viz. - visual art

Art + Architecture: Diana Al-Hadid’s “Suspended After Image”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:01:16 +0000

Image Credit: Sandy Carson, taken from CultureMap Austin

For those of us interested in architectural sculpture, the last few months in Austin (especially on the UT campus) have felt like gifts from the art gods. I’ve already written about one exhibition (the recently-closed El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa show at the Blanton Museum of Art). This month ushered in a second sculptural exhibition. New York sculptor Diana Al-Hadid’s Suspended After Image, a site-specific installation at UT’s Visual Arts Center’s Vaulted Gallery, is a feat of texture and height. As a fantastic example of architectural art, Al-Hadid’s most recent work for the VAC asks viewers to circumambulate the sculpture and ponder the relationship between memory, built objects, and humanity.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson (cropped)

Memory inspired the entire installation. Al-Hadid was stirred to create her sculpture “Suspended After Image” after seeing a Gothic painting of the Visitation which featured an intricate cloak. Working with twelve UT art assistants, Al-Hadid turned her memory of a two-dimensional painting into a three-dimensional structure. “Suspended After Image” has a certain sinuousness to it—a river of faux-fabric permanently flows over more than half of the sculpture. I’m tempted to think that the sumptuous river of cardboard, wood, plaster, and metal evokes the way that memory works. Much as fabric folds and rivers flow, we remember in spurts and starts. In a recent article on Al-Hadid’s installation at the VAC, Austin blogger Michael Graupmann reviews the artist’s creation process: “images she sees often get stuck in her mind, (‘made sacred’) and stay with her until she transforms them through her work.” The curvy form of Al-Hadid’s piece seems to mimic its creation process.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson, taken from CultureMap Austin

And yet there is also a sharp jaggedness to the whole thing—paint globs create skyscraper-like structures that rise out of the ground. It’s safe to say that “Suspended After Image” is a work that mimics our built environment, as Al-Hadid’s creations often involve architectural tools and methods. For this particular piece, Al-Hadid used a 3D modeling program and CNC router to plan its structure. Intricate lattices and elaborate stairs need to be modeled, whether they are used for art or architecture.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson (cropped)

And behind every architectural design is a person. Al-Hadid’s sculpture doesn’t allow its viewers to forget the human element in architecture and art. While walking around the sculpture (which urges us to do so from multiple viewpoints, even from above in the VAC’s Mezzanine), we’re surprised that the artist planned for every angle to be seen by an ambulatory audience. The most surprising part of Al-Hadid’s “Suspended After Image” is the supple plaster body that is either disappearing into or emerging from the stairs at the bottom of the sculpture. Is the built environment oppressing this body into oblivion? Is it growing human loins? I’m unsure myself. But at least the human (in the sculpture and outside of it) isn’t forgotten.

See Diana Al-Hadid’s “Suspended After Image” yourself at the Visual Arts Center until March 10^th, when another Artist-in-Residence piece will take its place.

Bringing the Streets Inside - Google Art Project

Cate Blouke — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:06:03 +0000

While the google “street view” feature has certainly revolutionized the way we look at maps, they’re now taking that technology a step further – over the threshold and into buildings. The “Art Project,” powered by Google, has partnered with museums all over the world to bring not just the art, but the museums themselves to your computer.

Screen shot of The Art Project home page

The street view technology enables viewers to explore the museums’ galleries in virtual space. Moving from gallery to gallery, they can zoom in on the works of art. While not all of the works are available for viewing (some of the pieces have been blurred for copyright reasons), the project enables people to explore museums they would never otherwise be able to see – since the museums involved are scattered across the globe (from New York to Madrid, Prague to Berlin).

Screen shot of street view tour of Gemalgalerie; Berlin, Germany

Although at times I find myself a bit dubious about the fact that Google seems to be taking over the (virtual) world, I’m all for increased accessibility and availability of artistic and cultural commodities. In addition to the museum tours, the project includes high-resolution images of some of the museums’ prized possessions. Selected and curated
by the museums themselves, the images include varying amounts of background information including “Viewing Notes, Artwork History, Artist Information,” and
“Tags.”

