Sight Short

I had previously seen this video before and I think the creativity is incredible. To think that we are close to developing something like this is intriguing to me. With augmented reality glasses coming to the market the thought of contacts with augmented reality is crazy to think about as a possibility. It will be interesting to see if we will learn more about the human mind and find a way to link human brain waves to technology and use our minds as the controller of digital data coming into our view. The more I see technology like this the more excited I get to enter the job market with hopes of working for a company developing revolutionary products.

Final Video Art Piece

Massive Attack

This group has some very cool instrumentals and beats beautifully put together. I really like the flow and tone this music sets. I listened to their first album Blue Lines a little bit and that  was all I needed. The group has a big influence in that they express opinions on the war and other political issues. Below is the video for their album Heligoland which I explored. It really got my attention from the album artwork.

UK Underground and the Smiths

At the head of the UK underground in the 1980's was the Smiths. It is so strange that we covered the Smiths in this class because I actually had a friend over winter break tell me about them and about how influential they are to the type of music that is being released today. Since then I have listened to a lot of their songs and I think they are a very interesting and talented group. They are a rock band who are known to be rebellious and radical. They sing about the struggles that come along in life and express strong opinion about the world. This type of music greatly influences the punk rock and hardcore music that I listen today. The Smiths have brilliant song writing ability and I am glad they have been brought into my view. They are a fairly popular band I am surprised I had not heard of them before this year.

TR 808 Examples

Charanjit Singh — “Raga Bhairav”

Cybotron-Clear

T

Talking Heads- Psycho Killer

3 video art examples

I viewed a very cool video called Pixels on Vimeo where blocks begin falling from the sky and connecting to buildings like Tetris and eventually the entire real life area becomes transformed by the blocks. 

http://vimeo.com/13362364

The next video art video that I watches really reminded me of the flipbook animations that we made at the beginning of the semester so I had to share it. It was a video called videogioco on vimeo, the link is posted below. It is a cartoon that is generated from a person flipping numerous pieces of paper with drawings to create an animation. 

http://vimeo.com/6605263

The third video art project that I viewed was Drums, I have seen things like this in the past but I find it very fascinating how they can take virtually created drum sets and have them produce real sounds and songs based upon the generated video. This video had a really cool sound to it.

http://vimeo.com/1307986#at=15

3 Video Mapping Examples

This video mapping projection was very cool to me, especially considering how much I like Audi as an automobile manufacturer.

This projection is UNBELIEVABLE. Very trippy.

Transforming entire buildings via 3D video mapping, becoming common now a days I suppose.....

Sheryl Oring

Sheryl Oring is one of my favorite artists that we have explored this class so far. She goes to a location and sets up a booth where people can express their opinions on the way that the country is being run by the President and after she gets peoples opinions via typewriter she mails the letters to the White house for reading by the President. She has a website where you can view the entries that have been sent over to the White house via electronic media copy. These opinions are not always just thoughtless uneducated responses but a lot of the time they express legitimate concern over the countries operations that people wish to get across. For every entry you can feel the character and  humanity going in. 

Propaganda vs Commericial

Propaganda and Commercials are very different in context.  Propaganda is a marketing tool that is typically implemented to start movements or radical behavior from the general public. Commercials are used to market either products or services to people usually without any political reference. Distinguishing between propaganda and commercials is sometimes tough but you can usually determine whether something is propaganda or not by seeing its effect on peoples views and behaviors.  Commercials are used to make revenues from products and services while propaganda's main mission is to get supporters to back an idea. Commercials have gotten very frustrating over the years which is switching people over to viewing methods such as Netlfix or DVR.

Video Game Revolution

Video games have really developed immensely over the last few decades. They provide users with a reality that is far from what is realistic in their daily life. With newer games things are becoming so realistic that it is almost an escape for most users. In the 1980's a lot of the top video game manufacturers like Nintendo and Sony began releasing consoles and some of their most successful games into the market. These early games might have been simple and the graphics may have been poor but the user experience was very enjoyable. I still play video games such as Super Smash Bros, Mario Cart, and Mario Party regularly because they are entertaining games that Nintendo built off of. The video game market is one that will learn from its past and has a very promising future. It was cool to watch this video about the revolution of video gaming and all of the success it has brought to companies. I am extremely satisfied to see how Microsoft jumped into the video game market and is doing so well. It shows me a lot of promise as far as Microsoft jumping into multiple technology markets. In the future we will see a lot of augmented reality gaming from current front runner video companies such as Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo but watch out for Oculus VR which was purchased by Facebook this year.

