History Module

Intro Reading Response


“The digital, by contrast, is code, inherently alien to human perception… Faced with the infinite multiplicity of digital files, the uniqueness of the art object needs to be reasserted in the face of its infinite, uncontrollable dissemination via Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.” In my ideal paradise, I would be able to make a living solely through traditional art—drawings, paintings, jewelry—anything I could create with my own two hands. But for those of us striving to incorporate art into our future these days, adapting to the always-evolving digital world is seemingly inevitable. Obviously there are the rare talents who can still make a living off the fine arts, but I’m not banking on that. I often wish I were born in the age before computers, because as the article stated, yes, technology scares me. Last quarter, I took a class in HTML, CSS, and Javascript—the most basic languages of web design. I could learn it, and I could make myself somewhat successfully do it. But I didn’t fall in love. I didn’t discover myself through coding as some say they do, and I never put in enough time to master the more difficult aspects of the language. You can never learn it all—it is always changing—but you can get close. It was in many ways shocking, to scratch the surface of a whole new world—the world that lies beneath so much of modern human interaction. I was overwhelmed to discover the power these languages held. They, or should I say I, can create anything. And show it to anyone. Everyone. Yes, that is beautiful. But it’s also ugly. Those streams of nonsense numbers and letters, I hate them. They intimidate me, they send me straight back to my sketch book in defeat. My challenge as a modern artist is to leave my fear behind, and embrace the new power of this digital world. It’s not just coding, its photoshop, Final Cut, illustrator, everything. The article focuses largely on artist’s refusal to face the digital world head on, to think digitally. But that won’t be me, not yet. I first just need to get to that point of acceptance of where I’m at.

History Reading Response


The ideas behind Nam June Paik’s piece MagnetTV are comparable to similar concepts behind a piece I recently made called “Tea Time.” This piece of work is featured in Rachel Greene’s essay Internet Art. The magnet certainly has an interesting effect on the tv. It is successful on a number of levels. The piece reaches a different level then mine did in the sense that it actually transforms the function of the object, beyond just manipulating its appearance and the reaction people automatically have when observing it. The magnet actually interferes with the TV’s normal functioning behavior. It disrupts the TV’s signal and transforms it into a completely abstract form, projecting an image untouched by human hands onto the screen. The image is a product of the magnet and the TV, and though they were put together by a human, the actual image projected on the screen was only created by the joint connection of the magnet and the tv. My piece “tea time” also focuses on the concepts of distortion. I painted a friends face completely white and surrounded it with hundreds of pomegranate seeds. The goal was to make the face look completely alien, as though from a different world, though still obviously recognizable in its true form as a face—just as the TV is still recognizable in its actual form despite the distortion by the magnet. I feel as though my piece is aesthetically successful, but did not master the concepts I was aiming for to the extent I would have liked. Still, I definitely can relate to what Paik’s goal seemed to be. The pieces are similar in that they both take things seen constantly in everyday life and attempt to distort their purpose.