Screen shot of Art Project's high-resolution image of Boticelli's The Birth of Venus

Over the past year or so, the viz. team has been working with The Blanton Museum here at UT on the Steve in Action Project – a collaboration between a variety of institutions who are exploring the value of social tagging to increase access and engagement with museum collections. While The Art Project doesn’t seem to allow tagging by visitors, and the tags currently seem rather limited, it will be interesting to see how this aspect evolves.

A third feature of the site enable viewers with google accounts to “create an artwork collection” from the available images. This is certainly a much more interactive experience than flipping through the pages of a book, and it opens up untold possibilities for art history classes, let alone the everyday art enthusiast. It’s also pretty cool in terms of preservation and proliferation of works of art.

"Nerdscaping" and QR Code Art

catherine_c — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 23:16:27 +0000

Image Credit: Eric Rice's Flickr

H/T : 2D Code Blog and Hampton for the QR reader demonstration

In anticipation of Viz Blog's upcoming collaboration with the DWRL Immersive Environments Group, I'm devoting this week's post to a bit of background on QR codes - two dimensional barcodes that can contain several different types of data: URLs, a limited number of plain text characters, phone numbers, or SMS. In the image above, Eric Rice's "nerdscaping" of his driveway has been captured from space by Google's satellite view. Although the code wasn't quite completed when the photograph was taken, Rice's project will inevitably be only one of many giant QR codes that will soon appear on satellite images. Driveways, yards, parking lots, and building rooftops are all spaces where these codes can be placed to embed information on specific locations in the real world.

QR codes are matrix type codes created in 1994 by Denso Wave that have begun to catch on the U.S. in the last few years. Unlike basic barcodes which only contain information in a horizontal direction, QR codes contain information in both horizontal and vertical directions.. According to Denso Wave's informational page, this allows QR codes to contain "a considerably greater volume of information than a bar code"and more than other forms of 2D code developed in the United States including PDF417, Data Matrix and Maxi Code (the 2D code found on UPS packages).

Image Credit: QR code (links to Viz) created through Kaywa's free QR code generator

QR codes are fascinating images in themselves. They resist ready classification for they are not only visual, but informational. In a way, they are like rabbit holes that have an immediate presence and simultaneously function as a gateway to data or virtual spaces. As such, they have already begun to be incorporated into art and design such as the work of Italian-Belgian artist Fabrice de Nola:

Image Credit: Interaction with Fabrice de Nola's painting Auditorium Roma, from de Nola's Flickr photostream

Auditorium Roma is a De Nola painting featuring QR codes that link to information about Rome and pertinent Wikipedia pages.

Image Credit:Fabrice de Nola's painting Auditorium Roma

In his work, De Nola explores the linkages between visual art (and the visual elements of QR codes) and information. The meaning of his work is enhanced by the information featured in the QR Codes, as in his piece Still (Mirror Edit), a brief history of viewing Earth from space:

Image Credit: Fabrice De Nola's Digital C-Print Still (Mirror Edit) from De Nola's Flickr photostream

Perspective affects meaning even more significantly in artistic work featuring QR Codes. Furthermore "Scannability" becomes essential to the process of making meaning, and this process itself more intentional than associative.

Image Credit: Close up of Fabrice De Nola's Digital C-Print Still (Mirror Edit) from De Nola's Flickr photostream

In some of the QR Artwork I viewed on the main Flickr Photostream, my iPhone QR Code readers (the basic and rather efficient free QR Reader and the less reliable pay app quiQR) had difficulty scanning the images, particularly those in which the design of the QR code itself had been visually altered. De Nola's artwork was highly accessible because he does not manipulate the appearance of the codes themselves, but instead places them within the context of a work of visual art. His work is a prime example of the ability of QR codes to link aesthetics with information.

