la grande jetee

This film completely blew my mind. I expected to be bored by the fact that all of the action was occurring in still pictures but after the first five minutes you really lose sight of that. The plot was so engrossing that it was easy to lose track of the fact that it was all being narrated. The ending was great. It was uniquely one of those moments in film where everything comes together and fails to make any sense at all, at the same time. 

olia lialina

Olia Lialina is the artist responsible for "My Boyfriend Came Back from the War," a website created with basic gif images and html code that tells the story lovers reunited after a war. It is "among the first works of New Media art to produce the kind of compelling and emotionally powerful experience that we have come to expect from older, more established media." Lialina calls MBCBFTW a "netfilm." I think this is an important piece because of the way, thematically, it split with ideas of what new media art is and can be by adding evocative emotional elements to relatively simple code and text. 

alexei shulgin

Alexei Shulgin is the front man of 386 DX, the "world's first cyberpunk rock band" featuring an old computer and MIDI software. The use of antiquated technology is intentional as Shulgin is satirizing contemporary technological culture in part. 

keith obadike

Keith Obadike is a "sought after sound designer" on the hip hop scene. Obadike attempted to auction off his blackness on eBay as a performance art piece. The idea that heritage or ethnicity is something that can be bought and sold is new but this piece recalls Glenn Ligon and Adrian Piper, artists who both created self portraits "exaggerating [their] negroid features." Pieces like these show how discussions about race as it relates to identity aren't over just because the sixties are over. 

robert frank's "the americans"

I really enjoyed seeing the Robert Frank exhibit at the National Gallery. In my art and studies, I am interested in American identity and iconography and that is what I liked most about Frank's work. He is a foreigner, so in coming to America and creating this body of work, one might expect for it to be covered in commentary and the photographic "hand of the artist." I don't think it's like that at all. I feel as though Frank truly captured the essence of the American spirit and let the photos offer commentary on themselves, not the other way around, making for some very effective photographs. 

julia scher

Julia Scher's work "explores issues related to electronic security." Scher creates installation pieces based on the idea of surveillance and then digitally alters the data that she collects, thus illustrating the way in which surveillance can be both faulty and altered.

Of her own work, Scher says that she first saw surveillance "in terms of looking at landscape." I find this to be interesting because landscape is often a subject in traditional painting or drawing, however, in appropriating this subject into digital media with an entirely new purpose, Scher really is making a statement about contemporary art.

john klima

John Klima, a photography major from SUNY Purchase, created "Glasbead." "Glasbead" is an interface that "exemplifies the convergent nature of new media art." It is an interactive online artwork and can be found here. Klima was inspired to create this piece by Herman Hesse and his novel entitled "The Glass Bead Game." Klima's work is considered to be interdisciplinary in that he employs techniques learned from being a software designer as well as attending art school, but also that he incorporates literature into the meaning of his work. Having all of those influences allows for his work to be multi-dimensional in a way that can often be true of new media artists.