Dada Show

Near the beginning of the semester I checked out that Dada show in the Jot Travis gallery. Some of the stuff was interesting. There was this artist who replaced all the letters in Moby Dick with the letter "e", that was neat. I don't really remember any of the other pieces, it was pretty forgettable. There was something that had to do with a television.... I don't know. Most art is pretty unremarkable to me anyway, it's all the same. That Moby Dick thing was different, I had always kind of entertained the idea of doing something along those lines but not for the sake of any sort of "artistic value" but just because I think it would be funny. Like having a book where each chapter consisted of only one sentence or each page only had one letter on it. It's more funny to me than artistic. So the Moby Dick piece was just kind of funny and amusing to me. I could try to ascribe some false meaning to it by saying that it's deconstructing a great work of literature and the artist is trying to reconstruct our views of the written artform or something, but I won't because that's not in the spirit of Dada.

Scott Tsuchitani Talk

I never really know quite what to say in these lecture write-ups. Scott Tsuchitani has the same first name as me, so that's cool I guess. His work in exposing the fetishization of Japanese culture was really interesting in that it made me feel kind of bad about having an interest in Japanese culture. I watch Japanese anime, I play Japanese video games, I listen to Japanese music, I watch Japanese movies, I am minoring in Japanese studies in a feeble attempt to one day live in Japan for a short period. Tsuchitani's talk made me sort of think twice about why I've taken such a liking to the Japanese. I certainly hope his talk made some other people feel the same as I did.

Final Project

It is important that we, in the current age, pay attention to how the internet and the media presented within, and accompanied by, the internet affects us. Not only in how the internet affects culture and society at large, but more so how we absorb and interact with the internet. We were tasked with associating our final projects with one of our readings. I was interested in "Clusterfuck Esthetics", by Jerry Saltz, and the notion of "maximalism". In art, I'm drawn to the practice of working within the confines of an extreme; whether it be the extreme of minimalism or the extreme of maximalism, I feel that it can add a unique skew to an otherwise unremarkable piece of work. I combined this interest with my interest in the internet age and crafted a video that was comprised of short, one second clips from the internet. I purposely sent myself into a "youtube spiral" and that's how I gathered the videos that I did. I wanted it to be frantic and uncomfortable, aggressive and curious. In doing this, I was attempted to remove any sort of coherence or narrative that viewers might usually try to ascribe to video. I was also trying to mirror the split-second attention span that the internet implants within us by offering all its information in short, bite-sized, bursts. The audio is simply the audio of the videos layered together, which I feel adds to the frantic nature of the piece. I'm quite pleased with it. Perhaps it needed to be longer, with shorter clips. That might have further pushed what I was trying to go for.

Lightbox

For the lightbox project I was, once again, thinking about the internet. I was interested in further exploring what I like to call the "low-res aesthetic of the internet age". I used a photograph of the stars that I took over the summer and attempted to "shitify" it by lowering the quality so much that it was barely able to be seen as stars anymore. In my mind, it looked a lot better than what actually turned out. When placed in the lightbox it just looked like someone had scanned a black page on a dusty scanner. I think in hindsight I maybe should have used a different image but perhaps the unexpected outcome further adds to what I was trying to do with this piece.

Curatorial Project

We were assigned to curate our own art show, from beginning to end doing everything ourselves. Due to the amount of people involved in this project, we had a lot of ideas going around at any given time. Most of the really good ideas got thrown out whether due to lack of interest, lack of time, or lack of submissions. Dealing with the entire creation and planning of the show was kind of a shitshow, but I guess that's kind of what the instructor wanted. In the end, we turned out a pretty okay art show. Some of the pieces seemed a little phoned in, mine included, for my taste. The initial theme was color, and we were to submit pieces that were composed of a single color. Some people didn't do that but we accepted them anyway so the color theme was kind of thrown out in place for this "plus one" sort of theme in which we had to bring in a friend's work as well as our own. I chose my "plus one" because he usually does some interesting, weird paintings but he chose instead to submit a fairly run-of-the-mill beach photograph and an artist statement that wasn't an artist statement at all (which he still presses is an artist statement). I wanted to try to take an image that was originally in color and draw it in black and white, so I chose an image that I felt would still somewhat convey a sense of color even though it was in black and white. I don't know how well this worked out, and I'm kind of disappointed in it. Oh well, no care.

Thrift Store Collage

Portraits of pets are, to me, one of the most kitsch and tacky forms of art. Naruto is an anime series that I think has reached that same level of kitsch but in the animation world. It quickly shot to the position of most popular anime and the anime community was oversaturated with the constant image of this blonde spiky haired goofball. My aim of the project was to take a tacky pet portrait and turn the background into a collage of the face of the titular character of Naruto. In doing this I just was trying to present two different forms of kitsch in one.

Performing For The Camera

I was interested in the idea of the internet. What an abstract thing for people to be obsessed with; a gargantuan electronic database of information. The internet has consumed us and those that have yet to be consumed will be consumed. A place to gain knowledge, a place to keep in touch with other people, a place for entertainment, a place to present opinions, a place of love, a place of hate, the internet. I wanted to visually represent the consumption of a life that the internet can achieve via low quality webcam footage and even lower quality effects and resolution.