Collaborative Presentations: Day One

Toni Dove and Christopher Jordon; Pascal Dombis and Jeffrey Shaw.


Toni Dove and Christopher Jordon:

They said that the interactive video artist Toni Dove and the photographer Chris Jordon are both artists making a statement about consumerism. I definitely was able to see the connection in Chris Jordon's work. Both his Intolerable Beauty and his work with the trash found in bird corpses really force our eyes open to what we as wasteful humans are doing to our environment. The arrangement of trash in the birds' bodies make one wonder if such an arrangement is even possible and the painting replica made up of 106000 cans - and that being 30 seconds worth of cans - is a shocking thing to hear. I think that the explanation along with the Colbert Report video really enhanced the work and helped to drive the point home. Toni Dove, on the other hand, I wasn't really getting "consumerism" from her. Sure, her Artificial Changelings piece was really cool and a look at how our generation is so different from previous ones, as well as probably what we will do to ourselves if we continue on this path (that's what I'm assuming the land of fire was supposed to represent), so I can kind of see the connection there, but Spectropia, other than show her style of artwork, I thought wasn't so much any statement on consumerism as it was a showcase of awesome video game potential.



Art Through Systems, Pascal Dombis and Jeffrey Shaw:

The commentary on search engines and how we have connected ourselves so thoroughly to such an unreliable source as the internet is pretty radical. I felt like the Jeffrey Shaw section didn't make much sense though. They said that it was about "how people are connected to the net and control what they look at", but I don't really understand how, and I kind of got the feeling that they didn't either. Pascal Dombis, on the other hand, was a well developed section. His search-engine-produced results really speaks for itself, to the point where I wish he hadn't included the overlay of colors. I felt that was kind of unnecessary. Also I have no idea what the whole "straight line curving into a circle reforming into a straight line again" thing had to do with the theme. This exhibit started me thinking on how it would be cool to make a sort of interactive statement on search engine's unreliable results, maybe by having someone type in anything they want and the computer would then bring up many results on google image search or some such thing - both the relevant and the extremely NON relevant. I'm not sure how that would work though: it sounds too complicated even for programmers.