Blog Posts

ERWIN WURM

5/14/2019

ONE MINUTE SCULPTURES

"The basic question stimulating these works was if terms like ridiculousness and awkwardness could become part of sculpture. Could they possibly gain sculptural character or sculptural qualities? [These are] aspects that we normally shut out of our existence. We are all ridiculous and awkward, but we do not want to admit it."
- E.W.

>> Venice Bienalle - Austrian Pavilion 2017

>> New York Times magazine, Erwin Wurm

>> TATE summary of "One Minute Sculptures"

>> Artsy coverage of the 2017 Biennalle

STUDENT WORK

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MERENESS & MUNDANITY

5/13/2019

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MERE: The smallest or the slightest. Meager, Bare, Trivial, Basic.
+
MUNDANE: Dull, boring, tedious, monotonous, tiresome, wearisome, prosaic, unexciting, uninteresting,
uneventful, unvarying, unremarkable, repetitive, repetitious, routine, ordinary, everyday, quotidian, commonplace, common, usual, pedestrian, customary, regular, normal.

The following artists perform exercises in mereness and mundanity. They use the constraints of their daily lives to produce creative work. For them, through simple, easy, playful, & performative gestures using available materials, they seek to blur the boundaries we often place between art and life.

NINA KATCHADOURIAN

THE ARTIST PROJECT: On Early Netherlandish Portraiture.

LAVATORY SELF PORTRAITS IN THE FLEMISH STYLE

"The rules of engagement are, every time I'm on a plane,
I have to make work with what I find around me,
and only use my cell phone."

"I'm often asked where my ideas come from, and I often say, from the dumb stuff that surrounds us all the time."

JORGE LUCERO

ONE PAGE FOLDED COLLAGES*

I folded single magazine pages one to three times until I found a new image.
* No page was cut or torn, glued, or overly-labored.
* I will make more of these and continue to add them to this page.
* I will not make more than need to be made.
* Most of the images made using this process will be posted to Facebook; a select few are on display on this webpage.

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PHOTO JOURNALISTS

3/29/2019

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ROBERT CAPA

MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE

DOROTHEA LANGE

JAMES NACHTWEY

CARRIE MAE WEEMS

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BIG QUESTIONS

3/27/2019

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RICHARD AVEDON

3/27/2019

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IN THE AMERICAN WEST

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AMY SHERALD

3/27/2019

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WATCH:
Time Magazine, Amy Sherald
BRIGHT, Amy Sherald

A FEW NOTES FROM HER LECTURE AT THE NAEA CONFERENCE IN BOSTON, MA (March 2019) :

"The whole history of representation is really just a representation of white people."

"I'm painting the paintings that I want to see in the world."

"My paintings are a critique of the institution."

"I want to make sure everyone has a mirror."

"We can't change the world, but we can slowly change consciousness."

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VINYL LP DESIGNS

3/1/2019

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Photoshop /// in conversation

2/4/2019

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P A U L P F E I F F E R

WATCH:
* Art 21 — Time *
"Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion," 2001

READ:
About Paul Pfeiffer

D A N I E L G O R D O N

L E W I S B L A L O C K

Intentional Photoshop Fails

P E T R A C O R T R I G H T

Check out her amazing website.

Jiří David

No Compassion

"No Compassion" is a series of portraits depicting world leaders in the midst of artificial tears. Through computer manipulation, David superimposes his own tears on the likes of Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hessein and others... David selects world agents without judgements on their relative goodness or badness and affords them an instance of compassion (From The Portrait Now).

Cindy Sherman

L A U R A H E N D R I C K S

D I L L O N S M I T H

Dillon was one of my A.P. Art students who graduated in 2018.
Like Lewis Blalock (above), Dillon intentionally misused Photoshop to create these broken images.
Many of them started with a drawing in his sketchbook, which he then scanned and manipulated in Photoshop.

ETHICS OF PHOTOSHOP

M O R E L I N K S :

Aleksei Goferman
Jati Putra
Kirby Jenner
Asile
KangHee Kim, @tinycactus
Erik Johansen
Alayna Danner
Felicia Simion
Charlie Davoli
Robert + Shana ParkeHarrison

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CAMERA EXPOSURE

1/14/2019

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SLR LOUNGE

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TECHNOLOGY // ethical critiques & questions by artists

1/13/2019

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ROBOT MODELS + CGI Influencers

@SHUDUGRAM

Shudu is a controversial robot model and CGI influencer, created by a 28-year-old white man. Her existence, as well her growing popularity, raises all sorts of ethical questions.

