Medium Specificity - Glitch Art

Artist's Statement

I have seen all of these paintings on the internet. As Magritte so wonderfully depicted, these paintings, all full of disturbing or scintillating life, are no more than paint upon canvases. My whole interaction with them and my entire knowledge of them stem from the internet, the paint depicted on LCD screens - another frame away from reality. They are no longer paint upon canvases, but pixels on a screen - and even deeper, binary code. The physical painting loses its texture, its brush strokes becoming gauche flatness made of red, green and blue. The pixels are zeroes and ones, the raw data a mess of indecipherable static.

Van Gogh's Starry Night in .raw format

When you reduce a masterwork of art into binary, is it still valuable? The physical strokes traced by the artist's own hand are gone, no longer a testament to the careful recording of the transcendental inspiration or moment of sublimity. With that gone, it is only an image on a screen - even less, a castrated set of pixels, void of the deeply spiritual and humanistic ties with the creator, that relationship rendered mute. I decided that I might as well take it a step further, and visually portray the images as their stunted counterparts to the physical, hand-crafted canvas. Their faults are made bare, static and inverted colours overpowering the original paints. The medium is the digital image, the specificity is code.

Hit the jump for the originals and a brief statement.

Textual Poaching - Samson and Delilah

Artist's Statement

I chose to use Klaus Nomi's Samson and Delilah aria mainly because of his persona - he donned the mantle of a complete and utter "other", and his music comes from that perspective. Having been born as an ethnic minority in a largely racist country, and growing up as a Mormon in a largely atheist country, it has been easy for me to relate to the outsider's perspective. I also decided to use visuals from Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love in order to complement the Nomi song as it is a film that champions the role of the introverted outsider. Both of these texts speak from a similar viewpoint, and I tried to create a comparison and suggest intertextual links between these two works that I admire deeply.

Klaus Nomi's otherworldly persona.

Nomi was a social outsider due to his sexuality, which he manifested visually in his bizarre appearance and theatrical stage performances. Despite his strangeness, he was still a classically trained singer and had an excellent ear for music, as shown in his performance of this aria - it is something of an anomaly on his pop/new wave fuelled LP, and stands out as a nod to the classical masters - the artists that went before him. I find it particularly beautiful, and decided that rather than cutting it up and producing a garish "remix," I would recontextualise the piece by placing it alongside images in a pseudo-music video format. I hoped that this would change the meaning of the piece and highlight the aspects that I can relate to. I followed the example of Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake by taking fragmentary moments and letting them run together, rather than telling a narrative. I feel like this pushes the focus towards the music.

Although I am not as extreme an outsider as Nomi, I can sympathise with his position and can appreciate his efforts as an artist. In my home country, I was a racial and religious "other." This was a central part of my identity regardless of whether I wanted it to be, and I feel as if I have grown into the role. On the other hand, I am also an aspiring artist and I believe in the unifying nature of art - even the most homophobic individual would have a hard time deriding Nomi's beautiful rendition of Samson and Delilah. This is proof to me that the acknowledgment of beauty is a natural, almost primal quality, and that it can overcome the discriminatory viewpoint that some individuals are taught and eventually embrace. This is not to put myself into the role of a token performer, but to give myself hope and an ideal to aspire to in my work.

The people I shared this idea with liked it but didn't offer any deeper feedback - they could draw textual links but I needed to explain the way they related to me, as it related to often unspoken aspects of my childhood and youth, and the overt and covert discrimination I faced.

Historical Story - Innovation

Link to screenplay

Artist's Statement

Writing a script surrounding a historical event can be a tricky process. What we take for granted today - commonplace gadgets, vocal nuances, and such - could be completely out of place or even nonexistent in the world of a couple decades ago. However historically incorrect that may be, in some instances old and new have been interwoven successfully, like Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet (1996).

