CART 351: Week 4

After visiting the Jenny Holzer exhibition I was amazed yet left without words. She chose War as her main source of inspiration to create her art pieces. Though a dark topic to portray through art, Holzer brought all aspects to the table by incorporating LED lights, silk screen linen paintings, and most important of all, words.

Holzer got the brilliant idea of accessing declassified US governmental documents such as transcripts, memos, emails and also death certificates. On the first floor of the exposition there is a piece called Redaction paintings. On these silk screened linen paintings we see planned out attack maps that were to be executed for the Iraqi War. The tiles of these two pieces are called Phase II- Shape the Battlespace and Phase III- Complete Regime Destruction. I believe these titles speak for themselves. To me these pieces were quite powerful through her use of bruised flesh colors and the position of the prints. I felt surrounded by death and violence.

Moving upstairs onto the second floor I felt dizzy, and uncomfortable. The brightness and speed of the LED lights made me nauseous. I believe her intention was to make the viewers feel like so. Up against two walls emerges this tall and what seems to look like a human torso entitled Thorax. As I was reading the text that continually spins at a constant speed, I understood that Holzer used a declassified historical reference to the death of a Iraqi non-combatant killed by the US army. The black sedan is used quite often making a direct link to the death of this un-named man. Another piece is very similar to this one called Ribs on the third floor. Similar to Thorax, Ribs lay flat on the ground as though penetrating though the wall and floor. The text on this one was different as it moved from the ground up. The text was about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay and the condition they were in. I found it quite hard to read this piece due to that fact that many of the word were overlapping one another. They were often erased or too fast to read.

The room that really stricked me as being overpowered by negetive forces was Lustmord Tables. On this floor the viewers can find large wooden tables in the middle of the room where bones of all shapes and sizes rest flat. Some bones had metal tags, resembling ones we place on dead bodies ready for autopsy. On the tags were inscribed the cause of death, rape and murder of that particual person. These were females of all ages that were brutally perpetrated in the Yugoslavia War. Being a woman myself, I felt a particular connection to this piece. Even though these were not the actual bones of the vicims I felt like death could be smelled on that floor. On the walls you could find death cirtificates which contributed immensly to the theme of violence and death.

In the other building The Monument and For Chicago could be found. Two pieces devoted entirely for Holzer's own writing. The Monument stands on the wall, in a semi-circular position and programmed with writings; from politics to religion. I liked the fact that the room is colder than the rest of them were. It felt as though we were walking into a new universe; someone else's universe of thought. The height of ceiling contributed to feeling of intrusion and the immense feeling of us, the viewers, being tiny compared to her thoughts. For Chicago was my favorite of all the LED light pieces. Laying flat on the ground I felt this very strong tendancy to sit down and just observe the yellow lights speeding from one side of the room to the other. The ten lanes illuminates the room, making it feel warm and very welcoming.

CART 351: Week 3

"Data Knitting" by Arjen Mulder

"Media are increasingly becoming means to construct realities, rather than means to represent reality." This phrase sums up the text "Data Knitting" very well as it is a reccurent theme through out the document. It focuses on the political, economical, social, historical, epistemological and software-based implications of techniques for data clustering and data combination. Thus our bodies have become genetic archives; a way to store information. Knowledge is a powerful tool, it is the result of data mangement data clusters. I found this article particulary interesting. It gives a very specific overview on data and the ways which it is stored. Studies are being made much more intensivly now-a-days on human interactions. The act of "relationships" are being analyzed scientifically. Data is now easily accessible everywhere and by everyone.

Gerhard Richter's "Atlas"

Gerhard Richter was born in a middle class German family in the 30's. His relatives, including his mother, father, brother were all involved in the Nazi community. Growing up with such violence and distruction perhaps built this hatred towards war. Being encouraged by his mother to further his knowledge in the art field, Richter went to an art school in Germany and later worked with known artists. He believed photographs should not only be based on the meaning but mostly on the esthetics. "Throughout his career Richter has shrunk from giving a psychological insight into his art, leaving his admirers and critics guessing and at times confused." This phrase is important when dealing with Richter's art.

I felt that his photographs reflected many themes combined into a single art piece. Mostly old pictures I felt like this reflected the passage of time. Like a photo album with memories that have been accumulated.

CART 351: Week 2

NeMe: The Work of Artists in a Databased Society: net.art as on-line activism by Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga

Is it fair to say that the internet can be used as an isolated environment to track down or statistically analyze today's society? Zúñiga believes, or purely communicates to his audience the term cyberspace. Which can be said to be an electronic medium, where communication is simplified. Individuals can interact, communicate, exchange ideas, create artistic media by using this so called electronic medium. Though this may sound nothing but good news to this technological era, Zúñiga points out that "The network increasingly interweaves the virtual and real." Thus, altering our ways of thinking and interacting with one another.

Social values are greatly diminished and our lack of communicating with one another is virtually un-existent.

