Watching: A Finished Product

The time has finally come for our images to be displayed in a Mudd Gallery Art Show! The Mudd Gallery as a venue is unique. I feel that it is nice to have a space that allows students to show their work but also limits the artists to the space given to display work. It’s nice to have the Mudd Gallery as an introduction to gallery settings because if you become an artist, you will have to work with all different kinds of spaces with various size limits. The gallery works towards giving students a ‘sneak peek’ into the powerful art world. I do, however, wish the gallery was located somewhere more prominent. I feel the gallery would have more people interested in going to see artwork if it wasn’t on the third floor of the library.

Mary Ann Doane’s article: Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity was a very challenging article for myself to read. I don’t feel I could wrap my head around everything presented in it, but I can comment on what I did understand. The full concepts of “medium specificity” have a way of not being relevant in today’s world because of the digital age and our way into the post-medium world. Digital technology and electronic reproduction in the digital media lean more towards immateriality. Technology is taking over the mediums of art and what use to be done with pen and paper can now be done faster and more effectively on a computer. Although some people still work as medium specificity artists, the numbers keep slowly decreasing year after year with as all the new advancements in technology keep appearing.

Watching Project: Round 2

MagCloud New Perfect Binding Option!

When editing the watching project, I took into consideration the comments given in class about The Neglect Of Hands series seeming to focus a lot on the metallic nail polish. I decided to continue with the wild nail polish look and contrasted it with the mundane hand tasks of everyday life. I re-shot the simple hand tasks but had the model's nails painted as bright blue or neon pink. The nails seem to almost take away from the tasks at hand and make a viewer focus directing on the nail polish.

            I found working with MagCloud to be such an easy process. I had positioned the photos in the order I wanted on Flickr and then just simply uploaded the Flickr set to the MagCloud website. The order became very critical for me because I wanted to start with bold nail photos, which ended up being the blue, and continued with the slightly less bold color of metallic. I divided up the metallic and did half before the neon pink nails and half after. I think this categorizing is what makes the MagCloud magazine powerful. The categorizing was just as important to Robert Frank in his book The Americans. Sarah Greenough really lets the reader know why Frank positioned photos in his book the way he did. I found it interesting that when I looked at the book the first time (before I read the article), I didn’t see any pattern. Looking at the photos after I had read the article, it made me really ponder the photos and figure out why he put photos in the places that he did.

The Neglect Of Hands

When I think about watching and surveillance, the first thing that comes to mind is spying on someone. I did not want to do a concept that pertained to spying on one person but rather, watching of one specific thing. I decided to focus on watching the everyday interactions of hands. I chose hands because I feel they are an afterthought in many people’s minds. A person uses their hands constantly and without them, one would essentially have to change their way of living. Hands are a source of identity but not one that is familiar to the human eye. In other words, it’s hard to identify someone just by his or her hands (of course fingerprints are the best form of identification but just forget about that feature for this project).  While reading Philip E. Agre’s article on surveillance, I noticed how the article always went back to identity of a person or thing. I wanted to become more specific with the idea of “spying” on one’s identity by focusing only on their hands, and how their hands interacted and functioned doing common, everyday things.

In the Richard Woodward article, there is a quote that seems to be very true for today’s networks. “Today, the negligible cost of making pictures and uploading them to networks gives anyone with a cell phone the chance in theory to appear instantly before an audience of billions on seven continents.” This quote makes me instantly think of flickr. We are posting projects on flickr that anyone that has a flickr account can see. That makes me feel somewhat exposed (funny that it’s the title of the article). Knowing that anyone can see my photos, and not just classmates, makes me become much more aware of how I present myself and my work in the network world.

Computers and Advancing Technology

The world today relies on technology for everything. One can communicate with others without the use of a phone, get a degree without leaving the house, and buy mostly anything online without having to drive anywhere. All these “luxuries” of today are because computers and technology has become so advanced. Technology is a complex idea that’s hard for one to wrap their head around. The dictionary defines it as a method of applying technical knowledge. The technology of computers and their advancements through the years is astonishing. The world has gone from computers that were the size of a television to portable computers the size of a notebook all because of advancement in technology. When Lev Manovich talks about becoming more advanced than what Web 2.0 is right now, I wonder if it’s even possible. The World Wide Web is where everyone goes for information, communication, and answers to questions. Berners-Lee believes the Web does not yet meet its design goal as being a pool of knowledge that is as easy to update as to read. Because Berners-Lee believed that to be true in 1994, I don't think it is as true now in 2011. It is very easy to update anything on a computer these days. It's what makes the internet so appealing to people. I know the world is always moving forward, but is there a point where we advance too far? The computer is something that is always advancing. Ted Nelson believes it’s something everyone should have knowledge of and I’m guessing most people do, but do you think there will be a point where the computer has gone too far? Advanced beyond normal human knowledge?