Mike Kelley

It's no coincidence, I think, that Kelley started out in a band, a punk band before there was such a thing. He was a founder of the legendary Detroit group Destroy All Monsters, a group that everyone heard about but few people actually heard. Just as that band pushed music across borders into strange new territory, his art has cut a wide swath through the formally and sometimes preciously defined precincts of art. He is an intellectual who operates from gut instinct, a thinker who's not afraid of stupidity.

Borrowing from pop culture and things that resonate from his childhood such as stuffed animals, and comic books as his materials I feel a close connectin to Mike Kelley’s work. In relation to making work that references comic books, Kandor 13, (2007) Is a sculpture based off of a city in the Superman comic. When asked about the details of this piece Mike Kelley states that: The story has been changed over time by the publishers of the comic to make it appeal to different generations of readers-but, yes, initially the city was stolen by Brainiac and shrunken. I don't remember why. To tell you the truth, I'm not interested in the story; I'm not a fan of Superman comics. I just like the idea of being burdened with one's past.

This helped me understand some of the feedback I’ve received on current works where I borrowed from media that I did in fact “like” but that’s not good enough there has to be something else beyond that surface.

Concidering responses to work, everyone reads what they want into the work we make but Mike Kelley’s response is one that I am learning to adopt. Doing research into the things that you did not intend to portray in a piece you can expand yourself intellectually and be better prepaired for the questions that arise when people look at your work. Kelly says, “From the response I was getting to my works with stuffed animals and craft materials-people went on about how the work was about child abuse. What was my problem? Why was I playing with these toys? Had I been abused? Was I a pedophile? I didn't understand what they were talking about. But when I did a bit of research, I discovered how culturally omnipresent this infatuation with child abuse was. Since everybody seemed to be so interested in my personal biography, I thought I should make some overtly biographical work-pseudo-biographical work. That's when I decided to build the Educational Complex-the model of every school I had ever attended. I was thinking of it specifically in relation to the McMartin Preschool child-abuse scandal. I would leave out all of the parts of the schools that I could not remember and then these areas would be filled in with recovered "repressed" memories-which would simply be personal fantasies.

Lopez, Ruth. "Mike Kelley Goes Home Again." Http://www.theartnewspaper.com. The Art Newspaper, 11 Oct. 2010. Web.

O'Brien, Glenn. "Mike Kelley - Page 4." Interview Magazine. Web. 08 May 2011. .

Welchman, John C., Isabelle Graw, Anthony Vidler, and Mike Kelley. Mike Kelley. London: Phaidon, 2002. Print.

Paul Pfeiffer

Pfeiffer appropriates still and moving imagery from popular culture—including movies and televised sporting events—and digitally manipulates them. Through this process, he creates seemingly endless moments that direct the viewer’s attention to singular details rather than the original contexts of the images. Unlike many of his predecessors working in film and video, Pfeiffer is not trying to create, or provide for the viewer, a cinematic experience. Instead, he builds on historical precedents by selecting and manipulating archival images to create innovative new works, or what he calls “video sculptures.” These works challenge us to decipher narratives based on both our recognition of the preexisting imagery and the modifications that Pfeiffer has made.

In his interview with Chrissie Iles in, A Decade of Conversation, he explains, “I started experimenting with video at the moment when it became possible to work with video on the computer, and I found my material in this virtual, digital space.”

There is a lot of honesty in interviews with Pfeiffer and you can learn a great deal about artistic practice when listening to how he deals with his problems. The sates that he dealt with the problem of “how to display this stuff and make it physical.”

Acknowledging the body of the viewer in the space was a kind of playing with spaces within spaces and activating a sense of shifting space within the viewer’s perception. This became a way to continue thinking about how to work with video in some ways a sculpture in some ways architectural without in the end having to put an object in the space.

Paul Pfeiffer has mastered certain post-production digital editing techniques to accomplish his sophisticated examinations of identity and social structures. In JOHN 3:16 (2000), the artist digitized more than five thousand individual frames of a basketball shot and repositioned them to highlight the fetishization of the ball among black males, thus rendering a sort of elegy for the black male sports player.

This piece like the piece Live from Neverland, 2006 touches on issues of race but Pfeiffer has something interesting to say about this, in his interview with Brian Curtin he says that “As far as art-making goes, race, like religion, or like Jackson himself, is a way into people’s psyches. Race itself is not so interesting. Sure it’s part of the picture, but it’s just one dimension. Ideally, I want my work to oscillate between different readings.” I appreciate this reply. In continually thinking about my interest in editing footage of cartoons from my childhood I have thought of delving into the history of cartoons such as the Smurfs, which has many theories on racism and politically incorrectness. It is good to have further perspective on works that deals with these issues.

Curtin, Brian. "Accessing Other Dimensions Paul Pfeiffer." ArtAsiaPacific Magazine July-Aug. 2009. ArtAsiaPacific Magazine. July-Aug. 2009. Web.

