hungrymimigarfield

[hungrymimigarfield]

Project 6: Wildcard Project (Week 13)

[hungrymimigarfield]

Project 6: Wildcard Project Progress (Week 13)

[hungrymimigarfield]

Project 6: Wildcard Project Inspirations (Week 13)

1) 2) 3) Unknown 

I enjoyed how thought provoking the first three images were and how cleverly they were portrayed and would like to have illustrations similar to this style in order to draw the attention of the audience and really make them ponder about what they’re seeing.

4) 5) Wangechi Mutu

Her collage work especially on Afrofuturism is extremely fascinating for me as an asian trying to depict artworks through an asian lens sometimes. I will be thinking how to utilize collage in order to present and credit elements of asian cultures. 

6) M.C. Escher

Optical Illusion is starting to rub on me for this project, I love how mind bending it is and it definitely makes you look twice and locks in the attention of the audience. This is me thinking about how to use art to really almost in a way incorporate the audience more.

7) Ghost in a Shell Fan Art by Unknown

A very old artwork I have saved because I just really love the way the cyborg is illustrated with the cords attached and I would like to experiment illustrating the idea of this but not the artistic style or aesthetic of it whatsoever.

8) Chris Hadfield 9) Gebro-Guru

Hadfield and Gebro-Guru both created beautiful imaginative spaces inside that seems to resemble spaceships and from being inspired by the previous project 5: New Imaginaries, I want to design my own imaginative interior of a space craft as I was very fascinated by the radical impact Nichel Nichols had just from her role. I would like to place that message in somehow, perhaps through the use of texts.

[hungrymimigarfield]

A Sea of Data: Pattern Recognition and Corporate Animism 2018 by Hito Steyerl (Week 13)

Hito Steyerl, born in January 1, 1996 in Munich, Germany, is a filmmaker, moving image artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. She has received education from the Japan Institute of the Moving Image and earned her philosophy degree at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is now working as a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts. 

In her art making, she places focus onto themes such as militarization, surveillance migration, the role of media in globalization, as well as the dissemination of images through her great layered use of metaphor, satire, and humor. 

What I found most fascinating was the topic on Dirty Data. Dirty Data is actually real data information that people filled in untruthfully in order to try to beat the system. I remember many occasions in which I would create dirty data in order to beat the system. Some examples include how I create random email accounts to use to sign up for apps so they can’t trace who I am, however although this seems to offer many advantages especially within a technological controlling world that we live in, it could also be dangerous for as a lot of essential jobs depend on true reliable data such as healthcare which has the most occurrences in dirty data according to Steyerl.

[hungrymimigarfield]

Wellness Days (Week 12 and 5)

Week 12 (One Post)

Week 5 (Zero Posts)

[hungrymimigarfield]

Postcommodity (Week 12)

Postcommodity, is a group of two Indigenous interdisciplinary artists called Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist. Their goal is quote to: "function as a shared Indigenous lens and voice to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st Century through ever increasing velocities and complex forms of violence.” Their work reminds me a lot of Afrofuturism and Afrofuturistic artists, in the way how they depict art through the black lens whereas Postcommodity is doing it through their cultural lens. Postcommodity uses mediums like sound and video however they place their own unique twist on it as they use sounds and videos that are more modern technology like ASMR instead of what would be considered as “commodity” videos and sounds. The works I find most interesting by them would be when they utilize the space, building or the architecture as a medium and install speakers into them which is an interesting way is thinking how to use the space and if space itself can be essential or the key component of the art itself.

[hungrymimigarfield]

Project 5: New Imaginaries (Week 11)

Both pieces place a focus on the environment.

1. Created this to showcase a planet that is personally perfect for me. Therefore the “new imaginary” would be imagining when humanity finally reaches a point where they have advanced so far in technology and the exploration of space especially planets that we are able to create an entire planet for ourselves or for specific individuals of people. I illustrated the result as to what this imaginary future could look like while keeping in mind a lot on how world building in films, comics, shows where a vast majority of creatures are divided into different planets due to their specific type of creature they are or the difference they have with other creatures. Also going back to the environment aspect in this, the reason why the planet is so personally perfect for me is because it is so environmentally friendly. I can live in a world that isn’t how the realistic current society we are in but instead, a world illustrated like this one where everything is natural. A world that is the way it should be. 

