Blog #12

This blog concerns the book New Media Art by Mark Tribe focusing on pages 42-64. The section outlines various digital artists work from mostly the mid to late nineties, the time of the dotcom boom, which certainly has had an incredible effect on the art done at this times. A piece by Mary Flanagan called domestic was done in 2003, it used a video game engine called unreal, a game that focuses on online play in which players control a character first person and attempt to kill other players. Her take on the game was to subvert expectation, she turned the game into more or less the sims in unreal, a house making sim that uses things like text to suggest inner turmoil instead of out. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy used an array of cameras to remake a scene from Evil Dead 2, they used the cameras in such a way that when filming the scene they turn on at different intervals effectively creating a unique shoot for every take. Dial tones by Golan Levin examined not only the newer cultural norm of cellphone etiquette bur also mirrored the work of John Cage and his use of everyday noises in his music. A piece by Rafael Lozano placed spotlights throughout Mexico City and allowed users to move the cameras via the internet. Ken Goldberg examined internet hoax and the way the internet is able to present a falsified scenario very simply. He set up a small garden and told gardeners around the world they could tend to it, begging the question, is this actually happening, or just some hoax.
Many of these pieces took advantage of the Internets upheaval into mainstream society, it was no longer something whose purpose was shrouded in mystery but rather a device which was primarily for selling goods. It still shocks me that many artists were able to do art such as this on their own, it to me subverts the idea that artists are people who paint or make sculptures. To me it seems that as an artist you either do fine arts or you work as a digital artist for an organization which wants to make money. These digital artists working on their own with computers surprises me in a few ways. I suppose its just the idea that if you know about computers you become hired by some company because they will pay for your services as opposed to creating a living on your own, it to me is a unique happening of our times.