SYNC
emma x zhang, 2020
– 12CM x 12CM x 11CM – Paper Clay, CD, Resin, Watercolour, LED Circuit Board, USB
SYNC
Category: /vol_1/
RGB Mode
Digital video with live data; 30 minutes (looped)
6.1 x 183.9 x 105.2 cm
Tabor Robak. Robak uses programs like Photoshop, After Effects and Unity3D to create densely rendered digital worlds that riff on everyday objects. He’s currently exploring illustrations on transparent screens in the second edition of his work Newborn Baby.
Art in the Age of Anxiety conjures the bombardment of information, misinformation, emotion, deception and secrecy that invades online and offline life in the age of digital technology. It aims to illuminate the ‘post-digital’ condition—the manners and behaviours found in a world altered by the rise of digital technologies—and posits speculations for our future.
All that good stuffs
Jesús Rafael Soto (June 5, 1923 – January 17, 2005) was a Venezuelan op and kinetic artist, a sculptor and a painter.
“I began to construct a world, telling myself that I must make use of all the elements they had set forth, but whose implications they had not fully explored”.
Quiet Place
Augmented Reality Risograph Zine
Nicholas Law
Artist and designer from Buffalo, New York.
+ formalism in digital art, a quiet pure electric place that i could enjoy without the stress of interpreting into bullshit meanings
♪ ♫ ♬ DATAVERSE DEEPLEARNING
Shadow of a Daydream
Adrian Ghenie weaves together personal and collective memories and fears to address the traumas of 20th-century European history. Recalling the textural richness of Northern European Renaissance painting, Ghenie depicts figurative imagery in contrasting states of clarity, fluidity, and decay, dripping and pouring paint, scraping surfaces, and deploying strong chiaroscuro. Ghenie is interested in those associated with genocide and mass suffering or revolutionary discoveries, but the main criteria would be, to put it simply, people who were both very influential but at the same time famous for their troubled minds.
“Every painting is abstract, I don’t believe in figurative. As soon as it starts to imitate, to depict something, then a painting is dead. This is the moment when you kill painting.”
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“But when you try to paint a tree, you realize, ‘I cannot paint all the leaves, I cannot paint all the textures.’ So you have to invent a movement of the brush that would suggest, in your mind, a tree. That is, essentially, abstract.”
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“I want a deconstruction of the portrait. In the 20th century, the people who did it really radically were Picasso and Bacon. They took elements of the face and rearranged it. There is no nose, there is no mouth, there is no eye—no sense of anatomy.”
“The portrait,” he continued, “was a landscape, basically.”
Grotesque is often linked with satire and tragicomedy. It is an effective artistic means to convey grief and pain to the audience, and for this has been labeled by Thomas Mann as the “genuine antibourgeois style”. The grotesque has staying power because our life as beings of flesh and blood has not changed, and so long as we have bodies, we can experience body horror. an ugly malformed part of the imagination. The grotesque in modern art was heightened by the real-life horrors of the first world war. It is at the heart of dada and surrealism.
+ i think Ghenie’s alienated painterly expression is arbitrary, studies of his influences of artists and historical context, reinterpreting the wide amplitude of various states of mind, through the progress of working from a visceral sense, we can immerse in ways that he immerses himself of creating a pure art for art sake in form of the visual journey.
https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/adrian-ghenie
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/how-ghenie-conquered-the-art-market
Same Same but Different
Series: Untitled, 2006.
Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 89 × 54 in. (226.1 × 137.2 cm). © Wade Guyton
Untitled, 2007. Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 84 × 69 in. (213.4 × 175.3 cm)
Untitled, 2008. Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, eight parts
+ U Sculpture (v. 6), 2007. Mirrored stainless steel
Wade Guyton, New York–based artist (b. 1972) has pioneered a groundbreaking body of work that explores our changing relationships to images and artworks through the use of common digital technologies, such as the desktop computer, scanner, and inkjet printer. Guyton’s purposeful misuse of these tools to make paintings and drawings results in beautiful accidents that relate to daily lives now punctuated by misprinted photos and blurred images on our phone and computer screens.
+ what is the line between a painting & printed images? his printer paintings speak purely of the machines, machines are supposed to make the identical, the reproductions , but each is different as it has its own unique painterly errors, whether its intentional or off-alignment during the process. this really inspires me of blurring boundaries between genres of design + art
+ lets talk about the typeface!! im so familiar with different typefaces as each delivers an unique personality, function and nuance. he is using Microsoft BLAIR ITC MEDIUM, designed by The International Typeface Corporation, In the late 1960s the company was one of the world’s first type foundries to come out of the photo universe and not the metal type one. ITC represents more than 1,650 typeface design… to describe this type the artist chose: maybe its license-free, a well designed san-serif modern but still carries a nostalgic curve that look quite masculine.
the ” X ” he chose as the subject / ‘figuration’ in his works is ideal because it lends an almost human form to the piece, like a body with limbs…
In our world, the way we think and learn is through language. That’s how we organise our thoughts and give meaning to things. By removing a single letter from its context, this painting gives us an opportunity to question our associations.
