Response to the Artists (art:21)

Sally Mann, a photographe and artist, gets depicted by her children as a driven professional and passionate mother at the same time. According to her her children, her obession with taking pictures, being her child has been sometimes difficult. Her daughter states in the film that thez kids have lost her mother to a certain extent but, on the other hand, have gained a friend. I am not sure if would necessarily consider that a positive development. The fact that the whole family seems to fit their needs to the mother's passion might create a critical relation between them in the long run. I can image that having such a passionate mother who truly seems to be involved in her work can also be a huge challenge or test for the family's cohesion.

I truly liked Mel Chin's artistic approach. He is one of the artists who uses certain objects that people usually don't need anymore or even consider them to be trash. Mel Chin then applies them to create something copmpletly new out of it. I furthermore appreachiate his effort in connecting art with science. He thereby generate art and helps to protect the environment at the same time.

James Turrell's project (The Roder Crater Project) was fascinating in this respect that is represents such a long and time consuming project. He mentions in the movie that this work has cost him two marriages and two realtions. However, his passion and dedication didn't seem to be restrictied by these sacrifices.

I especially liked Gabriel Orozco's attitude towards the process of art making. He pointed out that he uses tools everbody can use and that wants to depict "reality", which makes him to be outdoor all the time. I can't really explain why, but I was truly fascinated by some of his works. The most lasting impact on me was caused by the simple idea to attach a toilete roll to a huge ventilator on the roof. The idea seems so simple but it looked amazing.

Artist Response No 11

First Person Shooters

In the late 20th century, the entertainment industry began to converge in video and computer games. As the artists Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre, and Brody Condon state in the excerpt describing their work, the industry's focus especially lay on video games that simulate war and war-like situations. Through the present technologies in the field of video game programming, online battles can be often experienced as the real world through the mediating interfaces of game-like targeting and navigation systems. At the same time, increasingly realistic games known as "first person shooters" featured immersive, three-dimensional worlds in which players engaged in violent conflicts, depicted with near-photographic realism.

After September 11, 2001, the artists Anne-Marie Schleiner, Joan Leandre, and Brody Condon were all fascinated by and critical of an internationally popular first-person shooter called Counter-Strike, in which players choose to undertake either terrorist or counter-terrorist operations in an urban environment. However, the artists claimed to have seen the game as an overly simplistic ""convergence of network shooter games and contemporary Middle Eastern politics in a game.

When playing Counter-Strike multiple players connect via the Internet to occupy the same virtual environment, fighting with or against one another in teams and communicating through text messages and voice channels. In addition, players can upload images to insert in the game space as "spray paints," or graffiti tags, to commemorate a kill or mark territory. Velvet-Strike is an artistic intervention that enables participants to insert what the artists call "counter-military graffiti" into the virtual space of Counter-Strike.

In addition, the site features screen-capture movies showing sprayers in action and examples of hate mail from Counter-Strike players angered by the artists' provocative actions, which some fans of the original game interpreted as denouncing video game violence.
Schleiner, Leandre, and Condon, however, have made it clear that Velvet-Strike is not critical of violence in video games, per se. Instead, as the three artists point out, the work forces us to wonder what exactly is at stake in the fictive virtual worlds in which both soldiers and civilians immerse themselves, at a time when real-life warfare increasingly resembles games and games increasingly resemble real life.
I have always been wondering what it exactly is that makes us so curious about those video games. Maybe these games are becoming even more popular in the future, as Schleiner, Leandre, and Condon indicate, because the games become reality and the reality becomes the games. It might also be due to the believe that one has the chance to have such a dangerous experience without actually being in risk to die.
However, I appreciate the artist's approach to such a disputable issue. Nevertheless, I doubt that users are actually prompted to wonder what exactly "is at stake in the fictive virtual worlds".

Artist Response No 10

Vectorial Elevation (1999)

Mexican-born artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer created a unique spectacle by placing eighteen robotic searchlights around Mexico City's Zócalo, the world's third-largest urban square. In his project called Vectorial Elevation (http://www.alzado.net/), first presented in Mexico City to celebrate the new millennium, participants used a Web-based interface to control the searchlights, choreographing patterns on the night sky and the urban landscape.
According to the artis himself, this type of performance is called "Relational Architecture," which he defines as "the technological actualization of buildings with alien memory." The interesting aspect about his work is that laypeople and passersby can construct new meanings for edifices with internet software and robotic lights. In other words, even a layman has the chance to produce such an outstanding spectacle. According to Lozano-Hemmer, "light projections...can achieve the desired monumental scale, can be changed in real time, and their immateriality makes their deployment more logistically feasible."