10 ways data is changing how we live

Data, data, everywhere, every day, all the time. Data is collected from our daily activities such as shopping, in advertising, from the war to our relationships all is collected and nothing is left out. With technologies quickly advancing, information collected is even greater than before. By taking Google world as an example, information that we might take for granted is broadcasted all over the internet. Nothing is kept a secret from the public. It becomes much easier to track somebody down. We must understand that a lot of money is going into the research for more data.

CART 345: Week 3

Today in class we had to take pictures of ourselves and show the specific emotion through the photograph of course but also through the font. Here are the emotions and the pictures. I did mine with Sophie Girard using photobooth. We thought this was a different and amusing way of portraying our emotions.

Sad-Mistral
Surprised-Eccentric std
Angry-Cracked
Happy-Hobo std
Embarrassed-Baskerville Old Face
Confused-Webdings

CART 351: Week 1

We were assigned a project in Networks and Navigation untitled Mapping. We had to create a cartographic visualization employing the notion of map or mapping. I chose to do it on the people in my surroundings that I love the most. I chose my mom (Nicole) two of my best friends (Alexandrine and Mathieu), my brother (Alexandre), my boyfriend (Yannick) and his little cousin that I adore to death (Westly). I decided it would be a cool concept to place my photographs in a globe frame. This way you perceive the globe to be a representation of a map (or in other words my world). All the individuals I have chosen place a great importance in my life. My project consisted of asking each person of their thumb print and of course their photograph. With these two specific resources I came up with the idea of combining them and making one simple art piece. With the thumb prints being transparent you get a very good idea of what each person looks like without revealing everything. Every body has a unique thumb print therefore re-enforcing the identity issue.

So here is the link:

link

CART 345: Week 2

Today in class we had to find 2 fonts that we loved, 2 that we hated and 1 that we were unsure about. Here's what I came up with:

Love-

I thought both these fonts have a very unique usage of texture and color. ("Ice Baby" on the left and "Scary Toy" on the right) They are both very attractive and both have nice 3d effects to them. "Ice Baby" uses a nice ice texture as its main effect, adding this cool but attractive feel to it. "Scary Toy" uses fur as a point of interest. I just feel like intereating with the letters.


Hate-





These are the fonts I don't like (PizPaz Handwritting on the left and Zebrawood Regular on the right) I dislike PizPaz mostly because it is irregular and gives the impression of un-cleaness. Zebrawood on the other hand looks like something in a "cowboy movie". I don't like the degradation of the black and the dots on the bottom. It's too busy and un-attractive.

Not sure-





This is the font I wasn't sure about. I like the 3d aspect to it, but I'm not sure I like the "fatness" of the letters.

Then we had to team up and choose one font that we love and one that we hated. We agreed that "Ice Baby" was the one we liked the most. It's very original and the textures of the leaves in the ice make it unique and colorful. The one we hated the most was "Blazed" which looks very cheesy and roughly edited. It looks like something you,d find on a speed car, and I don't dig that look.

Team hated-

CART 345: Week 1

For the first week in this computation class we were introduced to the study of special topics in kinetic imagery. More specifically we (being the students) will have the chance to further explore digital text, and typography. By the end of the course we will be able to understand in greater detail the effects typography has over our daily lives. By manipulating text you can alter the meaning behind the text/words. Our project will include: motion typography for video, interactive texts, liquid/random/malleable fonts and computationally responsive letterforms.

This week we had two texts to read, one of them being Ellen Lupton's "Thinking with type." She breaks down typography into three main categories, Letter, Text and Grid. I have never taken the time to further my knowledge on the subject matter, and found it amazing to see all the possibilities related to text. Lupton analyzes the anatomy of letters, giving out information that one often tends to take for granted. For example; a letter consists of three specific linear dimensions, the cap height, the x height, and the baseline. Kerning is also something that I didn't know about. Lupton describes this as making an adjustment between two letters. But what I found even more impressive is when she talks about the different types of grids. Placing text on a page a certain way might alter the meaning behind the subject matter of that document. Therefore the publisher must take into consideration the different strategies of text placement. Space, size, weight, stucture all play an important role in creating an adequate document.

Type Basics is a very informative site where letters, and the anatomy of letters are clearly defined. Very close in resemblance to Lupton's "Thinking with type", Type Basics presents letters in a structured manner. Measurements seem to take an important role. What I found amusing was the hand-made examples which I thought were very helpful in better understanding their importance. It personalizes the website making it more easily approachable. He touches key issues, such as bold, italic and cursive, all very prominent in today's texts.


Words Matter
I saw this on television a while ago and thought it was a good example of word manipulation. This illustrates to what extent the power of words. By changing a simple letter you can easily alter the whole meaning of a phrase.



A lesson on Typography
I stumbled on this video from the Vancouver film school and thought it summed up the readings quite well. Without going into great details, this video goes over the basics of typography in a understandable fashion.