possible associations of culture codes:
- Kiss; (two lips “crossing over”)
- Generation X ;
- x-axis = The horizontal axis;
- Crossing, errors and Don’t;
- In algebra to mean a variable + unknown constant;
- Multiplication
- Ecstasy, a particular street drug;
- Forbidden +18 things;
- Intersection
- Ten in Roman numeral
+ it aligns with in ways i use my ‘x’ in my own branding and name! firstly its my initial, other than the symmetric look — power of the character lies in the method by which it is drawn — it crosses space, it marks time, it defines confluence, things come together, intersect then depart, it flattens the dimensional and it creates visionary form where the imagination strikes.
https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/WadeGuyton
https://www.printmag.com/post/international-typeface-organization
Nature, Dynamic, Fragmented
oil, acrylic, spray paint, ink and varnish on canvas, 200x150x4cm
painted cast aluminium, 62x45x25cm
Konrad Wyrebek, UK. The artist paints mostly in oil and acrylic. He usually always starts with the images he finds online. The resulting work of art interrogates the medium on different levels. From a formalist perspective, Wyrebek references the Neoplasticism of Mondrian and the Cubism of Picasso by exploring the fourth dimension in art seen in a contemporary context as the post-internet realm and the abstract potential of electronic images. However, by introducing the synthetic use of machines in his process and leaving the viewer to question the hand of the artist, Wyrebek challenges the boundaries of painting by raising important questions about the artist’s originality and the role of technology in contemporary art.
Process: Each image is pixelated through a succession of digital compressions with deliberate settings causing corruption of data in transfer between different softwares and devices.
Transformation interests me – how people or things can change, but particularly how we can make them change from our viewpoint. As I spend time with the found image, new thoughts and possibilities are evoked and I experiment with potential additions, deformations and changes that will become part of a transformed image.
+ similar to artist Dan Hay, Wyrebek depicts the manipulated/ corrupted images into large scale of man-labour painting. Differs the Hay, his paintings don’t particularly depicts the whole, but the mixtures of the digital presentation. He is abstracting the images by machine, compel viewers to search for meaning in the art work, not to merely look, but to really see.
+ the use of vanish in his painting while see in details creates a dynamic texture and lamentation comparing next to the matt paint in geometric distinction. the way he names his artworks are quite like codes / computer file names as well…
https://www.konradwyrebek.com/
https://www.widewalls.ch/artists/konrad-wyrebek
https://sophiacontemporary.com/artists/53-konrad-wyrebek/biography/
The Medium is the Massage
Marshall McLuhan, (1911-1980, Toronto), Canadian communications theorist and educator, he didn’t live to see the internet, i wonder how he thinks right now as he predicted the concept of the “global village”.
“The medium is the message” summarised his view of the potent influence of television, computers, and other electronic disseminators of information in shaping styles of thinking and thought. By playing on words and using the term “massage,” McLuhan suggests modern audiences enjoy main stream media as soothing, enjoyable, and relaxing; however, the pleasure we find in the MainStream media is deceiving, because since he changes between society and technology are incongruent, perpetuating an age of anxiety. His ideas of HOT / COLD medium is interesting: Print is hot. Television is cool. Mechanical tools are hot. Hand-wrought tools and software are cool. Hot media encourage passive consumption. Cool media encourage active participation.
“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perception and arbitrary values”
McLuhan
—Art is whatever you can get away with.
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—All media are extensions of some human faculty-psychic or physical.
The Medium is The Massage by Marshall McLuhan
— The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
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—The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.
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—Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms.
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan
www.britannica.com/biography/Marshall-McLuhan
WK — Five Themes — MOMA
William Kentridge once again, i found more resources of his works in this interactive web that shows most of the films that i was very interested in, here i can also listen to his commentary on his works. This is a site that i will be revisiting again and again.
Here i realised his importance and his awareness on the political issue that he tried to convey; the ominous monochrome vibe; the traces of the past and each movement of his patient processes; and sometimes Franz Kafka’s surrealistic imageries…
His charcoal drawings and print-makings remind me of these two german artists of the Die Brücke: Käthe Kollwitz, 1867-1945, and Erich Heckel, 1883-1970. their shared black + white and heavy expressions of the character. In many cultures, these two non-colours are associated with life and death rituals. what is the significance of these: Black is associated with power, fear, mystery, strength, authority, elegance, formality, death, evil, and aggression, authority, rebellion, and sophistication. Black is required for all other colours to have depth and variation of hue. … The colour black represents strength, seriousness, power, and authority.
https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/williamkentridge/
https://www.fastcompany.com/1561390/stone-age-animation-digital-world-william-kentridge-moma
Eager
Eager /adj/
having or showing keen interest or intense desire or impatient expectancy
Allison Schulnik uses painting, ceramics, and hand-made, traditional animation to choreograph her subjects in compositions that embody a spirit of the macabre(theme of death), her works were compared to “the comic-grotesque visionary James Ensor” by The New York Times.
+ i love allison schulnik’s painting/ sculpture from a long time, and of course her stop motion movies, and i rewatch this film and was so immersive and enjoyed every frame of a beautiful painterly impasto composition+painting with nuance. she creates her signature world that i desire to live in…
“My fixation on these characters is not intended to exploit deficiencies, but to find valor in adversity.”
ALLISON SCHULNIK
this is a project inspired by her… i also made a mermaid short stopmotion video but that was pretty DIY… this one too, i yet don’t know what message were i thinking to tell or express but i enjoyed dissecting and amputating a barbie toy and making a character of it
PUPPET WITCH, 2016
emma x zhang 