While the exhibition had no shortage of artworks by contemporary artistic geniuses, identifying which artist was associated with each piece was a difficult task. I found myself ignoring identification tags all together, since matching them with their respective artwork was next to impossible. I wondered why a museum, an institution traditionally with a mission of educating, might place such a low importance on the title and artist being associated with a piece of art.

Rachel Harrison, Huffy Howler, 2004

I reached the resource center on the 5th floor (which was beautiful, by the way) and decided to see what information I could dig up on the museum’s curatorial staff. What I found intrigued me…

In an article by Richard Flood (Chief Curator of the New Museum) he quoted Antonin Artaud’s, Theater and It’s Double (1938).

“Masterpieces of the past are good for the past; they are not good for us. We have the right to say what has been said and what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct, corresponding to present modes of feeling and understandable to everyone.”

I wondered…Have we placed such a high value on masterpieces and the classics in our creative culture that we have forgotten to look for new solutions?

I had let the idea of the masterpiece rest until I heard John Maeda speak at RIT on Wednesday. He was talking about learning design from one of his professors who had told him, “The classics will always be there”, that he should be exploring new solutions…this is when things started to come together for me.

John Maeda, Infinity, 1993

Masterpieces and the classics are great, and they hold stature in our culture because they are examples of solutions and communication that made a difference in their own time. So while we value them for accomplishments, for us and for our culture they exist only as a memory and as an artifact of the past. They are worth studying and knowing about and even exploring further solutions, but should we really allow those solutions to be the ones we consider first?

Has the fact that there is a certain amount of safety associated with previous solutions kept us from executing newer and riskier solutions, possibly even better solutions?

When I went to the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at MoMA I was overwhelmed by the innovation and creativity on display. What was even more exiting was seeing ever day people (people who aren’t in the New Media industry) getting excited about what they saw.

The exhibition was packed, people of all ages were coming together and were genuinely enthusiastic about the future. While some of the solutions presented may be risky, possibly even taboo, they were something new and extremely refreshing.

Sketch Furniture. 2005. By Sofia Lagerkvist, Charlotte von der Lancken, Anna Lindgren , and Katja Sävström of Front Design

Obviously reinvention is necessary sometimes, and even the best solution on occasion. That being said, I would like to believe there are still some new and innovative ideas out there. Those are the ideas we should be pushing towards.

As part of the New Media industry (an industry where art, science and technology converge), I feel as though we should be part of a movement aiming towards innovative solutions that push boundaries, make people uncomfortable and change our world in the same way the creators of museum masterpieces and the classics did.

Me in the midst of a sake bombing outing Saturday night with some of my best buddies and fellow New Mediaites.

I should also mention that I am currently beginning the last 10 weeks of my college studies…and it sure did creep up. I’m really excited to graduate, but at the same time I know that no company will ever give me the creative freedom and time to explore RIT has. Many of the projects I have been working are gravitating towards a more experimental, harboring on the fringe of the art realm influence. In many ways these projects are much more fun and leave me feeling very satisfied at the end. I thought that I should mention a few of my most recent projects.

Untitled Looks (aka: the Vag Cam)

Untitled Looks is an interactive installation art piece that focuses on human voyeuristic tenancies in order to examine the relationship between exploring and being explored. The piece is a 5’9″ mannequin wearing a short skirt and standing on two 44″ pedestals. Two cameras are used (one positioned to record footage of the spectators experience in the space (voyeur cam), the other positioned in the vagina of the mannequin (vag cam) taking a snapshot of the spectator as they look up her skirt). The spectators experience is then projected into a golden frame in a near by location for all to see. I am working on this project with Nathanael Wolfe (who sparked this idea) has been in charge of managing the physical aspects of the installation thus far and Graeme Reed who has been working on getting the Flash Media Server to sync up 3 separate SWFs (one for each camera and one for the projector). The project is still in progress but we expect the installation to be polished up by May 3rd for the Imagine RIT Innovation + Creativity Festival on campus where we will be exhibiting our creation.

myWeathertower

MyWeathertower is a flash site I made essentially because I got really sick of all the banner adds on weather.com. MyWeathertower visualizes the weather (accurate up to the hour) and time of day (accurate up to the minute) using the Yahoo! Weather API. The hardest part to implement was getting the sunset to be at the right time and look good for all the US time zones. The site includes deep-linking so you can bookmark your zip code and also includes dynamic snow and rain, information on the high and low temperature, the current temperature, wind speed and direction as well as the ability to scroll 360 degrees through the cityscape.

Emotipaper

I did in fact finish up my Emotipaper experiment I posted about earlier that I was doing with the We Feel Fine API and the Kuler API. You can see the final result and my documentation HERE.

Since this is the last quarter I wanted to do an independent study really examining what new media is and how it effects culture, ethics, marketing, etc. I’m doing my independent study with Therese Hannigan and Nate will be researching along side me writing parallel papers. I’m really excited about this series of papers I will be writing. I don’t think I’ve given myself enough time to analyze the industry, so it will be a refreshing break to do so.

Also I should mention, I added the Art + Experiments page to this blog so check it out to see case studies, experiments and research I’m doing and artworks I’m creating.

As a final note, I finally got my new portfolio site up and I will hopefully be redesigning my blog soon…but until then if you’re bored go to http://radiesel.com.

I recently figured out deep linking for myWeathertower and I’ve had a couple of New Media people ask about it…and given that I’m going to be incorporating it into my portfolio soon I though easy, quick and clean reference as to how to deep link a page would be nice to have for future reference.

For my sample code of Deep Linking in AS3 with SWFAddress please go HERE

In the words of Jonathan Larson, “I expect games and photos from Xerox now”

Summary: Basically what VH does is take a headline from CNN, separate that headline into an array of relevant words (words like ‘of’ and ‘the’ are excluded) and searches Flickr images for those tags using Flashr (an AS2 wrapper for the Flickr API). An array of images is returned for each individual word in the headline. Images are then displayed next to each other in a strip below the original headline.

Results: The result is pretty interesting and sometimes funny or even shocking. While presenting this project to some freshmen New Media students the headline I clicked on was “Six shot at Nevada school bus stop” and a couple of the images that were pulled back were of a gun and children, of course seeing the images next to one another with the headline above enhances the meaning of the headline. When I first started testing Nathanael Wolfe suggested that I try an RSS feed from somewhere other than CNN like Perez Hilton’s site usually those headlines yielded funnier results.Future Plans: Aside from speeding up the response times for getting images I would really like to give the user a way to input their 6 favorite RSS feeds, or select from a list of approved feeds so that they have a customized visual headlines page. Also I think deep linking would be a great way to bookmark your favorite RSS feed and only view that.If you have any suggestions for Visual Headlines please let me know. I would love to hear what you think!

If you want to check out the politician I made.