For our screenplay surrounding the history and possible controversy over the invention of the ballpoint pen, we were happy to keep the setting in the postwar 1940's. The time period isn't only correct for the emergence of the ballpoint pen, but it provides an interesting era of Caponesque mobsters and hitmen. Since the 1940's is saturated with the hatred and despair of war, it can be argued that the method of killing for sometimes little to no purpose had become more brutal. Think of Bonnie and Clyde's notorious run as criminals and killers, and multiply that by at least 10, because their number was up in the mid-30's, and by then they had done a lot of damage. 

The reason we felt justified in collaborating on a violent script surrounding the invention of the ballpoint pen was because we wanted to show how senseless conflict can be and how ridiculous our reasons can be for starting a conflict that will result in the loss of innocent lives. Just like Laszlo - our inventor - says, "But it is just a pen, it is no master weapon!"

The graphic novel, After the Deluge, addresses a question similar to this when the refugees of the flooded "bowl" were treated with neglect and even hostility from military groups who should have been passing out water and food instead of training their gun barrels at them - the cycle repeats itself.

Over all, we hope that our script doesn't gratify and entertain more than it makes a valuable point, because this is an important topic to address: What justifies violence? And who really has the right to decide when or if it's okay to disregard and even threaten innocent people's lives? 

By Daniel Tu and Gina Thompson

Genealogical Artifact - The Little Prince

The Little Prince is one of those rare books that grows with you. I read it when I was 12, waiting for my mum who had gone to the temple. Not wanting to leave me at home, she brought me with her and told me to bring something to occupy myself with - I took a small stack of books and some paper and pens. The Little Prince was one of those books - a crappy Chinese bootleg copy that had a stilted English translation and a glossary of English terms in the back. I read it voraciously, and finished it a few hours later, somehow in my bedroom at home, without noticing. It was so different - it felt as if Exupéry was speaking to me as a peer, and as a child. There was a mutual understanding between myself and the author, and I remembered that.

The second time I read it, I was a teenager. The image of the prince leaving his planet by way of migratory birds was one that held special significance for me - the need for an escape, discounting intoxication, was of great relevance to me at the time. I tried to follow his lead and let myself recede into my own thoughts, creating worlds and people and stories. This helped me through many problems that appeared, at the time, to be insurmountable.

The third time I read it, I was a freshman. I missed my home. I was tired. I felt an urge to go through it once again, but the copy I had grown fond of was in my parent's study in Melbourne. I spent hours researching the translation I remembered - the new mass-market paperback released a few years ago was abhorrent, the interpretation gauche, the words cold and soulless. There was a website documenting all the different Chinese bootlegs of the book, well over 100 of them - I gave up finding an exact copy. I turned to Katherine Woods' classic version, capturing enough of the original's poetry while still keeping a literary English tone. It was not what I was used to, but it had to do. I found an old copy of it on eBay, with colour illustrations and the original 1943 translation. I bought it for five dollars. When it arrived, I left it on my desk for quite some time and read it intermittently, focusing moreso on my schoolwork. It had the same beauty and the same emotion, but I was too tired, too busy to devote any attention to it. The characters were still just as relevant, the illustrations still just as sincere. I suppose I had just grown old.

Artist's Statement

The Little Prince is still my favourite book, and will likely remain so. I wanted to contact my parents about the book whilst writing this, but forgot to and ran out of time - I had to stew over these things myself, and I feel like it helped me achieve the tone I wanted. With this essay, I wanted to create an atmosphere of nostalgia and also discuss the concepts of growth and deterioration - the structure is quite obvious in this regard and the object itself is an excellent embodiment of these ideas. That's what The Little Prince is to me, essentially: a yardstick of my own growth and development as an individual, guarding against my own Baobabs and learning the value of my own planets and volcanoes.

There is one thing to note, though - when I finally read it the third time, it was just as potent. I was busy, sure, but I still felt the same things and understood the plights of the characters in a new, more mature sense.  I wrote that last line in order to discuss the feeling of deterioration and loss, but in reality, I feel like I have not grown old, nor do I expect to within this lifetime. The Little Prince is an excellent book that grows with you in the most remarkable ways, but keeps you rooted to your childhood, and that is why it is significant to me.