Always post the source info on your images

Hi All.
If you post pictures on the blog, you need to put the artist, title, date, and where you found the image-- not just random uncredited images. I recognize the tire buddha below as being by an Estonian artist I met in Finland, Villu Jaanisoo. When you use an image, you need to include all the credit information!
Thanks.
Shannon

Zero1 symposium and other things

on the week of zero1 there was a huge amount going on. On Friday I attended the symposium that was held somewhere at city hall. In the beginning it was great having to see fellow digital media and the likes there in the same room, but as the symposium went on and began on trying to concentrate on what they have to say to the audience I quickly lost interest. Not because it was not interesting, but because the "artist" or engineers and scientist that were talking was talking in very scientific terms and was in what i thought to be really communicating to their own kind leaving us the other people out of the loop. All I got out of the symposium was something about the climate clock that had to do with recording for a hundred 100yrs....and above all that the speakers at the symposium i thought to be very dry and technical.

Besides the symposium I got to work with an artist Stephanie Rothenberg with her art show, Best Practices in Banana Time....where she stages a talk show in SecondLife and at the same time in real life time. My job was to be the camera person in secondlife. At the same time while preparing for Stephanie's show I was also participating with digital media's red cross project a few of CADRE's student which includes me decided to showcase the red cross backpack at the zero1 fair. Our job was to fix up the red cross backpack and getting it ready for Zero1 street fair. Even though the symposium was not what I would hoped it to be, but over all i had an amazing experience and I am very grateful to be apart of something special.

Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German Architect who was known as the founder of the Bauhaus School which specialized in fine arts and crafts. Gropius, along with other architects such as Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe and Le Corbusier were known as the pioneers of modern architecture design.

Walter Gropius's designs were inspired by a less successful movement known as The Werkbund. The Werkbund technique is when one attempts to integrate art, economics, and engineering into a piece of art work, whether it be a structure or a piece of furniture. One of the best example's of Gropius's industrial designs is the F 51 armchair (the red chair) which integrates both the aesthetic material and the engineering (wood components) together.

Richard Deacon

Richard Deacon was born in Bangor, Wales in 1949 and lives and works in London. Deacon is a ground breaking contemporary sculptor who is well known for his dynamic, organic, anatomical, abstract sculptures scaling from small to massive.

He uses manufacturing and building techniques rather than traditional sculpturing methods. Therefore, he is able to use woods, steel and ceramics to produce slick curled, spiraled, shaped objects. Over the past decade, he has developed a vocabulary of shapes and this notion.

I am really gravitated toward his large-scale sculptures. Besides his exceptional craftsmanship, his works are consistently dynamic, forceful, aesthetically beautiful, and the best of all, they are playful -- resembling rubix cubes (puzzles) or maze. Deacon quotes: “The curve has a life of its own, it is not describing or depicting a shape.”

Spatial relationships between sculpture and its surroundings are also equally important to the artist.

Here is one of his works:

Restless, 2005

Steamed ash and stainless steel

158 x 374 x 257 cm

Robert Rauschenberg October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008

Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. Rauschenberg would picke up trash and found objects that interested him on the streets of New York City and brought these back to his studio where they could become integrated into his work. He claimed he "wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing." This sentiment can be seen in his various works. One of my favorite works from him would have to be monogram. In this piece Rauschenberg found a taxidermied goat, put it in a tire and placed it on a painted canvas. At my high school we had "Raushenberg Day" when Raushenberg would come and talk to us and do projects with the students. I was lucky enough to work with him on several projects that are on display at the school.

Where should tire scraps go?

Billion of rubber tires are produced yearly and through wear and tear become replaced. Many of these tires are burned and some end up in landfills. Tire’s are now recycled in various ways but may be somewhat tricky to recycle because they are composed of different elements. Elements contained in tires may be harmful to the environment when piled up in landfills they may be a fire hazard. The tires in the landfills take up space that can be used for other purposes. So, recycling tires in the form of furniture art seems like a great way to begin cleaning up the landfills. Much of the contemporary and modern art uses recycled items already. Worn out tires can and have been creatively reused as furniture and art pieces. The ottoman and chair below at first glance may appear as leather yet they are made out of recycled tires. They are perfect examples of recycled tires that functions work fabulous in most modern homes. Tire scraps should ultimately be removed from landfills and converted into functional pieces of furniture and pieces of art such as the interesting looking Buddha below.   

Blog Entry #3

Hey all,

Finally getting my last post up at the very last minute. I did the research weeks ago but as I seriously dislike blogging I just couldn’t bring myself to type it all up and then I lost my notes and had to start all over. Alas. Anyhow…tonight’s topic is pyrography. While it’s something I’ve been doing since I was eleven (although I generally refer to it as woodburning) I’d never really given any thought to it’s origins, history, or contemporary place in the art world—it was something fun to do that smelled good and looked nice when I was done. But Steve mentioned that the frame I had burned looked like Victorian pyrography and it’s been at the back of head to take a look and see what that was all about and this is as good of an excuse as any so here we go.

Right. First off is a definition for those new to the concept. It’s exactly what one would guess—writing with fire. Or drawing with heat. It can be done all sorts of surfaces: wood, leather, and some papers are my favorites. These days a nice, civilized, plugs-into-the-wall heating device is used like a pen to burn the desired design onto something.

Now into the history of it all. This article was the most informative and really quite interesting (although a lot of the links on the last page that I really wanted to follow seem to be outdated now). I especially liked that it included an example of a piece from before 700 A.D.. It would seem that people have been burning designs into things for rather a long time ( I kept coming across references to early Egyptian and African work, but nobody seemed to want to give me any details and actual examples....). I found a neat bit about Chinese pyrography dating back to the Han Dynasty (which I vaguely remember from an Asian Art History course as being a very long time ago indeed) here. But in terms of more recent Western art it stated out as something called pokerwork (which amuses me to no end)--so called because it was done by sticking the poker into the fire until it glowed and then using it to draw until it cooled down and had to be reheated to continue. A nice wee bit regarding that can be found here (this one was more detailed--speculating about the early use of heated needles for detail work, etc., but the site was kind of a pain to access--you have to take survey first...) The Victorian Era saw the invention of a benzine-fueled tool that made the process easier and the ladies magazines that popularized it. Factories sprung up to mass produce the stuff (w/ heated plates) and lots of neat things like this came into being.

Here are a couple of magazine/blog links I found on the topic (in terms of modern usage). They have forums and patterns and pretty pictures:

http://artonwood.co.uk/

http://www.pyrographyonline.com/

This guy put up a nice walk-you-through-the-basics site--I agree with most everything he had to say and as I don't have any step-by-step documentation we'll go with his....

Lastly, for anybody who wants to play too, here’s where I got my much-loved woodburner (although a soldering iron is a nice, cheap place to start….):

http://www.woodburning.com/

--Jahnavi