Monday, March 21, 2011

Image Remix

A Totem of Beauty

Above is my original image, Below is the remix.
Every image that composes this is from Vanity Fair magazine. I wanted to show different portrayals of beauty as found in a magazine. Naturally, that makes most of them similar in certain traits like size, dress, and (sexy) positioning. The lady slumped over the ladder I chose to represent as the everyday woman being burdened by the ladies portrayed in the glossy printed medium, since the everyday woman is constantly bombarded with what's hot, sexy, pretty; what's beautiful?

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Perseus Frees Andromeda


In Michael Rush’s book, New Media in Art, he defines the art that has developed out of the marriage of art and technology as the “Art of Time”. Early New Media artists like photographer Eadweard Muybridge endeavored to capture the element of time in his sequential photographs. Similarly, Warhol explored time as a medium in his Screen Tests.

The image I have posted, Perseus Frees Andromeda (1510) by Piero di Cosimo, is an example of how artists have struggled for centuries with addressing the element of time in works of art. This Renaissance painter, a contemporary of Leonardo di Vinci, uses a device called “continuous narrative”. This is a type of narrative that illustrates multiple scenes of a story within a single frame. The use of continuous narrative actually predates the Renaissance and can be seen on the roman sculpture, Trajan’s Column, and the medieval Bayeux tapestry.

Here, di Cosimo illustrates part of the story of the Greek myth of Perseus. In order to do so the hero, Perseus, appears in the image three times. First, he enters on the upper right, wearing Hermes winged sandals, and spots Andromeda tied to the rock. The translated Greek verse that describes this is so beautiful I feel compelled to post it here:

When Perseus her beheld, as marble he would deem her, but the breeze moved in her hair, and from her streaming eyes the warm tears fell. Her beauty so amazed his heart, unconscious captive of her charms, that almost his swift wings forgot to wave.

He lands and she tells him that Poseidon has commanded she be sacrificed to a horrible sea monster because her mother has insulted the Sea-Gods. Perseus waits with her and is pictured a second time on top of the monster as he kills it with Athena’s sword, which incidentally, he has just recently used to cut off the head of Medusa. Finally, he brings Andromeda to her parents, (pictured again doing so on the lower right hand side of the canvas) and asks for her hand in marriage, which they gladly gave. Perseus is not the only character to repeat. Andromeda is pictured twice, as well as the King and Queen and villagers who appear on the left, recoiling in fear, and again on the right, rejoicing.

So Piero di Cosimo successfully challenges the confines of the traditional canvas as containing a moment frozen in time, and delivers to us instead, a story as it unfolds in time.

-Jen Sutherland

Monday, March 14, 2011

Stan VanDerbeek's Work


Stan VanDerBeek, A La Mode Collage

The MIT List Visual Arts Center’s current collection by Stan VanDerbeek highlights the work of a new media art pioneer. VanDerBeek was at the forefront of many new media art forms and was inspired by innovations in science and technology.

The first thing that caught my attention upon entering the exhibit was a selection of collages that VanDerBeek created between 1955-1983. He used these images as animation frames in some of his most well known films including: Breath Death, Ala Mode and Science Friction.

Stan VanDerBeek, A La Mode Collage
I think VanDerBeek’s ironic collage compositions were created very much in the spirit of the surreal and Dadaist movements. On a plane of bare white skin VanDerBeek drew a small bird exiting a hole that looked like it was coming out of her body. I thought this was very creative and it caught my attention because of its beauty. All three pieces demonstrate his aesthetic skill, style and wit.  They are complex in nature and well executed. VanDerBeek understood the power of the image and used it in conjunction with technology to educate others.  He created images that assisted in executing the meaning of the film.

Stan VanDerBeek, Breath Death Collage
VanderBeeks own words explain why I believe he understood the power of the image.

 “The purpose and effect of such image flow and image density (also to be called “visual velocity”) is both to deal with logical understanding and to penetrate to unconscious levels, to reach for the emotional denominator of all men, the non-verbal basis of human life, thought, and understanding, and to inspire all men to goodwill and ‘inter-and-intro-realization’.”
 -Stan VanDerBeek, 1965

-Robin