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Home , New media art

SM1701. Contemporary and Art

Professor: David (Jhave) Johnston david.jhave.johnston --at-- cityu.edu.hk

WEBSITE: http://sweb.cityu.edu.hk/sm1701/2012_FALL/Jhave/ new rules for blogs

1. Everybody on tumblr.com 2. Every student must make a blog specifically for this class SM1701 and this class alone. (only posts for SM1701 go on this blog; if you already have a tumblr account then simply create another blog titled Name SM1701) 3. Profile photo and description must be filled out: profile must include: your name & the name of this course SM1701 must be mentioned. 4. All blogs must have a title (there are many currently called Untitled.) 5. A total of 10 blog posts minimum are expected. 6. The date function must be turned on: so that each post displays the date it was created.

Office Hours

Dr David (Jhave) Johnston

Wed. 5-6pm Office: CMC 7089

In Synergy Lab on 7th Floor Call 3442 5726 (I will let you into area) Oct. 1 & 2nd are holiday. Therefore, tutorial on Oct. 3rd is cancelled. Network of Stoppages Marcel Duchamp Paris, 1914. Oil and pencil on canvas REVIEW Participation (ongoing) 5%

Final Project 40% Blog (every (Dec. 6th & week) 25% 13th)

Quiz (Oct. 11th) 20%

Presentation of Blog (Nov. 1st) 5%

TRAJECTORIES

100 80 60 40 20 Arbitrary Arbitrary 0 COMPUTATION PREHISTORY

Sense Modalities Themes

Science and Art

Culture and Computer History

Media Archaeology (1907) (1909) Dadaism (1916) (1919) (1920) Postmodernism (1950) (1950) Situationalism (1958) (1960) Earthworks/ (1960) Conceptualism (1969) (1970) NEWS JR

Last week (Sept 20th 2012), an Inside Out project started on Connaught Road footbridge in Central Hong Kong. 16 large-scale black and white portraits of Hong Kong city dwellers looking up to the city's skyscrapers were pasted JR “Pattern” Exhibition at Galerie Perrotin in Hong Kong, from September 18th to November 10th, 2012 ! JR's first are presented, and an Inside Out photobooth is open to the public. Check out the pictures on http://www.insideoutproject.net/perrotinhk/ Kan Tai-keung

Kan Tai-keung’s Legacy and Beyond Exhibition Hong Kong Central Library (G/F Exhibition Gallery) 15/9/2012 (Sat) 1730-2000; 16-29/9/2012 (Sun - Sat) 0900-2000 LECTURE “Early 20th Century -ists & -isms” "Impressionism is a 19th-century that originated with a group of Paris-based . Their independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s, in spite of harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France."

Claude Monet Impression, soleil levant (1872)

Pointillism guess what its about? Georges Seurat Eiffel Tower (1889)

Chuck Close Self Portrait (2006)

“Scott Blake is a computer who created a Photoshop plug-in called the "Chuck Close Filter," which transformed images into mosaics reminiscent of the famous hand-made mosaics created by Chuck Close, whom Blake calls "the 14th richest living artist." Close objected to the filter, and threatened legal action, so Blake complied; although Blake believes that what he's made is legal under the doctrine of fair use, he can't afford to litigate against a multimillionaire adversary.”

http://boingboing.net/2012/07/11/letter-from-to-chuck-close-fro.html Figurative artwork—particularly and sculptures—which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational. Picasso Gertrude Stein (1906)

Daniel Rozin Wooden Mirror (1999)

830 square pieces of wood, 830 servo motors, control electronics, video camera, computer, wood frame.

Size - W 67” x H 80” x D 10” (170cm , 203cm, 25cm).

Built in 1999, this is the first mechanical mirror I built. This piece explores the line between digital and physical, using a warm and natural material such as wood to portray the abstract notion of digital pixels. http://www.smoothware.com/danny/woodenmirror.html The Zero Energy Media Wall Simone Giostra & Partners and Arup (2012) Beijing development by New York-based media artist Jeremy Rotsztain.

“…the building performs as a self- sufficient organic system, harvesting solar energy by day and using it to illuminate the screen after dark, mirroring a day’s climatic cycle.” http://www.greenpix.org/project.php Jeremy Rotsztain Obsessions (Flickr pets) (2008)

“ I collected pictures of dogs, cats, puppies (clearly, a different species than dogs), kittens, hamsters, and bunnies on Flickr.com and generated new images based on the features and colors of the originals. These high resolution images, which share a likeness to Gustav Klimt's work, are still images taken from animations that were made in C++ using the openFrameworks library.” http://www.mantissa.ca/projects/obsessions.php Gustav Klimt Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907); Oil and gold on canvas, 138 x 138 Cubism September 1908 --Matisse says Picasso is "making little cubes," referring to his work at L'Estaque.

http://www.cubistro.com/cubotimeline.html http://www.cubistro.com/cubotimeline.html http://www.cubistro.com/cubotimeline.html Cubism

Picasso Dryad (1908) Cubism

Picasso Girl with Mandolin (1910) Cubism

Francis Picabia Edtaonisl (1913) EXERCISE: DIY Cubism (Do It Yourself)

Every table is a group. Take an object to draw out of your pocket or knapsack. (No cellphones) Draw for 30 seconds the object. Sketch quickly! Don’t think. On signal pass the paper and object to your right. Next person rotates the object by 30 degrees and draws over original . The term collage derives from the French "coller" meaning "glue". Who invented collage? It is George Braque & Pablo Picasso who are generally credited with having started collage.

