Golan Levin. Blog Response 3

The third artist I have explored from the artist links on our class website is Golan Levin. An artist and teacher/researcher in Pittsburgh who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University where he is an Associate Professor of Electronic Art. This artist is prolific, but his project that most caught my eye is his Dialtones: Telesymphony collaborative performance piece. Using special software and utilizing audience participation, the artists asked audience members to register their cell phone numbers in advance of the show. The artists then utilized this software to dial multiple audience members simultaneously at different times to create music utilizing the ringtones of the participating audience members as various instruments.  The audience members have assigned seats and are given customized ringtones before the concert so they can present location-specific sounds and create cascading waves of sound throughout the concert venue. There are some terrific videos available here:
http://www.flong.com/projects/telesymphony/

Second Blog Response: Manfred Mohr

Further exploring algorithmic art led me to an artist named Manfred Mohr.  Another early proponent of digital art, this German-born experimentalist was involved in the world of digital art from the early years dating back to the late 1960's. Living and working out of Germany, Spain and Paris- before finally settling in New York in the early 1980's- Mohr has continued to produce interesting, and influential work with a strong geometric emphasis. Creating both still images as well as animated digital installation pieces- this artist has a large and very diverse body of work. My favorite piece on display is the recent Klangfarben installation. using custom software to randomly generate multidimensional frames of cubes that animate, grow, shrink and rotate while cycling colors and displaying across two LCD panels- one of which displays a constantly evolving image while the other displays still snapshots of individual screens from the animated screen.
http://www.emohr.com/ww1_out.html

First Blog Response

Our first assignment was to search our class website for links to other artists currently producing art in the always expanding realm of "digital media". My attention was immediately drawn to Algorithmic art and mathematics. Digital art is a very new area for me to practice- but it's something I've known about and have been interested in for years.  Having recently learned about fractals in a math class last semester, i was interested in seeing what kind of work people were producing using mathematical problems that didn't have easy, round numbers. Using computers to digitally create visualizations of these long equations which continually reduce to ugly, long strings of numbers manages to create beautiful, spiraling patterns that look extremely organic and often have repeating patterns resembling leaves, seashells, sunflowers and stars. One such artist is Bogdan Soban, a Slovenian artist who studied mechanical engineering. He became involved in emerging computer technology toward the end of his studies and decided that he wanted to explore the other uses of computers and this led to his experimentation in digital, generative art. The results are fascinating and quite beautiful.  This kind of art can be found all over the world today, but in the 1960's and 70's, before the era of home computing, it was radically new and exciting. Here are some of my favorite pieces: http://www.soban-art.com/galery22.asp

Hello

I am Joe, and this is my first school blog. This is an early post mostly to establish this blog and to explain briefly what I hope to accomplish in my Art 410 Conceptual Strategies class at San Francisco State University, Fall 2011.  Ideally, this is where my current work will be published. Any future assignments will be posted here as well, and by the end of the semester I hope to have a nice collection of new work available to view online here. I will try to put everything up here and maybe even some incomplete or failed projects as well. I've never done anything like this before, so I'll have to feel it out as I progress.