Logo Heist

Everyone remembers this company's name and logo. I decided to simply alter this logo because it's already so iconic. Originally created by legendary graphic designer Paul Rand, I thought it would be a good idea to take a recognizable corporate logo and alter it to reflect what the company is really about.

Enron was essentially a company formed by a merger of Texas-based oil and natural gas energy companies.  They rose to prominence when they inserted themselves into other states' energy markets and then became a limited liability company (LLC) and then later successfully applied for government deregulation.  Once they had these key components, they proceeded to fraudulently report their income and failed to disclose losses. This lead thousands of investors to believe that this was a profitable company.  By operating out of California and by maintaining no government regulation, Enron was able to further manipulate the market by having employees at major California energy plants divert as much energy out of state as they wanted, and even shutting them down altogether (rolling blackouts) to create a false "energy crisis". They were then able to sell the state-regulated power/utility companies their own electricity back to them at a rate of up to 20 times it's original value, and netted themselves a profit of over 800% between April 2000 and December 2000.  Since they didn't have to answer to government regulators, it was a long time before anyone was able to find out exactly what they were really doing. By the time anyone had discovered what was going on, they had bankrupted the California energy companies PG&E and Southern California Edison, they had laid off over 4,000 of their own employees, and when it became known that they had defrauded their investors as well as California state funds of nearly 50 billion dollars- it was too late to get the money back.  The taxpayers, customers and investors had to pay the bill.  Enron basically screwed everyone.

To this end, I decided to turn the logo from a colorful letter 'E' into a colorful hand making a gesture with an extended middle finger. With the knowledge of what this company has done, I think it's pretty self-explanatory.

I decided that the best place to post this image is a place that has a direct relationship to the ugly history of the company in question (and by extension, their logo).  Pretty much everyone in California was affected by the energy crisis in the form of raised electricity bills, increased taxes to bail out the state utilities who were bankrupted by the need to buy back their own electricity at 20 times the price they originally sold it for, and in some cases by rolling blackouts.  So I decided to post my logo in the middle of the electricity meters at my apartment building.

Art by Chance

M.A.S.H. is a game that almost everyone has played as a child. it's already a weird, interactive, 2-player game by design- but with a few more rules and changes it can be made even weirder and more random.  my idea for further randomness only requires a novel (in addition to a piece of paper and a pen). traditionally, M.A.S.H. is an acronym for mansion, apartment, shack, house and the game is something of a random fortune teller. my version makes it a random word generator.

Step one: Write "M.A.S.H" on the top of your page.

Step two: On the left side of the page write "Verbs" and make four spaces to fill with verbs later when we begin playing the game.

Step three: On the right side of the page write "Nouns" and make four spaces to fill with nouns.

Step four: On the bottom of the page write "Adjectives" and make four spaces to fill with adjectives.

Step five: Finally you should have a big blank space in the middle of the page. Have the player begin to draw a spiral starting small and gradually growing larger and larger. The other player will quickly tell them when to stop spiraling. count the number of lines from the center to the outside of the spiral. for the sake of this demonstration we'll say our number is 4.

Write down your number.

Step six: Grab a book and turn to the page of the number you picked (alternatively, you can turn to the chapter of the corresponding number).

Step seven: Read the words on the page and when you find the fourth word on the page that begins with the letter "M", write it down, under the letter "M" at the top of the page. repeat the process for letters "A", "S", and "H".

Step eight: Turn four more pages. Begin reading the page from the top, and write down every fourth noun in each of the four spaces in the section labeled for nouns.

Step nine: Repeat step eight- only instead of nouns, search for every fourth adjective and write them in the spaces labeled for adjectives.

Step ten: Repeat the last two steps- only this time search for verbs and write every fourth verb on the corresponding verb spaces.

Step eleven: With our board full of words, go back to the top of the page and beginning with your "M" word, begin reading each word that you have written, moving around the page in a clockwise fashion. Cross out every fourth word.

Step twelve: After rotating around the board, crossing out words- you should start running out of words to cross out. Make sure that you circle the last remaining word in each section and make sure not to cross out this word. Keep counting off four and crossing out words until you only have one word at the top of the page beginning with the letter "M", "A", "S", or "H"- one noun, one adjective, and one verb.

Write these four words down.

Step thirteen: At a very high volume, read the words aloud.

ART.

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.