BUT

Really they just invented a term for something that had been going on for 2000 years. Techniques of collage were first used at the time of the invention of paper in China, around 200 BC. Constance Sackville-West (1860) Georges Braque

1907 1909 Cubism 1912 Collage

1914 World War I 1915: head injury, temporarily blind

1916 - : prints, , return of figure

Georges Braque Fruit dish and Glass, papier collé and charcoal on paper (1912) Braque believed that an artist experienced beauty "… in terms of volume, of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty [he] interpret[s] [his] subjective impression...” He described "objects shattered into fragments… [as] a way of getting closest to the object… Fragmentation helped me to establish space and movement in space” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Braque David Rokeby Sorting Daemon (2003) “ "Sorting Daemon" surveys its environment and uses the resulting images as the primary content of the work. In this specific case, the system looks out onto the street, panning, tilting and zooming, looking for moving things that might be people. When it finds what it thinks might be a person, it removes the person's image from the background.

The extracted person is then divided up according to areas of David Rokeby Sorting Daemon similar colour. The resulting swatches of colour are then (2003) placed within the arbitrary context of the composite image projected in the KinoWelt Hall at the Institut.

On the left side of the composite, flesh-coloured patches are sorted by hue (olive on the left, pink on the right) and size (largest on the bottom and smallest on the top.

The right side accumulates all the other coloured patches, sorted by hue horizontally and saturation vertically (with most saturated at the bottom. (Saturation is the intensity of the colour.)

The extracted person first appears 'whole' at the bottom of the composite and then slowly separates into coloured regions which each move to their appropriate location in the composite.”

http://www.davidrokeby.com/sorting.html Max Ernst, L'Ange du Foyer, (1937) who is this? Martha Graham Letter to the World (1940)

“Graham has been sometimes termed the "Picasso of Dance," in that her importance and influence to modern dance can be considered equivalent to what Pablo Picasso was to modern .[1][2] Her impact has been also compared with the influence Stravinsky had on music, or Frank Lloyd Wright had on architecture.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Graham onformative unnamed soundsculpture (2012) http://www.onformative.com/work/unnamed-soundsculpture/ Max Ernst Europe After the Rain (1940-42)

"I see no reason for painting anything that can be put into any other form as well-“

Georgia O’Keefe

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/O/okeefe.html Imogen Cunningham The Dream (1910) Imogen Cunningham (April 12, 1883 – June 24, 1976) was an American photographer known for her botanical photography, nudes, and industrial landscapes. ANTHRO PO MORPHIC

Imogen Cunningham Magnolia Flower (1960s) Paul Strand Wall Street (1915) Karl Blossfeldt Haarfarn (Maidenhair fern) from "Urformen der Kunst"(The original art) (1929) "It is the unique power of the cinema to allow a great many people to dream the same dream together and to present illusion to us as if it were strict reality. It is, in short, an admirable vehicle for poetry."

Jean Cocteau, at age 70 http://www.museum-joanneum.at/en/kunsthaus/events_5/into-the-night-jean-cocteau What is this? (Hint we saw it in first lecture…) The conceptual pre-cursor to frame-buffers. The ancestor of video. The birth of film. REPEAT CYCLE: Figurative dissolves….

Cubism

Picasso Dryad (1908) Cubism

Picasso Girl with Mandolin (1910) Cubism

Francis Picabia Edtaonisl (1913) Marcel Duchamp Nude descending a Staircase No.2 (1912)

1912 Duchamp is asked to withdraw his painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, from the Salon des Indépendants in Paris

1913 At the Armory Show of , Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase is the most controversial exhibit.

Transformers Series (2007 -- )

Domestic Total Gross Revenue: Billions. "A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction."

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism by F. T. Marinetti (1909)

1.We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. 2.Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. 3.Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. 4.We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. 5.We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit. 6.The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor, and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements. 7.Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man. 8.We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!… Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. 9.We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. 10.We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice. 11.We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Free words, between 1914 and 1916 Théo Van Doesburg & Piet Mondrian, , 1917

Piet Mondrian Composition A (1923)

Mondrian "withdrew from the group (DeStijl) after van Doesburg reintroduced diagonal elements into his work around 1925" http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/bio/?artist_name=Piet%20Mondrian Dadaism

Tristan Tzara (1917)

“We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished” Marcel Janco Dadaism

”I am neither for nor against them, and I won't explain myself because I hate common sense.”