Triumph of the Nerds

Triumph of the Nerds was an extremely well made documentary about the history of computers. It was the best technology documentary I have ever seen with interviews with all the top CEO's of companies such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and Apple. Being an MIS major I am surprised that I had never seen this documentary previously, it brought a lot of value to me. It was cool to see the competitive strategies of Apple vs. Microsoft that took place in the 80's and 90's. It made me again realize that Steve Wozniak was the true brains behind Apple, he was the king of computer hardware while Steve Jobs was the visionary and marketer. The first Revenge of the Nerds segment went over the early computing and software developing days with the Altair, Apple 2, and "homebrew computer meetings". IBM was in a ton of danger when Apple released their first personal computer and they went to Microsoft to develop an operating system and software for their own personal computer in a one year gap of time. When Microsoft did this they took over the market and put Apple on the burner to compete in the market where Microsoft was now the front runner. In 1995 Microsoft released their first GUI in Windows 95 and offered significantly more software than Apple. Around that time Steve Jobs left Apple and this left Apple with no other choice but to release commercials against Microsoft. It is amazing to me that Apple is still around as a company today with all of the failures that they have had in the past. When it comes to computers Microsoft still has the edge in my opinion, Apple still can't get their ridiculous prices down. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had a lot of respect for each other but you can tell Steve wasn't a fan of Microsoft's "tasteless design". I took a lot from this video and I find it crazy how Oracles CEO had the concept of cloud computing envisioned so long ago.

Golan Levin site and Interview

Golan Levin had a very interesting interview about how technology is becoming the future of art. He goes over a great deal of new technology such as 3D printing and different types of cameras. In the meantime he is doing his entire presentation with a video effect in which makes him look three dimensional with small lines modeling the depths of his body. He also dives into the value of a degree in which he believes that making the connections in something you like doing is the most important thing. The most interesting thing I found from the interview is his disbelief in singularity, the belief that technology will surpass the intelligence of humans. Personally, I believe we are a hell of a lot closer to achieving singularity than most people think with technology growth over the last decade. Technology will continue to grow at compounding rates every year.

Golan Levin has many cool projects on his website for all fans of art at any age demographic. The project of his that I reviewed on the website was Finger Spies where he dressed up his friends fingers as Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Van Eyck and took pictures of them doing various things. I thought it was a really cool project. Very strange but unique. 

5 songs

I believe that a genre (movement) should be added to this class, the genre is called Hardcore. It is derived from punk rock music in the and has brought a huge movement that has been around for awhile and is only growing. A lot of hardcore bands are spreading the message of being Straight Edge, no alcohol, drugs, or tobacco. They created a scene that is very violent and emotional. This is a genre of music I listen to regularly and I watched a few documentaries on how hardcore was started. Straight Edge hardcore started in the 1980's on the East Coast in Washington DC and quickly expanded out to the west coast. I will post one of my favorite older hardcore band as 1 of 5 artists recommended for this class. Madball, they were one of the early Hardcore bands from New York in the late 1980's. While this band does not use technology a great deal in their music or videos the movement they belonged to was one that shouldn't go unnoticed. They are still around playing shows today, video below:

As far as an addition for the punk genre for this class I would probably add Blink 182, they really brought a lot to the punk rock community since their founding in 1992, the song I chose is Always, my favorite from the band. They did some cool things with the video editing in the music video. I also think this song is beautifully written.

An addition to the Dubstep genre should be Knife Party with their song Centipede below. This is a super cool video loaded with special effects. I am not a huge fan of Dubstep music but I have always been a fan of Knife Party since they released this song in 2012.

Addition to House music would be Phuture, they used a Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer to make their music and were one of the first Acid house groups to form. I chose them because I really enjoyed listening to "Acid Tracks" which is posted below. This music is generated completely through technology.

Another addition to the punk rock movement would be Misfits, a lot of their videos have cool effects and they are the creators of the horror punk sub-genre. Founded in 1977 they provided a very different type of punk rock and their appearance was pretty unique at the time.

Performance Art Piece

Just missed a tour before security showed up but got a few reactions including a couple that did not show up on camera well enough to upload. But here it is! MIS Major Decontextrualized, MAN VS FOUNTAIN

Douglas Engelbart

 Douglas Engelbart was given the title "the Mother of All Demos" after a computer demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer conference in San Francisco, California. He featured a complete hardware and software system called the NLS system. The presentation was way ahead of its time and displayed the first graphical user interface influencing Microsoft and Apple in the 1990's. Instead of lines of code to perform functions the demo used a mouse device to click, resize windows, and highlight. The entire presentation went on flawlessly without any technical glitches which is incredible considering it was so early in the age of computers. The presentation went over a lot of modern fundamental elements of computing like file linking, revision control, video conferencing, word processing, etc. It seems like Engelbart had practically came from the future and blessed us with this technology. He gained enough funding from NASA and ARPA to make his system and create the greatest technological demo of all time, even to this day. I am interested in doing more research as to why he did not make a major push in the computer market over time, he seemed so ahead of the field.