Sensual Suicide and Ironic Intent - Florian Jennet and Valentin Beinroth's "Freeze! Revisited"

Cate Blouke — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 21:42:01 +0000

Image Credit: "Freeze! Revisited" by Florian Jennet and Valentin Beinroth via todayandtomorrow.net

H/T to Ben Koch

Since the 1950s, the pop art movement has been challenging our ideas about mass-produced images and objects. Particularly by manipulating context, pop artists identify and exploit cultural trends. In a recent exhibition, two German artists explored the intersections of art, violence, and mistaken identities.

Image Credit: "Freeze! Revisited" by Florian Jennet and Valentin Beinroth via todayandtomorrow.net

The “guns” in these images are actually just gun-shaped popsicles. Even with contextualization, the images are striking, primarily because they reverse my expectations. The sensuality of the young woman contrasts ironically with her (essentially) suicidal pose. Given the other people in the background and the incongruity of her expression, it’s easier to disassociate the image with the potential violence it depicts.

The vending machine look of the freezer (above) provides an interesting commentary on contemporary issues of mass-produced violence and the widespread availability of weaponry. I don’t know much about gun politics in Germany, so maybe I’m just reading my own political views onto it. However, images from this project were featured in an issue of as|peers (an American Studies journal) that focused on America and Crime.

These images come from "Freeze! Revisted," the second version of Valentin Beinroth and Florian Jenett’s “Freeze” project. In the first project the ice guns were flavorless, not intended for consumption but just to “look real on first sight.” The artists enacted realistic situations with the ice guns and then discarded them in various places around Frankfurt – until the performances were stopped by the police.

For “Freeze! Revisited,” the edible ice guns were handed out to visitors. Whereas the first project left little visible record, this version resulted in an exciting archive of images.

Image Credit: "Freeze! Revisited" by Florian Jennet and Valentin Beinroth via todayandtomorrow.net

On the whole, I found the project delightfully morbid, and most of the images amused me thoroughly. The photo of the little boy, however, I find rather disturbing. Standing alone and gazing earnestly at the camera, the boy reverses the gaze and thereby implicates the spectator. Directly connecting youth and violence, this image loses the sense of irony that the project otherwise invokes.

Or, perhaps, irony was never the goal. The artists’ websites are largely written in German (which I don’t understand). So this brings up the interesting question of intentionality, especially across cultural divides. Is my reading of these images as anti-gun, pro-gun-control any less valid though the “text” is German and I’m American? Were these ever meant to be ironic? Or were they intended to shock instead of amuse? Does intentionality even matter if I can’t access it?

Steve in Action

timturner — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:15:10 +0000

High Yellow by Ellsworth Kelly, courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

This year, the Visual Rhetoric Workgroup has collaborated with the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin on the Steve in Action project. Steve in Action is a collaboration of individuals and institutions collectively exploring the value of social tagging to improve access to cultural heritage collections and engage audiences in new ways. (For more about the Steve in Action Project, see their web site.)

Through this collaboration, the DWRL and the Blanton are conducting a study that explores how undergraduate students use software (like those provided by social media sites such as Flickr or Facebook) to tag digital images of abstract works of art. We are particularly interested in exploring what type of language undergraduate students use to respond to abstract art, and how tagging art alters students' experience and understanding of the artwork. This study will have implications for understanding social tagging as it is used in art and writing instruction. In addition, the project should serve as a way to understand the greater implications of social tagging as it investigates students' abilities to produce forms of knowledge in other areas based on skills learned in the literature, composition, or art classroom.

Although the Steve in Action team believes that its research into the value of social tagging to enhance finding will prove a significant contribution to our community’s understanding of social tagging and access to abstract art, the constraints of deploying the Steve in Action tagging tools in an artificial environment structured specifically to answer research questions have made it difficult for the Steve in Action team to develop authentic and engaging tagging activities and interfaces and thus to begin to examine another series of questions about social tagging. We are keenly interested in questions of motivation and in understanding how social tagging engages and rewards the visitor; in gauging the uses and benefits of social tagging for institutions and their visitors; and in measuring what kinds of support and resources are required by institutions hoping to institute social tagging practices.

