Artists

I am definitely not any sort of art aficionado so when I was asked to write about 3 artists I really had no idea where to start. Thankfully Angus provided the class with a decent site to start those like me who had no idea where to start, thus began my journey of random clicking and interesting results.

The first artist I came across the really stood out for me was Joseph Nechvatal. The reason this particular artist stood out to me was his work in computer virus generated art. Specifically, the Computer Virus Project 2.0 which he did with the help of Stéphane Sikora. In this particular piece/exhibit an image would be infected with a randomly generated number of viruses that would have their particular behavior randomly generated as well. I found this work of his particularly interesting because of the presupposed contradictory nature of  the piece. Generally speaking a computer virus is though of as purely destructive but in this case its destructive nature is being used to produce art.     

The second artist I found that caught my attention was Jillian Mcdonald. The reason that this artist stood out to me was her rather concerning obsession with the actor Billy Bob Thornton. The two projects are "Me and Billy Bob" and "Screen Kiss" the conceptual sequel. In the first piece the artist inserted herself into various romantic scenes from movies staring Billy Bob Thornton. The sequel piece was created with the intent of making Billy Bob jealous by showing the artist in intimate scenes with other actors. I definitely found it rather odd as far as art goes but interesting when its grounded in her argument that "misplaced intimacy is a symptom of our heavily mediated culture."

The final artist that I found interesting was Christa Erickson. When looking through her various projects I noticed she seemed to always use three or more mediums in a piece. One of the pieces that stood out to me was "Whirl". This is an interactive piece in which the viewer blows on a pinwheel which controls the playback of video and audio. The audio and video are also interesting considering she chooses to perform the audio playback via a record player and the video is of people playing on a circle swing in the early 19th century. This creates an interesting juxtaposition of both old and new.

http://www.nechvatal.net/ 
http://www.jillianmcdonald.net
http://emedia.art.sunysb.edu/christa/index.html   

Introduction

As a programmer I chose a jack of trades style of course work, starting off with OO in the early CS java courses. Then took the python course as a part of the ISTA course work which convinced me to switch from CS to ISTA for my major. I have since completed course work in both mobile and web technologies, iOS and html/php/css respectively. Most recently I took the cyber-infrastructure course last semester which exposed me to a lot of interesting aspects of distributed computing, HTC, and  HPC.

As for my art background, outside of ISTA 301 I have not taken any college level art courses, although I did take art history like courses with focuses on Ancient Greece and Rome. For fun I have dabbled with Gimp and other graphics programs all I produced from that were the results of various tutorials and some signatures for forums.