Mark J. Stock

Mark J. Stock might be one of the most inspirational digital artists I have ever seen. I chose to review his piece "Research Code" and I was amazed. Not only does he provide an art piece, he provides extensive research in nearly all of his art pieces. In this piece he consulted thousands of pages of information and added his own contributions. At the end of this project he had created 400 new pages of text and 600 pages of computer code. He then created an image of the paper equivalent of all the work he had done, each revision of each page of code appears on one page of the image. And if that wasn't already impressive enough, the code that was written on these pages was used to create the flowing forms in the image. This is truly one of the coolest things I have ever seen being an amateur programmer myself.

Mark Snyder: Electroacoustic Performance

The performance by Mark Snyder was very powerful and contained a lot of meaning through visuals and amplified instruments. I had a venue in my hometown where a lot of bands would play this style of performances with almost no lyrics and instrumentals to go along with projected imagery. The only difference is that I have never seen traditional instruments such as a Tuba that Mark Snyder used amplified and effected before. It was cool to see this show because I had not heard or seen anything like it in quite some time. The way Mark Snyder coordinated the final song was magnificent, the female performers did an incredible job with both the harp and the vocals. As the music began to come to life so did the images and colors in the back display which shows how much effort and heart went into every song. BRILLIANT.

Persuasive Games

Persuasive games are different then your ordinary game in the fact that they are games that help advocacy groups and lifestyle brands communicate their products and ideas through video games. These games will market a specific product, brand, or idea to a consumer which I think is a revolutionary concept. For example, I was looking at a few of the games and I saw that CNN had numerous games featured on the site such as Campaign Rush, Planet in Peril: Animal Rescue, and Presidential Pong. Also, car manufacturers such as Chrysler and Jeep both have games to show off features of their new cars.  I like to think of a lot of video games as mindless garbage but games that are actually serving a purpose whether it’s advertising a new product or promoting a cause, this could be a good market. Not everyone likes to do comprehensive reading so this enables people to gain information while being entertained.

 

Steve Jobs Stanford Address

Although I am a huge supporter of Microsoft and Bill Gates, I believe that Steve Jobs did a wonderful job with this speech. He has always been a guy who is good at selling his ideas and having great visions in his product design. A lot of the great minds out there will drop out of college and the fact that he dropped out of Stanford without graduating and came back to deliver such a powerful speech shows a lot. Even though I am a Macintosh “hater” doesn’t mean that I can’t show some respect for the legacy he left behind. Bill Gates was a guy who wanted to create a computer that EVERYONE could use and be able to afford. Steve Jobs created products that showed so much style and character that their price tags can ALMOST be justified. I was a little disappointed in Steve dropping the ball on Microsoft in this speech saying that Microsoft copied everything from them. I think Steve was being a little hypocritical in the fact that I have heard him use the Picasso phrase, “good artists steal” many times. Nevertheless people will always remember Steve for his aggressive, persuasive, and creative way of getting his messages across.

 

Raymond Kurzweil

The video that I chose to watch was Ray Kurzweil: The Coming Singularity. Ray Kurzweil is a brilliant man with all the facts and figures to represent what he believes is the future of technology. He believes that by 2020 we will have computers that are powerful enough to simulate the human brain. He goes over the exponential growth in technology where even the growth increases every year. By 2029 he thinks that we will have reverse engineered, modeled, and simulated the brain. This will provide us the software, algorithmic methods to simulate all of the human brains capabilities including our emotional intelligence. By this time computers will be far more intelligent than the human brain. He stresses that these extremely intelligent machines are not coming from space but from within us. By 2045 we will have expanded the intelligence of our human machine civilization a billionfold, which will be singularity. Singularity is a point in time that is difficult to see beyond. Along with the technologies that are helping us try to treat cancer and other disease can be used against us in the future if terrorists get ahold of the technology and use biological viruses they create against us. I knew that Kurzweil predicted the future before watching this video and I thought that he very easily could have just been making this information up but it seems like he has a pretty good idea on how fast technology will in fact advance.

