As I build my personal website, I am figuring out the permanent spaces for my work will live. I have started to build a more permanent blog on personal website, zephanh.com, where my new blog will live. This is my new space where personal information and class projects will be posted.
Latest Updates RSS
-
zephanh
-
zephanh
Being a student in EMAD, I’m very interested in creating art in the digital realm, from visual, print art, to website and graphic design. That all started when I first realized the amount of diverse creation tools available for computers nearly five years ago. After experimentation with these many tools, and finding my area of interest, I’ve moved towards the creation of digital and physical interactive art. As an artist, and designer, it’s important for me in my work that the viewer can feel a part of it. For me, art is sometimes most interesting when I can interact with it, which makes me feel like I’m directly connecting with the piece.
Site-specific art has a wide range of possibilities, in both form and presentation. It can be large installations in a public space, or created for small electronic devices, like cell phones, or music players. I liked this idea of creating a media player based piece of art and decided on using my Microsoft Zune player. This project plays off the idea of interactive art by creating something that presents itself as interactive, but it reality, the user has no say in what happens.
My thought is to create an animation that acts as if the player has sensor capabilities. This animation has some object, like a square or something else on the screen, that tells the user to turn player up side down, or any other certain direction. It basically tells to user to do things the player can’t actually do, while playing a video that follows the directions it is giving. It becomes an interactive piece without actually being interactive.
Obviously, with this idea, timing comes in to play, as well as the user following directions on the screen. This gives the appearance that the user is actually controlling what is on the screen. So, I’m going to have to do some testing and see approximately how long it would take for people to follow the given instructions. I would like to use audio to give instructions too, as well having the user “alter” the sound.
It is necessary for this project to be on a handheld media player because of the turning and interaction involved with the video giving instructions. A mobile device allows users to more rapidly respond to the directions given, thus making the project more successful.
-
zephanh
The four videos on DUVAGA each talk about site-specific art, including installation and interactive installations. The first video of the large chunks of chalk by Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla was my favorite, as it reminds of using chalk as a kid on the sidewalk. What makes this project more intriguing is that the pieces of chalk are much larger than normal pieces of chalk – nearly three feet long. Normal people then used this chalk to write something on the ground. It was really interesting how the police and government officials stopped this work by taking the chalk and power-washing away the writing on the ground.
In the other videos, Mark Dion creates a sustainable environment around a fallen tree, as a way of preserving the trees ecology and the environment contained within the tree. He takes this massive fallen tree and brings it into a green house in the city. I also liked this project as it takes a very natural object and ecology and brings it into an urban environment. He tries to preserve life contained within a fallen tree.
The other videos, one of Alfredo Jaar’s flowers within a metal container, and Krzysztof Wodiczko’s video installation, were also pretty interesting. I’ve seen Wodiczko’s work before and think he is very creative, especially in this work with the wearable camera which then gets displayed on a monument. Each video portrays different types of site-specific art, from audience-created works with the chalk, to using natural objects in unnatural places, and using the surrounding buildings as a canvas.
-
zephanh
Thanks to the sleep-depriving, yet amazing, StumbleUpon, I found wordle.net, which has a great applet that arranges words in a text based on how many times they’re used. So, if your text says the word Pickle four times, and Tricycle two time, the word Pickel will come out twice as big as Tricycle. I used the text from my artist statement for this project, and got some cool results.
-
zephanh
Imagine giving birth to a baby, but you build the baby from the toes up. Kinda like my project. Except, instead of a baby, it’s a Flash interactive application, and instead of baby puke, it’s RSS feeds. The application is close to completion, with only implementation of the menu bar and RSS feeder, and then polish, and finalization. Adrienne has been my partner on the project, as we both contribute ideas as well as actual implementation. We’ve found a good amount of both Green/Sustainable Living and Green/Sustainable Design RSS feeds that the user of the application will be able to explore and go to. Only about a week left of work-time until the project is due. I’m pretty excited to see it finished and hopefully WORK!
