Collaborative Presentations Day 2

Usman Haque and Rebecca Allen; Cory Arcangel and Lillian Schwartz; John Lasseter and John Knoll; Pascal Dombis and Terry Mulligan


Liz and Jessica did an exhibit on Usman Haque and Rebecca Allen, titled Interaction Required. It was about interactive technologies and the viewer playing a central role in the gallery space. Usman would be presented outside and Rebecca inside.

Rebecca's pieces were "Fleeting Words" (1991), "Bush Soul #2" (1998), and "Sleight of Hand" (2004). Bush Soul #2 dealt with human prescence in the artificial world. It invovled a vibrating joystick and was meant to show the reaction of humans in an enviornment. They claim that it's "not like a game", but it sure seems like one to me. Slight of Hand also screams of gaming potential. It is an excellent use of virtual reality technology, sensitive to human hand movement.

Usman took viewer creation in a different direction. His "Blurbal" was a light show inside balloons, with the entire contraption strung together and attached to handlebars that the audience could turn to manipulate the lights and shape. He had "Primal Source" at a beach festival in California, 2008, which utilized mist projection and light, and the crowd determined the imagery. The one that impressed me the most was "Evoke", which used microphones in the crowds to control colors lighting up a building. It was able to determine the difference between not only volume levels but between the lilts and tempos of applause, singing, clapping, yelling, etc. The throng crowding the building certainly shows that it succeeds in impacting the people.

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Ryan and Kyle Czepiel did Cory Arcangel and Lillian Schwartz, in an exhibit to be viewed at the MET.

Cory manipulates technology to create art. His pieces include "Super Mario Clouds", which shows the beauty of clouds through game technology by breaking into the Mario game cartridge and removing everything except for the clouds from the game, "I Shot Andy Warhol", which removed targets in an old shooting game with famous people, "Super Mario Movie", which created a movie from the Super Mario game wherein the game breaks down to the tune of his own soundtrack, and "Sans Simon", the only non-video game piece, in which Cory uses his own shadow to block the image of Paul Simon throughout and entire video of a song at a concert.

Lillian has the "Mona Leo", which splices Leonardo daVinci's chalk portrait together with his Mona Lisa - it is an argument regarding the speculation that Mona Lisa is actually his self-portrait. She also has "Pixelation", which is meant to establish a new medium - the computer for art as a new paintbrush tool, and another work too which deals with the idea that computer animation is a form of art, with special effects and form.

Cory questions what we view art as and Lily expands the viewers' perception on what we know.

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Next there was an exhibit of John Lasseter and John Knoll, on the development of a digital art.

Lasseter was a Disney animator who moved to Pixar. He did the short film "Where the Wild Things Live" which mixed 2-D and 3-D animation. He also did all-computer graphics animation projects of Andre and Wally B., as well as the Pixar icon of the lamp jumping on the ball. He also was the chief contributor to Toy Story: the first feature-length computer animated film.

Knoll, on the other hand, created the first version of photoshop, which was a mac-compatible floppy. He did "Abyss", which, in contrast to Lasseter's computer animation films, was the first movie with cg animation. He was also behind Star Trek, and the cg model of the light ship in season 3.

Both Lasseter and Knoll work on a lot of movies as the first of their kind in their respective fields of special animation.

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Jessica Crocco and Liz Hannah did Pascal Dombis and Terry Mulligan in an exhibit titled "Repetition".

Dombis worked with algorithms. "Rizong III" is a digital print with hundreds of intersecting lines, which suggests both chaos and order. "Topo Rizong" (2004) is a geneation of many ovals into a large work of art, and "Antisana" is a specific digital print installation with a similar building up of a repeated pattern that zooms out into a new image. It's the same shapes repeating over and over again until it creates an organic form that is its own peice.

Mulligan also uses excessive patterns, but already has the image to create in mind, which makes it more - or is it less? - flexible. Some works include "Five Objects", which is squares and different shapes repeated with an emphasis on color to form images like sailboats and pears. Also there is "Music Series", a symmetrical-ish composition of guitars and notes, again with square repetition. Finally we have "Abstract and Color", which is still utilizing a pattern but is obviously very formulated and thought out.