New Media Art in Context- Art 346 Fall

Jonty Horwitz is from Johannesburg, South Africa, where he studied electrical engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand.  He is considered to be an artist, engineer, and entrepreneur and his artwork focuses on the aesthetics of art in the context of human perception.  His work such as the nano sculptures are meant to show that there are almost no boundaries between science and art due to the latest creations of technology.  The fact that these sculptures can only be seen with the naked eye is what Hurwitz was so fascinated by and motivated him to create these sculptures, even though they were eventually destroyed within seconds due to an unfortunate accident in the lab.  Hurwitz's catropic and oblique anamorphic sculptures are digitally stretched before being created and each one that he creates has a specific story behind the piece. His Savoy Cat was inspired by a story of superstitions and his first piece, Seven Generations,  is meant to make us think about the choices we make in our loves and how our actions can be determined in a way other than just looking at pure genetics.  Overall, Jonty Hurwitz loves to bring the concept of new technology and art together, as well as bringing a more personal experience into the artwork.

Steve Lambert's work includes street, internet, and performance art.  He has been an artist since about 1999 and made international news in 2008 for his replica of "the paper of record", the New York Times, which announced the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other good news. This paper was released after the 2008 US election.  Lambert's work revolves a lot around the work of advertisements and aims for his work to create a mutually meaningful exchange so that it reaches the people outside of the gallery walls, and he tries to make his work fun pieces of art to look at and enjoy, even though there is a more serious message behind the work.  In the world of advertising online, ads tend to cover the sidelines of a webpage, Lambert's solution to this was to create Add-Art, which would replace advertisements with actual contemporary art when downloaded.  In addition to not wanting to see these ads, Lambert would also get distracted from other social websites, so he with the help of Charlie Stigler, he was able to create Self-Control.  This app is currently only available for mac users, and what it does is it blocks any specific website that may be distracting for someone, for a specific period of time, that once it is started cannot be undone.  Both of these apps are free to download and do with whatever the user wants to do with them.

Nick Yulman is a Brooklyn based sound and interactive media artist in which his work tends to revolve around 3 different contexts: installation art, oral history, and music.  His work aims to investigate the musical potential of everyday objects and mechanically manipulated instruments.  His work "Song Cabinet" is an interactive media piece that users can activate by opening and closing the drawers of the cabinet. This piece is a great example of investigating music's potential because people have control over how the 'song' will sound and these are ordinary objects being used. The objects used are meant to represent a specific location, which is labeled on the drawers, giving the piece a biographical feel since the objects are of the artist's personal collection.  Yulman's work "Animal Magnetizer" is an interactive musical installation that uses spatial sensing and automated acoustic instruments.  People can collaboratively control the mix of instruments activated through the presence of their hands and bodies. For this piece specifically, the interactive aspect if meant to inspire a playful collaboration among viewers and the arrangement of the objects in the space requires multiple people to work together in order to hear the entirety of what has been programmed for the mix to like as a whole.  For many of his musical installations, such as "Animal Magnetizer", Yulman uses the mechanical music system Bricolo, which allows digital music makers to incorporate robotics into their performance and recording setups.