The Art Assignment

PBS has some really great stuff on Youtube. My personal favourite PBS Youtube channel is the Ideas Channel, but there are of course others. Notably, another little channel called The Art Assignment hosted by curator Sarah Green and author John Green. Yes that John Green.

So here's the gist: The Art Assignment tasks budding internet artists to contribute to a different theme every week. This of course is open to anyone, and many submissions are collected through social media avenues like Tumblr, Twitter, and more and then showcased every week. One of the themes I found quite interesting was introduced by a guest on the show named Brian McCutcheon (not the hockey player).

The theme is to take an existing object and highlight one aspect of it in our society by emphasizing that aspect. It's something I personally would love to try at some point if I had the time, resources and money to invest in such a project.

Art Series preliminary work

I decided to do a photography series. Here are some of my preliminary shots (only a few out of the 22 I've taken).

Sketchbook

Week 5

Week 6

Surrealism presentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KIphQdjZYdzxUaArFjprr4mpQvQe1XKm4lIX9WW5GCg/edit?usp=sharing

Sketches: week 3&4

Week 3, theme: juxtaposition 

Week 4: no theme

Sketchbook weeks 1&2

Cory Arcangel

Cory Arcangel is a contemporary artist who has done work in many different areas, from restoring Andy Warhol's long-lost digital art, to creating a program that lets you order Domino's Pizza from DOS. One of his most well-known pieces is Super Mario Clouds, a modified Super Mario Bros. cartridge with everything but the sky and clouds erased.

Now, you may dismiss this stuff as silly, and at the very least, it is a little tongue-in-cheek, but it's deeply connected to modern digital culture and how art can be used to represent that culture. Super Mario Clouds has been featured at 8 different exhibitions. 

Another of his cartridge hacks, I Shot Andy Warhol, is a modification of the light-gun shooter Hogan's Alley, except instead of shooting criminals and sparing innocents, you shoot Andy Warhol and spare the Pope, Flavor Flav, and Colonel Sanders.

 

He has also created self-playing input systems for various games, mostly designed to make them lose, and a collection called Lakes, which features various photographs being reflected on what appears to be a body of water. He's also put out books, music, and many other pieces of art, code, and cartridge hacks, and has open-sourced much of his code and cart hacks for free public use.