Inflatable bodies

Inflatable bodies

     When we were assigned to go to Irvine and go to an inflatable bodies exhibit, I wasn’t sure what I was going to see. I was sort of expecting real life human bodies that would fill with air and expand. I thought this would be weird and how could people do that? We were told that the exhibit was small, but I didn’t know it was that small. I paid for 2 hours just in case I needed it and I was there for about ten minutes. I was upset that I didn’t have to pay for all the time, but it was only $4.

     When entering the exhibit, I didn’t know what to do. I just started to take pictures and was moving around. When I started to move, the bodies inflated. It was pretty cool, but its not what I expected. The bodies didn’t look like bodies. They were supposed to be parts of the body of something, im not sure. They were pretty cool though. I forgot to get a picture of me with them, but in one of the pictures there is a glimpse of my friend Jesus.

     The exhibit next to the bodies was cool. It had some paintings and stuff like that. My favorite thing was all the books smashed together sticking out of the wall. They weren’t on a table, but they seemed to sit there in the air. It must be crazy glue or something.

Edweard Muybridge

Edweard was an English photographer who spent most of his life in The United States. He is known for hie pieces of animals. He used to film animals and capture their everyday motions. He also invented his zoopraxiscope which is a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip.

He emigrated to the US, arriving in San Francisco in 1855, where he started a career as a publisher's agent and bookseller. He left San Francisco at the end of the 1850s, and, after a stagecoach accident in which he received severe head injuries, returned to England for a few years. While recumperating, he got into photography and really enjoyed it.

Robert Raushenberg

Robert was born an American and rose as an abstract artist , but then came to be known as a pop artist. He is well known for his "Combines" pieces in the 1950's in which non-traditional materials and were used and put together in inovative ways. He was a painter and a sculpture, but his Combine pieces combined both of the styles of art. He also used photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance.

He was born as Milton Ernest Raushenberg. His father was German and part Cherokee and his mother was of Anglo-Saxon decent. HIs family was Christian and he studied at the Kansas State Art Institute and he later studied art at the Juilan Academy in Paris. He died on May 12, 2008 of heart failure.

John Whitney

John Whitney was an American artist that was an animator, composer, and inventor. He was born  on April 8, 1917 and died on September 22, 1995. He was born in Pasadena and attended Pomona College. He first started with a 8mm camera. then he went and studied in Paris. On return he began filming his pieces with his brother James.

Whitney used mechanical animations for some of his pieces as well. he did pieces on guided missle projects and psycadelic pieces. He had 3 children named Michael, Mark and John Jr. They are all filmakers. There is a Whitney film collection that contains all of his works at the Academy of motion picture and arts sciences.

Bill Viola

Bill Viola (b.1951) is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For 40 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published, and translated for international readers. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.

Matthew Barney

Matthew Narney is an American artist that does sculptures, drawing, film, and photography. His first works used video and performance with sculpure installations. He created a couple pieces between 1994 and 2002 called the Cremaster Cycle.

Matthew Barney was born March 25, 1967, in San Fransisco. He lived in Boise, Idaho from 1973 to 1985, where he attended elementary, middle, and high school. His parents divorced and his mother moved to New York City, where he would frequently visit, and where he was introduced to the art scene In 1989, he graduated from Yale University. His earliest works, created at Yale, were staged at the university’s athletic complex. Barney lives with his partner, singer Bjork, with whom he had a daughter 2002.

Stelarc

                   

Stelarc is a performance artist who has visually probed and acoustically amplified his body. He has made three films of the inside of his body. Between 1976-1988 he completed 25 body suspension performances with hooks into the skin. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems, the Internet and biotechnology to explore alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body.

In 2004 was awarded a two year New Media Arts Fellowship. In 1997 he was appointed Honorary Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. He was Artist-In-Residence for Hamburg City in 1997. In 2000 he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Laws by Monash University.

Erwin Redl

                       
    Austrian-born artist Erwin Redl uses LEDs as an artistic medium. Working in both two and three dimensions, his works redefine interior and exterior spaces. Born in 1963, Redl began his studies as a musician, receiving a BA in Composition and Diploma in Electronic Music at the Music Academy in Vienna, Austria. In 1995, he received an MFA in Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he now lives.

    Redl's works have received attention both nationally and internationally. With his piece Matrix 1, he lit the face of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art for its 2002 Biennial Exhibit. Works such as Matrix 2, which was shown in New York, Germany, France, Austria, and Korea, and Fade 1, which animated the Eglise Sainte-Marie Madeleine in Lille, France, explore volume and allow people to move through lit spaces.