Grid Art Project

Roommate bumped into the table coming back from st. patty's day celebrations but... 900 beer caps of all variety, drink heavily!

 

 

War of the Worlds Broadcast

The radio broadcast, War of the Worlds was very realistic and interesting. If I were alive during the time of this broadcast I probably would have been one of the suckers to actually believe this attack was going on. The entire story was narrated beautifully and with much detail. I would say that the only thing that gave away that this broadcast was not a live report was the music in the background at certain times and obviously the end where Orson Welles expresses that the broadcast was not real to listeners. The acting and writing that went into the production of this broadcast made it so realistic that I stayed fascinated even though their were no visuals associated.

Boston Flipbook

A Clockwork Orange, I'm Singin' in the Rain

This scene in Clockwork Orange is one that is sure to stay in a viewers mind forever. The character Alex DeLarge and his group of friends enter the home of a couple and assault them. After they are done with the assaulting they proceed to rape the wife in front of the husband and have both of their mouths taped shut. In the midst of this chaos Alex begins to sing "I'm singin' in the rain", a song that usually reflects a happy situation. I believe that Stanley Kubrick threw this into the movie to show that these drugged out punks were sick in the head and ultraviolence is what made them happiest. This movie was set in London in the future, it was very surprising to me that this song was chosen but this director is one of my favorites.

Stop Motion

I think the concept of stop motion animation is very unique and interesting. I remember as a kid watching Rudolph where Arthur Rankin Jr. used this type of animation and it seemed revolutionary. The Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer television special first ran in 1964 so I think its cool that people are still utilizing this animation technique. Stop motion animation is created by taking multiple photographs (frames) of a static object and these frames are played in a continuous sequence.

The two Vimeo videos that I chose to watch were Bumble Bee Boy and Iron Man Vs. Bruce Lee. I thought that both videos did an incredible job with this animation style, the Bumble Bee Boy animation seems like it must have taken a lot of photographs to complete as it is a small toy with many small parts that were moving. I believe that stop motion animation will continue to be used in the future especially in children's television shows. One example of stop motion animation in a show that I watch is in Robot Chicken on Adult Swim.

A Trip to the Moon

This video was very shocking to me, it was very ahead of its time....at that time. The way that the backdrops were transitioned and things were dissolved into the scene was impressive to me. While the physics and concept of the moon was very different at this time period it was cool to see a film with extraterrestrial life on the moon. These moon creatures reminded me of the aliens in the movie Signs how they were defeated so easily, in this case they were struck by an umbrella and went up in a poof of smoke. The characters that were brave enough to travel to the moon in the large bullet structure got a lot more than they bargained for, experiencing bizarre weather conditions and running into another form of life that did not want them to be there. It wouldn't be until 1969 when the first man walked on the moon, 67 years after this film was released; this is what opened up my eyes the most.

Jono Vaughan Presentation

The presentation Examining the Self: Gender Identity, Social Engagement, and Art Production that Professor Vaughan presented was very eye opening to me. I had never really explored what goes in to the life of a transgender individual. Being transgender requires a person to encounter many obstacles and lack of security. These individuals experience a great deal of hate from the general population for being the people they want to be. Jono showed us (the audience) samples of artwork representing masculinity through historical references in her charcoal works. Her artwork contained numerous lithographs with Minotaurs included in them. One quote that I really admired from Jono's presentation was "Sometimes its the simplest things that drive the most successful work". I believe this quote is true in art, it is all about how you build on these ideas. I thought Jono's Project 42 is an extremely cool idea and I hope that she gets more funding to continue with it. It is a project in which a transgender individual who was killed is danced for and appreciated by a volunteering individual who wears an abstracted garment specially designed to represent that person. I was relieved to hear from Jono that the world is changing and that the transgender community is starting to become more supported and understood. The internet is a great avenue for these individuals to connect and share experiences together.

Wicked, Behind the Scenes

This behind the scenes video of what goes in to a broadway play from the director's standpoint really intrigued me. Joe Mantello seems to be a phenomenal director in the fact that he is open to anyone's suggestions for how the play should modified. He stated that he attended each rehearsal and stood in as the audience and observed how things were shaping up. Joe said that he erased what he had learned the previous rehearsal so that he went into each rehearsal with a fresh set of eyes. Prior to Wicked calling in Joe Mantello as a director the play lacked the direction it has now taken. The Wicked Witch of the West is often looked at as a horrible villain but this play shows a different side of the her that people would not expect and the audience responded very well.

