Wednesday, March 3, 2010

...f-artist...

Two consecutive days of encounters with Fernando Orellana, made me think again about my relation to art... or rather to the concept of 'being an artist'.

I really enjoyed he day of workshop with Arduino board (to be honest, I was quite disappointed that we didn't have two more sessions of workshop as it was promised to us). As I'm not experienced in hacking, circuit bending, wireing, soldering etc. I didn't manage to build anythng spectacular. I had a lot of though and feel encouraged to experiment more. Also, the way Fernando was explaining technical things appealed to me. I butchered my robot R.V. to get to motors from his legs. It wasn't easy, emotionally.



In our group we managed to successfully go through blinking-LED-switching examples. Finally, using pulse modulation, we created pseudo-hypnotic spiral, that I really liked!



Fernando pointed out that Duchamp made a similar device in one of his motor based artworks. I looked it up online. Indeed, together with Man Ray, he did some optical experiments. I was glad that with our first experiments we get conceptually close to this class of artists - especially that I like a lot of Man Ray's photographs.

Today we attended Orellana's talk about his art. Some pieces presented by him were from the field of robotics, however, he also showed some paintings. Strangely enough for iMedia student, I was impressed especially by the latter. From mechanic instalations, I liked Extruder in particular: the whole Henry Ford concept behind the artwork and the prettiness of little Play-Doh cars. I believe, my perception of Fernando Orellana would be a lot poorer if I hadn't seen his drawings. The fact that today he mentioned his Fine Arts background made me feel more comfortable - 'oh he is not just a computer geek'.

As I took a lot of photos during Arduino workshop, I uploaded them and sent link to Fernando. In his reply he wrote that I "have a good eye" :-) I don't really know the guy but this opinion means quite a lot to me. I kind of know that I am not bad at photography. It was something I wanted to do since my childhood. Some of my friends really like my works. However, it is very different if my friends or my Mom admire my photos. It is uplifting when someone with artistic sensitivity and knowledge says a good word about your work.

All these made me re-think what art means to me.
When I was really young, I wanted to be an artist cause I thought it is realy 'cool'. I had this notion of beter people, gifted in some miraculous way by gods. A few years ago, I started thinking about 'art' and 'artists' as something hugely overrated. Many times it is just a label, not diffferent from the brand labels of popular clothing.

These days, I'm not sure what my position is...

I'm just hoping to finally get my T-shirt printed:

'I'm not an artist,
I'm a human being'

2 comments:

  1. :) you have two good eyes.
    I liked his stuff too and because its uses technology but gives them human characteristics. I think it allows us look at the art in ways that is different from mediums like photography and video which reflect the world in a way we already know. With the robot art you can both identify with the human aspects but it also allows you distance yourself from it so you can reflect on it, if you get what i mean. It kinda made me want to make art again, I still hate the majority of art galleries though but not all.

    ReplyDelete
  2. just thought though, you could make your floor thingy and then photograph people using it, capturing the experience you hoped them to get and then making them reflect on their experience of using it. just a thought,

    ReplyDelete