Lozano-Hemmer furthermore explains that when a participant's design for Vectorial Elevation reached the head of the Web queue, it was beamed into the sky, visible to crowds on the ground in Mexico City and, via Web cameras, to a large online audience. More than 800,000 people from 89 countries visited the Web site in a two-week period. The light show they produced was visible within a 20-kilometer radius.

As it is described by the author, the project's aesthetic effect remind us of those of the Tribute in Light (2002), a temporary public art memorial to the victims of 9/11, by Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, who utilized vertical beams supplied by 44 searchlights placed at Ground Zero in New York to project vertical beams into the night sky above the World Trade Center's destroyed Twin Towers.
However, Lozano-Hemmer describes his project as an "anti-monument" that serves primarily as a platform for public self-expression. Although Lozano-Hemmer uses technologies that suggest "panoptic regimes of control", Vectorial Elevation is primarily meant to be a celebration of the potential these technologies have to produce a new kind of participatory spectacle.

Artist Response No 9

360degrees

360degrees started out as an idea for a website almost five years ago. It has since evolved into a major initiative with the collaboration of dozens of imaginative and dedicated scholars, statisticians, activists, ex-offenders, students, educators, artists, and programmers.
According to the website (http://www.360degrees.org/360degrees.html), 360degree is a web page that is creating a database of organizations working around issues of incarcerations, crime and community development. The names who stand behind that idea are Jennifer and Kevin Mccoy. In the context of their project, they have been collecting the stories of inmates,lawyers, judges, parole officers, parents, victims and others whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system.
In connection with a new series on National Public Radio, Prison Diaries, they have conducted interviews and given inmates and officers tape recorders so that they could keep tape diaries of their experience in prison.
They claim that each story is focused around a specific case and is told from the point of view from the people involved. The amazing aspect about their project is that one is able to explore each speaker's personal space by navigating 360 degrees through their chambers or cells.
Mr and Mrs Mccoy's website state that its ambition is to involve and motivate other the web sites visitors in the fight for justice. I truly find the depiction of authentic stories and fates interesting and also inspiring at the same time. Thus, people have the unique opportunity and chance to read, hear or even understand victims' perspectives better.

Scrapbook Entry No 22

10.000 BC

This picture was also taken in Germany's capital, Berlin, at the "Potsdamer Platz" in 2008. The "Potsdamer Platz" is a famous and historical place in Berlin where many big companies have their head office. However, the picture shows an unbelievable huge commercial poster for the upcoming movie(at that time) "10.000 BC". However, the interesting thing about this gigantic movie poster only becomes clear by taking a closer look at it. The shop windows beneath the poster, as well as the building windows above it, are actually part of the poster. In other words, this huge commercial poster depicts not only the commercial itself but also the shop windows beneath and above it.
Since my sister works for a company whose offices are opposite to the building were the commercial poster was attached to, she knew that the movie company had to pay approximately 200.000 euros for a whole month to have its commercial poster hang down from the building.

Google Earth Link

Scrapboo Entry No 21

The marionette

This picture was taken in Berlin, Germany's capital in February 2008. As you can see on the picture, it depicts a plastic marionette that had been animated by five other people who were all dressed an in a black suit, wearing a white mask.
By simply looking at the picture one wouldn't be able to see what was so special about the marionette. However, the amazing thing about it was how realistic and graceful these five people had the marionette move. It took a bow and waved at you and even danced for you.
I didn't believe my eyes when I first saw the puppet moving. I guess it must have taken a great amount of practice, timing, patience and perfect cooperation as well as communication to coordinate the marionette's movements since five people were responsible for its actions.

Google Earth Link

Respone to collage project

I truly enjoyed the collage project for two main reasons. First of all, I liked the idea of creating a collage with the objective to translate a secret word into pictures. Since we had to choose three different approaches to depict the word, one really had to be creative and thoughtful.
Another reason why I enjoyed this project so much was because I thought it very interesting and inspiring to analyze someone else's work and thereby see their ideas and methods to explain their word.
It furthermore taught me a lot about the possibilities of the photoshop program we used. Although we are probably only familiar with a few basic operations, I still enjoy using it for other personal purposes.

Scrapbook Entry 20: Lock your bike properly

Lock your bike properly

This picture reminds me a lot of my home town Heidelberg.
Heidelberg is a relatively small city where you can do everything by bike. One doesn't need a car in order to get anywhere in the city. That is why, especially the students use bikes primarely for their transportation. Everytime when there is a huge student campus party somewhere in Heidelberg, students take their bike instead of there cars because they most of them want to drink alcohol (Despite the fact that riding one's bike under the influence of alcohol has the same legal consequences as driving your car, students feel safer by doing the former one).
So usually, when the parties are over, some of the students who came one foot or used public transportaion to get to the party, try to find unlocked bikes to get home as quick as possible. One assumes it hard to believe but it happens more than one expects that one finds a bike that is totally unlocked or locked in a way you see on the pictureho knows, but this might be due to the fact that the student who tried to lock it was already drunk.

