POW #6

Reading 2

Jason Salavon is an artist from Austin Texas born in 1970. The bulk of his work revolves around taking pre-existing media to create works of art. One of his works re-arranges the frames of movies such as Star Wars to create images that are arranged by luminosity in a radial pattern. Another of his works creates two images one called good, the other evil. The contents of the images are massive collections of thumbnails of things that are considered either good or evil based on google image searches.  I choose Salavon For the same reason I chose Burson. I’m interesting in Salavon’s work because he is an artist that attempts to understand society and the reasoning behind our collective ideas on morals and behaviors.

Takeshi Murata was born in Chicago Illinois, and is Rhode Island School of Design graduate (1997). His early works as shown in the book are heavily based on the manipulation of technology breaking stills from videos he creates. His later works involve more digital manipulation as he creates objects that appear to be realistic but break the laws of physics. I’m interested more in his later works. I like the idea of a digital sculpture not an animated piece or a movie but having a sculpted shape that only exist digitally. Can that be considered a sculpture if it cannot exist in a physical space? If not what do you call that kind of object?

POW 5

POW # 4

Nancy Burson (Reading 1)

Nancy Burson is an artist and photographer who was born in 1948. Her most influential work is mainly from digital technology, she is known for creating programs that allow the morphing of faces. outside of artistic endeavors she created the program that allows law enforcement to view what a missing child may look like later in life. This technology also help her to create her Human Race Machine. This program allows the user to take an image of themselves and apply physical characteristic changes that shows what the person would look like if they were another race.

In addition to making her own technology she also created work that uses an early version of layering images to composite images of people who were in the public eye and seen as beautiful in order to create an image of a fake person who would be a sort of baseline of someone who would be defined as attractive. In another composite she took a book of book of racial stereotypes and based on population statistics created an image of a person who's features represented the amalgamation of humankind.

What I find to be interesting about her work is that many artists attempt to create work that shows people what it is like from another perspective, or to show the world how certain constructs like beauty are just perspective, but with Burson's work for what i assume to be the first time was able to create work that was able to take those concepts or ideas and make them a physical reality. She was able to show  people what it would be like if they came from another place or culture in the world, and break down what it was that we as a culture at the time considered beautiful or desirable in an attempt to understand why we found it to be.

POW week 3