Madama Butterfly

Pjotr Pegin's Madama Butterfly is an animated opera that did a great job at hitting a number of emotions. The story is about a woman who seems to be on an isolated island who meets a skipper and has sexual relations with him; she ends up getting pregnant. After this encounter he leaves her behind and she waits for his return. In this time she has a baby who remains connected to her through an umbilical cord. One day the skipper does return but he has a wife and kids along with him, he breaks the umbilical cord and takes their child along with him. The child was the last thing Madama Butterfly had connecting her to the man she was in love with; she once again was left with a broken heart and significant disappointment. I really enjoyed the music in this opera, I thought it went very well with the animation.

The Birth and Life of Opera

The documentary “The Birth and Life of Opera” shows the different ways that opera was influential over history. Opera was originated in Italy over 400 years ago. A group of writers and poets in Italy called the Camerta created a new type of entertainment that offered a story as well as music.

A great deal of the music we have explored in this class is unrecognizable for me but throughout this documentary I began to recall a few of the songs. Mozart’s La Marriage De Figaro was an easy story to comprehend and I recognized the music. It was a story about a count who tried to get vengeance on a servant named Figaro by taking the virginity of the household maid who Figaro happened to be marrying soon. Figaro had tried to ruin plans between the count as his wife prior. At the end of the story the servant bests the powerful count. This opera was extremely popular and revolutionized opera during this time.

I thought it was interesting how opera was used during times of war in history as propaganda.


I realize now after watching this documentary how the success of opera over the years made it possible for modern day broadway to still exist.

Deus Ex Machina

Deus Ex Machina is a phrase used to describe an event where an unsolvable issue is resolved by an unexpected new character, object, ability, etc. This plot device is used frequently in modern books and movies as well as near the beginning of time. 

One example of Deus Ex Machina in pop-culture is in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when Harry is outmatched by a basilisk and a magical phoenix brings him the sword of Godric Gryffindor to kill it. Another example is in Lord of the Rings when Gwaihir and other eagles save Gandalf from any situation where he is in danger. One really  interesting piece of pop culture that I found that showed Deus Ex Machina was the Claw Machine in Toy Story 3. The alien toys worshiped the claw as a god and treated it as a decider as to their salvation. Deus Ex Machina adds a great deal of thrill to literature and film which is why it has been around for so long in history.

Raul Cuero

Raul Cuero's story was very inspirational to me. It is a story of a man overcoming many significant struggles with the odds completely stacked against him. Raul was raised in Columbia in poverty and had uneducated parents who could not read or write. When he came over to the United States he excelled in basketball and was able to gain a scholarship which furthered his education. He graduated college and went on to bring a great deal to the science community. In the United States he experienced many situations of discrimination in which he used to fuel himself to work even harder. He is now a professor of microbiology and has 9 scientific inventions to his name. He also started up and is research director of his own organization called the International Park of Creativity. A couple ideas that he had that I enjoyed are below:

"Creativity has nothing to do with art or being intellectually advanced. Creativity has to do with how you perceive nature in relation with your assistance."-Raul Cuero

"Everything is a process, never let the results be the motive for you doing anything"-Raul Cuero

"Learn by doing...."

I can easily apply some of the things that Raul Cuero expressed in the interview to my everyday life. Learn by doing is a basic statement but one thing I definitely need to keep in mind. If a person just sits back and thinks about something in contrast to actually performing this action the idea may not be as effective. He also expressed that taking your time with something is always worth it and that everything is a process with many steps before completion.

Juan Carlos Delgado

Juan Carlos Delgado’s artwork is very different from a great deal of artists I have seen. He is a brilliant sculptor and he adds other elements to his work so that the audience can get a full feel for the message he is trying to leave behind. Temperatures and environmental effects appear in a sequence on his work, expressing different messages to its admirers.

Cuarto Norte is multimedia in the fact that Juan Carlos Delgado brings another element into the picture, in this case its touch. Another reason it is multimedia is that the sculpture is changing its appearance in a sequence. This shows a time control in his work essentially narrating a story. Although the article associated with these pieces was in a different language I still feel like I gained an understanding.

Class, Initial Thoughts

My name is Kyle Sewell and I am a Junior at the University of Tampa double-majoring in Business Management and Management Information Systems (MIS). My initial thoughts of this class is that it is unlike any other class I have taken before. I was very surprised about the material of the class; This class is one of those that will keep my on my feet at all times. This is my first art class that I have taken at the University and I look forward to seeing how Art and Technology are interrelated. I have never really given opera a chance but I have already started to gain some interest and understanding over the last couple class periods.