Kandinsky Miro

As you'll see from the following posts, I've enjoyed experimenting by digitally integrating the masters. Here's a Kandinsky/Miro blend:

Seurat Monet Series

I enjoyed the previous, self-assigned VanGogh / Chagall experiment, and decided to try another round. This was harder to blend to my liking.
 

Chagall VanGogh series

I wanted to experiment with color and composition by digitally integrating two well-known artists. Who better than Chagall and VanGogh?

Not your everyday aspen tree

When I create things just for the heck of it, I often incorporate eyeballs. Maybe it's my way of letting you know I'm keeping an eye on you.

Caught ya, Arrogance

I hate to admit I've allowed myself to lose some (a lot) training since my September half marathon. But I'm hangin' in there! So I headed to the clubhouse treadmill, entering at the same time as another healthy-minded individual. But this guy was arrogant - you know how you can just tell?

I did a quick stretch and started. Actually, tried something I had just read in Prevention Magazine about trying to walk sideways and backwards to get more overall leg workout. I tried. I felt silly and know I looked silly. I glanced downward and saw the arrogant guy, on the floor doing crunches, looking up at me with a "good luck, broad" smirk. (Whatever)

Forward facing, increase treadmill speed. Here I go. Three minutes into my steady pace, Smirk Boy gets on the treadmill next to me. His pace a little quicker than mine but not much. Not quite fifteen minutes later, he gets off to get a drink. He walks around a bit, gets another drink, jumps back on. Me...steady. This time, I don't know why, but I took it on as a challenge - I'm not stopping before he does. Well, piece of cake. He stopped again maybe ten minutes later. Me...steady. Third time, same thing. And then I saw him leaving. Woohoo, I won, you jerk! I still had a good few minutes in me so gradually punched up the speed to a sprint. Vindicated!

Put your arrogance away, that's all I'm sayin'.

I will wear my heart upon my sleeve

I opted to veer away from traditional and intended imagery with these words uttered by Iago in William Shakespeare’s play, Othello. Iago is the deceitful, revenge-seeking antagonist in this tragic story, and I didn’t want to give weight to the negativity. I did continue with the intended meaning of the words of outwardly showing emotion but portrayed something

more genuine.

According to the original plan, this file would have had sixteen layers, instead, I ended up with eight. The three colored panels have an applied distort filter overlaying a reduce-transparency heart image.

Van Morrison CD Design

Better than dust bunnies, I found an old CD design project I completed. The problem is I need to also find the digital files to properly upload. Poor resolution results after scanning and uploading printed piece.

Artist Statement

Me and Toni, we're like this (crossed index and middle fingers). Okay, I am referring to artist, Toni Dove, but I may have exaggerated on the connection. I did, however, have some email communication with her as she was kind enough to pass on her most current artist statement. (See previous post for full report.)

"A thread runs through all my work, - how do we make ourselves up? How do we think up who we are? How do the institutions around us shape how we think of ourselves? I'm interested in the history of automatons, robots and cyborgs, which are really dopplegangers, or doubles. They show us our deepest anxieties, what frightens us, what we love. The technologies around us affect us in ways we don't yet understand. What is the boundary between the computer and human touch, where does the body end? Our edges are blurry. I’m interested in the current mutations of cinema and how we inhabit media in a responsive or interactive sense. Can we occupy a character's point of view, see through someone else's eyes; walk around in the movie, be "in" the movie in a simulated physical sense? I always sit in the third row, so that tells you a lot.

Artists working with new technologies have the potential to make a fluctuating and confusing cultural landscape accessible to an audience. Emerging technologies that might otherwise be frightening because of the speed and scope of change they generate can be made coherent. Art that experiments with new technological syntax can help audiences make the shift from bystanders to participants in their own culture. I like working with something that is shaping the world I live in at this moment. It lets me participate in some small way in my own culture – and gives me some insight into forces changing my world. It’s also really fun to make these things and I work with a great team of people – it’s both a pleasure and an education."

Virtual artist, Toni Dove

Welcome to the world of Toni Dove’s digital art work, where in her own words on Here.org “is a Bermuda triangle between games, theater

and film”.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines ‘pioneer’ as “a person or group that originates or helps open up a new line of thought or activity or a new method or technical development.” Within the digital art realm, Toni Dove easily falls under this definition. As a digital artist, Toni had gotten used to working with tools she was not yet familiar, but with the start of her 1993 project, Archeology of a Mother Tongue, in order to accomplish her goal, she needed to work with tools no one had yet developed so set out to create the tools herself. Interpretations of the Electronic Landscape, an interview on Felix.org, Toni, reports on the learning curve in working on an interactive project: “As an artist, you're sort of involved in a territory where you're building a piano in order to compose the sonata.”

As touched on in the opening, Toni Dove’s recipe of art intertwines theater performance, computer graphics, video projection and interactive media to include motion sensing and sound, and in some cases robotics. Taken from the Felix interview, “…I've always been interested in mixing high tech and low tech and being able to create some kind of collage where you can develop an aesthetic out of a bunch of technologies.”

