It begins....

Welcome to the witterings of a wee wombat. As wombats lack opposable thumbs and have difficulty typing, we are not traditionally associated with blogging. However, this particular wombat wants an art degree and therefore must do its best to muddle through a Digital Media Art class. Said class requires said blog and here we are......

The blog itself is actually the second class project, to be added to throughout the term. The first entry is meant to display the first class project--a bit of internet research meant to expose our general interests to our instructor. It was aptly enough entitled Expose Yourself (yes, it’s funny--now pull your mind out of the gutter and keep reading).

Part one of the project asked that we select our favorite Media Art project from the following list and give a brief explanation of what we liked about it:

https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/marktribe/new+media+art

I was most drawn to a project entitled Pedestrian by artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar in which a tiny black and white urban world with tiny people is projected down onto the floor of a gallery, scurrying about their business amongst the feet of the viewers. The still image provided strongly resembled the works of any of several famous photographers and the write-up states that this was intentional. The movements of the animated figures was carefully researched using models in special motion suits reminiscent of Marey’s and Muybridge’s motion studies in the late 1800’s. It’s just a charming idea--a tiny little animated city swarming about your feet, looking like Modernist photographs and moving as realistically as possible. However, I do wonder what happens if they are stepped upon....

https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Paul+Kaiser+and+Shelley+Eshkar

Part two of the project called for three things:

a) A news article reflecting a concern that we have about today’s social environment:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/31/online.internet.therapy.cbt/index.html

I chose this CNN feature about online psychotherapy on the basis that it instantly provoked me to a strong negative reaction. I do not care for the idea of online health care--especially for mental health. Isn’t the whole point of therapy that one talks to somebody about their issues? Our society seems to have this need to put everything online--banks, retail stores, public services, customer service, school, anything and everything. It strikes me as dehumanizing somehow.....or at the very least horribly impersonal.

b) A You Tube video that we found to be shocking or fascinating:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glUnzzoFUxg

Watching this creepy Japanese robot crawl across the floor was definitely fascinating, in a morbid sort of way. Throw in the artist in the nurse’s outfit, the maintenance hatch/butt, and the confused little Australian boys and we’ve got a winner....what a great piece of performance art.

c) A piece of technology being developed for the future that caught our eye:

http://uwnews.org/article.asp?Search=parviz&articleid=39094

These little contact lenses look just like something out of any number of my favorite science fiction movies, tv shows, and books. The idea of granting humans super-human vision through the use of technology (and tiny, unobtrusive technology at that) is highly appealing. I like it when I see fictional devices becoming reality--now if only they could start perfecting the holodeck....

Overall, my selections exposed an interest in “People, illusion, online life, scale, mechanised people, future super human components” to my teacher. We'll see where these interests take me over the course of the semester.

--The Wombat