Sony NEX-5, Not Just a Fashion Accessory

You can set today's digital cameras on automatic and use them as jewelry...or take control and make meaningful images by starting out with a concept then learning enough about what the camera can do to control the end result.  On the most basic level setting the ASA/ISO, color balance and size of your .jpgs (or raw files) or manipulating the focus, exposure and flash takes the user beyond the generic point-and-shoot aesthetic.  We'll be experimenting with the Sony Nex-5 camera, which is lightweight and portable yet offers control. There's a beautiful "Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera Handbook" PDF you can download that offers helpful illustrations and instructions to aid you in understanding the camera's capabilities.

People You May Know

Diego Velazquez: Las Meninas, 1656

In Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera since 1870, SFMOMA curator Sandra Phillips argues that photography has played a major role in voyeuristic looking. Velazquez famously recorded acts of looking as far back as 1656 in his Las Meninas painting. Contemporary artists Emily Jacir (linz diary) and Shizuka Yokomizo (Stanger series) make work about deliberate performances before an unseen but perceived camera reminding us that someone is always watching. Gladys Kravitz was the nosy neighbor archetype always looking out the window in Bewitched. Today, every cell phone has a camera and every person has a cell phone thus making it possible for any action to be captured by anybody. Boundaries between public and private space blur and the  doors are thrown open for ubiquitous self-surveillance as we all willingly post every detail of our lives on FaceBook or otherwise. The panopticon conceptualized by Michel Foucault (wherein we live with the idea of being watched and adjusting our behavior accordingly) has seduced us. Philip Agre in Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy cautions us as he critiques ways our daily activities are captured and turned into a commodity. 

Gladys Kravitz always watching on "Betwitched"

The Machine is Us/Ing Us

1945 ENIAC computer showed several problems with the H-Bomb Design

Why is Thomas Edison (inventor of the light bulb) a household name and not Doug Engelbart (inventor of the mouse and networked computing first demonstrated in 1968), Computer Lib/Dream Machines (inventor of hypertext) or Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web)? For one thing, Edison was an entrepreneurial business man while Engelbart, Nelson and Berners-Lee were idealists who saw their inventions as ways for people to share information and collaborate freely. Scholar Michael Wesch still believes the web is a huge collaborative project with all of us contributing using platforms that both help share information and fuel the capitalist machine. Lev Manovich also views Web 2.0 as a platform for mass collaboration.

Like the Stars

Astronaut John H. Glenn, Jr. 1962, the first American to orbit Earth.

The astronaut John Glenn may have caught a glimpse of heavenly blue from the porthole of his spaceship, but I have watched the lights of a computer in operation. And they looked like the stars. -- Allan Kaprow from his essay The Artist as a Man of the World (1964)

Digital Projects Show Case

Friday, March 11, 2011, 3-6:30 pm
Warch Campus Center Cinema
Lawrence University
Fruit Slushies & popcorn! Everyone Welcome!

PROGRAM 

Tom Coben: 
Into the Caves:
Protecting the Bats of the Philippines (video, 18 min.)
Delicious to some
The bat population falls
What is the answer? 

Kate Duncan-Welke: 
Song of the Sea (soundscape, 4 min.)
Calm whales amid blue seas
Silence then a flowing song
Music from nature 

Kanesha Walker & Jinglei Xiao:  
Systematic Destruction (video, 5 min.)
Gentrification
Strikes our nation making it
Better? No. Far worse. 

Cait Genovese: 
Words Cannot Explain (video, 6 min.) 
Birds floating in air
traveling down a foggy road
abstract remembrance

Jordan Severson:  
An Exquisite Cycle (book, video, 9 min.)
Video and sound
Conceptions of life and death
Collaboration 

George Ziegler:  
Quest for the Apple Part II: 
The Ultimate Quest (video, 13 min.)
Look what I found here
I lost something I once knew
I need the apple 

Hillary Rogers:  I Don't Get It (book)
Peek at glory past.
If only marble mouths could
move, what would they say? 

