Week 4: MedTech + Art

The thing that struck me most about the intersection of MedTech and Art was plastic surgery as an art form, and my intrinsic disgust towards the extreme aspects of it. While images of robotic arms and implanted microchips enabling cyborg-like abilities seem both practical and artistic (as I remember familiar scenes such as in Starwars Return of the Jedi) plastic surgery for the purpose of making a person beautiful has a certain “don’t cross this line or else” factor that I can’t ignore.

Henry Damon has had surgery to make himself look like Red Skull (Simon)

Specifically the mention of Orlan with her 9 plastic surgery operations (Barbara) and the idea of the show nip tuck show made me feel uneasy as soon as I started hearing about it. I’d like to throw into the mix the man who has had many plastic surgeries to make himself appear more like Red Skull from the comic book series Captain America (Simon). These people look horrific to me, but I had to think twice about the situation to be sure why.

A poster from one of Orlan's shows showing some very shocking imagery. (Barbara)

What is complex is the idea that these people are really expressing themselves in an artistic way, similar to what people have been doing for centuries. In America it common and accepted to tattoo your body (I have one), to get piercings, and even a little bit of plastic surgery is fashionable. In addition many tribal cultures (ezakwantu) have unique piercing and body stretching techniques that seem extreme but acceptable under different cultural norms.

African Body Art (ezakwantu)

So what is it about Orlan and others that seems to push the boundary? Chuck Palahniuk (the author of Fight Club) deals with similar issues in his fictional book Invisible Monsters in which (spoiler alert) the two main characters deform themselves on purpose to prove to society and themselves that they won’t be controlled by the pervasive ideas of their cultures. This author has many great insights into our modern culture and in this case he sheds light onto the fact that people feel estranged by stringent definitions of beauty that society puts forth and at the same time empowered by the advances of medical technology, pushing them to shock the public and say, “I don’t live by your rules”, in an attempt to re-define beauty and art through disfigurement of their own bodies. I think there is a line that has been crossed here; if you need to shock people, at the risk of permanent disfigurement, to feel that you are truly expressing yourself, I think you have made a serious mistake. In Orlan’s own words “’Being a narcissist isn't easy when the question is not of loving your own image, but of recreating the self through deliberate acts of alienation.’”(Barbara) Then again who am I to tell people what to do with their bodies?

  

Rose, Barbara. "Orlan: Is It Art?" Stanford.edu. Standford, n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2015.

McCormack, Simon. "Comic Book Fan Chops Off Nose To Look Like Captain America Villain Red Skull (GRAPHIC PHOTOS)." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2015.

"African Body Modification – Body Art Scarification - Tattoo." African Body Modification – Body Art Scarification - Tattoo. Ezakwantu, n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2015.

Palahniuk, Chuck. Invisible Monsters. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Print.

Week 3 - Art and Robotics

As I was reading Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction the connection to Andy Warhol’s work came immediately to mind. In a sense Warhol played directly against Benjamin’s ideas about loss of aura in reproduction by creating art pieces that were purely reproductions to show how reproduction can create or deform aura.

To me Benjamin’s sense of aura in original artwork seems to be a sort of curiosity generated by an observers incomplete knowledge of the history of the object. This seems to be in harmony with Warhol’s understanding when he says, “I think ‘aura’ is something that only somebody else can see, and they only see as much of it as they want to. . . You can only see an aura on people you don’t know very well or don’t know at all” (Warhol, 77). Although Warhol refers to a person, the same applies to object in the sense that if there is no mystery behind the creation of an object it will cease to have aura. Benjamin himself seems to have a similar idea to Warhol, in aura being the idea of being removed from the reality of the object/person, “The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the camera penetrates deeply into its web” (Benjamin).  This holds true in my mind as aura seems to be enhanced by the observer’s porous understanding of the making of the object, but diminished by a complete understanding and sense of easy replication (think of the painter who can’t see the aura of his painting because he saw every step involved in painting it).

