Digital Art

Thanksgiving food for thought

Using photographs from my family’s thanksgiving dinner and tweets and facebook statuses about thanksgiving, I’m going to make a typography piece. The tweets and status will take the shape of the food, people and other parts of the scenery I photograph. 

Inspired by artists: Martin Firell, Jenny Holzer

 

Christmas Youtube videos

I want to compile Youtube videos about people opening Christmas. Opening presents is  one thing that most people do on Christmas and seeing the various reactions and emotions would be interesting

Inspired by artists: Christain Marclay, Yoshua Okon

 

Thanksgiving Dinner

When we talk about thanksgiving, food is always a main topic of discussion. What would a Thanksgiving dinner look like without the food? I want to take videos and photographs of dinner and remove the food that defines this holiday for most of us

Inspired by artists: Paul Pfieffer, Jillian McDonald

Reality today is a branded reality. Advertising has always mirrored our culture however; brands today not only mirror our culture, but are also infused into our culture, and because of this, the lines between cultural value and commercial value have blurred. Thus, because art is based on cultural and societal values, brands have a visible influence on modern day art.

When brands are meshed together, they lose their original meaning and create new, original piece of work.  If the typography, logos, slogans and colors featured in commercial advertising are used in a non-malicious way to create art, I do not see why there should be a problem. Most art is created by imitating aesthetically-pleasing components of other art works, in a sense all art is a remix at least on a conceptual level.

Copyright laws are important for artists because they restrict from people stealing work;however, as laws  become more and more strict, they also restrict creativity by calling imitation and remixing copyright infringement. Artists today are starting to disregard the copyright laws altogether because the money and effort necessary to fulfill the legal requirements when remixing makes it extremely difficult to follow these guidelines. The mashup artists we saw in the film, “Good Copy/Bad Copy” are a good example of this, artists like Girl Talk say that because the copy right laws limit them so much, if they want to make art, they have to run the risk of getting into huge legal battles.

The songs featured in Girl Talk’s albums are so heavily manipulated that they do not represent the original song anymore, and I think this innovativeness is something that should be appreciated not rejected. The infrastructure of any art form is generally the same: musicians use the same notes, artists use the same colors of paint but because they use their resources in different ways, they all create art. Brands are a resource as well, and the general public should be able to use them to create art, manipulating a beat is no different than manipulating a brand, they both use elements of our culture to create art.

Chipotle’s advertisement  ”Back to the Start” shows the impact that the manipulation of a piece of art has on the message.  The advertisement is about Chipotle’s transition from factory to sustainable methods of farming. A Willie Nelson cover of Coldplay’s “The Scientist” plays throughout the silent film, and because of the context of the song, it seems as though the song is about sustainable farming which is not what the original meaning of the song is. Brands manipulate our artwork in order to display their message, why should we not be able to use their brands to display our messages?