Taylor's DTC 355 Blog

I was scrolling through my recommended news stories and I found this one called "Faces of Frieze 2020: Picturing the art crowd at Los Angeles' premier fair," published by the Los Angeles Times . Frieze Los Angeles is both a collection of art installations and an appreciation of fashion. Many artists create paintings and other installations to show as backdrops for photos to be taken. The article included many prominent artists whose work was in the show. The new media portion primarily shows up because some of the art was created digitally. One piece was even a larger scale version of someone's work that was uploaded to Instagram prior to the event. Because people were taking pictures of the attendees, there is an additional digital/new media element to this event. The link to the original article is here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-02-15/faces-of-frieze-los-angeles-2020-photos

Title:  Pixelated Productivity For this photomontage project, I tackled two objectives at once: one, clean my desk, and two, take photographs of the time passing as I cleaned it. The image above capture about two and a half hours of work, completed during the power outage that occurred on Friday, February 7th. Using Adobe Photoshop, I pieced together sections of several different images from various stages of the organization process. If you look closely at the different sections, you can spot a Polaroid camera, Fujifilm mini film cartridges, printed pictures from family trips in the early 2000s, keys, the frames on my wall, me sitting at the desk, a computer, my phone, and many other items changing places as time goes by.

I found a site called Currents New Media that records artists and pieces that are shown at their annual festival. Currents is based in Santa Fe, and they host many artists each year and show their work. The work that I wanted to talk about this time is a multi-media piece from 2016, called Elegy. This piece is done by a performance art group called ARCOS. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find out very much information about ARCOS. I believe that they primarily are a dance performance group, though. Elegy takes place both in-person and online, with audience participation available in the form of a 360 degree video leading up to the live show at Currents. The audience could interact with the video as they walked around. They could hold up their phones at a specific angle and view a specific moment that follows the story ARCOS created for their performance. I think this sort of art piece is interesting. The pre-festival aspect of it gets the audience excited for the piece and then...

This second section of our book included several new ideas about art. One of them that piqued my interest was that art became minimalist, and this was somehow linked to ideas expressed in poetry. This change in art occurred with the furthering of different art movements as they rose to prominence. The idea that someone took poetry and applied those sort of rules to physical, non-verbal art pieces is interesting. It just goes to show that in the light of new methods, almost anything can be applied to art. Overall, however, this section was more of a review of art history that I have already learned about. I'm interested to see what else this book has to offer in terms of the explanation of new media art and artists.

The first reading section of our book, New Media in Art, it went through the early phases of cinema and worked its way into talking about Marcel Duchamp and how he took work that already existed and used it as a basis for more abstract, nonsensical pieces. This section seemed to me like more of a short review of things I've learned about in my past art and art history courses. It serves as a nice reminder, however, of the evolution of art as a whole. Movements like the ones Marcel Duchamp was a front-runner in often rejected past ideas about what is considered art and what is considered proper artistic practice. Especially with things like cinema and movie-making, technology evolved quickly and allowed for more people to become experimental with it. This produced several interesting works of cinematic art, a few of which are shown in the reading.