Scrapbook Entry 19: The Hurdlefail

A friend of mine recently sent me a link via email of the Web Site "Fail Blog" (http://failblog.org/page/).
As the name might suggest, the Web Site contains a variety of funny pictures that depict more or less humorous accidents.
The one I chose shows a desperate hurdler who apparently has a hard time to run the 110 metres hurdles succesfully. I can really sympathize with the athlete. I truly enjoy this picture because I made this experience myself. Since I am a Physical Education student, I had to take three semesters of practical classes of track and field. I speak from experience when I say that not everyone is a born hurdler. It takes a lot of patience and practise to acquire the proper technic to run the hurdles.

Artist Response No 8

Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon: The BoarderXing (2002)

Since the internet became available to the world's public, it has been used for all different kinds of purposes. But nowadays, the internet rather represents a worldwide community connected across geographic distances by an electronic network.
However, as it is explained in the excerpt (https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Heath+Bunting+and+Kayle+Brandon),technology and mobility is limited to the privileged and the ramifications of the globalizational reality have excluded, for political, economic, or social reasons, many others from networks of communication and transportation.

Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon have created an online basis that addresses these issues. It is called BorderXing.This is an online guide to crossing European borders secretly. The site is said to be primarily addressed to activists, asylum seekers, and others who lack the requisite government documents to pass legally from one nation to the next. The guide is built around a database-driven Web site that contains information about routes between various pairs of countries in Europe. Furthermore it contains documentations of the artists' attempted crossings. Besides that, even instructions on how to cross specific borders undetected and without a passport are accompanied by hiking maps and lists of necessary tools. In interesting question would be where Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon did get these information from and how they have managed not to get caught by officials.

As it is stated in the excerpt (see link), the artists patrolled the boundaries of the BorderXing project by limiting access to some of the Web site's texts to authorized users. One critical thought about the project is the overthrow of the integrity of national European borders.

Despite the fact whether one might consider Heath Bunting's and Kayle Brandon's work art or an illegal course of action, I truly admire the political engaged nature of their work. I really wonder what the authorities think about that. However, according to them, their work is not about decoration or visual pleasure; it is about the beauty showing in BorderXing in the form of photographs taken by the artists as they travel illicitly between countries. These often-stunning images, traces of the artists' experiments in illegal migration, reveal liminal landscapes of surprising beauty.

In my opinion, this again is a perfect example for the endless boundaries of the possibilities of the World Wide Web. Nevertheless, I would be truly interested myself in these secret routes and photographs. The fact that it is illegal probably makes it so fascinating as art. Especially the pictures might cause a notable attraction and appeal because they truly correspond to reality.

Scrapbook Entry 18: Where there's a will there's a way.

Where there's a will there's a way

Two weeks before I came to St. Mary's College last year at the beginning of September, I had gone on an excursion to Austria with other students from the Physical Education Department. Besides activities such as rafting, rock climbing, and Canyoning, we also did a mountain tour on a mountain that was 2538 meters high.

The picture depicts a small valley on the mountain 1560 meters high. As one can see, the last stage had yet to be overcome. At this particular point, the whole group had been on their feet over 3.5 hours and was truly exhausted. Consequently, half of them decided to go back into the valley where our hostel was. The other half decided not to give up yet and summit the mountain.

As the picture suggest, there wasn't any path prepared for hiker to follow in order to get to the top. However, the group decided to attack the challenge despite the risks. Fortunately, everybody made it to the top of the mountain. As a memory, all group members left their names in the summit register ( second picture).

Three hours later, the second group finally found their way back home unharmed and save. The only negative consequence for the brave group was that they were late for dinner.

By the way, I was in first group...

Google Earth Link

Scrapbook Entry 17: Fortune Cookie

The Fortune Cookie

Last week in the Great Room, I decided to finally grab one of those fortune cookies for the first time. As one can read on the picture, I am said to be moving to a wonderful new home within the year. So far so good. But to behonest, I never used to believe in those things.

However, the funny thing about that was that I had spoken to my current roomate in Germany just a few days before I got this fortune cookie. One topic of our conversation was dealing with the thought of moving again within Heidelberg.
We ended our phone conversation by argreeing that we would look for a new apartment as soon as I got back to Heidelberg.

This coincidence, what it obviosly was, still doesn't convince me to believe in such things. Yet, it really has kept me wondering and made a least a little bit more superstitious.