A Decade in Conversation. New Haven [u.a.: Yale UP [u.a., 2010. Print.

Rush, Michael. New Media in Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005. Print.

"Paul Pfeiffer: In The Zone Current Exhibitions Exhibitions." Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Web. 08 May 2011. .

Atau Tanaka

Mostly known for his collaborative piece with artist Kasper Topelitz, Global String, 2000, Atau Tanaka is bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. Atau creates sensor-based musical instruments for performance, and is known for his work with biosignal interfaces. He seeks to harness collective musical creativity in mobile environments, seeking out the continued place of the artist in democratized digital forms.

Global String, is a networked music installation which I comprised of two sites, each with a steel cable 15 meters long that stretches diagonally from floor to ceiling through the installation space. The cables are connected to a real-time sound-synthesis server sending data to the internet. Conceived as a worldwide musical communication piece, it allows participants form different locations to collaborate by plucking or pulling strings. Sound data is then streamed to each site and video projections provide a visual connection among the users. This piece opens my mind into the realm of collaboration once more and is an amazing example of how collaboration can happen digitally as well as in a physical space.

I am most interested in Tanaka’s piece Bondage; the piece was conducted using a software that has immense depth in its capabilities the program is called metasynth and I have been dabbling with it off and on for the better part of a year now. It is nice to see a piece that uses this technology for its physicality and Tanaka’s piece shows me opportunity for creating sculptural works with the material created within the space of Metasynth. Bondage, is a piece about enigma drawing on mystery and fantasy. It is digital in nature, but analog on the surface. The artist uses wood and paper as a vehicle for digital image and sound projecting a Japanese woman in a kimono onto a sliding paper shoji screen. The sounds are sine-waves, but not in a typical ultra-clean design space. The viewer’s presence completes the loop, uncovering parts of Nobuyoshi Araki’s original photograph, scanned left to right in frequency bands producing sound. The quadraphonic sound system is oriented vertically in the plane of the paper screen. The fibers of the paper give an organic surface for the digital pixels. The result is a total environment, a concentrated space where sound meets image, but where interaction is not pushed to the fore. Instead, he attempts to create a magical space, drawing upon the voyeuristic fantasies of the viewer.

Atau Tanaka. Web. 08 May 2011. .

Wands, Bruce. Art of the Digital Age. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Print.

Stephen Vitiello

As is the learning curve with many mediums, I have been learning how to edit/produce and record sound. Though I have not created a ‘sound’ piece so to speak, I feel it is inevitable that I will do so. I have always had an interest for working with sound and now that I am learning tools to manipulate/create it, It will only be a matter of time that develop a solid concept for creating sound art. One sound artist that I have been looking to for inspiration is Stephen Vitiello. Born in New York in 1964, Vitiello played in punk and noise bands in the 1980s, before collaborating on projects with the multimedia artist Tony Oursler. In the late 90s, he began to operate as a solo artist and composer of site-specific work. He is most known for his work with the World Trade Center Recordings: Winds after Hurricane Floyd of 1999.

Part of the Vitello's skill is finding the unnoticed - just as the film director zooms in on the eye at the keyhole, or mesmerizes with a slow-motion dripping tap, Vitiello sets his recording equipment to capture the overlooked. In Night Chatter (2006), this piece is composed of an analog synth track that rumbles under natural sounds recorded in the James River State Park and Cypress Bridge Forest, both in Virginia. The artist states, “When I’m out in the field at night recording, there is a feeling of chatter, insect and animal voices that are communicating outside of my translation skills.” The artist was interested in connecting this experience to the concept of "chatter," a term which, since 9-11, often refers to communications picked up by U.S. government surveillance to track potential terrorist threats.

It is said that in some ways Vitiello is also a sculptor - caught up in recording or presenting within three-dimensional spaces. The gallery promises that we will be caught by surprise by a voice or a bird singing. It's probably even more truthful to say he considers four dimensions, as time is another factor.

Another appeal to the work of Stephen Vitiello is the collaborative aspect of his work; he often performs and collaborates constructively on sound pieces with various artists. Having only collaborated once in an improvisational sound installation, I was immediately hooked and hope to create more projects that involve the collaboration of others.

"THE COLLABORATIVE (RECENT) HISTORY OF STEPHEN VITIELLO." Interview by Alex Gibson. Fluid Radio. 10 Apr. 2011. Web. .

Johnston, Lorna. "Stephen Vitiello: The Birds." Time Out Sydney. 11 Aug. 2010. Web.

Scott, Andrea K. "Chime After Chime." The New Yorker 16 Aug. 2010: 1. The New Yorker. Web.