As part of a major research university, we extend the research on tagging initiated by the Steve in Action team to look at a primary audience we serve, undergraduate students, and to learn about what language they use to describe and categorize works of art that use abstraction. We hope to use the data we collect from this research to inform museum education practices at the Blanton and to share with faculty who use this content to teach undergraduates.

Currently, the study is its first phase, which asks students to look at a collection of digital images and read contextual information about them if they choose. They then answer a series of questions about the experience. The survey collects information about how students responded to the art and asks them to describe the experience of looking at it, and also to engage in a small writing exercise by defining abstract art and retitling three of the images. You can explore the interface here.

We record the language these undergraduate subjects use to describe abstract art in order to help museum professionals and educators assess what university students find interesting, understand, or misunderstand about such art. We hope that the data we collect will provide information about how social tagging technology mediates students' experience of images and helps them translate visual meaning into verbal descriptions.

The second phase of the project will ask student to tag the digital images using the social-tagging interface designed by the Steve Project. It will likely be implemented in the fall of 2010.

Torture and Legos

timturner — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:19:45 +0000

Image credit: legofesto via Boing Boing

John Jones sent along a link to this image, from the work of a photographer who documents events in the "war on terror" with Lego dioramas. (I have an earlier post on viz. on a somewhat similar subject, an artist who used Legos to create depictions of the Holocaust.)

I'm ultimately not quite sure what to make of the sculptures. On the one hand, the childlike qualities evoked by Lego bricks provide an unsettling contrast with the events depicted, and the potential alienation of subject from matter that consequently arises may be effective in spurring reflection on the questions raised by the use of torture. In particular, the modular nature of Lego blocks (mass produced so that any two random blocks will fit together) may be emblematic of the programmatic nature of the torture regime instituted by the U.S. Although it is tempting to write off torture as an aberration, an exceptional situation that can be explained away by reference, for example, to human evil or to the actions of only an unauthorized few, in fact, as the recently released torture memos show, torture was an organized and systemic practice. It emerged from specifically defined contexts and practices and was authorized through familiar bureaucratic channels: it was, in fact, given the stamp of legality and legitimacy by officials in the Bush administration. The components were already in place; all that was lacking was a willingness on the part of those in charge to (forgive the facility of the analogy) put the pieces in place. What is most shocking about the torture regime was not its aberrational nature but the ease with which it emerged in its context.

On the other hand, the alienating effects of the project may, for some, remain problematic, as if treating such serious subjects with such childlike objects--toys--trivializes serious and systemic human rights abuses. I have a little more on that line of argument in my earlier post.

Rene Alvarado

kathrynjeanhamilton — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:34:46 +0000

Mexican-American artist Rene Alvarado currently has an exhibit at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts through November 12.

"Madonna and Two Horses"

Is this stuff cool, or what?

"Songbird"

If you go to the artist's website, you can see even more of his fantastic paintings -- and find out more about the artist, whom I'd never heard of before hearing of him on KUT a few days ago. On the website his work gets compared to Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo's, but I see similarities between Alvarado's work and a host of others. You can see the surrealist influence of Dali, without a doubt, and an almost Chagall-like dreaminess. Picasso is there as well. But what Alvarado brings to the table is a specifically Chicano approach to these surrealist landscapes. According to his site, he is concerned largely with the psychology of identity. His parents brought him to the States when he was 7, and it is through his art that Alvarado tells the story of creating a new life in West Texas.

Recurring images in his work are bulls, the sea, and the female form. In some paintings Alvarado seems to be asking us to contemplate the art of display, as his still lifes stare back, accusingly, at the viewer. In another eerie painting, all in red hues, three mysterious bird-like creatures look over the sculpture of a torso -- with a dolphin's head. I chose the two paintings here because they seem to represent two different directions Alvarado takes in his work: abstraction and portraiture. In the first, the Madonna's triangular form occupies most of the canvas, her dark head and halo standing out against the softer pastels. Within those pastels, horses and fish and faces lurk, swimming and whispering and standing alert. The triangle of the Madonna's form intersects with a second, shadow triangle, the base of which is the blue feathers behind the horses' heads. All these triangles -- not to mention the look of the Madonna's head -- bring to mind ancient Mesoamerican civilizations that this Madonna might have been a part of.

