numba 5

Nick Corona
Tyrras Warren
Art 101
11 February 2011
                    Numba 5
    This week we were presented with John Park, a digital art guru, and program expert. He was young (apparently dreamy) and went to University of Oregon about six years ago. He was never very specific, but I believe that his focus in art is 3D animation. He also is working on a music and art program with a dancer at University of Oregon. It has to do with combining technology, sound and art together to form some sort of super stimuli. The main focus of his presentation, however, was technology and its problems, strategies and solutions.
    He first explained how technology is something that, although made by us, is not really under our control. People will always be innovating and trying to make faster ways to do things, and cooler ways to do things. It is inevitable. It is hard to judge the morality of such a course, for many reasons. One of the most basic ideas is that technology gives jobs. The more things we have to take care of, and make, the more people will be employed. Yet, the more we innovate things to do things for us, faster, more efficiently, and more cost effectively, the less jobs we will also have, because the machines will be doing the work for us.
    The reading that we had was first on Paul Pfeiffer, who is originally from Honolulu, but lived most of his young life in the Philippines. He works in video, sculpture and photography. He is most famous for his works of photography and video where he edits out certain scenes to get a different perspective of the works he is taping or shooting. His “Four Horseman of the Apocalypse” is  an ongoing series of photographs in which he erases certain parts. For instance: one of them depicts Marilyn Monroe, in one of her famous photographs. He removed her from the picture and it changes the way people view it.
    When asked about erasure, Pfeiffer responds that he doesn’t really think of it as erasure, but more like camouflage. He uses the background to make a the image that he is “erasing” become transparent. Its more like an illusion of the audience or whatever is behind the point that he takes out. He is using his technology as a tool to make the view of his art different. The name “Four Horseman of the Apocalypse” actually is a reference to Albrecht Durer. Who was a pioneer in the field of representation and helped create the foundation for the whole field. It also has a biblical reference, which Pfeiffer likes. It gives a sort of epic foundational image to those who know them.
    In the article about the “Poltergeist” Pfeiffer is asked about the technology he uses to change his pictures and how it helps him do his work. He responds by saying he thinks that it is a big dilemma, in that, the image tools and so complex and almost needed to capture certain images that it is hard to just if we are using the images or the images using us. I think this connects to Johns lecture in that he thinks that we should use technology as a tool and not let it change the way we live our lives. We cannot let our increasing technology to harbor us to a point of necessity.
    A couple of the short videos showed a bit of how he works as far as erasure with the famous Muhammad Ali fight. Its really cool, because you can make out the vague outline of the fighters, but not quite. I kept trying to look behind them though, for the mess-ups in the crowd, but couldn’t catch any. It really does look like more of a camouflage though, than actual erasure. Also, in the scene of the diorama it was interesting to see how he re creates these things, and how the viewer can have no idea of what is real and what isn’t.
    This is a picture of the famous Mona Lisa. Yet the face is missing. I thought that this was a good example of erasure, even though it is a somewhat blunt and obvious explanation of the literal word. Yet, if the Mona Lisa was seen without the face, which is arguably the whole point of the work, it would be seen very differently. It makes me wonder what would be different about views of art if it was actually created like this. If people actually thought in this way of erasure back in “the olden days”. Art would have been totally on a different path, in my opinion. As ridiculous as that sounds.

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