BFA Show
Ah art how we get along. So being an BFA major I had to put on a "art" gallery show as my senior project, but I was a full fleged digital media guy doing "web stuff" which dosen't get along to well with white walls. However I persivured and managed to pull of a criticly acclamed (by my peers and instructors) art show. I can't say I get art, or really even care for it, all I did was put 3 farily interesting web pages on 3 really uninteresting walls. I described the theme of the show as exploring "the social concencness that arises from the people gathered on the web". Yes I know, if I try really hard and think of big words I can have an art moment.
;Because you are reading this on the web I'm afraid that all the pop & pie is all gone, but I did add a few pictures and attach my artist statment down below. So enjoy and if you want to know more about the individual prjoects in the show here are some links.
I am a digital media or “now” media artist; most of my work is web- or video-based. Currently I am working with social aspects of the web, and the collective knowledge/information that comes with people gathering in one space. The critical idea is how people interact with virtual spaces, such as YouTube and Wikipedia. YouTube is a place where people can put their personal videos on the Internet for the world to see; Wikipedia is a website similar to an encyclopedia, except all the entries are created by the users. I am exploring this interaction by looking at what kinds of information people are willing to put on these websites and discovering the persona generated for the website (YouTube) depending on the content being uploaded by the users. I am primarily focusing on the sites that rely on user-generated content like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Blogger because the users are the ones that control the websites despite the fact that they have no ownership of it. My pieces are websites that use clips from social websites such as YouTube, or video recordings that are made while exploring one of these websites.
Tube Squares is a project that takes around fifty videos from YouTube and displays them in a grid pattern with random videos playing. Here we are confronted with a wall of videos that range from last night's debate on CNN, to footage from a video game, to some girl's video diary. Each video was put on YouTube by a user who considered it important enough to share with the world. Tube Squares tries to examine our society by displaying videos that we (the users of YouTube) think are important; think of it as a documentary put together by the users of YouTube. Then the videos are automatically added to the list of possible pieces that could be used for Tube Squares, except this documentary is constantly changing and expanding the library of material that it can show.
TubeWikia is a mash-up of YouTube and Wikipedia; it takes a search entry from a user and returns search results from both websites and are displayed side-by-side. The idea is to contrast two distinct types of information that is returned from; Wikipedia returns formal, almost scholarly, information, while YouTube gives results that are at the least, informal, and sometimes only loosely related to the search.
Turing Network is a collection of bots who try to pass themselves off as human by running blogs. A blog is a personal website that is used to post stories similar to an article in a newspaper; someone who runs a blog website is known as a blogger. Turing Network uses the website digg.com, a social news website where individuals post links to news stories or just cool stuff, to find things that are then posted to a blog. A search is done for keywords that identify stories to be on a certain topic like 'space', 'Obama', 'xbox', 'Clinton', 'facebook', or 'bush'. If a keyword is found, the program looks for a second set of keywords to make sure the context of the story is right, making sure the word 'space' is referring to 'outer space' and not 'office space' or 'Myspace'. Here I am using the power of the social web to drive these fake bloggers. Turing Network is exploring the realm of these intelligent entities that exist on the web and appear to float between intelligence and just a set of instructions.
