A transformative communication method; information in multiple formats converge, and data is translated into a new medium.
This work explores the combination of two different data sources. The first, "Meaning", is a website that asks visitors to assign meaning to images. The second, "Choices", is a virtual installation that has sculptural pieces that can be "touched".
An application records the touch of each avatar in the virtual space; each object is mapped to an image from "Meaning" (the website). Based on which objects the visitor has touched, and what meanings those objects have (based on the input from the website), a "portrait" is created of the avatar. These portraits are then projected into the Project Room gallery at Columbia College Chicago (the portraits that have already been made can be viewed online as well).
The resulting portraits are created from the images on the website ("Meaning") and from images pulled from the avatar Li Sani's flickr stream that are designated as portraits.
Participation in this project was by assigning meanings or by interacting with the Second Life installation (Originally installed at: I AM Columbia/222/109/22)
Watching shadows move is to watch a dance - a dance of live things, dead things, any thing: Shadows reduce many distinctions. Rhythm and the perfect amount of randomness is generously provided by nature, change. In Damals, Jetzt #2, common fennel (foeniculum vulgare), like any of us, dances to the cycle of life and death. Painting records the dance in a moment; a dried plant, or mummy, provides sculpture, a homage of what once was; a video, the mime and moving reminder of memory; the seeds, a token and taste of how it may all repeat.
Andrew Oleksiuk was part of an art collective known as Designer Mustard Gas, known for its recorded audio, video and live performances. In 1989 Designer Mustard Gas created a noisy abstract music video entitled "Idaho" using a television studio, photographic slides, found objects, and primitive computer graphics technology. Andrew Oleksiuk is now presenting stills and prints from the video and a remix: the video is presented as a machinima of an abstracted 3D object in a virtual world including a representation of the artist as avatar. "Idaho Transmediation 2010" is a mediation on the pasage of time, technology, and art history within the artist's lifetime.
The years I spent as an aerospace engineer were fraught with ambivalence – the cold war was not a war at all, but a competition about who can build the better weapons. War is a terrible fact of life that escapes most of the people in this country. This piece is meant to both deal with my ambivalence as well as acknowledge that war could happen on our soil at any time.
Susan Chapman - aka Teal Freenote in virtual worlds
I pursue personal and spiritual questions by creating visual images of ideas and emotion... and by creating word images of the visual and emotional. Works of art are the footprints of the artist's journey and, for me, art is the translation of that which often remains unspoken.
My digital fine artwork is a synthesis of digital drawing and painting, photography and scanned items, often with an environmental theme. I explore the inner landscape - layers of ideas, perceptions, beliefs and realties. The juxtaposition of what is seen and unseen, what is all around us and what is obscured by clutter, what we have and what we long for, what is material and what is spiritual, the beauty of the natural world and the unending irony of "development".
I pursue the same goals "virtually" in completely digital artwork inside the virtual online worlds of Second Life ® and InWorldz. A totally new creative medium, I can interact with and show my work to people all over the world in a three dimensional online interactive environment. My virtual "photography" focuses on the wonders of virtual environments, experiences interacting with virtual creations, and sometimes through the unique viewpoint of a tiny avatar. My virtual sculpture derives from dream and symbolic imagery around emotional and spiritual feelings.
My real life digital fine art is currently featured in the Common Ground International Tour Collection, which has been touring the world from 2008 through this year. My work is also featured in Digital Art Revolution by Scott Ligon, a book about creating digital art in Photoshop and developing a distinctive, personal approach to digital artwork.
In Second Life ®, my work is exhibited in Gallery Freenote on the Tiatopia Island sim and other galleries. An extension of Gallery Freenote will be open on the InWorldz grid in the near future.
More information can be found at Susan Chapman's Azure Gallery and Teal Freenote's Blog.
