Art 345 Final Project:

Artist Statement: This video is my first attempt at Adobe Flash. I had many ideas for this final project, and I at first started creating an animation in Adobe Photoshop CS5 using their new puppet animation tool. But, after I wrote my final paper investigating the works of Miguel Chevalier I became inspired by his work and wanted to create my own piece that reflected his digital techniques. I first created shapes with all sorts of spikes and edges, then I used the shape tween in Flash to animate the key frames. I have about 25 layers, each with different shapes doing different animations. The layers are timed so that only a few shapes overlap animation. I feel that the movement is very interesting an a little hypnotic.  The sound is a clip I made my combining multiple clips in Audacity. I used tools within Audacity to amplify, clip and edit each layer of sound to create an entirely new song. The visual effect is enhanced by the interesting sounds from the pieced together sound clip.      


Art Exhibition Paper: 

Museum Review

            The title of the photo show at the Museum was The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a changing environment. All of the photographs in their own way made a statement about alterations to nature. It seems that this show is also a play on how man is responsible for the alterations, which have a negative impact on nature and how life was before man came and built over it.

            A great photograph that I enjoyed was Howl by Amy Stein. This image shows a coyote howling to a street light. The animal is looking up into the light as if it is confused. This image has to do with animals and how their habitat has been changed by man as well as their presence. I believe the photographer was trying to show how the man made environment can hugely impact the animals. I found this image very interesting because you see the coyote staring into the light but the snow around the coyote is untouched. There are no foot prints around the coyote that suggest the animal stumbled across this man made street light.  Overall the image is very interesting and beautiful.

            Another great image that caught my eye was by Yang Yongliang and was called untitled #5. This image has a feeling of a dreamlike world and is very imaginative. It is said to be sort of a seamless collage of photos taken within the busy cities of China.  This combination of separate images is put together in such a way that a new landscape is developed. On a level of altered environments this work critiques China’s rapidly growing, building and intensely changing environment. This image to me brings up the issues of design and photography. At what point does photography end and when is the piece considered a graphic design work? Can a piece be considered both? Although I love both photography and design, I feel that a photo should be minimally changed to still be considered a photograph. This piece to me is a beautiful representation of digital design.    

            One final image I found fascinating was called Site Specific_NYC 07 by Olive Barbieri. This image is a classic example of a bird’s eye view of a city. This comments on how an animal like a bird flying overhead sees the city and its inhabitants, coxing the animal to believe that its surroundings are nature. Little does the bird know what nature is and what this massive city once looked like. On a photographic perspective, this photo is very interesting to me because it has a very strange depth of field. The areas that are in focus are not of similar planes and likewise for the areas of the image that are out of focus.

Artist Lecture Review: The Work of Art Featuring Jeff Ross (KNPB)

            Jeff Ross is an award winning photographer, who wanted to take a break from commercial and advertisement photography and give back to the community. His project took place at the Renown Rehabilitation Center. Here he found himself in a much different environment than he was obviously used to. Instead of photographing and object for an advertisement or a beautiful model, Jeff had to document the trials and tribulations relating to the lives of individuals undergoing intense physical therapy.

            It is very interesting to me how Jeff was able to create a photo essay and open the eyes of the viewer, giving them a glimpse of these individuals’ hardships. During the program it was said that, “Jeff takes the responsibility of showing who that person is.”  He developed intimate relationships with these individuals that were either recovering from a serious accident or dealing with declining health problems.  This in turn allowed him to capture true and natural moments of pain, struggle, denial, recovery and/or optimism. In a sense these pictures give the viewer a behind the scenes look of this individual’s life. And for some the camera turned the individual into the person they were before their lives became overrun with the constant hope for recovery.  He said, “They were kind of celebrities at that point, it made them feel better about themselves.”  

            Jeff said, “When you see someone walking down the street with an artificial leg, an amputation, these kinds of things, you look the other way. I want people to look at this person. They are just like you and me and they are struggling to get their life back.”  Art can do just that. It can open the eyes of the viewer forcing them to face reality and see the beauty in something that would have never been noticed before. These photographs in a sense freeze a moment of time, capturing an emotional response from the viewer and telling a story in a split second.        

