#art3647c

Deep down below

In an ocean once so blue

Lies a graveyard,

Full of brittle shells,

Shattered and scattered

The remnants oh so fragile

A place full of tiny lives,

Sea butterflies looking up at the snow

That once fell from those skies

Now devoid of happiness and vitality

Silence and melancholy take hold

The vicinity bubbling intensely

Flora that blossomed now shriveled

A lone butterfly newly drifting down

Begging for salvation

They find tiny flora,

Tendrils reach to scour the land in white

A tiny butterfly barely hanging on by the thread

They stretch out—embracing it

As it shares its final breath

Its shell cracks,while its wings dissipate

But it smiles happily,

Knowing that the tendrils have begun to spread the seeds

They hold the key

To save them

Those teeny,brittle shells

[FINAL PROJECT] TEXTILES QUE ME SIGUEN

This work is very meaningful to me, titled "Textiles que me siguen", I mixed the traditional technique of cross-stitching, with a way of showcasing the principles learned about internet art throughout the semester. I created the mockup pf ti website using Premiere Pro and also the screen recordings of musing these tools within the site, along with the physical cross stitched pieces scanned to create the digital gallery for my works. I think inviting the audience to participate in the creation is one of the principles that I appreciate the most about internet art, and in this day and age, it really pushes the envelope for traditional techniques to have this type of platform to be displayed through. I personally will explore further making this site a reality along with an engineer that can help me, but I think the idea and concept is very clear and the result with the correct tools can be successful. I look forward to hearing your feedback and opinions and making this project a reality.

Valeria Morena

[ARTIST REVIEW] MISHKA HENNER

[ARTIST REVIEW] AMALIA ULMAN

Amalia Ulman is an Argentine artist born in 1989. She grew up in Spain and, throughout her early life, had a strong influence from both her mother and father. Her father was a tattoo artist, and she developed an interest in body modifications. Growing up in an environment that encouraged curiosity, she described herself as an anarchist and a utopian. In her practice, she works with performance, installation, video art, and net art. Her works explore the themes of class imitation and the relationship between consumerism and identity. Through her experimental practice, she involved the use of social media in the creation of her works.

One of these works is titled "Excellences & Perfection," which was produced through the curation and publishing of posts through Instagram. The artist spent months documenting a hoax and fake life of this character—herself—going through the life of a future it-girl, which got thousands of people (followers) invested in her made-up day-to-day life. After this work, she was defined as a social media artist, and her performance widely impacted the perception of the internet today. It also predicted and shone a light on the behavior of the keyboard warriors who visited her page and published both praises and hate. She turned herself into a consumable character and published a curated life. Through different states, she explored the performative side of gender and the stereotyping of women. This work is predictive; it gave us a look into the future and the formula for gaining followers through a very selective representation of reality. She demonstrated that nowadays, a large social media following means power, and this was shown through the impact her work had—something that would not have been possible had she not gathered tens of thousands of followers, which comprised a vital part of the success and accuracy in predicting the future of social media. The use of the rising social media platform Instagram and her several conversations involving its founders after the work was completed, shows the fact that this platform was such an integral element for the creation of this work, through the culture it promotes, even if it was not created with such purposes. 

This work was created in 2014, and looking back at it, knowing what we now know about the countless "influencers" and the curation of online content, she was incredibly ahead of the curve and extremely accurate in the way we now see and use social media profiles. Through a series of fake scenarios, which drove her to even fake a plastic surgery procedure, Ulman shows us the ultimate critique of gendered expectations and their proliferation through mass media. She made several powerful points, but the main one was the deceptiveness of social media profiles and the lack of context and reality. Her work was an omen of current times and an accurate premonition of how twisted social media culture is.

Sources:  https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/39375/1/amalia-ulman-2014-instagram-hoax-predicted-the-way-we-use-social-mediaLinks to an external site.

https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/23700/1/amalia-ulman-meme-come-trueLinks to an external site.