Knowbotic Research

                Knowbotic Research

                       
Knowbotic Research is a German company established in 1991. They experiment with technology, information and knowledge, interface, immersive virtual reality, and networked agency.
Knowbotic is a term that combined “knowledge” with "robot" meaning intellectual agent on the Internet. Knowbotic has developed some projects themed on an information environment and a computer interface. Since 1998, it has become more flexible, and with these main three of them, different members from various fields such as art, science, and philosophy, have joined in each program. In 1997, it worked with Japanese art group, Canon Art Lab, in Tokyo. This project aimed at revealing the function of the city by interacting between real and the virtual world.


The Knowbotic Research group received some awards such as:

• Two Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nicas (in 1994 and 1998)
• The Claasen Prize for Media Art and Photography, Cologne
• The international ZKM Media-art award
• The August Seeling-Award of Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum

Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas

     Joan Jonas was born in 1936 in New York City. She is a pioneer of video and art performances. She does videos of things that are weird. One of her pieces is called “Roll Call” and it is just images coming down vertically and a metal spoon hitting the screen. It goes on for nineteen minutes. She started out her career as a sculptor then slowly began her transition into video art. She is supposed to be one of the most important female artists to emerge in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, but I don’t understand her art. It was also hard to see her videos. There were like two videos out to see and the rest, if there was any, was twenty seconds long.   Some of the pieces she has done are: Wind (1968), Songdelay (1973), Organic Honey (1972-1976), the Juniper Tree (1976), and Lines in the Sand (2002). Some of her influences are conceptual art, theater performance, feminism, and other visual media. In 2003, she also had some solo exhibitions at Rosamund Felsen in Los Angeles and the Pat Hern Gallery in New York. Today she is a professor of visual arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

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Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik

     Paik was a video artist and I believe he was on during the video day. He used video art to perplex his audience. He first started in Neo-Dada art which was inspired by John Cage. He then worked with a woman to combine his video and music with hers. They placed the images and sounds on top of each other and there was his first success at getting his name out.

     He did crazy things like putting 3 television sets out of a cello. Not that many people would think of doing that. His notes and works have been collected and put into one book for fans to research him. Sadly he died in 2006 due to a stroke. His piece with the cello is cool because it is a real cello. He didn’t make one, but he improvised it.

Four Yip

Four Yip is an artist from Amsterdam who uses art in the world of Second Life. She really pushes the boundries of the system and creates these pieces of art that may be confusing.

     She tries to create these things that will blow your mind. It is weird in that she tries to make two sides of an avatar and put them together. Some websites say other things so it was hard to fidure out what or why she does it, but she does and here is a picture of her strange art.

Scott Blake

Scott Blake

     Scott Blake was born in Tampa, Florida. His style of art is the use of barcodes to make art. He would use pixels that will show up and dissipate to make a piece seem like it is animated. He started to do this around the Y2K scare and that could have influenced him, but it isn’t sure where this barcode style of art came from. It sort of just popped up.

     Scott’s art has been in magazines such as: The New York Times, FHM, and Adbusters. He has been asked to do work for private collections such as for Jane Fonda and many people have his work in their collections. The creators of Photoshop also recognized his artwork. They recognized him at the Adobe Design Achievement Awards. He also received a B.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design.

Gracie Kendal

Gracie Kendal

     Gracie Kendal is a woman who uses Second Life because she is not content with her actual self. Gracie is the name of her avatar I believe and this is how she feels about it, "…I have found it difficult to be comfortable in my own skin. My sense of self has become dislodged and torn apart. Through Gracie I have begun to put myself back together." Kris is her name in real life, but she feels that both are her. To her the cyber world is an outlet for the real world. Second life helps her feel comfortable because Kris doesn’t feel “real” in her body. It is as if she was born in the wrong body. She feels as if Gracie can help her in ways that she cannot.

     Gracie started using second life because of her grandparents telling her about it. She started an art gallery and is on the top ten lists for the best art in the second life world. In the real world, Kris is trying to be an art major and in 2010 she was supposed to be graduating with her art degree. The belief that second life is real can be confusing for some. Kris uses it as an outlet for her emotions and that is all that counts. If it makes her feel better about herself, then no one should penalize or disrespect her for doing what makes her feel good.