Cao Fei

Cao Fei
Cos players [young people dressed as game characters]

Is a series of photographs that were taken with the purpose of revealing how young teens take virtual worlds to an extreme level. She is showing essentially how some people choose to live in what she calls a second life using virtual worlds to ignore or in a sense run away from reality. I chose this series because I think that what she is trying to accomplish by this is to show that people can step outside of virtual worlds and still be who they aspire to be in games in our real world.

Alexander Calder

I chose Alexander Calder because I think his work is interesting in that it he is a kinetic artist. In his performance "Le Grand Cirque," he uses strings and kinetic energy to make his figures move. He is known for his invention of the mobile as well as for his other sculpture. Most of his work was of larger scale and involved wire to some degree. During his career, he sculpted famous figures as well as his personal friends out of wire.

Leonard Nimoy

I'm choosing to talk about the photographer Leonard Nimoy. Most know him only as Spock from Star Trek, but he is also a producer, director, writer, and a photographer. He has been for over 40 years. His favorite thing to photograph is naked women. He doesn't title his work, preferring to focus on the content of the picture. I think its awesome that someone we normally know exclusively as an actor has such a rich talent for another art form. All of his photos are in black and white. The picture above is from his "Full Body" project, in which he wanted to show women that are normally shunned from the modeling world.

Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson is now a very well known artist to the city of Chicago. Last year he exhibited a large collection of interactive and responsive art installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art. He is well known for creatively using light, sound, and space to interact with his audience. The exhibit was called "Take your time."

The following link is to a video of a very popular Olafur Eliasson installation that Chicagoans did not see.

The Weather Project, Olafur Eliasson

This installation was featured in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London. It is titled The Weather Project. The following is a description of the project from wikipedia:

"Eliasson used humidifiers to create a fine mist in the air via a mixture of sugar and water, as well as a semi-circular disc made up of hundreds of monochromatic lamps which radiated single frequency yellow light. The ceiling of the hall was covered with a huge mirror, in which visitors could see themselves as tiny black shadows against a mass of orange light. Many visitors responded to this exhibition by lying on their backs and waving their hands and legs. The work reportedly attracted two million visitors, many of whom were repeat customers.[3]"

Studio Roosegaarde - Liquid Space 6.0

Liquid Space 6.0 is an interactive space which physically becomes bigger, smaller and brighter in relation to human behavior. This interactive fusion of mechanisms, embedded electronics, sound and LED's creates an organic dialogue with its visitors.

Hackaday - Road Sign Hacking

This is a little old, but I feel that it's very interesting and relevant.



Some people figure out how to get inside a road sign to change the text and publish the details.

It describes what we see as private vs. public information, and how access to that information has changed with technology. I think that the technology used to build the world around us is still catching up with what's being done, or what's possible. New connections are constantly being made, and there is an interesting mix happening with the digital world and the tactile one.

There is also a subversive context to this article that i think is especially relevant. This information is not really "meant" for the public to know, yet here it is. I think as these connections continue to be made, and be made available to the public, more people will take advantage of them.

Also in case it doesn't go without saying, altering road signs is most definitely illegal.

Robert Henke & Christopher Bader - Atom

Robert Henke is a Berlin based artist who was experimenting with electronic music since the mid 1990's. He is responsible for Monolake project as well

as one of the most influential music production software Ableton Live. Being a conceptual artist Henke released several albums inspired by CERN

(European Council for Nuclear Research) and other research in the field nuclear physics. As he wrote in one of album's descriptions, physics was his

passion since childhood but he never felt quite smart enough (as he puts it) to become a physicist himself. In his project Atom he collaborated with

Christopher Bauder to create an installation that united sound, light and sculpture into one visual-audio minimalistic treat. White self-illuminated

spheres corresponded to the rhythm and textures of the sounds produced by the artists while representing the movement of atoms.

For more information, pictures and videos one can follow the link below

http://www.monolake.de/concerts/atom.html

Wooden Mirror

This is Daniel Rozin's wooden mirror and how it works. Taken from the OU course 'Computers and processors'. I thought that this was really interesting because I have never seen anything like it before. It explains how it works in the video. Enjoy!

Camille Utterback-Abundance

Abundance is a temporary public installation commissioned for the City of San Jose, California by ZER01 – the Art and Technology Network( Under work leader, Camille Utterback). At night, Abundace transforms the city hall plaza into an interactive social space. A video camera mounted on the City Hall captures the movements of people in the plaza below. The animations are generated in response to the people's movement and projected onto the 3-story cylindrical rotunda. Utterback’s colorful, fluid and interesting patterns creates a subtle subversion of the bold geometry of architect Richard Meier’'s building – warming and humanizing its surface.