My kid could paint that (2007) is a documentary that follows the early artistic career of Marla Olmstead, a young girl from New York who gained world wide fame first as a child prodigy painter of abstract art, and then becomes the subject of controversy concerning whether she truly completed the paintings herself or did so with her parents’ assistance.
The documentary got me to really question the authenticity of art itself – where art is acknowledged to be an autonomous realm of human expression that connects with someone enough for them to translate its meaning and what it means to them.
How much does the artist’s being and their background have to do with the way a work of art is perceived, the way it is socially accepted and how much it sells for?
How does media coverage and advertising affect individual spectator’s perception to a work of art? The documentary also brings to mind Mr. Brainwash from Banksy’s ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ documentary, is what the art represents meaningless and secondary to profit from selling?
Reading notes from the book Open Sky by Paul Virilio
- Nikolai Gagol – “Without even leaving we are already no longer there”
- Paul Klee – “To define the present in isolation is to kill it”. Technologies of real time (such as telecommunication techniques) are killing ‘present’ time by isolating it from its here and now, in favor of communicative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our ‘concrete presence’ in the world
- speed not only allows us to get around more easily; but to see, to hear, to perceive, and thus conceive the world more intensely.
- Long distance telepresence technologies: a civilisation of forgetting, a live (live-coverage) society that has no future and no past, loss of traveller’s tale and possibility of some kind of interpretation coupled with a sharp loss of memory. A real-time image no longer offering concrete (explicit) information but discreet (implicit) information, a sort of illumination of the reality of the facts.
- Gustave Flaubert – “the better telescopes become, the more stars there would be”. The real is hidden in the reduction of images on the screen.
- present (or telepresent) man no longer actually inhabits the energy of any machinery whatsoever. It is ‘energy that instantaneously inhabits and governs him’.
- With the transport revolution of the 19th century, movement from one place to another has undergone mutation. Since the ‘departure’ and ‘arrival’ at a destination were particularly privileged to the detriment (damage) of the ‘journey’…the passivity, the somnolence of bullet train passengers and screening of films on long haul flights.
- With the instantaneous transmission revolution, it is now ‘departure’ that gets wiped out and ‘arrival’ gets promoted, the generalised arrival of data from television to telecommuting, to the teleaction made possible by remote control of domestic systems of the smart house.
- Are we free, truly free to choose what we see? Clearly not. On the other hand, are we obligated, absolutly forced against our will to percieve what is first meley suggested then imposed on everyone’s gaze? not at all!
- the Internet; a gravitationalless space
- (instantaneous transmission such as the Internet and instant messaging has resulted to) globalisation of the present; time-world of an instantaneous trajectography bearing no reference to the ground or surface (geography)
- technologies can not exist without the potential for accidents. Growth of technology or television separates us directly from the events of real space and real time, we lose wisdom, sight of our immediate horizon and respect to our dissimulated environment.
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution…Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” – Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst book
Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, acclaimed for her innovative video installations. This exhibition, her first survey show in the UK, presents single channel videos, sculptures, photographs, wallpapers and video installations spanning her career from the 1980s to today. Highly accomplished technically and employing dazzling colour, Rist’s practice fuses sensual images, music and text to create mesmerising installations. Rist creates a total sensory experience for her audience by showing her works within architectural installations conceived specially for particular spaces.
A very interesting read by Kristen Daly courtesy of the Transformations website.
For over one hundred years, moving images have been recorded onto frames on expensive celluloid tape and projected by fairly simple machines. This has been a remarkably reliable way of recording and exhibiting, but also a remarkably static media technology. Films cannot easily be reproduced, delivered or manipulated ….
The power of social networking is growing ever greater in today society, nowadays also key to business and to market themselves, as its been proven to be effective and costs nothing at all. I am using twitter, to further market and brand ofthedigital - and myself as an independent digital artist. I will use the twitter account to update inform and update followers on my artworks and other projects. This account is hyper-linked from the ofthedigital website. I first had a hyperlink to my personal twitter account, however this seemed inappropriate and unprofessional, as the modue is in after all professional practice.
I have designed my items to promote myself as an independent digital artist, and to market myself as a web designer and a graphic designer to large and already established organisations. The website (ofthedigital.com) is the focal point and the hub of marketing myself and all the materials designed lead the user to it. The site is my portfolio and provides an archive of all my projects ordered by years.
The completed SFX shot. We added the classical audio to the shot and added another adjustment layer in final cut to blend eveything together. The slow paced audio, slow moving chairs and clouds all work very well together. We’re both very pleased with the result.
We’re now at the finishing stages of our SFX shot, Mohannad has also finished his part of modeling the objects in the scene. He also added vegetation to blend the modeled building and lamppost to the scene. At this meeting we fixed the lighting and added shadows to the bouncing chairs. we adjusted the lighting positions to achieve convincing shadows. We both also decided to change the colour of some of the lights from white to make the 3D objects and footage blend even more together.
In cinema 4D, we placed the full colour train footage on to a plane, and used the alpha footage to key out the black background. It took us a while to get the alpha setting right, but we got there in the end. We then placed this plane on top of the modeled bridge and just behind the modeled barriers, we altered the size of it to in accordance to the size of the modeled lamp post, which is also present in the train footage.
Initially in After Effects, we cut and exported the footage short to just before the trains appearance. Since, we have the time we decided we would add the train footage over the scene we already have in Cinema 4D. This is to achieve a more convincing composition, where we would now have the illusion the chairs are flying down behind the bridge and train. To do this, I had to first key out the the train from the rest of the footage, followed by painful key framing of the trains movement. I also used the footage to create an animated alpha mask to use for keying out the black background later in Cinema 4D.
University of Southampton
Nearly 200 works, including paintings, prints, posters, photographs and film, are displayed across two of the city’s most prestigious art galleries, the John Hansard Gallery at the University of Southampton, and Southampton City Art Gallery. The works on display are part of ARTIST ROOMS, a new collection of modern and contemporary art held by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland for the nation.
This free exhibition, which runs until 26 June, explores Warhol’s fascination with fame and celebrity, giving visitors an overview of his work from 1951 until his death in 1987.
