up to date syllabus DIVA200-002

revised-syllabusfeb7.pdf

with reworked dates for field trips.

Urban Intervention presentation

lecture   Here are the links to the projects on pages 16-19 of the lecture: 

• Laser Tag (by Graffiti Research Lab); how to page; 
• LED Throwies (by Graffiti Research Lab); how to page;
• TXTual Healing (by Paul Notzold); 
• Light Criticism (by AntiAdvertising Agency).

Society of the Spectacle

First published in 1967 by Guy Debord, member of the Situationists International. This is a rant against image based culture rooted in consumption. Still holds true today. read Chapter 1, Chapter 2

On the Poverty of Student Life

First published in 1966 this is a document published by member of the Situationists International. It is a rant against the problems of both economic and intellectual poverty and the institutionalization of education. read

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

“…In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new…”.
read more

We can look at Benjamin’s essay terms of its relevance to digital reproduction. When works are produced digitally and therefore subject to virtually limitless reproduction, does this change our ideas about art? 

Image, Language, and Belief in Synthesis by George LeGrady

“…All technologies distort. By expanding our abilities to perceive, they simultaneously diminish us. We experience the world through the senses and the act of seeing is one of giving meaning, taking stock of our environment to counterbalance chaos. Technologies that help us to see shape the way we see, and, in the end, determine how we see. These inventions have resulted from choices framed by cultural beliefs to arrive at a particular view of the world, not representing the totality of human experience but a view locked within the limits of a fluctuating history. In the way that we are born into language, we also enter an unfolding, socially defined world of visual continuum. We integrate these conventions unquestioningly, recycling them in varying degrees as a means to arrive at the new. As we consider the impact of digital technology on the production and interpretation of images, questions arise about the belief systems that are in place and their development over time….” read more…

Patricia Piccinini – Still life with Stem Cells

This is an image from Piccinini’s latest series of work, Nest.  Her short essay below draws some very thought provoking  relationships between digital and biological ‘data’ …

Still Life With Stem Cells

by Patricia Piccinini (2002)

Last year I saw one of those extraordinary things, which reminds me that what I make is not so strange or far-fetched. As usual it was in a petri dish. This petri dish contained a small layer of cells, a thin skin of biological matter that was pulsating to rapid but steady rhythm. This was the first time that I had really seen stem cells. These ones had been differentiated into heart cells and they were doing what heart cells do; beating – flatly, geometrically, pointlessly.

Stems cells are base cellular matter before it is differentiated into specific kinds of cells like skin, liver, bone or brain. Pure unexpressed potential, they contain the possibility for transformation into anything. They are the basic data format of the organic world. Like digital data, their specificity lies in that, while they are intrinsically nothing, they can become anything. They are biomatter for the digital age.

I am interested in how this changes our idea of the body. Already our understanding of the human genome leads us to imagine that we understand the construction of the body at its most intimate level; the stem cell provides us with a generic, plastic material from which we can construct it. In the last ten years, the body has gone from something that is uniquely produced to something that can be reproduced.

This transformation has already occurred, with very little fuss given its magnitude. The question of whether this is a good or a bad thing is both too simplistic and a little academic. As with so much of this biotechnology, the extraordinary has already become the ordinary. The real question is ‘what are we going to do with it’. Still life with Stem Cells is one possible answer.

Panorama presentation

panorama presentation

Andreas Gursky

 

Gursky’s large panoramic prints up to five meters in length required him to distance himself ever further from his object and to elevate himself above it. He positioned himself in another apartment building (Hong Kong, Shanghai Bank, 1994), on a crane (Mayday V), and even from a helicopter (Bahrain). The adoption of a bird’s-eye view goes hand in hand with an opposite move: zooming in to the tiniest detail …

Jeff Wall

A sudden gust of wind …. (afterHukosai)

Wall  draws upon cinematic techniques by using actors as protagonists, artificial lighting, staged compositions, and a narrative technique which leads you to contemplate the unseen events leading to the moment depicted