Intro Reading

More issues rise as contemporary art being digitalized. One of them is Nowadays, there are hardly anything that are created with originality. "One side effect of the information age is that research is easier than ever before." People can easily gather information and view others' ideas to help generate their own works. And not only does that jeopardize the authorship, it also makes people question whether artists is really creating art or just duplicating art. Art lost its uniqueness , quality that separates art and the ordinary apart.

"The digital, by contrast, is code, inherently alien to human perception. It is, at base, a linguistic model. Convert any .jpg file to .txt and you will find its ingredients: a garbled recipe of numbers and letters, meaningless to the average viewer." The point this quote is addressing might seem to be a negative for art, but that might not be the case sometimes. Digital media allows artists to create art works in a fast, convenient manner. The new media also allows folks to create "art works" even though they do not has any art background. This is quite similar to from last lecture: although computers are by multiple complex layers, users do not need to understand its structure to become users. In opposite, people who are familiar with computers and coding could take advantage of their expertise to create something that is unique with this new media. After all, a big part of art is about self expression and development. Above case seem to achieve the goal.


Software Reading

"Trouble at the Interface or the identity Crisis of Interactive Art" by Erkki Huhtamo addresses the essence of interactive art and some of the identity issues it is facing. "By clicking a mouse, rolling a trackball, waving one's hand, jumping, shouting or pedalling a bicycle the user was asked to realize or complete the work that would not exist without his/her actions." Unlike traditional art, interactive art allows spectators to participate and install meanings to the work. This interaction makes the art works more profound since each interaction provides different outcome. Huhtamo points out that most interactive art instalments require viewers to physically engage with the instalment. Thus when internet, a medium that is relatively new and interactive, is used for artistic purpose, often they are not categorize as "interactive art" because most of them could not successfully combine "remote interaction" on the internet and "local interaction" within a physical space. Colorflip and many other websites by Rafael Rozendaal seem to achieve that. These pieces all allow users to achieve goals such as flipping color or fill in the blank space with physical motion by wielding the mouse. http://www.newrafael.com/websites

Lev Manovich's "Database as Symbolic Form" discuss about database and its relation to narrative. Database is a collection of data. One of the interesting characters of database is that there is no end to the growth of database. In addition, various data that are stored in the database might not be relevant to each other. This is the opposite of the narrative which usually has cause and outcome. Sometimes, artists try to correlate these two ideas in an artwork. Many Youtube users utilize this concept in their video to create some kind of interaction in their works. One of the videos I found well executed this concept. The video starts with some kind of story(narrative). Towards the end, the viewers are presented a few choices in order to complete the ending and the work itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJmibLVm6AE

In "The Society of Mind", Marvin Minsky talked about how the world is formed with blocks. Not just the physical objects, but more importantly people's thoughts and actions. Sometimes, people take the ability to do things and the idea of common sense for granted, without knowing their significance even though they appear to be easy. Take Giant Gorilla Sculpture by David Mach(below) for example: this piece at first sight appears to be a giant gorilla, but when being examined closely, one can see that it is build by stacks of coat hangers. This is no easy task. One must know the essence of gorilla(in terms of form and appearance) and the shape of hangers in order to construct this artwork.





Hardware Reading

"Device Art: A New Art Form of Media Art from a Japanese Perspective" by Machiko Kusahara.

Device art, according to the reading, is a concept for re-examining art-science-technology relationships both from a contemporary and historical perspective in order to foreground a new aspect of media art. Traditional art works focus more on the visual experience. On the contrary, device art includes "the median" as part of the works, allowing viewers to have an aesthetic experience in a more physical way. One of the interesting questions addressed in the article is that how do we define art? I think art is something that provides people aesthetic experience which provokes thoughts, ideas, and inspiration. Although some people might hesitate to include technology oriented device as art, I personally think such worrisome is redundant. Device art simply takes advantage the technology and provides us the experience not only visually but also through other sensory. Device art can be served as a tool to solve the clarify the relationship between art and technology in modern ages

"Design Noir: The Secret life of Electronic Objects" by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby

One of the issues Dunne and Raby addressed in their article is that products and devices seemed to be people-oriented. For the consumers, they are entitled to customizer the way to use the products: to use them appropriately or to misuse/abuse them due to factors such as emotion. For the designers, their job is to create new design or to modify the old ones in order to fit people's life better. Products and technology have infiltrate people's life to a level that people assumes these devices are the solution to all of the problems. In reality, only people can provide the real solution.





Network Reading

"Six degrees of interconnection" by Duncan Watts

The article addresses the concept of connection. One of the example mentioned in the article is the small world phenomenon. The small world phenomenon claims that anyone on earth can connect themselves to anyone else in only six degrees of separation. Six degree of separation might seems like a very small distance at first glance. However, people who are from third degree or further might be a complete stranger. The irony hides beneath this small world concept is that people who are complete strangers to you might still be able to affect you in ways one cannot think of. This is quite astonishing yet scary at the same time. I think this forces us to think about how this network works and what it means to us in today's society. In today's world which internet and other social media are closing people's gap vastly also makes me wonder maybe people can connect with others in even less degree of separation.

"Six degrees of separation: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means" by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

The interesting thing I find interesting about is the way the author re-examines the idea of six degree in a different approach. The author tried to map out the internet(nodes) and measure the distance between web pages. The result is: on average, it would take 19 degree to reach from one document to another. Through this experiment, the team discovered that although 19 is larger than 6, the distance between documents are shorter than people's. This is not only due to we are finding documents through clicking in digital world instead of travelling, but more importantly it is the mechanics(methods). Each nodes for the document will most likely have multiple links. With viewers filtering these links with reference, it takes people a lot less time to find the desired information. In other words, we can reach from documents to documents in shortest distance because internet is well mapped out. Barabasi took this discovery and questioned Milgram's six degree experiment. That the society must be connected in less than six degree of separation.