Final Paper

Digital Metamorphosis

            Miguel Chevalier is a digital artist who has dedicated his life and works to the exploration of technology. “Taking references from the history of art and reformulating them using computer tools, his works investigate the flux and networks that underlie contemporary society” (International). Chevalier has also been said to be a pioneer of virtual and digital art. His work is very unique even in the direct sense of digital art. The very individual approaches he uses within his work, which leaves an intense signature of work that, can only be created by Miguel Chevalier. “His images are a rich source of insights into ourselves and our relationship to the world” (International).

            Chevalier born in Mexico City now working in Paris became a master of digital art only after intense study.  He graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris then continued on to Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs.  He also studied art at the Pratt Institute in New York and later attended as an artist in residence at the Kujoyama Villa, Kyoto, Japan. It has been said that, “Miguel Chevalier's wide-ranging artistic vision has been shaped by a broad education and extensive travel” (International).

                 Beginning around late 1970 Chevalier began using the computer to express his artistic creations. His work is seen as experimental and first of its kind. He wanted to be innovative and create work unlike any other, one could say inventive as an engineer yet avant-garde like a painter. What jump started Chevalier’s ideas and creativity with digital art, was intense feeling that technology would be very important in the future. After he farther developed his programming and computer skills he began to toy with the idea that technology would be a new and ever growing medium. With the result of his ideas, came an innovative type of applied art.  Within this new form of applied art came technology shown as no one had yet seen. Chevalier had succeeded in creating art through technology. Themes like nature, artifice, flows, networks, virtual cities and ornate designs influenced and are expressed within his work.  After his first work Chevalier had started to explore the ideas of hybrid and generative image. This idea definitely comes through in his later works.

A piece called “Fractal Flowers” is a great example of combining technology with art to create a world in which you can lose yourself. “Nothing can predict what these “fractal flowers” might produce, as they are infinitely free to hybridize and reproduce” (Desaive).  The code based work Chevalier produces is very distinctive, a transposition of nature to a technology created universe one could say. Fractal flowers has been said to be one of Chevalier’s defining pieces. Not only does this piece question art in the digital era, it is shown in such a way that the question of art is no longer a question. The pieces are made to be poetic showing the viewer a sort of whimsical look at digital metamorphosis.    

            Chevalier uses technology to relate his art to modern day. The idea is that everything around us in the world today is artificial. He explains, “we live in a world in which almost everything surrounding us is artificial: there is artificial light everywhere and we cultivate vegetables in greenhouses, for example. Even nature is not free from culture” (Chevalier, Herbarius 2059 2011). His visions for society in a contemporary aspect is shown all throughout his work by creating “artificiality” when he uses the computer to create a whole new artificial world. Using the computer as a medium, Chevalier explains his ideas for this new world:

For example I decide that a flower can have between a hundred and a thousand leaves and is allowed to grow a maximum length of three meters. The computer then randomly creates a plant within my boundaries. This way the outcome is always unique and surprising, even to me. Creating a virtual life is very exciting. (Chevalier, Herbarius 2059 2011).

The awareness that he is creating a new world, a virtual world is what keeps him going. A place that can capture a new essence of nature is the final and ultimate goal.

            Chevalier studies plants. Their growth, movement and life, just as a botanist would. A work called ‘Herbarius 2059’, shows just that. This innovative piece comes together in a virtual reality demonstrating the life of fractal flowers but in the form of a book. On one side of the book you watch the life, growth and death of a flower, while on the other side you see words spilling on the page, as if you were to see a message on a screen as it was being typed. Although the flower is not a realistic depiction of a flower, you create a sort of imaginary world where this flower exists. The flower shows a time laps of the life of a real flower, from a sprouting seed to a dying plant, to a new growth of life.                In a you tube video; Chevalier speaks of his influences and what lead him to explore the digital side of art. He spoke of artist like Monet and how he used intricate brush strokes to capture light. Chevalier said, “When you use a computer you work with light, red, green and blue” (Mill). He explains how he was most interested in the work of Monet and how he captures the motion of light in his painting. He then began to experiment with ways in which he could capture the motion of light within his digital work. He also spoke of influences from Andy Warhol and how he re-created the same piece just using different colors. Once again this was an aspect of color he wanted to explore because there are a lot of variations of color in the digital world. Yet another artist Chevalier was inspired by is the master of pointillism, Seurat.

