Frida Kahlo's self potraits

Since I'm still really interested in Frida's art work. I wanted to share some of the self potraits she has done. As I wrote earlier, all her self potraits are sybolic of her life struggles. She loved to paint herself and 55 of her paintings are self potraits and I would like to share a few of those.

borderxing

This is one of the projects in the new media art text. After reading so many projects on net art and web based art and computer games, it was really interesting to come across this project.
I wondered how is it that this artists are not arrested or don't get in trouble for what they are doing. Isn't it illegal to cross borders the way they do.
I thought that it was really brrave what they were doing. If you haven't read on this project, you should. I think it was one of the more interesting ones in the text book.

Frida Kahlo

In the last 2 days I watched the movie Frida about a mexican artist. I found her art work rather strange, and plus she also has a really interesting background, so I thought I would do my blog on her.

Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907 – July 13, 1954)

In 1925, a trolley car collided with a bus Kahlo was riding; an iron handrail impaled her, broke her spine, and exited through her vagina. She survived her injuries and eventually regained her ability to walk, but she would have relapses of extreme pain which would plague her for life. After the accident, Kahlo turned her attention from a medical career to painting. Drawing on her personal experiences, her works are often shocking in their stark portrayal of pain and the harsh lives of women. Fifty-five of her 143 paintings are self-portraits that incorporate personal symbolism complete with graphic anatomical references. She was also influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, aspects of which she portrayed in bright colors, with a mixture of realism and symbolism.
An active Communist supporter, Kahlo allegedly had an affair with Leon Trotsky, who was assassinated at his home in Mexico City by agents of Stalin in 1940. Sometime after Trotsky's death, Frida denounced her former friend and praised the Soviet Union under Stalin. She spoke favorably of Mao, calling China "the new socialist hope". Her home was decorated with socialist art, including portraits of Marx, Engels, Stalin, and Mao.
Kahlo was noted for her unconventional appearance, including pronounced eyebrows (a unibrow) and a thin moustache which she did not remove.

here are some images of her work

New terms in new media art

while researching on Ken Goldberg and Natalie Bookchin for my paper.I came across two interesting terms that relate to their work.

Telepistemology -Ken Goldberg
" the study of the nature of knowledge gained through remote, mediated sources such as the internet. " This refers to his project telegarden in which gardeners around the world are given the chance to tend to living plants by watering and feeding them via the web, using an industrial robotic arm .

Telepresence - Ken Goldberg and Natalie Bookchin
"being present in a place where we may not physically be present". this term was used by Goldberg in one of his books but it applies to both his work as well as Bookchins. I'll be presenting my paper next week so I'll touch on this. but here is in example
" when I'm reading a book I can get transported, and so I'm present in the middle ages, or when i'm watching a film, I become so engrossed in that I'm completely unaware of my environment even if i'm sitting in an uncomfortable chair."

continued from Raquel Blog

Raquel wrote about Ken Goldberg and his project Telegarden. This was the other artist I wrote about in my paper.
To learn more about Ken Goldberg and his work, visit raquel's blog, which I would attach the link if I knew how to do that, but I don't.

“New media can transform how we perceive, learn, communicate and experience the world,” says Ken Goldberg. “What is ‘new’ is accelerating rapidly with emerging technologies, yet remains deeply rooted in powerful aesthetic, cultural and political forces.”

Natalie Bookchin

This is one of the artists I used for my paper.
Natalie Bookchin was born in 1962. She received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the State University of New York in 1984 and a master of fine arts degree in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990. She now lives in Los Angeles where she is a faculty member at the California Institute for the Arts. She works collaboratively and independently and exhibits, performs and lectures widely in the United States and Europe and on the Internet.
I found her work rather interesting, because not only is she a contemporary artist but a political one as well.
She creates video games, but her games are not typical from the games you are used to playing, because her intention is not just to provide entertainment but to also critize political agenda.
the intruder which is one of the games she has created is a critique of patriachal violence, and Metapet criticizes corporate culture.
for more about her or to check out her work visit this link
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=289

Michaeal Hayden

After my last blog, I got interested in Michael Hyden and did some more research to see what kind of other art work he has produced. below will be a link to his portfolio.

