For the group tutorial this week, an artist talk by Jake Biernat.
Biernat is a student who graduated last year. He won the South Kiosk award for his final exhibition and wrote the research paper about the copyright challenges with Richard Prince’s work. (Jonathan emailed this last term after our discussions with the lawyer and the Techno-Viking film.)
First up, a work, with 100,000 images… collected from the web (by hand!). Then another video. For one piece, he used the word of the day from the Oxford Dictionary daily email - he used that word as a search term Made in iMovie… then later uses Premiere Pro.
Not interested in placing his art back on the web… likes the conversation around it.
Was presented as two monitors on clear plinths (reflective gold paper on the top of the plinths). Wanted to display in a way to engage the viewer by using a different presentation method.
Third video: snippets from female video bloggers. Who is their audience? Their sister or close friends. Do people realize the things they put online, anyone can come along, see it, and use it.
Forth video: Very weird.
Philip posted this quote, from a book on international relations that he was reading as it “seems kinda relevant”:
The idea that ‘we’ have passed a threshold of civilisation is actually key to Rorty’s entire argument, for with reference to Putnam he holds that ‘philosophy’ is precisely what a culture becomes capable of when it ceases to define itself in terms of explicit rules, and becomes sufficiently leisured and civilised to rely on inarticulate know-how, to substitute phronesis for codification, and conversation with foreigners to conquest of ‘them’
A lot of the sound was distorted. This was done deliberately. To add another layer. To have the sound “pump” (and be heard down the hall and draw the audience to the space). Plus, when taking pieces from disparate sources the sound levels are all over the place, so rather than normalizing, distort to “normalize”.
Biernat talked about the the first photoshop image. This is something we recently saw at the Electronic Superhighway expo.