In her work, Toni aims to escape linear story-telling by enabling the viewer to change the story progression, as Women, Art and Technology explains, “she (Toni Dove) is interested in an immersive experience that triggers feelings of engagement that can be used to intensify the narrative experience.” Taken from the Felix interview, “…the idea of immersion in a narrative space. The sensation of walking around in a movie... And the other aspect, was a certain kind of virtual illusion that results when a physical action produces a response in video and audio. And that can be a powerful and actually sensual experience.”

Throughout her pieces, Toni Dove touches on psychological, social and economic themes from intimacy to consumerism. Her ideas are often born from digital advertising and/or watching movies.

To recap some of Toni Dove’s works:

In Ghosts, Mari Kimura and Toni Dove control screen movements via robotic beings. Using multiple backdrops, the three-dimensional piece becomes a theatric event with music, singing and dialog between the virtual ghost and the two creators of the piece.

In Spectropia (2001), the performance opened with digitalized commentators Sally and William, who summarize the story. In the year 2099, Spectropia has set up a lab to locate her father lost in time while searching for inheritance. In scanning old garbage, Spectropia was able to construct virtual realities to piece together past events. One example, Spectropia scans found cloth fibers resulting in Sally, the bubble dancer, virtual resurrection from the 1930s. When Spectropia’s equipment short-circuits, Spectropia is transported in back in time and into the body of a female detective. From the technical aspect, Toni Dove and her co-performer, Luke Dubois, are puppeteering the unfolding events.

In Artificial Changelings (1995-2000), the viewer dictated the sequence of events by where they are located within different floor pad zones in front of a projected screen. The motion of the viewer impacted character behavior. The story line was a romantic thriller revolving around a 19th century Paris kleptomaniac who has a distant connection to a future encryption hacker. For a sampling of interactivity, place cursor over images: http://www.tonidove.com/interface.html

Casual Workers, Hallucinations and Appropriate Ghosts (1994) was a video installation piece commenting on troubling themes within human intimacy. The work was positioned following a string of adult video retailers in Times Square. Outside an empty theater, video and sound emanated from glass cases along the strip.

Archeology of a Mother Tongue (1993), collaboration with Michael Mackenzie, was a murder mystery with computer graphics, laser disk video and interactive sound. The viewer looked through a camera which enabled the viewer to look within the virtual space; as well as, to seemingly touch objects within the screen using a virtual glove. The viewer becomes the coroner character in the story line as a murder investigation unfolds. The book, Immersed in Technology, explains that the "questions raised in this piece isn’t only where do I come from but also am I human or machine, alive or dead?"

The Blessed Abyss - A Tale of Unmanageable Ecstasies (1992) used 15 slide projectors, pre-recorded sound and video projection onto three-dimensional backdrops. The statement Toni Dove wanted to convey in this piece was how society dictates our passions which lead to excesses
and perversity.

Toni has served on many art boards and is a multiple grant and award recipient. Her piece, Spectropia, is currently on tour. She lives and works out of New York but has had performances in Europe and Canada; as well. Her pieces have been displayed in print, radio and on TV. Her comment, from Felix, on some traditional mediums “the whole notion of photography and film as a documentary medium is toast, it's finished. It's become a completely plastic and manipulatable arena. Which is what I always wanted to do with it anyway. So it suits me quite nicely.”

References

Artist website:
http://www.tonidove.com/

Interview:
http://www.e-felix.org/issue4/electronic.html

Biography info:
http://www.here.org/who/artists/ghosts/#tonidove-statement

Immersed in Technology, Art and Virtual Environments, edited by Mary Anne Moser and Douglas MacLeod for the Banff Centre for the Arts, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, © 1996

Women, Art and Technology, edited by Judy Malloy, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, © 2003

Self-portraits

Working with Photoshop has had its challenges; add to the mix my clumsiness on a Macintosh, my learning curve and frustrations have been great. As I progressed on this project, however, I did gain confidence and know-how with the tools and functionality. Using a mix of personal photographs and Internet images, I used the layer tool to keep my images separate for editing. The most common practice utility was the quick select tool; as well as, lasso for subtractive purposes. Other tools frequently used were opacity reduction, stamp tool and zoom. I still lack knowledge of how to create all the possible effects but trust those will come, at least in part. Time consumption was greatest in finding images that were applicable and cleaning up the orphaned pixels. I am certain there are shortcuts for the latter and look forward to learning them.

As far as conceptual identities, like the technical aspect, I started small and worked up. My initial completed projects were more surface with reference to my ancestry and comedy. For some of my later pieces I dove deeper, and while some might appear cliché, felt them good expressions of current place. The crème de la crème (final piece) is poking fun of the works that rest before it. There is an acknowledgment that while my expressions of current place may in some instances seem bleak (and probably exaggerated), I myself stand in my own way but I also try to keep a humor about it.

Next project: Self portraits

(Inhale) For a class assignment, I am to come up with 10 self portraits using Photoshop to manipulate my photo in various ways. I have a few ideas but am also a few short. I think it will be a fun project but my concern is getting 10 unique, well-done portraits in time for deadline.
(Exhale)

Here we go...

Previous works