Seeing the Past in Present Tense by Paula Levine

“Monuments and memorials can activate you, awaken and open your present, by reintroducing ideologies that have lapsed or require considering again. They can defy physics, allowing your past to occupy the same place as your present”
This article is trying to convey that monuments are not only a thing in a public space, but they can trigger different emotions and memories with people who visit it or they can tell a story of the area the monument is located in. “Public monuments helped to celebrate and cement this progressive narrative on natural history… memorials to heros and events were meant not to revive old struggles and debates, but to put them to rest.” So not only do monuments preserve a place in history for fallen heros or an heroic event, it shows that something great was accomplished and will bring forth the memory of that said event to the viewer.
I was recently in Washington DC and I came across the Lincoln memorial. I was surprised to notices that I did not only admire the scale and the skill put into making this statue, but it made me think about all the turmoil in the American past and even in the present. I remembered everything I have learned in my past history classes while gazing upon this monument and then compared it to my ethnic studies classes on racism today. I came to think about all of this just by looking at a stone statue of a man. After reading this article I remembered this event happening to me, which allowed me to understand that Levine was talking about on a personal level.

The Eiffel Tower by Roland Barthes

The Eiffel Tower is famous symbolic icon of France. If there is merely a photo of the tower, I as do many others. instantly think of France. To many it is not just a building, they become part of it when visiting, as did Barthes. What Barthes tries to convey within this article is that one may not only become part of the Tower, but the may become part of the dream that the Tower presents. He describes his notion of the natural; first one would have to look at the object, in this case the Eiffel Tower, integrate the obvious and then look at what is natural. There can always be a connection to what is man made and created to what is natural. This article could not keep my attention as needed, so I did not read it very diligently. But what I got from it was that the symbionics of certain objects carry great meaning.

Interview with Eva Sutton on Unnatural Science

This article gives a clear description of what a hybrid actually is in the eyes of an artist. Sutton genetically engineers natural animals with other natural animals to make an unnatural creature that does not resemble anything on earth. “It's creating an animal that in parts is recognized as a natural animal and yet, when it's hybridized in its totality, it's completely unnatural. And, in fact, it's monstrous. Sutton views herself both as an artist and a scientist; she never wanted to have to make the decision to become one or the other. So her found the medium of the two; “ Science states meaning and art expresses it.”
The piece that she shows on her website of Unnatural Science is of a hybrid of at least three different animals. The head is of a goat with a bubble like connection to a torso of a colored enhanced bird of come sort within an egg shaped bubble connected to the rear of either a hippo of some type of pig. They are all connected by what looks like to be a small bone within clear bubbles. It is very interesting and does not look like anything that one could find in nature. And if it were to be found, it would be extremely frightening.

Here is the link to view the Hybrid piece:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/egg/205/sutton/peeps/peeps.html

Culture Jamming by Mark Deny

I really enjoyed reading about the concept of Culture Jamming; “a media hacking, information warfare, terror-art, and guerrilla semiotics, all in one.” I have always seen art pieces that have transformed a well-known symbol or icon into something with a different meaning while still keeping the resemblance to the original piece. “Culture jamming, by contrast, is directed against an ever more intrusive, instrumental technoculture whose operant mode is the manufacture of consent through the manipulation of symbols.” I believe this quotation describes the concept of culture jamming head on. The idea of jamming is to do anything that steps in front of the culture one lives in, to stop the flow of media. Like a slap in the face, or to knock a person into sense of what is really going on around them and what the media and “people in charge” of the media is really trying to sell them. I found by reading this article there are many artist who have used culture jamming to bring a point across, I just could never give there art a categorization until this article.

Indeterminacy Project

My Recipe:

First deciding what medium I will be using:
Numbers 1-3 in a hat:
1- paint
2- marker
3- a mixture of both marker and paint

Second, seeing what color I will use:
For the background: close my eyes and reach into a huge bag of paint or markers
or both (depending on what number I chose in step 1)
Heads- blue
Tails- black

Finally, figuring out which shapes I will be drawing.
Every time I hear a car horn honk- a line
Every time I hear a person yell- a figure 8
Every time a weight loss add comes on TV- a spiral

I will draw all of this within a 30 minute time frame.

Unfortunately I did not have a partner for this project, that is why my recipe is bias for my location.
This assignment made me paint something that I would normally never paint. It was hard for me to stay to the recipe because I wanted to add different shapes and colors. I got frustrated with the repetitiveness of the piece, within my usual pieces, I try my hardest not to repeat anything.
After completing this project I realized that I did not add into the recipe where I would be placing these shapes, I just placed them where ever I liked or thought looked best. Which I understand is not totally by chance.
I did enjoy this project because it showed me a new way to go about painting; not everything has to be planned out to a T. And there was no stress involved while doing it, I did not have to fret about what color to use or what design should go there...

Hybrid

Interview with Eva Sutton on Unnatural Science:

This article gives a clear description of what a hybrid actually is in the eyes of an artist. Sutton genetically engineers natural animals with other natural animals to make an unnatural creature that does not resemble anything on earth. “It's creating an animal that in parts is recognized as a natural animal and yet, when it's hybridized in its totality, it's completely unnatural. And, in fact, it's monstrous. Sutton views herself both as an artist and a scientist; she never wanted to have to make the decision to become one or the other. So her found the medium of the two; “ Science states meaning and art expresses it.”
The piece that she shows on her website of Unnatural Science is of a hybrid of at least three different animals. The head is of a goat with a bubble like connection to a torso of a colored enhanced bird of come sort within an egg shaped bubble connected to the rear of either a hippo of some type of pig. They are all connected by what looks like to be a small bone within clear bubbles. It is very interesting and does not look like anything that one could find in nature. And if it were to be found, it would be extremely frightening.

Here is the link to view the Hybrid piece:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/egg/205/sutton/peeps/peeps.html