The second painting, "Songbird," doesn't beg for the same kind of symbolic unpacking. It's what Alvarado does with color here that's so interesting to me, the play of shade and light that makes the soft grey feathers on the bird stand out so strikingly against the woman's hair. On the right side of the painting we see the faint imprint of a flower shoot.

Alvarado has converted an old church in San Angelo into his studio, blending community, tradition, and functionality in practice as well as in his art. It may be well worth the 4 1/2 hour drive from Austin to see.

The University: instituting culture, institutional culture

Jillian Sayre — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:44:27 +0000

This summer I taught a rhetoric course that focused on the idea of a University. The course used Cardinal Newman's nineteenth-century treatise as a jumping off point but also looking at other ways a university might define itself as an institution. One of the more interesting discussions in class was one in which we investigated the relationship between art and the university...

The University of Texas, our home institution and object of study, has an archive (describing itself as a "world-renowned cultural institution") that not only houses important pieces of visual, textual, and performing art but also has its own galleries to put these objects on display. The building itself was recently renovated, and the atriums converted into "galleries" themselves that display the Center's significant collections on etched glass windows:

This is in addition to the University's art museum (a "cultural gateway"), which opened one of its two new buildings last year, a 124,000 square foot space that houses more than 17,000 works of art. When the museum opens its second building next year it will be the largest university museum in the country.
The space, time, manpower, and of course money (the Blanton project is estimated at $85 million) that the University has invested in art is somewhat astounding and the questions we asked in class were somewhere along the following lines:
How does collecting and displaying art further the mission of the university? What do these collections argue about the nature of the university among other institutions? Of the University of Texas among other universities? Does this accumulation at the level of high culture stand in contrast to the modern, investment-model university or can it also serve its mission?

Their answers were varied and interesting, but I won't offer them here. What I will do is give you the outline of a related assignment from the class. One obvious connection the university holds to visual art is through its use of sculpture and statue. These are everywhere on campus, offering the public an image of the University's values through its association with the figure. I gave them a map of statues around campus and asked them to explore.

Umlauf's Torchbearers outside the FAC

I told them that their task was to find and analyze one piece of public art on campus. That it should be a statue or sculpture visible to the public (not inside a building or in the art museum). Their job was to discover the argument of the piece and to consider the argument the university makes about itself by making the piece part of its public space.

Women in Art (more rhetoric of the montage)

Jillian Sayre — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:04:45 +0000

Perhaps a good point of departure for a discussion of Women in Film would be the creator's earlier attempt to give us an overview of Women in Art:

Does high art create/communicate normative body structures or gender roles in the same way as popular culture?

Perhaps it is the chronological extension (this montage covers 400 more years than Women in Film) but the faces here seem to resist the homogenous beauty of the doe-eyed starlet. On the other hand, it is also interesting to note a similar lack of racial diversity. If modern cinema produces 3 African American actresses, 500 years of Western art produces none.

Shepherd Fairey Has a Posse

erinhurt — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 20:49:38 +0000

I remember when I used to live in Portland in the late 90s, and I would see these stickers of Andre the Giant in all the bus stops. I never knew what they meant, but I liked them well enough to peel one off a bus stop wall and stick it on my bike.

I discovered several years later that the artist behind the "André the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign is Shepherd Fairey , which he created while attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1989. The "André the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign later evolved into the "Obey Giant" campaign.