Tristan Tzara Manifesto (1918) Dadaism

anti-war anti-authority anti-nations anti-profit anti-structure anti-seriousness anti-depressant anti-ideology anti-purpose anti-establishment

ANTI-ART

Kurt Schwitters Merz (1919) Dadaism

“Without other aim than to have no aim, it imposed itself by the force of its word, of its poetic and plastic inventions, and without premeditated intention it let loose, from one shore of the Atlantic to the other, a wave of negation and revolt which for several years would throw disorder into the minds, acts, works, of men.”

391 2, ed. Francis Picabia http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/hofmann2.php (Barcelona, February 10, 1917), cover. Dadaism

Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, with 1917 sound-poem Dadaism

"For us, art is not an end in itself ... but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in.” Hugo Ball Surrealism Guillaume Apollinaire, Il Pleut (1918)

- he coined the term: "Surrealist" in 1903 Guillaume Apollinaire, Il Pleut (1918)

It’s raining women’s voices as if they had died even in memory And it’s raining you as well marvellous encounters of my life O little drops Those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular cities Listen if it rains while regret and disdain weep to an ancient music Listen to the bonds fall off which hold you above and below Surrealist manifesto. Andre Breton (1918) http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/Surrealist_Manifesto

"It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled." Surrealist manifesto. Andre Breton (1918) http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/Surrealist_Manifesto "We are still living under the reign of logic:... The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. ... Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer -- and, in my opinion by far the most important part -- has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. ..." Surrealist manifesto. Andre Breton (1918) http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/Surrealist_Manifesto

"The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them -- first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason. The analysts themselves have everything to gain by it. But it is worth noting that no means has been designated a priori for carrying out this undertaking, that until further notice it can be construed to be the province of poets as well as scholars, and that its success is not dependent upon the more or less capricious paths that will be followed." 1930 - Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Andre Breton, Hans Arp, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Rene Crevel, Man Ray Hans Arp Shirt Front and Fork (1922) Painted wood Man Ray Rayograph (1922) Gelatin silver print

Made by putting objects directly onto photo paper and exposing it to light.

Man Ray

Rayograph; Comb, Straight Razor Blade, Needle and Other Forms

(1922) Gelatin silver print

Note abstract from ordinary and echo of cubism.

Dust Breeding, 1920, printed ca. 1967 Man Ray (American, 1890–1976) Gelatin silver print Herman Kolgen http://www.kolgen.net/projects/dust https://vimeo.com/26607228

DUST (2010)

INSPIRED BY 1920 MARCEL DUCHAMP + MAN RAY'S PHOTOGRAPH “ É LEVAGE DE POUSSIÈ RE “, DUST EXPLORES CHANGES IN THE STATE OF MATTER. AT THE EDGE OF THE IMPERCEPTIBLE, PIGMENTS ARE SUSPENDED AROUND A MAGNETIC FIELD. RANDOM FIBROUS NETWORKS TAKE SHAPE AND THEN FORM COMPOSITE OBJECTS, HYPNOTIC IN THEIR COMPLEXITY. SOUND PARTICLES PAIRED WITH LUMINOUS AGGREGATES EXIST ON A SCALE THAT CANCELS OUT ALL POINTS OF REFERENCE.

THUS, AT THE TURNING POINT BETWEEN THE INVISIBLE AND THE VISIBLE, DUST BECOMES INTOXICATING AND THE VIDEO SURFACE A VERITABLE ACCUMULATION OF X-RAYS.

Salvador Dali Basket of Bread (1926) Oil on canvas In 1926 Dali got expelled from his Art College for making a statement that there was no one so competent as to examine him and his work. http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/salvador-dali-211.php In 1929 Dali & Luis Bunuel make "Un Chien Andalou" & in December his father threw him out of the house http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/salvador-dali-211.php Salvador Dali Persistence of Memory (1931) Oil on canvas, 24 x 33 inches

Surrealism

Salvador Dali, "Metamorphosis of Narcissus circa" (1937) Will Wright Spore (2009) http://www.ea.com/spore What is “installationart”? Surrealist Exhibit Paris (1938)

Duchamp hung 1200 coal bags from ceiling

• site-specific • moves art off walls and out of galleries • transforms space • hybrid (uses painting, , objects, light, etc…) • anticipates “Interactive” new media installations

Myron Krueger Videoplace (1972 - )

“…some of today’s most commonplace and widely-appreciated were initially conceived and prototyped, years ago, by new-media artists.” Golan Levin http://www.inventinginteractive.com/2010/03/22/myron-krueger/ What is a ‘ready-made’? What is a ‘found object’? Marcel Duchamp Fountain (1917) Found (ahem, bought) object.

"People took very seriously when it first reached America because they believed we took ourselves very seriously. A great deal of modern art is meant to be amusing."

Marcel Duchamp Maurizio Cattelan Untitled (2002) Maurizio Cattelan Untitled (2009)

Canvas, wood, and plastic Banksy Sweeping it Under the Carpet (2006)

Graffitti Banksy Girl Frisks Soldier (2005)

Israel West bank Pisan 皮三 (Wang Bo 王波) http://www.whiterabbitcollection.org/artists/pisan-wang-bo/ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/the-dangerous-politics-of--humor-in-china.html

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