In the case of Warhol’s art, he used the idea of reproduction to show how aura can be created and deformed as observers become enamored or desensitized, (but either way curious). In his piece Marilyn Diptych, the distorted replications of Marilyn Monroe’s face evoke a sense of unknown celebrity where we are forced to wonder about the original piece’s aura (Marilyn herself), especially in the face of her death and fading presence. In another of his pieces Orange Disaster #5 he replicates the image of an electric chair with an orange filter with the effect of desensitizing and deforming the aura of what would otherwise be a object with a dark aura and history, in a way commenting on the politics of putting people to death. More modern examples that fuse replication and aura exist such as apple with their chic but personal devices (Shenshen) and video games that are all the same yet feel like authentic story lines.

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962, acrylic on canvas, 2054 x 1448 mm (Tate) © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. 2015

Andy Warhol, Orange Disaster #5, 1928, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas,  269.2 x 207 cm (Guggenheim) (C) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift, Harry N. Abrams Family Collection, 1974  

An Apple Watch is tapped for a transaction during an Apple event last Tuesday in Cupertino, California. — Reuters 

"Andy Warhol, 'Marilyn Diptych' 1962." Tate. Web. 20 Apr. 2015. <http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/warhol-marilyn-diptych-t03093>.

Benjamin, W. (1968). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In H. Zohn (Trans.), Illuminations: Essays and reflections. New York: Schocken.

"Orange Disaster #5." Guggenheim. Web. 20 Apr. 2015. <http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artwork/4176>.

Shenshen, Zhu. "Apple's Aura Continues to Shine and Create Buzz in IT Industry." Apple's Aura Continues to Shine and Create Buzz in IT Industry. 18 Apr. 2013. Web. 20 Apr. 2015.

<http://www.shanghaidaily.com/business/it/Apples-aura-continues-to-shine-and-create-buzz-in-IT-industry/shdaily.shtml>.

Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Week 2 - Math and Art

Math is a technical language that quantifies and relates things in the physical world we live in. Our perception of the world is based on a variety of complicated physical phenomena that are well modeled by mathematics and thus it shouldn’t be that surprising that artists have been making use of these mathematical descriptions to create art for a very long time.

Tricking the mind to perceive depth is one of the ways artists do this and is the idea behind the vanishing point, in which parallel lines in the real world are seen as converging to a single point through our own eyes (a result of our eyes interpreting smaller but similar objects as being linearly further away). A replication of vanishing points on a canvas will give the illusion of depth to an art piece.

(Above) Classic Example from Mattereal.com. (Right) M.C. Escher uses multiple vanishing points in Up and Down to allow the painting to be viewed in different ways depending on where your eyes start to view the painting.

There is an analog in music production to the depth perception we get from vanishing points in visual art. Beyond the fact that sound and light are intrinsically similar, (both are packets of waves that our brain quantifies and interprets as patterns of abstract ideas, i.e. color, brightness, pitch, loudness, harmony, attack, decay) it turns out that when a sound engineer wants to make a sound seem closer or further away there is a trick for that too! An article by Paul White called Creating a Sense of Depth in Your Mix illustrates a number of ways to do this including taking the high frequencies out of sounds you want to sound distant (because higher frequencies are absorbed more rapidly than low ones), adding the right amount and type of echo or reverb, and creating contrasting clear and loud sounds to give a reference sound space.

Of course there are many more examples of art utilizing mathematics to trick our minds into new artistic experiences including holograms, stereograms, 3D glasses, motion sensor camera’s, the theremin and the ubiquitous idea of recording sound and images onto other media.

Up close record and record player showing grooves created to model sound waves (vinylrecordfair.com)

Sterogram from stereogramsworld.files.wordpress.com

The Legend of Zelda Played on the Theremin by Randy George

"Cool Stereograms |." Stereogramsworld.wordpress.com. N.p., 25 Sept. 2012. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. 

George, Randy. "The Legend of Zelda Theme on Theremin." YouTube. YouTube, 23 July 2006. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. 

Houdon, Par. "Matte Painting - Partie 5 : La Perspective - Matte Real." Matte Real. N.p., 07 Jan. 2012. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. 

"How to Clean Vinyl Records - VinylRecordFair.com." VinylRecordFaircom. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. 

"The Mathematical Art of M.C. Escher." The Mathematical Art of M.C. Escher. Platonic Realms, n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. 

White, Paul. "Creating A Sense Of Depth In Your Mix." Creating A Sense Of Depth In Your Mix. Sound on Sound, Feb. 2009. Web. 13 Apr. 2015.