Interactive media artist, researcher, and entrepreneur, Scott Snibbe’s latest work, Björk’s Biophilia App Album. Snibbe’s work not only speaks to the future of music that goes beyond listening, it showcases the possibilities of allowing the end-user to have a unique experience. Please view the video above and click here to learn more about the artist.
True/False | Simulation/Simulacra
Lately, I’ve been diving back into my philosophy text from undergrad days and re-exploring ideas that made little sense to me back then. I wouldn’t exactly say that the same ideas are understandable now but experience has led me to think much more critically. The most interesting aspect of what I’ve been reading has to do with this French philosopher named Jean Baudrillard and how he believes that meaning is derived from knowing what something is NOT. Basically, a dog is a dog because it’s not a cat. I know, simple right? But, what about other complex areas like, oh, I don’t know, art, or politics, or religion. All these things appear to be simulations so the world can make sense! Okay, fine, Baudrillard, Disneyland doesn’t exist!! Try telling my little cousins that. Yet, secretly, it’s true. Disneyland is an imagined place (or is it)? More to come…
Spread, Part I – Sharon Grace + Carissa Potter
Spread is currently showing at the SOMArts Cultural Center. The posts to follow are first impressions and reflections about each pair of artists in the exhibition.
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An artist’s work is almost always derived from a mentor’s guidance or influence. An integral part of the professor’s role is to push the student to their limits; to test the student’s mental agility, intellectual stamina, and help nascent ideas bud into something greater than the student ever imagined. In the exhibition, Spread: California Conceptualism – Then & Now, the viewer sees five pairings – a vanguard artist and their student. Such an exhibition reminds the audience that each artist carries on the legacy of their teacher (even if their path is divergent).
While Sharon Grace’s single channel video of marbles bouncing off a hardwood floor while an individual in high heels walks ever so slowly across a wood floor; Carissa Potter’s work, I’m Attracted to You, is on the other side of the wall. Although both artists utilize different mediums, the commonality is their perspective on human interaction and behavior. Relationships between people and things is prevalent in their works. Even with Grace’s time based media, you interact with it the way you want, which is not too dissimilar to Potter’s work. There doesn’t seem to be an obligation to dig deep to find a particular meaning. You’re given a concept or idea of something (an experience) and you take it for what it is in a moment.
The key difference is the use of language as a device. Words are much more rampant in Potter’s work. Much of the complex ideas riddled within our minds are laid in a combination of text and images. Grace’s work, on the other hand, in particular, for the show, barely includes any text until you look at the deconstructed drawing of the box that holds a heap of marbles. In researching Grace’s work, language is verbally expressed versus written. Either way, the pairing, at first, may seem a bit enigmatic but if you watch and read, keep in mind your behavior and responses to the works.
