Artist 11

This is an image from the Electronic Disturbance Theater, an internet based group that organizes large scale protests in support of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, following in the example of the sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's.  They are not able to make their presence so immediately physical, and so several figurative measures have been taken to allow these electronic methods to hit just as hard.  When the participants run the "bad URLs" on the targeted web sites, whoever is trying to log in on the other end (whether that be the President of Mexico, etc.) is presented with the name of one of the innocents killed during the massacre in the village of Acteal, as well as the site possibly overloading, or at least loading extremely slowly.  I was very drawn to this mission, and the work that this group does. I am very interested in issues of human rights, and methods of protest and so forth.  However, if this group were not present on the list of New Media Artists, I would probably label them as an activist group, which they surely still are, but not an artist or group directed at creating art.  There definitely seems to be an art in the act of organizing the protests and properly executing their objectives.  And the manifestations of those objectives and aspirations would be the realization of the dignity due to all humans.  And that would surely be a beautiful, moving thing.  It seems to me that this is actually beyond art.  This is a question of the human experience, of life.  Art is the description of a message, a vision, of what that life should or may or did look like.  Well, perhaps then the EDT is truly creating art.  A fluid and somewhat intangible, ever changing work of art, that definitely takes us away.

Artist 10

This is a still from one of the animation projects that artist Vuk Cosic created using ASCII, adapting the screenplays from select films into black and green pictures made up of numbers and letters moving rapidly across the screen.  I think this is a pretty cool concept, because it inherently forces a new perspective on the film, whether that be ambiguity or something else.  This is exemplified in the image to the right.  Without the context of the rest of the film, it is almost impossible to decipher what is going on in the still frame. 

In the New Media Art article the pointlessness of the ASCII format is repeatedly referred to, and I'm not sure what he means when he says his experiments with ASCII are carefully directed at their full uselessness from the viewpoint of everyday high tech and all its consequences.  I don't know how to go about adapting film into ASCII format, but I imagine that it is not that easy, or else I think he would have done more than five films so far.  And if this takes that much work, than why do it if one's view of of it is that it is pointless and purposeless.  This seems contrary to the whole point of art to me, that one creates art because one is driven to build, to create, and this inspiration is a purpose in itself, much less whatever kind of message that that creation emits.  Perhaps that message in regards to Cosic's art is purposelessness. 

Artist 9

This is the title page image for the project "Brandon", created by Shu Lea Cheang, in memory of, and in contemplation of Teena Brandon, sometime known as Brandon, who was raped and killed in 1993 for posing as a man.  Through the simple, black and white imagery, the rather short loop grabs at the essence of Brandon's story, biologically a woman, but identifying more closely with the female gender.  Without the context of Brandon's story, the image becomes much more ambiguous, and could be taken for many different things than it was intended to mean originally.  However, to a certain extent this even furthers the whole mystery and ambiguity that is gender.  By making the transformation in the animation so fluid, it seems that Cheang is implying that the divisions between genders are not as formidable as popular culture has had it in the past, and usually still does have it.  

Artist 8

This is an image from the project UMBRELLA.net, created by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki.  The concept was to visually represent the technological networks established by cell phones in everyday life.  Umbrellas seem to have been one of the original inspirers for the project, and so they have been incorporated as an important part of the project.  The blue umbrellas represent those individuals who are connected to the umbrella network, while those with red umbrellas remain isolated.  The image itself is interesting to me, because the huge gray backdrop makes the people and their umbrellas seem very small.  It seems to me they are commenting on the way that technology is changing the way people interact, at least those with such pervasive access to technology, just as the Frontline documentary we watched earlier in the semester did.  Perhaps the huge gray backdrop signifies that these technological connections are very important, so we will not be left alone in that empty gray world.  Or perhaps it means that we are in fact isolating ourselves, collectively, from the world and each other, and with our increasing dependence on technology, the world outside is fading.  The questions relating to the pros and cons of technology are deeply interesting to me, and I appreciate the questions UMBRELLA. net is asking.