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.