Felix Gonzalez-Torres: taking candy from a dead man

PROJECT No. 2 – SOCIAL TRANSPARENCY PERFORMANCE

Create a performance based on an ordinary task to be presented to our class in the Hurvis studio and documented. Use real materials and objects without pretending. You are not representing, not recounting, not-re-enacting, but simply doing. Ideally this activity will make sound and prompt viewer interaction. Use minimum language or none at all.  Contemplate Bourriaud’s statement that: “A work of art has a quality that sets it apart from other things produced by human activities. This quality is its (relative) social transparency… The “transparency” of the artwork comes about from the fact that the gestures forming and informing it are freely chosen or invented, and are part of its subject” (41-42).


It was really fun for me to be in on this one! Always think of my Christian background this time of year (Easter), and how that lore is all about aspects of performance in real life, pre-media. So i wanted to explore one that i always thought was pretty wacky, transubstantiation. In my improvised monologue i speculated that maybe 5 or 10% of the US population would regularly participate in the holy communion ritual, but with some flimsy research it seems to be much more. According to the Religion in United States wikipedia page 70.6% of our population considers themselves Christian, and 60% of those consider themselves devout. On a worldwide level we're 31.5% Christian, according to Major religious groups. What a bubble i live in!


This iphone documentation interests me in how ambiguous this all looks, and i really like to look at them as images without captions for that reason. The neutral black/gray environment of the studio adds to the level of displacement for me.

Allan Kaprow's LP

A how-to guide in LP form, because you need to dig these ideas often and repeatedly. There's also a nice short documentary of this period of Kaprow and crew at Rutgers.

Joseph Beuys Wants You!

The huge idea here is that Art can be everywhere, always, making every life experience a heightened, enriching, nurturing event. That everyone can participate in and comprehend. That Art can enlighten us and save our planet from destruction by humankind.

ALLATONCENESS NEW MEDIA WORK

Tuesday, March 14, 11:30-2:00 Warch Campus Center Cinema
New media projects by 13 ART 240 Digital Processes students responding to Marshall McLuhan’s ideas of the global village from his seminal book The Medium is the Massage. Writes McLuhan, “Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. “Time” has ceased, “Space” has vanished. We now live in a global village…a simultaneous happening…we have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction.”

Madeira Seaman   Instinct Art    A collection of drawings that begins with a scribble from me and ends with a drawing from someone else. This project explores the concept of first impressions, collaboration, and communication through drawing. The drawings will be displayed on a password protected blog at the url scribbleswithstrangers.tumblr.com. The password is digitalmedia.

Elias Hubbard  johnie told me to "Just call it a presentation of your photoshop manipulations"    A creative experiment attempting to produce a cohesive and repetitive set of digital images, that will likely fail.

Eryn Blagg   In Detail   A collection of photos of normal objects, in everyday surroundings, in detail.

Lizzy García Creighton   A Night In   A documentation of my dinner plans with a retired botany professor and perhaps another student. In this project I hope to push the boundaries of "social art." I will also be expanding on the main theme that I have been exploring throughout this term of making "everyday life" into a work of art.

Tess Bourbeau   not forgotten   a series of images with the essence of memories, staging things that never happened, or altering past memories to personally reclaim them. by adding them to the global village, a platform on the internet, they become valid and their current definition may be interpreted as reality, or having actually happened.

Jack Lucas Panoramic Survey of State Power In Appleton, WI   An exploration of the architecture and geographic spaces of State power, using several image making tools, each with their own connotations when thought about in relationship to State power.

Veronica Bella   Ode to Basquiat   A documentary of life through painterly lenses. Profound inspiration from Jean-Michel Basquiat. Halted and confronted by his wonder and engagement with everyday life, manifesting through video, sound, and photography.

Mike Gans   Who is she   Worship my false celebrity.

Annie Connolly and Lilly Donlon   Good Girls Gone Bad    We are going to play with layering projected images of found and original footage while simultaneously playing an original sound track. We are pulling inspiration from the five-out-of-five star recommended show, Sonny and Cher's Comedy Show as well as from Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The goal is to create a disorienting and dreamlike experience for the viewer through the layering of different mediums.

Morgan Shapiro   Skipped Forms    An exploration of childhood through modern media. I created an Instagram account, @skippedforms, which takes my childhood videos-- which have never been uploaded to the internet before-- and brings them to the forefront of social media. In addition to the videos themselves, the process is important as well, with all the videos being a VOB format, which is long outdated.  

Chris Gore-Gammon   Chris Gore-Gammon

Glenn McMahon  The Good Neighbor   Who's watching you?

Loving Ted Nelson

Here is Ted on the big screen for the first time-- interviewed by the great film-maker Werner Herzog for his 2016 movie about the Internet and its consequences. His PhD thesis, "Philosophy of Hypertext", is finally available and published. (340 pages). http://tinyurl.com/j42fzch 

Smart Studios' Butch Vig

Coming from a self-taught, non-industry, DIY background Butch Vig brought a fresh approach to recording raw Midwestern alt-rock talent that eventually became an industry standard and is now partially available to everyone in the form of the Waves Butch Vig Signature Vocal Plugin.