MICHAEL HAYDEN
SCULPTOR IN LIGHT
Michael Hayden admits to being very interested in LIGHT. For more than three decades he has utilized and manipulated Light to be the most important and unifying constituent in all of his "Lumetric" Sculptures. He has had the pleasure of creating architectonic scaled sculptures in light, for publicly accessible sites on this continent, Europe and Asia that are measured in hundreds of feet and multiples of tons. Hayden has collaborated with Architects, Interior Designers, Construction (Civil) Engineers, Landscape Architects, Electronic Engineers and Technicians, Composers, Poets, as well as other Artists. He has also interfaced with Clients, incorporating their particular aspirations and concerns to develop unique "Lumetric" Sculptures that are readily understandable to people from all walks of life. Michael Hayden resides in Santa Rosa, California with his wife, Kristina Lucas,(also a sculptor)and three of his children, Kit, Charys and Gaven + 2 birds & some fish.

http://www.thinkinglightly.com/portfolio.cgi?category=Hayden

new media art

I passed O'hare airport this weekend and was fascinated by the neon sculpture in terminal one of the airport, so I thought that would be interesting to share.

"The Sky's the Limit," is a 744' long kinetic neon sculpture designed by Michael Hayden, located in the underground walkway between Concourses B and C in Terminal One.

the neon lights shange color all the time and they also have music as they change the colors. If anyone is flying out of chicago O'hare be sure to check that out.

here is what it looks like:

http://www.ohare.com/ArtGalleries/SkytheLimit.htm

Motion Graphics- new media art

The new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression." ~ Marshall McLuhan

New Media designers combine cross-media, interdisciplinary skills to develop original content, design and produce creative, practical communications. Majoring in New Media results in a portfolio demonstrating extensive skill sets and experience in some areas of study e.g motion graphics.
here are some examples of what you can do with motion graphics especially in film.
http://www.cybmotion.com/projects/index.html

I did further research to see how much a motion graphic artist would make. not as much as I thought.
this career would pay 50,000-70,000
0r 35/hr for freelance work.

Dadaism

dada -An early twentieth century art movement which ridiculed contemporary culture and traditional art forms. The movement was formed to prove the bankruptcy of existing style of artistic expression rather than to promote a particular style itself. It was born as a consequence of the collapse during World War I of social and moral values which had developed to that time. Dada artists produced works which were nihilistic or reflected a cynical attitude toward social values, and, at the same time, irrational — absurd and playful, emotive and intuitive, and often cryptic. Less a style than a zeitgeist, Dadaists typically produced art objects in unconventional forms produced by unconventional methods. Several artists employed the chance results of accident as a means of production, for instance. Literally, the word dada means several things in several languages: it's French for "hobbyhorse" and Slavic for "yes yes." Some authorities say that the name Dada is a nonsensical word chosen at random from a dictionary.
Many artists associated with this movement later became associated with Surrealism. Many other movements have been influenced by Dada, including Pop Art and Fluxus.

for more on dadaism and to see some examples of this work:
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/d/dada.html

Abstrast expressionalism

A painting movement in which artists typically applied paint rapidly, and with force to their huge canvases in an effort to show feelings and emotions, painting gesturally, non-geometrically, sometimes applying paint with large brushes, sometimes dripping or even throwing it onto canvas. Their work is characterized by a strong dependence on what appears to be accident and chance, but which is actually highly planned.

http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/a/abstractexpr.html

I finally found a link to fluxus and advertising. As I said in class I'm coming into this class with no background whatsoever in art. I'm hoping atleast my blogs make some sense. Well I have an advertising background and was hoping to find a link of that to fluxus.

http://www.nutscape.com/fluxus/influx/shoes3/midwest.htm

Experimentalism

While reading this, Marcel Duchamp comes to mind again. 'Experimentalism doesn't mean trying new things, it means trying new things and assesing the results.
All all Marcels work is about experimentalism, but its all useful tools. Converting a urinal into a fountain. Creative. Repurposing one thing to make it usable as another.
if this is intersting to you , here is a link to some of his work.
http://www.understandingduchamp.com/