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/amalia-ulman-instagram-excellences-perfections/index.htmlLinks to an external site.

[ARTIST REVIEW] KEITH HARING'S "UNFINISHED PAINTING"

Seeing Keith Haring's Unfinished Painting always gets to me. The significance and purpose of this piece and to think of all the art he would have been able to create if he had more life to live is heart wrenching. He wrote the year he was diagnosed with AIDS: "Amazing how many things one can produce if you live long enough. I mean, I've barely created ten years of serious work. Imagine 50 years.… I would love to live to be 50 years old.". Even when having a little bit of information of the context of the creation of this piece, it speaks volumes to how inappropriate it is to complete this work with the use of AI. The painting was purposefully left unfinished to represent the fact that his life would be cut short due to AIDS. The fact that the creation of this piece was based in representing the effect of the AIDS pandemic in the gay community and culture, and someone decided to "complete" an already completed piece with a soul-less AI platform, ignoring the late artists intentions, plagiarising his style, and disrespecting the context in which this piece was created along with all of those who suffered and are represented through a work like this. 

Artificial intelligence is trained with existing information and produces a result that "imitates" the learnings. The concept that Haring intended with this artwork was to leave it incomplete purposefully, but this is a complete piece in an of itself, since through the blank spaces within the canvas and the feeling that it still needs to be filled, the deaths of the AIDS pandemic are represented and the way that these lives, including the artist's were cut short. Still being alive, he still knew all the things he would miss and all the work he would still have left to produce and communicate because he will not live long enough to do so. "Completing" this piece with artificial intelligence not only negates the significance of the appearance of the piece being incomplete, but also uses the style of an existing artist that had a trajectory to develop and is loaded with their own essence and AI cheapens that process out. In the sense that ignores the process and produces something empty and devoid of meaning, context, and soul. 

When working with artificial intelligence, which is something inevitable considering the rapid advance and incorporation of these technologies in our daily lives, it has to be taken or considered as a tool, rather than the machine of a final creation. These technologies are trained with existing work from artists that have worked very hard to develop their style and trajectory and mimics it without crediting the sources or providing a monetary compensation for the usage of the images and content that were used to train the program. I think transparency is key to truly transform AI into a tool rather than the originator of empty ideas and the producer of poorly crafted work that is meaningless. By labeling AI work, we are able to differentiate the source of these images and conserve the hard work and craft of the artists actually producing work from their own context and experiences, rather than from machine learning from other's works. 

Rebecca Mock is an illustrator and animator. Her work is found mainly in digital media; through her hipnotizing color palettes she achieves life within the creation of short animations depicted in the GIF format, communicating a snippet of her chosen ambiance and charming narratives with the wise usage of color and texture. The creation of her editorial illustrations hAS ENABLED HER to find a lot of enticing projects with several brands that have pushed her career forward. 

Brandon Tauszik is a visual artist and self defined "image maker". Through the use of audiovisual media, he is able to create as a photographer and filmmaker. His current ongoing projects explore various aspects of America’s social periphery and social situation. Recently, he is working with cinemagraphs—an innovative blend of still images and film that remains largely unexplored, exported and depicted in the GIF format. 

Both of these artist as they use the same media format of GIF have wide differences. Tauszik uses videos of real characters depicting real social situations in the american scene and Mock explores themes of ambiance and peaceful settings through illustration and animation. Mock's color palettes are varied and eclectic, as Tauszik in his GIF series 'Barbershop' uses black and white to depict the individuals in his images.

I picked this particular piece from Rebecca Mock, because I love the way she captures the movement and ambiance. The use of her color palette and the animation applied to the setting transports you into the scene as if you were part of it. The use of highlights and shadows and the texture that accompanies it communicates a moody setting in which she depicts the subject matter of this work, "The aftershock", which  depicts the interior of a family house after an earthquake. About this work I appreciate the fact that these are the last peaceful moments before everything falls apart, or maybe it never does.