We looked at this image in my class today, and I casually asked them, "What is the rhetorical effect of a visual image if you can't identify the argument - or even the claim?" While my initial answer to this question would be that the visual must not be very effective at all, upon further consideration, this absolutely can't be the case. Visual images are frequently coupled with arguments to which they have no direct relationship in order to sell products or catch the attention of the public. But what I find fascinating about Shepherd's work is that there is often no discernible argument at all, unless you are already familiar with his work and his viewpoints. So what *is* the rhetorical effect? Shepherd himself describes his current work as "[an attempt] to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the campaign and their relationship to their surroundings. Because people are not used to seeing advertisements or propaghanda for which the motive is not obvious, frequent and novel encounters with Obey propaganda provoke thought and possible frustration, nevertheless revitalizing the viewer's perception and attention to detail." And people seem to love it.

Dylan's Theme Time Radio enters the visual realm

Justin Tremel — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:32:49 +0000

Those of you who subscribe to XM satellite radio may have come across Bob Dylan's weekly radio show Theme Time Radio. Recently comic artist Jamie Hernandez created an imaginative promotional poster for the show.

Boing Boing reader Simon Nielsen took Hernandez's poster one step futher and made a short movie tribute using Hernandez's artwork and the audio from Ellen Barkin's evocative voiceovers that open each episode of Theme Time Radio Hour. Nielsen writes:

"Barkin introduces each episode of Theme Time Radio Hour with an evocative vignette describing the nocturnal activities of the restless characters living in the big city. It is from these spoken word vignettes that Hernandez was inspired to create his artwork. The illustration is detailed with many of Ellen Barkin's night time characters - some asleep, some consumed in thought, others burning the midnight oil long into the night. Prostitutes, homeless men, drunks, lost souls and lovers intersect near a street corner of the Abernathy building. I was so fascinated by the world within this poster I set about finding all the spoken word vignettes and weaving them together into a whole. I started from show number one and worked my way through the spoken word introductions of all 50+ episodes of Theme Time Radio Hour. The following movie is my modest attempt to bring to life the inhabitants of the mythical Abernathy Building and the art created by Jaime Hernandez."

One can find a YouTube link to the movie here

I find the amateur video a striking example of how one can very easily but also very evocatively join the visual elements to the auditory, to create something new, an enhanced experience of both media transferred into a third. It also seems a good example/model for a student exercise to make a movie using a single image to tell a story/make an argument by exploring it in depth and detail, joined with audio commentary.

Science as (body) art

Jillian Sayre — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 19:53:35 +0000

Following our earlier discussions about the intersection of science, art, and rhetoric, I bring you the o-chem tattoo. I think the tattoo not only promotes science as a field of visual representation but is also among a growing corpus of "geek" tattoos. These tattoos frustrate the long standing assumption that body art and body modification is an unintellectual enterprise, one in which you tear at, pervert or destroy the body. In this way, these tattoos also work against the mind/body split, demonstrating how thought is not separate from but also occurs on and through the body.

Check out the following link to see a group of geek tattoos at ModBlog

Critical Mass and Visual Protest

erinhurt — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:24:31 +0000

In my "Rhetoric if Protest" class today, I had my students watch We Are Traffic, a documentary directed by Ted White about the xerocratic protest group Critical Mass. This group relies on several key elements of visual rhetoric to both make their points within their local communities and to spread their ideologies nationally and internationally. I find these to be excellent classroom resources.

One way that Critical Mass spreads its message is through their flyer exchange . Each flyer offers a visual representation of how a particular Critical Mass community decided to present their ride - some are more informative, others are more political.

Also featured in the documentary is an artist by the name of Rigo23 , whose murals often take the form of street signs but impart drastically different messages by building eco-friendly meaning onto these pre-existing symbols. He explains (I'm paraphrasing here) that as a pedestrian and biker he found roadway symbols to be nonsensical (he uses the example of the one way street, which only seems to apply to cars) yet if one disobeys these symbols the result can be a city fine or even injury. His protest murals bring attention to the signs themselves, the meanings (or arguments) that we already attribute, and then add another layer of meaning. I found them to be one of the more interesting aspects of the documentary.