Wands, Bruce. Art of the Digital Age. New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Print.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

I currently completed a piece that I have mentioned briefly before, that involved pulling cartoons from my personal childhood form my memory and subjecting myself to them as an adult. While engaging in this act and eating a bowl of Trix cereal (Trix are for Kids) I was trying to reference the moments of bliss experienced as a child when engaged in such activities. Some of the context of these cartoons were darker and though they probably taught me life lessons in ways that I have not completely deciphered yet, I feel the response I got for the work is a result of my in ability to talk about the piece, or have give the piece the time and research it deserved. Though excited about the completion on the piece, I am now excited to revisit it in some new way socially and politically to bring something to the viewer. Looking at the work of Every Anvil (2001) by artist couple Jennifer and Kevin McCoy I feel there approach to commentary on cartoons is a good example of directions that such research could move toward for me.

Every Anvil (2001) is a video database of shots from over one hundred episodes of Looney Toons cartoons from the 1940s and 1950s. Each shot is indexed according to categories of violence and physical extremism such as ‘Every Explosion,’ ‘Every Flattened Character,’ and ‘Every Scream.’ The McCoys devised an interactive installation in which visitors (or participants) choose which disks to play according to the ‘action’ or ‘emotion’ they want to see.

Similarly, Every Shot, Every Episode (2001) contains literally that: every shot of every episode of the 1970s television show, Starsky and Hutch, which viewers can watch according to their own tastes for the content of certain scenes. The computer now rearranges the dramatic content for prime emotional impact according to the desires of the viewer.

An interesting aspect of the McCoy’s work is that they write their own programs -- and along the way arguably turn the tedious task of writing code into an art form.

"There isn't a shortage of visual and sonic effects offered in commercial programs. But when we want to combine different processes to achieve a certain aesthetic or per formative effect, we often can't," said Jennifer McCoy. "If we make a software tool ourselves, we can customize it easily. Plus we instantly know how to use it, of course."

I am not necessarily interest in the programming aspect of their work, however their work is a lesson in content and what it is you want to say to your viewer or participant about that content and what is the best rout for the content to be experienced. This is not to say that I couldn’t see myself learning programming in the coming years to integrate into my work, but right now I am very excited about the idea of editing imagery in simple ways to convey messages, whether that be programs as simple as photoshop, or by editing clips in Final Cut.

Jana, Reena. "Real Artists Paint by Numbers." WIRED. 6 Sept. 2001. Web.

Rush, Michael. Video Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007. Print.

Ken Feingold

In looking for media artists that have worked with their childhood as inspiration I found artist Ken Feingold. Growing up in a significantly different time and situation, Ken’s search for his childhood is much different than my own, but the concepts and ideas, as well as approach is something to be learned from, in trying to better articulate the concepts behind my work.

At the center of Feingold’s work, Childhood/Hot & Cold Wars (The Appearance of Nature), he writes: I have undertaken a search for my childhood TV memories, a kind of archaeology of those images and sounds that I remember, or see now, as having been formative in my understanding of what was going on in the world. I grew up watching television programs I saw in my first years. The thoughts of my childhood emerged amid constant references to world war, the atom bomb…and promises of endless progress in a fantastic technological future in which I would be visiting other worlds.

I spent my childhood visiting worlds of my own via cartoons and I think this is an opportunity to look deeper at what these cartoons informed me of. What were the social and political situations of the time and how were they represented in these cartoons, how can I express this to my viewer?

Another source of inspiration for a piece that I have been contemplating via the appropriation of two robotic dolls known as the Teddy Ruxpin, is Feingold’s pieces that consist of heads of his creation that question their own existence. In his work If/Then, allows identical heads in a cardboard box that talk to each other in an attempt to determine who and what they are: “I wanted them to look like replacement parts being shipped form the factory that had suddenly gotten up and begun a kind of existential dialogue right there on the assembly line.”

Collins, Judith. Sculpture Today. London: Phaidon, 2007. Print.

Druckrey, Timothy, and Charles Stainback. Iterations: the New Image. New York City: International Center of Photography, 1993. Print.

Rush, Michael. Video Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007. Print.

Jim Campbell

One thing that I have kept in mind when reading about the works of Alan Rath was the human interaction that is crucial to his practice. In searching for other artists whom work in a similar vein, I found artist Jim Campbell. With a lower-tech approach Jim Campbell is interested in looking for intuitive ways for viewers to interact with systems.

In attempting to create systems that respond and progress in recognizably non-random, but un-predictable ways, he has tried to create works that have a destiny of their own. His most recent work, inspired by artificial intelligence, investigates people’s connections with the information age.

In Library (2003), all but the faintest evidence of surveillance is erased. People entering and exiting the New York Public Library are filmed by the artist and then rendered indistinct by Campbell’s technological manipulations. The result is a haunting testimony to the fleeting nature of life itself and, becomes a memorial to all those anonymous people who have been photographed, passed through information systems, and then abandoned as useless data.

Druckrey, Timothy, and Charles Stainback. Iterations: the New Image. New York City: International Center of Photography, 1993. Print.

Rush, Michael. Video Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007. Print.