece. Kutiman is nothing without the viewers, because it’s the viewers who upload their videos.

Similarly, he frames his finished product on a website that is accessible to anyone.
Perhaps the viewers upon watching his video project themselves into the work. When they realize the work is based off of average people like themselves…perhaps this transports them to a place where they too can feel like an artist.

Research paper notes

So this is one idea I have for the research project…however I’m not sure I can narrow down what I am actually interested in investigating, “How does relating to AI via dialogue reflect on us?”

CHAT BOTS/ Talking to machines

Chat bots learn how to generate better dialogue over time based on user interactions.

Turing test-The test was introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence,

Rollo Carpenter Cleverbot.com creator

“Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human, explains that even the clunkiest computer chat program opens a little window on human introspection and intelligence” – http://www.radiolab.org/2011/may/31/clever-bots/

Bina48 is robot living in Vermont that can be interviewed (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvcQCJpZJH8)

How do we react to robots?

How does the robot effect the interviewer when she makes eye contact?

The interviewer starts to feel the robot as a ‘her’ and ‘help’ her through the interview, “Help her be less confused.”

Christian,Brian. The Most Human Human: What Talking to Computers Teaches us about What it Means to Be Alive. 1 ed. New York City: Random House, 2011.

Fellous,Michael. Who Needs Emotions? : The Brain Meets the Robot. Cary: Oxford University Press, 2005.

McCorduck,Pamela. Machines Who Think : A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. natick : A K Peters, 2004.

John Bender and Michael Marrian, “Diagram” in The Culture of Diagram, (Stanford: Stanford, UP, 2010) pp 19-55

I found the Diagram reading to be quite dense and it took a few tries to grasp some understanding…so I hope my interpretations are some what accurate.

It wasn’t until page 29, 3/4’s of the way down the paragraph that I started feeling some relation to the reading.

“When anatomy’s insider view of the hand is put against the surface we live with in daily life, the user is reminded of his or her physical being and cognitive activity: this awareness is located in neither of the images separately, but only comes alive in the activity of correlation.”

I found this blurb to be particularly interesting, and if I am interpreting it correctly, it’s stating that the real “art” created is through the viewers experience of relating their own hand to the diagram. This fascinates me because in my own work, which is primarily in “new media”, I feel I am constantly trying to pull these relational tensions in myself. I take a memory, an experience, and try and interpret it in the same way my mind correlates the original memory. The product is usually breathy, a bit surreal or distorted, much like the way our minds jumble the original experience. So through the act of watching my work after it’s been created, I hope to inspire a similar reaction in my viewers. Perhaps they cannot relive my specific memory or moment. But hopefully through the use the medium: animation, video and sound, they can grasp something familiar and hone in on their own experience.

I feel the author explored this many times throughout the article, the assumption that they viewer would bring their knowledge of a past experience to the diagram. Many times it discusses the use of perspective and how in some of the plates, the perspective perhaps wasn’t drawn in a way that would allow the viewer to fully see what was being displayed, IE: the pastry tools. The author  describes that it would take a fully human experience to be able to project themselves into the plate to realize it’s full potential. I feel a lot of ‘New Media’ banks on this same perception. Whether we are discussing time based media or perhaps some of the more science based mediums we discussed in class. Most ‘New Media’ requires an interaction from the viewer. The viewer needs some prior, real life experience, to experience the work.

…But perhaps that true of all art, regardless of medium!

4D work

Ashes to Ashes, Funk to Funky

Here We Are