April CommQuote

I love this bleary mixing of media morphing into other media forms/formats. That's what artist Jim Campbell is all about as reported in Benjamin Sutton's Why Is Jim Campbell’s Low-Res Video Art So Compelling, Even Captivating? for artnet news.

"In Topography Reconstruction Wave (2014) [pictured below], the footage of a crashing wave plays behind a thick layer of resin sculpted to represent a photograph of a wave. This work, part of a new series employing more sculptural elements than much of Campbell’s preceding works, culminates when the blurred video of the wave seems to line up perfectly with the sculpted resin wave encasing it....In addition to the process of stripping away visual information in his low-resolution videos, he is increasingly interested in the conversion of one type of media into another—in the case of the resin works, transforming black-and-white images into three-dimensional sculptures. The effect is deeply unsettling because of the way in which the video’s flickering lights interact with the translucent resin.

'As the lights change it distorts based on how thick the resin is, and what that does is that as the light passes through the face it feels like the face is moving, which goes back to this theory about some of the very earliest cave paintings that we have found; some people have suggested that with fire in there that they were actually animated,' Campbell explained."

You can take in the full article here.

December CommQuote

 

We've had videos reign as CommQuotes; our quote this month is an image (or two).

There's more to  Erik Kessels 24 HRS in Photos installation than meets the eye. What looks like just a junky room full of trash is actually all of the images uploaded to the popular social networking photography site Flickr on a single day in October. Kessels printed out over 900,000 images that exhibit participants can walk through or pick up for closer viewing.

Kessels’ installation is part of A Sense of Place, a photography group exhibit on view at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco through May 2014. A review of the show can be found here.

You can get to know this artist/designer better at this TEDxBreda talk.

September CommQuote

September's CommQuote is visual, brought to us by Salvador Dali whose late work is being featured at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta through January 9, 2011. Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone (1938) is featured in the exhibit and seems to fit nicely with what I look for in good, albeit pictorial, quotes for the blog.

ONandOnScreen

Just discovered an interesting site called ONandOnScreen.

"Here poems and videos meet their match: poems are written for videos, and videos are made and paired with poems. The poems may enhance the videos and the videos may glamorize the poems.

ONandOnScreen is a conversation between moving words and moving images, on and on."

The site does not feature video of poets reading poetry, but rather poems and videos "talking" to each other.

Edited by Thomas Devane (check out his Burning the Bear Suit with accompanying video), and published quarterly, ONandOnScreen is currently accepting submissions.

December CommQuote

David Hockney has a new passion, drawing on his iPhone, as Lawrence Weschler describes in a recent New York Review of Books piece. The application called Brushes, which enables users to digitally draw or fingerpaint on the device's screen, provides a full color wheel spectrum that can be easily lightened or darkened. Hockney has gone wild with this new technology producing thousands of images which he casually sends to friends. So far he's been working in three thematic areas--portraits and self-portraits, still life of plants and flowers, and California dawns. Most iPhone painters use their index finger but Hockney is strictly a thumb-man. He has no problem with his images finding their way into print media but believes it's worth noting that:

"...the images always look better on the screen than on the page. After all, this is a medium of pure light, not ink or pigment, if anything more akin to a stained glass window than an illustration on paper. It's all part of the urge toward figuration. You look out at the world and you're called to make gestures in response. And that's a primordial calling: goes all the way back to the cave painters. May even have preceded language. People are always asking me about my ancestors, and I say, Well there must have been a cave painter back there somewhere. Him scratching away on his cave wall, me dragging my thumb over this iPhone's screen. All part of the same passion." --"David Hockney's iPhone Passion," Lawrence Weschler, The New York Review of Books, October 22

January CommQuote

"Perpetual Art Machine (PAM) is an on-line video database begun in 2005 that provides community for artists, curators, scholars, and students....In addition to the Web site, PAM sponsors an interactive, traveling video installation that allows viewers to function as curators, choosing video programs by selecting various keywords...

Colette Copeland: How does PAM differ from other on-line media databases, such as Rhizome or Eyebeam?

Lee Wells: The biggest difference is probably funding. In operation for over ten years, both Rhizome and Eyebearm are bankrolled by institutions and key patrons... Most of our funds come out of pocket and a lot of free labor on the part of the founders and volunteer PAM artists at large. Although PAM engages multiple forms of new media, our primary focus is on the growing international video art community. Rhizome and Eyebeam broadly cover the entire spectrum of new media.

CC: ...what are some of the concerns that collectors have regarding archiving and preserving video long term?

LW: In my opinion, it's all about the digital archive files. It's just a matter of time before everyone is up to speed. The days of Gigi-beta and DVDs will come to pass as we rapidly move into the era of HD video on-demand relayed through high-speed, fiber-optic networks and secured in on-line (bank-like) storage databases. The problem is that most people who buy art still want an object to hold. At this point it still takes an enlightened and progressive collector to invsest in video and new media art."

--from "Predicate, Participate & Perpetuate: An Interview with Perpetual Art Machine" by Colette Copeland, afterimage, Volume 36, Number 3, pp. 18-19

March CommQuote

Romanian visual artist, Alex Dragelescu, is one of the featured artists in a piece by Tim Mckeough, Painted by Numbers, in this month's Wired (March, 2008). The article showcases the work of five artists who program raw data (such as census reports, spam, YouTube clips) into two and three dimensional abstractions. Says Dragelescu, who creates spam architecture:

"I am very much like artists who appropriate manufactured or exisitng objects. Spam is found, discarded, abject data that can be mutated, recycled, and transformed."
--Alex Dragelescu, Wired , March 2008

Special Issues Roundup

Camera Obscura (Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies) is devoting two issues to Divas. Fabulous! Divas, Part I (Number 65, 2007) features divas of the screen, musical theater, soap opera and the life and times of Josephine Baker with tributes to Judy Garland, Grace Jones, Sylvester, Julie Andrews, Courtney Love, Isabelle Hubbert, and Angela Lansbury. Stay tuned for Part II (next issue).

Index on Censorship (Volume 36, Number 3, 2007) has a special 82-page section on Reporting the Middle East From Frontline Journalism to Reportage: How the Region Looks from the Inside.

afterimage has an Art & Activism Special Issue (Volume 34, Numbers 1 & 2) including the article "Tactical Media and the End of the End of History" which defines tactical media as "situational, ephemeral, and self-terminating. It encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular sociopolitical context in order to create molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that will contribute to the negation of the rising intensity of authoritarian culture." Other articles address global media ecology and documentaries that promote media activism.

EME (Explorations in Media Ecology) honors founding father of media ecology, Neil Postman, in its Volume 5, Number 1, 2006 issue. Leading off the issue is the keynote address delivered by Postman to the Speech Communication Association in 1973 where he discussed the new graduate program in media ecology he had just launched at NYU's School of Education.

Journalism Studies (Volume 8, Number 5, October 2007) looks at Cartooning America Post-World War II. Most of the articles in the issue were originally presented at a conference titled "Cartooning the USA: America Through the Pen of Political Cartoonists" held at the British Library in 2005 and organized by Phillip Davies who serves as the issue's guest editor.