Is Lynn Hershman's idea of interactive media still alive today?

Lynn Hershman pioneered the concept of interactive media. Digital technology such as DVD players, PCs, and home video game consoles allow for more and more types of media to involve the user. Virtual reality is slowly making its way into reality through physical interfaces such as camera's with depth sensors and the nintendo wii's physical control using wireless gyroscopes. As time passes, technology allows artists to embed more choices within their work. Fictional stories once restricted to single paths in books can now have hundreds of alternate storylines in video games depending on the choices made by the user. People can escape into a virtual second life on the internet and use the anonymity provided on the internet to find new creative methods of escapism.
Society as a whole has latched onto this idea of interactive media. We are past the turning point of digital technology integrating into daily life. It is inescapable. At this point the rush is to see how we can integrate this technology more fully with real life in order to mesh the virtual world and the world around us.

How does one unscript politics?

I hold the opinion that the artists power comes from the ability to relate ideas through alternate means. The masses that can view an artistic work can take the satire, images, video, or any other art form and interpret meaning to match their own preconceived notions. This is powerful because most people may have a feeling or an idea but have no focus or momentum to it. The artist then is able to give people a direction and a side to take on issues. The opinion of the artist can be taken or ignored depending on the viewer and is able to be harmless but still effective. The power of the images used in my political campaign ad are able to elicit much more feeling from a viewer than just telling them that the educational system's financing needs reform.
In the end, the viewer can decide whether or not to internalize the views presented by artists. In Randall Packer's presentation on the fake government department, he is able to highlight many issues that have arisen through the delinquency of the current presidential leadership while still allowing the viewer to keep their own ideals and opinions handy. Randall Packer said, "The artist does not work in a vacuum" which highlights the fact that an artistic work of this sort needs context to take full effect, but can stand on its own. Within context the work will influence a view or present an opinion on a specific event or issue, but out of context it can retain its value as art.

idea for dvd project

Revised from the previous idea: I plan to make an interactive parody of fighting video games, using Mortal Kombat as a template. I will make multiple scenes with some filters, canned footage, and slow-mo/freeze frame to create suspense in the fights and add situational humor.

I plan to use reverse, multiple points of view, still photography, slow-mo, etc... to change what may not be normal, but certainly comprehensive to a bystander.

Obama Education Ad

Also available on youtube

Political Ad Prep

For this project I will be focusing on Barack Obama. I plan to focus on the issue of getting out the youth vote with the slogan "Barack Obama, paving the way for tomorrow's leaders, today" or something along those lines. The emphasis is to quantify the idea of change by focusing on the current shift to the next generation and to have the older generation think about their kids.

Reaction to Hirshhorn/YouTube

YouTube has opened the floodgates of information on the internet to include video in the available content. The internet provides an uncensored collection of responses and opinions of real news around the world. Anyone with a camera and an idea can create a video and have it available for millions of viewers to see. This removes the control that the media currently uses to focus our attention on one thing or another and enables users to choose their news. With such a large user base as well, YouTube provides artists with an incredibly large audience. What was once relatively hard to distribute, video art can now be posted and seen by thousands upon thousands of eyes an unlimited number of times. Any artist can get their name out and launch their career and it can all stem from word of mouth. The internet took a traditional grassroots method and amplified it a million-fold. Users like the Numa Numa Guy Gary Brolsma can almost accidentally become pop culture celebrities by tickling the fancy of bored web surfers both young and old.

The Numa Numa Guy- over 9.6 million views

The implications of this newfound media stretch to the realm of politics. Activists and satirists who previously depended on rallies and cafes to get their word out on the street can now have a much louder voice. Groups like jib jab fuse comedy with their message to increase the effectiveness upon the viewer. The ability to host and distribute video web content has exponentially increased the power of the individual.

The Hirshhorn exhibit The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image brought to my attention a number of innovative uses of video art. Tony Oursler uses video art to achieve a moving sculpture which is more real than any painting or sculpture yet eerily artificial at the same time. His work, pictured below, uses video art to evoke a reaction to a unique blended art piece. The innovation is in the delivery. Anyone can show a movie of an eyeball or a man talking. Anyone can carve a face out of granite, but the fusing of these two ideas combined with recorded audio creates a surreal effect that I never even imagined.

Reaction to Dietz Lecture

Steve Dietz spoke in his lecture about unscripting the political process. To me this involves breaking down the façade used by politicians and their organizations. By looking deeper into a politician or political organization’s position on issues, artists attempt to discern the true motives behind the words so beautifully composed by the staff writers. The traditional political process is presented in a neat package to the public, with very specific, yet vague pieces of information. They always tell you just enough to get your attention, but not enough to take away the flexibility of indecision. Artists are able to cut through that veil of secrecy and illustrate what they feel is a truer, if not exaggerated point of view on these political subjects. One example of how this can happen is through the use of irony and sarcasm. An easy source of material for satirists, politics provides points that can easily be blown out of proportion or taken out of context to give an image of ridiculousness. In this case, the Billionaires for Bush go around protesting for Bush to be re-elected. They campaign for this because billionaires saw increasingly large tax cuts during the Bush term. The point of the group is to make the public aware that they are getting what seems to be the short end of the stick and essentially the activists are using reverse psychology to discourage supporters of the GOP. By making a stand on a point that a politician like Bush would purposefully keep quiet, the awareness on that issue is raised and can better affect the outcome of the democratic system America attempts to take advantage of.