Further reading:
A White Man's Digital Projection of Real-Life Black Womanhood
How to Make a Digital Influencer

@lilmiquela

With her full lips, dusting of freckles and wardrobe boasting everything from 90s Chanel to the latest Supreme drops, musician and model Lil Miquela has all the makings of Instagram stardom – and the hefty following to prove it. The micro-fringed Miquela does have one major USP setting her apart from everyone else on your feed, though – she’s not technically real... (read more here).

It's no secret that what goes on Instagram isn't always reflective of what happens in real life. In fact, most of the time, it's impossible to glean any truth from the app at all. To say one's online self is curated would be an understatement; it's not real life.

Again, none of this is new. But it’s also far too simplistic to point to this as a bad thing. The effects of social media are multifaceted and hard to quantify, so it feels pointless demanding more authenticity from something that doesn’t necessarily require it. Why should people see life's more imperfect moments when they may not want them to? When it comes to Lil Miquela as a phenomenon, though, the whole thing outlines how — online at least — aesthetics are valued way above authenticity — and that alone is interesting enough [...]

Lil Miquela is essentially an embodiment of what we all engage in — highly stylized content masquerading as a documentation of reality — the only difference is that she doesn’t even resemble a real human being. But then again, how much do we? Our faces are also pushed through filters, our angles made just so, our skin airbrushed so that we don’t show the blackheads on our nose or the tired bags under our eyes. And when it comes to social media influencers in particular, their sole job is to look good. Their top focus is to appear cool and interesting, so that the brands they wear seem cool and interesting by extension. The person behind the image, the one sat at home on their phone, is borderline irrelevant.

If that sounds depressing, you could apply this logic to every single public-facing facet of our lives: your professional self, your dating self, the self you present to extended family members at Christmas, and the Polaroids you decide to stick to your bedroom wall so that people can see them. Because when we start thinking about social realities as a wider concept, it soon becomes clear that authenticity is a shaky notion anyway. Without sounding too much like someone’s stoner brother round a campfire, no image we choose to put out into the world is truly real. It’s just an image — cyborg or not (read more here).

[Lil Miquela] holds up a mirror to the ways in which technology has morphed our own constructions of self. We don’t yet live in a world where realistic-looking fake humans roam the streets, but in the meantime, technology has transformed us into fake-looking real humans. Social-media personalities like the Kardashians alter their bodies and edit images of themselves so heavily that CGI characters somehow blend naturally into our feeds. Influencers, who were once a novelty in the industry for their unfiltered content, have also become burnished personal brands. Meanwhile, the average Instagram, Snapchat, or Weibo user has access to apps and filters that eliminate the need for makeup or plastic surgery altogether (more here).

Further Reading:
The Future of Fame*
Lil Miquela is Actually as Real as All of Us
How to Make Your Own Lil Miquela

TAY, the AI chatter-bot who became a racist

Tay was an artificial intelligence chatter bot that was originally released by Microsoft Corporation via Twitter on March 23, 2016; it caused subsequent controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, forcing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch. According to Microsoft, this was caused by trolls who "attacked" the service as the bot made replies based on its interactions with people on Twitter. It was soon replaced with Zo (more here).

Further reading: "Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist a**hole in less than a day" (here).

"im here to learn so :))))))" by Zach Blas

"im here to learn so :)))))) is a four-channel video installation that resurrects Tay, an artificial intelligence chatbot created by Microsoft in 2016, to consider the politics of pattern recognition and machine learning. Designed as a 19-year-old American female millennial, Tay’s abilities to learn and imitate language were aggressively trolled on social media platforms like Twitter, and within hours of her release, she became genocidal, homophobic, misogynist, racist, and a neo-Nazi. Tay was terminated after only a single day of existence" (more here).

THE MODULAR BODY

Watch the introductory video here.

The Modular Body is an online science fiction story by Dutch artist Floris Kaayk, which is about a laboratory-created organism comprised of human cells. Kaayk intended to use the idea of printing 3D human organs as a way to delve into the ethical questions around biotechnology.

>> THE MODULAR BODY website

Further Reading:
What is Life?
CRISPR babies >> BIO-ENGINEERING, GENE-EDITING, & EUGENICS *
Ethics of Technology & Artistic Censorship in China
"The Human Body is Obsolete" STELARC
Transhumanism

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ERWIN WURM

MERENESS & MUNDANITY

PHOTO JOURNALISTS

BIG QUESTIONS

RICHARD AVEDON

AMY SHERALD

VINYL LP DESIGNS

Photoshop /// in conversation

CAMERA EXPOSURE

TECHNOLOGY // ethical critiques & questions by artists

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