2. Just like the first piece, this one is also a potential space that I used my imagination because it is something I wish this world could have. For this piece, I envisioned a world where there barrier between land and aquatic animals are broken. 80% of our ocean has never even been explored or mapped. It is terrifying how little we know of what covers the majority of the planet that we live on. For this piece, instead of creating a world like the first piece again, I decided to do a closeup shot because I wanted to enhance the relationship between the human and the fish. 

[hungrymimigarfield]

Project 5: New Imaginaries Inspiration Art (Week 11)

Image:

1. Unknown

2. Unknown

3. Unknown

(First three inspiration envisions overall layout of my imaginary planet world)

4. Wayne Spiegel

(I took interest in this type of digital cubism aesthetic therefore I instantly knew wanted to integrate geometrical triangular forms into my planet world building, perhaps I could use it to show hills or trees)

5. Regular Division Bird/Fish by M.C. Escher 

6. Sky and Water I by M.C. Escher 

(Repetition has captured my attention and I have always had a fascination for fish, not too sure about the optical illusions however though, could perhaps be composed together with a human to show an imaginary world that displays a world that has no barrier to marine to land animals??)

[hungrymimigarfield]

Shu Lea Cheang (Week 11)

Shu Lea Cheang, a Taiwanese artist born in 1954, is a multimedia artist focused on videography, film, installation and web spaces. The main themes her work deals with is social issues on race, gender and sexuality.

Cheang’s earlier works consists more of video and installation art. Fresh Kill, her earliest feature film which was premiered at Berlin Film Festival in 1994, reveals how she touches on the issues such as gay rights, gay sci-fi narratives, environmentalism, etc. By utilizing such themes, she manages to use this near futuristic world to critique current issues in our society. In 2000, Cheang created a cyber sexual porn film called IKU which was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival which is also set in a near future world which she compares to Blade Runner. With this, she manages to allude to our sexual and gender restrictions we face and to illustrate how real corporations can control the masses through their technology.

3x3x6 is a multimedia immersive installation constructed in Venice’s medieval prison named Palazzo delle Prigioni and was most recently showcased at the 58th Venice Biennale. In this art piece, she reflects on how technology confines contemporary society, especially those who don’t conform to racial, sexual and gender norms. Palazzo delle Prigioni is a significant as she uses the setting to make connections between the historical sexual transgressions and our current societal issues.

[hungrymimigarfield]

Skawennati (Week 10)

Skawennati is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) woman and belongs to the Turtle clan. She obtained her BFA from Concordia University, Montreal. Her work addresses topics such as the history, future, and change from her perspective as an urban and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her practice with cyberspace is used as both a location and a medium. Although she is most famous for her machinimas, which are movies made in virtual environments, she also creates still images, textiles and sculpture in her art practice.

In my opinion her most impressive piece that she co-founded with Jason Edward Lewis called AbTec, which stands for Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, is an Aboriginally determined research-creation network cyberspace including web pages, online environments, video games, and virtual worlds in order to give the control of how Aboriginals would like to represent themselves to other or to non Aboriginals. To quote in their own words, the piece is literally about “Indigenous peoples are making their own spaces online, using art as the backdrop for cross-cultural dialogue.” It has gained a lot of acknowledgement therefore they have had many collaborations and sponsorships as it should.

[hungrymimigarfield]

(Week 10)

[hungrymimigarfield]

Astria Suparak (Week 10)

Astria Suparak, an american artist and curator from Los Angeles, California, creates cross-disciplinary work about political issues and she often uses pop culture as a jumping-off point. What I found most exciting about one of her ongoing works she started in 2020 is this piece called Asian Futures, Without Asians, and will be made up of a variety of smaller projects. This project is a visual analysis of 40+ years of American science-fiction cinema and how white Western sci-fi films depict futures that are heavily influenced by Asian culture. However, even though the future seems to be asian, why are there no asian people? This project successfully portrays the implications of borrowing Asian culture, but also the effects of using elements of Asian culture without firstly crediting actual Asians and secondly without really knowing what it is they are putting on screen. Also the reason why I am most interested in this work is because Suparak samples a lot of popular sci fi films especially in her video essay called Virtually Asian which is part of the project!