In a 1999 interview with Patrick Imbard (which can be found at www.Chevalier-chevalier.com), Chevalier noted that the pointillists' experimentation with brushstroke and "simultaneous contrast of color" neatly mirrors a process in electronic art: The juxtaposition of pixels on a computer screen creates color and form just like setting one brushstroke beside another in a painting (Kuntz).

Chevalier spoke a lot about how he wanted to recreate nature in his work. This is how he first developed the idea of his piece Ultra-Nature.

            Ultra-Nature, a very interesting piece created by Chevalier captured the attention of many people. Chevalier re-created this piece many times through the years, 2004-2011. Ultra Nature is an interactive virtual reality instillation. He used special software created for him, to create a computer generated landscape. This landscape consisted of nature, flowers, trees and plants. His work allows viewers to participate with the pieces by moving their arms and bodies. This in turn simulated movement of the plants, flowers and or trees. Chevalier said in his you tube video he wanted his piece to have a “poetic feel” simulating the growth, life and death of plants.

            Margot Lovejoy, author of Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age, categorizes work like Chevalier’s in the form of video art created from computer animation.  She speaks of “The use of computers for an art grew out of existing formalist art practices, especially with regard to 1970’s Minimalist, neo constructivists, and conceptual aesthetic tendencies” (Lovejoy 174). She believes that many interests of computer work were motivated by the artist’s interests in kinetic and interactive aspects of computer programing. “In the next decades, the continuing work of many pioneer artists probed at the edge of computer’s potential, participated in developing new software tools and made vital contributions in laying the foundation for future achievements” (Lovejoy 175). This is exactly what Chevalier did. He created a whole new view of the artistic expression that can be created from a computer. “Miguel Chevalier continues to be a trailblazer, and has proven himself one of the most significant artists on the contemporary scene” (International).

            Miguel Chevalier’s work is very interesting to me. He uses nature to capture viewers in such a way that this virtual world becomes a reality. Although, I have not experienced his work in a large gallery setting where the walls surround you as if you were part of the piece but I still feel memorized by his work that I have seen on a small screen. His work is not high definition realistic by any means, but the realistic life cycles and movements of the nature put you in this sort of alternant universe where these strange plants grow and exist. Some of his other pieces that don’t show the life cycles of plants and just consist of shapes also have their own way of introducing a new world. The movement of these shapes combined with the alternating sizes growing from small to big and back to small again, captivates the viewer and somewhat confuses them as they search for some recognizable pattern, only to conclude that no such pattern exists. His work is beautiful and fascinating creating a whole new world where the viewer can entirely lose themselves in this digital world.         

Works Cited

Chevalier, Miguel. "Herbarius 2059." 14th June 2011. Design Miami Basel. 1 December 2011 <http://www.priveekollektie.com/upload/cms/39_PRESS_RELEASE_Miguel_Chevalier.pdf>.

Chevalier, Miguel. "Miguel Chevalier Exhibitions." n.d. Digital Nights. 1st December 2011 <http://www.digitalnights.sg/Miguel%20Chevalier.pdf>.

Desaive, Pierre-Yves. Center for Digital Cultures and Technology. 23rd April 2009. 1st December 2011 <http://www.imal.org/en/activity/fractal-flowers>.

International, Digital Art. Miguel Chevalier Biography. 30th December 2009. 1st December 2011 <http://www.digitalarti.com/en/blog/miguel_chevalier/miguel_chevalier_biography>.

Kuntz, Melissa. When Nature Won't do, There's Miguel chevalier's Ultra-Nature, at Wood Street Gallery. 14th December 2006. 1st December 2011 <http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A20358>.

Lovejoy, Margot. Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age . New York, NY: Routledge, 2008.

Mill, Idea. You Tube, Miguel chevalier on Ultra-Nature (part II). 19th December 2006. 1st December 2011 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N9uCfODWvg>.

Popper, Frank. Art of the Electronic Age . Harry N. Abrams, 1993.