Soundscape

Do we really interact with computers, or just input commands?

In "Diary: Audience 1966, A Year From Monday", John Cage compares the evolution of the relationship between artist and audience to the relationship between man and machine. He says that we are an audience for computer art and we need a computer that isn't just labor-saving, but increases the work we are capable of doing. In this he was a visionary, seeing the future path that Personal Computers had yet to show. My argument though is that the computer is still just a tool. At most it is a static medium.
Although programs and tools now allow the expression of multiple forms of art through a digital landscape, they are still reacting back and forth in real time. The artist makes a move, and the computer responds like a chess game, with the dance between them forming the art intended. I think the artist still just inputs their will and the computer reacts. It is not yet to the point like with John Cage's new concept of audience where the artist is truly affected by the reaction of the medium to the building of the performance.

Situational Tour

Life goes on in the big city
A testament to heroes of old fades into the background
From 9-5 they shuffle on by

At the end of the day the rush begins
Caught up in the rat race, but who really wins?
Passing by, they stare straight ahead,
Soon the memory may be dead.

Modern measures to protect the art.
Is it a shield, or a cage?
The memory gets locked away.

Visitors come from far and wide,
but do they know what's kept inside?
They see the man, but do they see hi-s-tory?

A great leader on his throne,
His memory demands respect,
He alone can break the rules
Calmly seated, waiting to be forgotten

Many enter the grand hall
They pay tribute to the man,
they don't see what it used to be,
they don't see the reality of the memory

Solace for the fallen.
A permanent hush has settled on the hall.
Like dust on a mantle it blots out what people used to feel
It feels like you have stepped away from the busy world outside

Young and old they mark their visit
In an out in an instant
Few stay to learn what happened here
About the man in the chair

This shrine may be a tomb
A testament torn by time
As the days go by few remember
Few hold on to the truth behind the stone facade

The hero of a nation looks out from his seat
He watches over the seat of power
He serves as a reminder of hard fought ideals
But on this bleak day, does anyone even notice?

At what point does the audience start to affect the artist?

There are many levels to the involvement of an audience in multimedia artwork. With Wagner, the audience merely was hit from multiple fronts and was not particularly involved in the outcome of the piece itself. As time went on though, artists like John Cage helped the development of methods that involved the participation of the audience and added a factor of "indeterminacy and chance operations" to his work. Artists today range greatly in their inclusion of the audience, from simple multimedia performances with traditional audiences to performance comedy like that seen on "Who's line is it anyway?" where the audience directly affects the outcome of each skit.
I think that it is imporant to note that the artist chooses the level of involvement the audience has, but as soon as the audience is given any sort of choice to affect the outcome of the performance or piece, the artist is subject to their whim. If nobody that showed up to telesymphony had a cell phone, or had the correct brand, Golan Levin would have had to abandon his original plan for the cell phone musical performance. Technology opens the door to new methods of integration between artist and audience, but also forces the artist to often relinquish full control of the situation to gain that interactive spark.


Situational Tour Location:

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I chose the Lincoln Memorial because it represents a number of things depending on who is there. To most, it is a representation of the authority of liberty and justice and the solidarity of our nation following the civil war. Many of the people found visiting do so out of ritual purpose, usually related to education. I know certainly that many of my friends and myself included made school trips to the national mall, but to the lincoln memorial inparticular to catch a glimpse into our country's history.

Isn't the terminator a cybernetic machine?

How crucial are visionary leaders to cutting edge technological development? Were their ideas a natural progression or blind leap of genius?

As the reading stated, men like Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wienerm and J.C.R. Licklider lead the way with ideas of personal computers despite a general consensus of skepticism on the subject. On one hand, the super-computers that took up entire buildings were slowly growing in power and shrinking in size, but without the large support of Douglas Engelbart I don't believe NLS would have come out when it did.

Once the idea for a personal computer that acts as an extension of humanity for enhancement rather than as a potential rival in the still-mythic artificial intelligence I think that it was a natural progression to reach the xerox alto. Every scientist or engineer working at all in the field of computers were going to naturally be drawn to the idea of making computers more accessible and certainly more useful. One can definitely notice though that the enhancements came slowly. First size came down, then punch cards were replaced with an actual code interface, and finally a GUI which we all use today (like windows) was developed in the final steps of development before the Xerox Alto.
Like the theory that given infinite time a room of monkeys with typewriters would compete all of Shakespeare's works by chance, I believe that the move towards personal computers was inevitable once world war 2 ended. It naturally sparked interest as a powerful new tool and demanded to be enhanced to expand the user base.

Is multimedia legit?

As an Information Technology major in KOGOD I am constantly coming up against the question, "Where do you draw the line between IT and non-IT business"? I want to re-pose that question for this class as, "Where does one draw the line between digital art and computer tools?"

The answer I think depends highly on one's perspective. A computer certainly has a number of programs ranging from video games to script editors, from doing your taxes to organizing your favorite music. How you use these programs can certainly affect whether they are considered capable of producing art. I think that at this point the specific art form viewed from a computer is limited to programs that produce visual or audio media formats. Whether using photoshop, finalcut, flash, or something that creates machinima through videogames and other graphical engines, the final product is multimedia, limited to a combination of existing separate media types found outside of the digital world.

The key factor is that computers enable the combination of media with ease.

Multimedia Website