[hungrymimigarfield]

TEDxFortGreeneSalon: Visual Aesthetics of Afrofuturism Ingrid LaFleur (Week 9)

LaFleur discusses how Afrofuturism manifests itself visually. Afrofuturism was a term first coined by Mark Dery. I would like to highlight a really important quote by LaFleur from this talk: “Afrofuturism is a way to encourage experimentation, reimagine identities, activate liberation, it is a concept that encourages collaboration disciplines.” This goes to show the radical impact Afrofuturism has on people and it impacts afrofuturistic artists to deal with a wide range of media. Some examples mentioned were interesting and it opened up my eyes to unconventional “mediums”.

One of the most interesting examples mentioned is a jazz musician, poet, and philosopher called Sun Ra. He utilizes music as an “medium” or considers music as an art form in order to reach his audience about Afrofuturism. He wanted his audience to believe that he is a cosmic messenger who ascended from Saturn to spread love and peace through teleporting us through his music.

Sun Ra has stated that “every song I write tells a story that humanity needs to know about in my music. I speak about unknown things, impossible things, ancient things, potential things.”

I realized after watching this video that the visual aesthetics of Afrofuturism really plays a large part on the influence of artists and broadens their creativity to utilize unique methods or mediums in order to portray their ideas through their racial lens. This has opened my eyes and realize how important the itself medium is and it is the way you place your own personal exploration to it.

[hungrymimigarfield]

Afronauts (Week 9)

Afronauts is a short film directed by Frances Bodomo who is a Ghanaian filmmaker. The film was very successful as it is officially selected at the Sundance Film Festival, it was featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art, and was reviewed by the New York Times.

Afronauts is a journey back in time and a peak into the future, it tells a hidden based on a true story of Zambian people who tried to reach to the moon first before the beating the United States. Even though it was made with a small budget, the film still extremely visually mesmerizing and is in black and white. According to an exact definition of Afrofuturism from dictionary.com, it means “a cultural movement that uses the frame of science fiction and fantasy to reimagine the history of the African diaspora and to invoke a vision of a technically advanced and generally hopeful future in which Black people thrive: this movement is expressed through art, cinema, literature, music, fashion, etc.” The short film Afronauts was inspired by a true story about this schoolteacher named Edward Makuka Nkoloso who attempted to start a space program in Zambia in the early in 1960s. Bodomo took inspiration from this historical anecdote and tried to offer speculative histories of the Cold War space race and the decolonization of the African continent. Bodomo said once in an interview with NYU “When you’re outside the grand narrative of history, to get in by playing the game is futile. You have to poke holes in the game. Leave cracks in it, open it up, redefine it.”

[hungrymimigarfield]

Nichelle Nichols on meeting a Star Trek Fan (Week 9)

The actress Nichelle Nichols, who was the first African-American woman to play in a lead role (Communication Officer Lieutenant Nyota Uhura) in Star Trek was told a fan would like to meet her who turned out to be the Martin Luther King Jr. He eventually gave her a pep talk to stay in her role in Star Trek when he discovered her plans to quit the show. King said to Nichols “You can’t do that he said don’t you understand that for the first time we are seen as we should be seen you don’t have a black role, you have an equal role.” The pep talk literally convinced her to stay in her role and continue on with her Star Trek role. This continuation allowed her to make a radical impact to everyone but especially to African Americans everywhere. She presented a groundbreaking opportunity for black women to believe it were possible to be able to do what she has done. If you look at the movie this way or more specifically the characters on the Bridge, it isn’t just white people or a certain type of person who gets to explore space, everyone gets to, no matter the race or the gender. There were many tv stations who refused to run the show because there was a black woman starring in it however it became one of the most popular shows even to this day. A little fun fact coming from a Star Trek fan: Nichols actually selected the name ‘Uhura’ as the name for the character she was going to play on Star Trek. The word was derived from the Swahili word ‘uhuru’ which means freedom and/or independence which fit well for the impact her role has created.

[hungrymimigarfield]

Project 4: Peeling the Banana AKA Peeling (Theater Troupe) Wikipedia Article (Week 8)

[hungrymimigarfield]

Challenges Faced Along The Way Peeling the Banana AKA Peeling (Week 8)

Because Peeling conducted so many different performances under so many different topics and circumstances, it was difficult to discern which events and performances were more important and relevant to be included in the Wikipedia article than others. As a result, a significant amount of time was devoted to researching and choosing which events to include. Because there was not a specified criterion for inclusion, there may be personal bias and interpretation involved during the selection process. However, I prioritized including events that made greater social impact and impact on the organization.