Rafael Rozendaal

His works

Rafael Rozendaal is a digital artist who primarily uses websites as his medium. His work allows many people to access it, as it remains public even after it is sold.

His websites are very simple, yet also very interactive, as the piece is basically controlled by the viewer. The simplicity of them allows each viewer to be impacted differently. Each piece carries a different emotion. For example, his piece deepblackhole.com is so simple that once you interact with it in a certain way, you can't undo what you've done and refreshing the page does nothing. This leaves the viewer with a sense of finality. Most of his websites deal with interacting in the page that allows the viewer to create and/or destroy.

I feel like he is able to accomplish the goals set by his artwork - to reach the public with his websites and impact them in such a way that makes them realize that the internet is also art, and that with each click we make, we impact it in turn.

Via Rhizome.

Vector Portrait

Revised

Original

Rob Seward - Four Letter Words

Four Letter Words from Rob Seward on Vimeo.

Seward works as an artist and programmer. He holds a master's degree from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and worked with composer Fred Lerdahl creating softwarebased on the Generative Theory of Tonal Music.

Four Letter Words is a robot that displays four letter words that are derived from a word association database. The algorithms used to generate the words take into account rhyme, letter sequencing, and association. The robot tends to display "dark" subject matter, which is influenced by different language and perception studies.

Essentially, the robot could be expanded to display any length of text, but the artist's choice to use only four letters sets a limit on how many words can be displayed. This influences the piece greatly - many of our most raw words are four letters long: love, hate, kill, hurt, etc. The piece also includes many swear words, possibly because of the many associations people make with these words. Overall, the simplicity of the piece is very impactful. The white fluorescent lights on the black background enhance the importance of the words being displayed and the associations with the words may or may not be what we expected, which can both allow us to relate to and feel alienated from other people.

Via Rhizome.

photos for project 2

Unprepared Piano

Thomson & Craighead have been working together since 1993, using sound, video, and the internet in their works to explore how technology changes the world around us. They are based in London. Currently, Thomson lectures at the Slade School of Fine Arts and Craighead is a senior researcher at the University of Westminster and lectures at the University of London.

Unprepared Piano is a grand piano connected to a database of MIDI files appropriated from the internet. The piano then performs each piece by randomly selecting different parts, so it might play drum parts along with strings, brass and woodwind parts. Each time the piano replays a piece, it randomly reselects the parts it plays. No performance is ever the same, although traces of the original score can be heard in the performance. This results in the performance sounding like a little kid is playing around on the piano.

The artists didn't specify what their goal was in this piece, perhaps to force people to reexamine their views on music. If that is the case, they definitely accomplished their goals. The grand piano is traditionally revered as a strong and authoritative instrument, and because in this piece no one is playing the piano, the piano becomes even more powerful to the viewer. However, because the music is just so random sounding, it doesn't really sound like anything other than a cat walking across it. This urges the viewer to reexamine their views on music, that perhaps there is a certain formula to composing, and not just throwing random notes together. It is also possible that it is urging the viewer to look at the parts of a musical whole, and notice that each individual part is important to the whole, not matter how random it sounds.

Via Eyebeam.

Revisions for Project 1

The edited version.

David Jimison and JooYoun Paek - Too Smart City

The concept:

The final product:

David Jimison's work focuses on the interactions between technology and culture and says that Too Smart City is direct result of everything he's been studying as a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Tech. JooYoun Paek's work focuses on human behavior and technology. Both artists create work that respond to urban life, such as Paek's Polite Umbrella or Jimison's Storyscape.

Too Smart City is intended to be an interactive public installation, exaggerating the original purpose of ordinary park furniture. Benches, trashcans, and signs are fitted with so much computer intelligence that they become almost useless: the viewer is only allowed a certain amount of time to rest on a bench, can only place a certain type of trash in a trash can, or may become confused by the excessive amount of directions given by a sign. The artists describe Too Smart City as a way to

"involve people in a playful examination of the effects that these everyday objects hold upon our lives. Through comedic exaggeration, we hope to invoke the guests' imagination of both positive and negative futures."

But overall, Too Smart City is the examination of "too much of a a good thing." I feel that Jimison and Paek have definitely accomplished their goals with this piece; they were trying to make the pieces inconspicuous until someone tried to use them, in which case they became activated and eventually became more annoying than good.

Via Eyebeam.