Zenabu Abubakari:
All Displayed (book and calendar)
Visually displayed 
A global dialect is formed
Consumerism 

Anam Shahid:  Distortion of Reality: 
Pakistan in America (book)
We are who we are,
No matter how far away
We go beyond home

Krissy Rhyme:  
Portraits of People I Wish I Could Be (book)
Ah navel gazing
Like the art of karate
It must be mastered
 
Maki Miura: 
Earthlings (portfolio)
In little A-town
Hatch that bubble; discover
the diversity

Ali Scattergood:  
Sheer Presence - Relocated (portfolio)
Sheer Fabric Flows on
Energy moves within us
like a tree grows tall 

Jake Cihla:
Record of Rose Creek Dairy (portfolio)
I cannot describe
The joy of finding a place
In graceful decay 

Art and the Day Job

Artist Kristin Boehm of Minneapolis, 2010

What's going on out there for young artists right now? Lawrence University alumnus Kristin Boehm ('09) visited the Department of Art & Art History to talk about what she found in Minneapolis. Boehm's first video made when she was a sophomore in our Digital Processes course, Sweet Porridge, a digital adaptation of a Grimm's Fairy Tale predicted her future interests in a way. With its use of hand made yarn dolls, references to nurturing and eerie digitally synthesized dialog from an old-fashioned fairy tale, we begin to see the artist's ideas and aesthetic begin to take shape. Kristin's Reclaiming Technological Landscapes: SpinHandSpunDesigns honors project in 2009 incorporated knitting functional cozies to protect digital devices on commission. She also made larger cozies for street signs to communicate with a larger and perhaps more random public. Her visit to Lawrence was sponsored by the Coleman Foundation and the Lawrence's Department of Art and Art History as part of an initiative exploring opportunities self-employment for artists. That Boehm embarked on a series of proposals and internships related to her interests in art, knitting and technology while completing numerous commissions for iPod cozies is a testament to her determination, engagement with issues and stamina. Ironically, her attempts to be a self-employed artist lead her to a professional position as a designer working for Caring Bridge nicely merging her interests in digital culture, design, humanity, and psychology.

Kristin Boehm's "Sweet Porridge" video, 2007

The most fascinating kind of art

Tupperware Party: domestic fans gather to
socialize and consume (circa 1950s).

In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Warhol writes: "Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business-they'd Money is bad," and "working is bad," but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."  Having started out as a commercial artist designing store windows and ending up operating Andy Warhol Enterprises publishing magazines and cranking out portrait commissions holding this view makes sense. As Warhol wrote, calling an artist a $ELL OUT was the greatest of insults decades ago. Warhol predicted if not forged the way for the current possibility of "artist as entrepreneur" which has captured the mainstream media imagination with a spate of articles. The Economist wrote in its February 17, 2011 issue, "If businesspeople should take art more seriously, artists too should take business more seriously. Commerce is a central part of the human experience. More prosaically, it is what billions of people do all day." 

Warhol, Koons, and Hirst demonstrated that both fame and wealth could be achieved while an artist was still alive to benefit. The starving artist became stereotype than lapsed into "boho" lifestyle. Indeed the Internet has created new opportunities for young artists to make and sell artwork. Like a Tupperware party, young artists can develop networks of fans and friends, an inner circle of supporters willing to buy their wares. In 2007, Jen Bekman created 20x200 offering a "large selection of high-quality artwork starting at only $20." She welcomes novice consumers with only $20 to spend and hopes to turn them into art fans by offering editions of prints by an array of both the famous and the up and coming. Kate Bingaman-Bert started drawing then selling her drawings of her credit card statements to help get herself out of debt. Then she began drawing everything she bought and posting the drawings online as a project. The ongoing project evolved into her Tumblr blog Obsessive Consumption/The Office of Kate Bingaman Burt and a book. Even Minneapolis photographer Alec Soth, who has been embraced by the chic Chelsea art world has found a creative outlet in the realm of selling cheap items online to "fans." He recently established Little Brown Mushroom Books to publish and sell posters, zines, t-shirts, hats and books ranging in price from $7 to $950. Artists can craft an online artist profile using FaceBook then blog about their artistic process and projects for free on BlogSpot and selling hand made items on Etsy. It is free and easy but it takes a degree of persistence, resilience, adaptability and vision to stand out in the increasingly crowded online world of artists self-promoting and business becomes an art in itself as Andy said.