Scrap Book 21

This is a coat hook, to be found on the stall door in the bathroom in Dorch, 2nd left.  It seems to me to resemble a face, and specifically the face of an elephant.  I've been tempted quite a few times to draw ears around the sides.  That of course would have made it art though.  This coat hook is not art, however, because it was designed purely for the purpose of functioning as a coat hook, and was most likely in no way intended to resemble an elephant's head.  It was manufactured in a factory, made by machines, and was not the manifestation of a creative impulse to create of some individual.  The fact that I see it as an elephant head is, from a psychological perspective, due to a process I believe is called projection, the tendency of human being to see patterns or make connections that might not really be there.  

Scrap Book 20

These three marks are found on the floor of the bathroom in Dorch 2nd left.  I was struck by the symmetry of the marks, and the way that they balanced with the congruent tiles.  It seems to me that, even though these marks were assumedly made by totally random processes, their symmetry, for some reason, implies an order, a non-randomness.  And perhaps even more than that, some sort of designer, or sentient being behind the marks, responsible for the symmetry, to account for the coherence of the marks.  But then again, Nature presents us with some of the most beautifully symmetrical, patterned things in the world, and it is usually man's attempt to create such beauty, or at least an ordered pattern of his own, that leads him to adapt these patterns that he finds in the natural world.  They are not always geometrically sound or applicable, and this gives force to the argument that it is all in fact random.  These marks on the floor were assumedly random, and are not exact in their symmetry anyways.  But they are close enough to appear somewhat aesthetically pleasing, which is why I noticed them.

Scrap Book 19

This is a picture of the floor in the hallway of Dorch, 1st left.  The trail of dried blue liquid actually extends all the way down the hall in front of me, and all the way down the hall and all the way up the stairs behind me.  I am not sure what the liquid is, or was, but it reminded me of the paintings I saw of Jackson Pollock's during the museum visit.  The blue is actually a lot easier to see when present in the hallway.  But the trail is very wandering, even down the narrow hallway, it weaves around, sometimes little drips and sometimes bigger ones and sometimes huge splashes like the one in the foreground.  However, even as it winds and weaves, it remains on the white tiles, never touching the blue border tiles.  This seemed very artistic to me, in the simplicity of the materials, how the growing and shrinking drops seemed to imply a narrative, the length of the trail, and the way it remained on the white tiles.  And even though the trail was certainly man-made, this does not inherently imply any intention or design behind it.  I must assume that whatever substance was dripping on the floor was not dripped and wasted on purpose.  If the drips were in fact intentional, then I would definitely consider them to be art, again, in the way of Jackson Pollock.  However, until that intention is known to me, I must believe that the drips were an accident, which would not be art. 

Scrap Book 18

This is the RA bulletin board in Dorch second left.  This is what it looked like Saturday morning, whereas on Friday afternoon, it had been covered in papers talking about political issues such as illegal immigration, abortion, and such things.  Assumedly, this was the quasi-intentional work of a few people having a good time.  I'm sure there are movements in art that center on themes of reduction and maybe even destruction, such as this is an example of.  But again, the intention, to me, is all important.  I can look at this bulletin board and see art, project an image onto it by forming patterns between the little white bits of paper and the huge brown gash sliding through the black.  But that does not mean it is a work of art.  A work of art requires an artist, an artist who creates or changes the appearance of his media in order to convey a thought or emotion, or any other sentiment.  I of course do not know for sure, but I would assume that whoever tore down the bulletin board was not intending to make art, but rather just destroy.  Because that is fun sometimes.

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.