Readings

 

Reading 5:"Seeing the Past in Present Tense" -Paula Levine

Personal Response: 

Levine brings up a good point that monuments can be built to honor the past, but the past can be easily forgotten and the end result is being left with a bunch of enormous statues or buildings without any reasoning why they are taking up space. I do believe that in a way, that some monuments that were built before this generation's time has been devalued to merely broken cement rubble or abandoned buildings. The meaning of which they were signified to create has long gone. As a country run with politics and religion, there are things of the past that do not need to be remembered today, so in turn some monuments just rot away. People forget and then soon believe that things never happened.Then again, I do believe it is at the cost of the individual to forget out of ignorance of the past. Levine states that monuments "demand, set in motion, reach, invite" In other words, its to "awaken and activate the public imagination" (p. 4 Calling to Mind). It's really up to the individual to take the left turns, the detours, etc. to find out more about the given area a person is traveling on or simply to understand more about the past.

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Reading4:

Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs:

From what I can understand from this snippet, technology is being bashed on and how information is being visually portrayed as the truth. When in truth, the information is irrelevant and "true" information is then lost. Culture jammers, hackers, slashing, and sniping is letting people know what things are as they really are.  The "information age" is all about visuals and images rather than reading from text or actual knowledge. From this article's text, people have become lazy to know and understand things unless it's viewable rather than having a process of thought. It's alot more advertisement rather than critical thinking...you do whatever the ads tell you what to do.

Some quotes that I understood:

"We believe we live in the ‘age of information,’ that there has been an information ‘explosion,’ an information ‘revolution.’ While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information."

"Everybody watches it, but no one really likes it. This is the open secret of TV today. Its only champions are its own executives, the advertisers who exploit it, and a compromised network of academic boosters. Otherwise, TV has no spontaneous defenders, because there is almost nothing in it to defend."

"We can no longer do anything without wanting to see it immediately on video…There is never any longer an event or a person who acts for himself, in himself. The direction of events and of people is to be reproduced into image, to be doubled in the image of television. [T]oday the referent disappears. In circulation are images. Only images. "

Semionics for Beginners: 

Semionics- Study of signs

I believe that as humans we do try to always make meaning out of everything that we do or anything involved in our world. The meanings of one person can mean something else to another person. In today's advertisements, we see images of certain things with a saying, a slogan to get us perked up to buy in. Usually the images and sayings aren't really what they actually mean, it's more of a pun or something to create a connection to it's viewers, it's consumers.

 

Reading 3:

"Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments", Katherine Hayles - blog a response to this essay

Personal Response: 

The description and meaning of body is definitely obscured in looking at humanity in a frontal kind of view. People see what they generally see, it's just features that appeal to the eye. I agree on what  Katherine says about the internal workings of the body. That it's not merely a static vessel, but has internal processes that relate to other things outside the vessel. As she says, it's the embodiment and the body that work together internally and externally to relate to the outside world.

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 Reading 2:

 

Systems Aesthetics, Jack Burnham
This article was written in the 1960's. What relevance does it have today? Blog a short response. Choose 1-2 points that Burnham mentions that resonate with your ideas of art and culture and with contemporary digital practices.

"Scientists and technicians are not converted into "artists," rather the artist becomes a symptom of the schism between art and technics."

 

Personal Response:

Today, science and technicians (technology), has become an integral part of the human race's existence and adaptivity. With new forms of art emerging, I can see how the system of science or technology can be considered as an art. There would be an need of some sort of formal instruction and decision making in trying to find a cure or solving a disease. The scientist or technician may not be specifically considered an artist but the mindset of an artist in order to systemize a creative way of thinking.
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Art, as an adaptive mechanism, is reinforcement of the ability to be aware of the disparity between behavioral pattern and the demands consequent upon the interaction with the environment. Art is rehearsal for those real situations in which it is vital for our survival to endure cognitive tension, to refuse the comforts of validation by affective congruence when such validation Is inappropriate because too vital interests are at stake....

 

Personal Response:

This statement to be reminds me of the theory of the evolution of man. A thought process and evaluation of Darwin. Art is adaptive as humanity is adaptive. With relation to the environment it evolves. In a way, art is a survival of the fittest in a sense that the mind has to be in a certain place and at a certain time to be creatively active...in order to engage and understand the environment .

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READING 1:

• “Sentences on Conceptual Art”, Sol Lewitt - This was written in the 1960s.What relevance does it have today?

Response:

The "Sentences on Conceptual Art" is relevant in today's society in that most art itself has concept which follows some sort of process and have some sort of meaning through what ideals is used regardless if it's meaning is not understood or even be barely visible. The only person that should know exactly what the ideals of a piece of art means is the one who created the piece. I believe that most the concepts in Art as it is stated at some of sentences do not always have to be rational, because being rational seems more repetitive and "old". I agree that irrational thoughts and ideas implemented in a piece of art gives the artist a new experience of which sometimes becomes an ephemeral moment. In today's society conceptual artists are always craving something new and want to discover "that" something new. Overall, these sentences are embedded in every artist's mind in one way or another.

 

New Media Art Introduction

 

Response:

New Media Art, is more of non-conventional art or art that isn't always have to be visually enticing. To me, New Media Art is more about the content of what an artist understands, sees, believes, etc. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone else, but the artist. It's more about the main message or the main voice of the piece whereas it creates a deeper meaning than like a portrait of a person whereas the only thing it does is it represents a face rather than an articulate piece of random numbers that represents the chance and probability. Those same numbers could mean nothing to the viewer, if the piece wasn't informative, but just a display. New Media Art is taking means of something and creating an individual take on applying different mediums or mediums that aren't particularly seen as an element of art.