Community Art Event #2 ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany

I was traveling through Europe, and I happened to travel through Germany with some friends of mine and I was lucky enough to see an exhibit that featured all art that has to do with technology, called the museum of media. It was a really fun museum because it was very interactive. There was a motion sensor bubble screen that uses your shadow or silhouette to interact with bubbles floating around. There were a series of exhibits that included a gallery of different video game consoles that displayed different ways that art is affected by video game programming. There was also a remarkable audio map that was on a world map that indicated sounds specific to the locations. For example, sounds from Africa included African drumming or sounds in the jungle and in New York, the sounds of traffic. Overall, I found this exhibit to be fun and very educational in terms of the media art presented.

ZKM Center for Art and Media

ZKM Museum of Media

"Stream to Freedom," a Monument Intervention

On the San Francisco State University Campus there is a monument that no one knows is a monument called, "Garden of Remembrance," it is a garden that is dedicated to the 19 Japanese American students who were part of the many Japanese Americans that were interned during WWII. This garden has 10 boulders that represent the 10 relocation aka internment camps that held many Japanese Americans who were so wrongfully imprisoned. There is a plaque that indicates this garden as the "Garden of Remembrance," but no one can see it because it is located across from it in the corner, covered with trees. My Monument Intervention project is about making this garden known and the remembrance of what happened to the Japanese American internees known. So I decided to create an impermanent chalk stream from the boulders to the plaque to lead people to read what the garden is really about. I designed the stream to include koi fish representing the people interned going toward freedom, and lead people to read about what happened to them. I also included writing the 10 names of the internment camps on the boulders themselves to indicate where these fish were swimming away from. Almost metaphorically, this garden with no one knowing its meaning is like the imprisonment of these people and now my intervention is giving them freedom by letting people know at least for a while what the meaning of this garden is.

Information about the Garden of Remembrance

"Facecrack," a Culture Jamming Project

My culture jamming project's premise was taking the new huge powerful social network, Facebook, and critiquing its power over people in terms of how it is taking people's time, energy, and time from reality and is addictive, it is living life through a social network vs. reality. I took the actual ad and used a different font that was closest as possible and put these in sticker form all over different places I could find such as bathrooms where people are in constant interaction and can focus on different places. I took the facebook's tagline of "Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life" and changed it to "Facecrack helps you waste time and stalk the people in your life." The overuse of facebook for people is phenomenal to the point of people's lack of interaction in real life vs. in the cyberworld. People live their lives on facebook from showing off their newborn's photos weekly to their depressive posts about breakups, and many other life updates. While this doesn't seem awful, it begins a lack of actual communication in real life like with people and referring to facebook as the only means of interaction.

Signs – what are they and why should they matter?

Signs are present in everyday life. Signs on the billboards, in the subway, on the street, in the stores, on your home, the bathroom, the airport, the stores, everywhere you can imagine. They are used to express information through words, pictures and colors. They are EVERYWHERE... although in a more abstract way, "signs" can be seen as something occurring and telling us something we are ignoring or need to know such as smelling something familiar to remind us of something, but in terms of the art world and this class, signs are conductors of information to tell the world something. We see them everyday, and are bombarded with them in our lives. They matter because without them we would not get the proper information we need, but also, they matter because it's how we communicate indirectly with one another- from the written words in the many the alphabets and characters of the world to simple pictures communicating to people basic needs, from Ikea instructions to intricate paintings created to express emotion and incite feelings, we need signs to communicate to one another visually.

Response to Mark Dery’s Culture Jamming article (Living in the Empire of Signs)

In Dery's article, I felt that although this article felt somewhat dated in terms of it's relevancy to issues, events and themes now in United States American culture, that the spirit of challenging normatives within society are apparent in relation to revolutionary ways of looking at the world cramming us with information and advertisements and feeding us what we are to do and think. I felt that him including the "Ant Farm" group was good in terms of using them as examples of performance art and challenging mass media and what they are telling the public. I feel that culture jamming is a great way of challenging people to look beyond what they are being told and artists are using this to their advantage to educate and challenging thoughts about art. The movements of post-modernism and looking at art in different ways is no longer new and I felt that this article does expand on it, but nowadays artists are taking it further than before.

Community Art Event #1 PIXAR: 25 Years of Animation

PIXAR: 25 Years of Animation

One of the biggest animation companies in the industry, Pixar, had a wonderful exhibit in Oakland. Pixar's exhibition, "PIXAR: 25 Years of Animation," has a wonderful showing of concept Art from Pixar's designers, and artists. I grew up watching Pixar films from the first "Toy Story" to the latest movie, "Toy Story 3," and I always enjoy them. The art from this show shows how the evolution of characters from the ones we see on screen, to the storyboard changes and the actual art in 3D in sculpture forms. It was such an honor to see the art on display and it was fun to be able to interact with the actual art used to inspire the animators of Pixar.

Culture Jamming

Reverse graffiti by Moose

Banksy Piece

One of the art forms I feel that is "culture jamming" art is graffiti art. Many graffiti artists use their forms of spraypaint, wheatpasting, stenciling and to express their ideas, feelings, art forms, and messages to the world in a rebellious way. The history of graffiti art stems from going against the system by oppressed people and for them to get themselves out there in a world through their rebellious art forms. Various artists have made huge statements about political issues, social issues, environmental issues, etc. One famous, " a sell out" in the graffiti arts underground world is Banksy, the world known graffiti artist from the UK. He makes huge statements through his art on commenting things going on in the world from war to disasters, classism, etc. I feel that culture jamming is a wonderful art conceptual form and that it is a way for people to learn and question the world around them for the better.

The top photo is from an article I found on "reverse graffiti" which is the use of erasing dirt off the wall, this one is by Moose. I found this to be interesting because of the use of "cleaning" to be the "pen" or "medium." It's a culture jamming to me since it is a use of dirt rather than paint... the medium in itself is statement to the art world.

I instantly think of adbusters as one of the greatest source of culture jamming.