I am pretty happy with my idea but feel its a bit too similar to Adrian Ward’s autoshop software. Everytime I think about the text application itself I think of msn for some reason. Then the uses of msn of being a live chat room. Maybe the word processing software could be a chat room application instead one that could be hosted online and used by people from all over the world. A graphics visualisation would stream along with the conversation in an attempt to maybe influence peoples behaviours and dictate the conversation.
March 4, 2009
January 20, 2009
Ownership 101
Ok so this post is merely so I understand what ownership means. Terms related to ownership such as copyright will aslo be explained. In my essay this is a key point I will be referring to a lot (or trying to) to properly emphasize how ownership in Art is such a fragile subject. Both in an intellectual and asset sense.
Ownership defined:
Ownership is the state or fact of exclusive rights and control over property, which may be an object, land/real estate, intellectual property (arguably) or some other kind of property. It is embodied in an ownership right also referred to as title.
Copyright defined:
Copyright is a form of intellectual property which gives the creator of an original work exclusive rights for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation; after which time the work is said to enter the public domain. Copyright applies to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete. Some jurisdictions also recognize “moral rights” of the creator of a work, such as the right to be credited for the work.
The intent of copyright is to allow authors to have control of and profit from their works, thus encouraging them to create new works and to aid the flow of ideas and learning. – (art driven by money and not enthusiasm?)
Movements such as dadaism attacked the capalist and socio-economic system by threatening ownership in Art. You cant own art is the message that screams out to me. Creating art does not make you an artist! Materials you use, processes you use, things you base your work on, they dont belong to you so how can you possibly claim you own the final piece, which is inclusive of these things. Attacking art was a step at attacking the political and social agendas at that time period, suffice to say the dadaist movement was provoked by these factors in the early 20th century.
January 18, 2009
Futurism – the predecessor to dada!
Futurism was an art movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere.
The Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was its founder and most influential personality. He launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he published in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. In it Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. “We want no part of it, the past”, he wrote, “we the young and strong Futurists!” The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists.
The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture and even gastronomy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(art)
Its the first art movement that becomes anti-art and at the time where there was only traditional art, it had nothing to hold it back. The birth of new age technology added momentum to the movement and emphasized “technological triumph over nature”.
Francis Picabia
Francis Picabia is one of the artists who moved through many art movements. He moved from impressionism to cubism between 1908 and 1913 losing interest in his landscape portraits. On a trip to New York he met up with Marchel Duchamp where he embelished in the Avant-Garde movement and subsequently started to introduce modern art into western culture. After some time wasting away in New York through drug and alcohol abuse he returned to Eastern Europe and embarked on the dadaism movement. Here he met up with artists; Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon and after sometime painting under the influence of dada, he progressed into surrealism where he refound his passion for the arts.
“Artists, so they say, make fun of the bourgeoisie; me, I make fun of the bourgeoisie and the artists,” – Francis Picabia (1923)
He is a unique artist in the sense that he does to dada artists what they do to art, he mocks them and rebels against their ideologies and values.
Rene Magritte
Rene Magritte was one of the pioneers of the surrealism art movement after spending some time experimenting with abstract painting. He moved to France in 1927 just when the surrealist style was taking off. He joined in surrealist activities and “time that he developed his pictorial style, which includes figures of the ordinary world in an extraordinary order.”
This is one of Magritte’s most famous pieces of work and encapsulates what i want to explore in my essay. The caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” translates as this is not a pipe. This is not a pipe in the sense its not what we define as a real pipe, an object you can go and pick up. It is merely a picture of a pipe, but yet we would charactirize this as a pipe because it has the aesthetic attributes of what a pipe is. This is a prime example of how surrealism blends rational with irrational. We would say its a pipe even though we know its not a real pipe. Socially this implication is used everyday, through advertising, communicating idealogical values and even social networking. If someone was to take a photo or duplicate the mona lisa in painting, we would say its the mona lisa even though it isnt actually the real painting. The principle of ready mades from dada applies here aswell, the Mona Lisa original painting was titled “Mona Lisa” and yet it isnt actually Mona Lisa at all, its Da Vinci’s painting of a person with a title “Mona Lisa”.
Argument:
With this said, when does a piece of art not use a ready-made. Whether its the subject of the art or the materials used, ready-mades influence the outcome of the final art piece.
January 16, 2009
Tristan Tzara – Dadaist Poetry
“DADA – this is a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot down; every bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different subjects, and who, instead of situating suitable characters on the level of his own intelligence, like chrysalises or chairs, tries to find causes or objects (according to whichever psychoanalytic method he practises) to give weight to his plot, a talking and self-defining story.”
– Tristan Tzara, 1918.
Tristan Tzara invented a dadaist method to create original and innovative pieces of poetry that could be carried out by anyone.He asked people to cut articles out of newspapers and cut each of the words from that article up into individual words. From here people were asked to place them in a bag and shake it up, take out words one at a time whilst copying them down on paper in conscious thought. The end result would be something that confused and shocked and thus something that was Dada.
This process of dadaist poetry is perhaps one of the earliest examples of automation and even generative art; it is a process that determines the final piece but incorporates the random factor found within software and generative art.
Argument:
Although you have carried out the process, the start materials are ready-mades, i.e a newspaper you found, scissors you used, a bag you found etc… and the final poem is decided by chance on what words you pull out of the bag. Are you the owner of this poem?
“Anti Art – Dada = Nothing!“
Ready mades
“Apropos of ‘Readymades’” by Marcel Duchamp, 1961
In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. A few months later I bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, which I called “Pharmacy” after adding two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon. In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote “In advance of the broken arm.” It was around that time that the word “Readymade” came to my mind to designate this form of manifestation. A point that I want very much to establish is that the choice of these “Readymades” was never dictated by aesthetic delectation. The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste … in fact a complete anaesthesia. One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the “Readymade.” That sentence instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal. Sometimes I would add a graphic detail of presentation which, in order to satisfy my craving for alliterations, would be called “Readymade aided.” At another time, wanting to expose the basic antinomy between art and “Readymades,” I imagined a “Reciprocal Readymade”: use a Rembrandt as an ironing board! I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately this form of expression and decided to limit the production of “Readymades” to a small number yearly. I was aware at that time, that for the spectator even more for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my “Readymades” against such a contamination. Another aspect of the “Readymade” is its lack of uniqueness… the replica of the “Readymade” delivering the same message, in fact nearly every one of the “Readymades” existing today is not an original in the conventional sense. A final remark to this egomaniac’s discourse: Since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and readymade products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are “Readymades aided” and also works of assemblage.
(http://www.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20of%20art/duchamp6.htm)
Dada Artists
Marcel Duchamp – (1887-1968): was a founder of the Dadaist movement in New York City and was a prominent figure in the entire movement. His aim was not to please the eyes, but to make the viewer think what art is, and what it can be. He made humour a significant factor in serious art and vice-versa. Duchamp created the first “ready-made” called the “Bicycle Wheel”(1913),
which was an old bicycle wheel mounted upside down on an ordinary kitchen stool. And created such works as “Nude descending a Staircase” (1912), and “the Large Glass” (1936).
Max Earnst – (1891-1976): was a for-runner to Dadaism, who turned Surrealist after the movement ended. His purpose of art was not to please people, but to make them “scream in revulsion” in hopes that their torment might “awaken some moralistic vein, still buried in the human consciousness.” Earnst was in the war and knew first hand the horrors of it. He believed the war showed how the “anarchic forces of nature, which man should respect, turned destructive through the neglect of civilization.” A Dada work: Battle of the Fish (1917)
“In the nerves of fishes is the vibration of dada da da”
Kurt Schwitters - (1887-1948): was a leading Dadaist sculptor. He made collages and assemblages from litter, and other objects he found by chance, calling it Merz. Merz was Schwitter’s trademark, “standing for freedom in the cause of creation, but standing for freedom with its roots in the traditional disciples.” He did not fit in with the Dadaist anarchy, however he was a well known Dadaist artist in his creations of entire rooms filled with found objects. In fact, he turned his entire house in Hanover into a museum of trash assemblages. He later created another two more ‘trash’ houses in Britain and Norway, and in Lake District (England), he covered an entire barn wall with objects. (This was later transferred to The New Castle University.)
Dadaism – a brief introduction
Dadaism - An art style founded by Hans Arp in Zurich after WW1 which challenged the established canons of art, thoughts and morality etc. Disgusted with the war and society in general, Dadaist expressed their feelings by creating “non-art.” The term Dada, nonsense or baby-talk term, symbolizes the loss of meaning in the European culture. Dada art is difficult to interpret since there is no common foundation.
(http://www.progressiveart.com/art_terms.htm)
Dada was not art, it was “anti-art.” For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics the Dadaists hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadaism)
To summarize in my own words, Dadaism or ‘Dada’ was an art movement founded at the start of WW1 to rebel against political and social events at the time, attacking the cultural commodity of ‘art’ by establishing itself as ‘anti-art’. It was a form of work that enabled people to challenge the concepts of what art is and to completely disregard and even attack traditional art at the time.
New Idea
After one of the lectures about dadaism, new art and some of the shocking art pieces (artists shit etc) that have been introduced to the art world, I have been influenced to switch my idea from a cybernetic / system theme project to more of art ownership and how “art” is losing value in industry due to movements such as futurism, modernism, dadaism etc. I want to know how you define an artist and then in more recent movements such as generative art, how you go on to tell who is the owner of art works influenced by medium and process rather than the artist’s thought and talent. There is also this development of technologies used in a social context where people go to museums and take photos. By law the ownership of that photo belongs to the person who took the picture and yet the object it depicts does not. But the object itself is in principle the same as the photo. Looking into ready mades and art duplication I hope to expand further on this analysis of art ownership.
