cave writings 3- exhibit#2

On Sunday, my boyfreind and I went to see the Cave Writings III exhibit at Brown Univ. It was an amazing thing to have seen it on the Advent DVDs and then to go see it and use it for myself. The Virtual Cave is comprised of 4 screens, 2 on each side of you, one in front, and one on the bottom under your feet. we took off our shoes and put on special 3D glasses (just like the ones you get at IMAX, except a lot more high tech), it was nice that there weren't very many of us, just 6. the demonstration is about an hour, and we were able to see different projects that Brown students had done.

Cave Writing was created using text edit, but now it has its own text edit specifically for cave writing, which is accessible from their website for free, so you can download it and play around with the world thats already created, they obviously don't give out the source code, but I think its pretty awesome of them to allow people all over the world to access the program for free to enjoy.

My favorite part was the piece about memory, which was on Advent DVD, 3 different memories came up in white text on all of the black screens. They were read aloud for us, since only one of the 3D glasses had a mouse attached, we all took turns as words starting coming toward us, we had to bounce back the words with the light that emitted from the mouse, but when we bounced them back, they landed in different spots within the other memories.

also, a very cool thing was that Damon Baker, the guy who demonstrated cave writings, seemed eager to help me start up a cave writing class at Mass Art. I think that having a class like that really puts us at the forefront of virtual new media. The Brown Students did some awesome things with the program, but I think students at Mass Art could skyrocket it into something unique and amazing. So this was my interview, we want to get a cave writing class at mass art.

gears are expensive

I am trying to get in contact with christy georg, our resident kinetic sculpture artist/teacher, I cannot afford the gears I have found, and definitely not the gear motors that I need. The ones I need are well over $200. and I need 5 for one shape! so i need to ask her if some other gear motors that I found will be alright for me to use, I found some very inexpensive ones, but I need help finding gears that will fit them. I know she would be able to help me. I hope she gets back to me tomorrow. I went to see her after her kinetic sculpture class, and she wasn't there. I guess class ended early. so i have emailed her. The gears definitely won't be ready for Thursday, but probably for the Thursday after that.

I recieved an email back from the boston college physicist from "Fracas over Fractals". He advised me to contact him after may 15th since the end of the semester is so hectic, which is fine, i will be happy to do it. Im glad he emailed me back though. I really feel like i can reach my goal with his help.

artist statement ideas

Materials I use

Plaster
Wood and exterior materials
Found objects
Colored pencil
Watercolor
Paper ( bookmaking)
Fabric
Computer

I make art through experimenting with different media and with what works, how different surfaces adhere to other surfaces, sewing, coloring, speaking through my own language of patterns

Triangles within triangles, loud and bold colors, also colors that create atmosphere, and historical elements appear in my art repeatedly. Politics appears in my art, socio-economic issues, architectural elements, interior design, linear Japanese elements of design,

I like creating my art because It allows me to express myself, to learn how to do new things, to meet new people, to figure things out on my own, keeps my mind busy all the time, makes me excited to be doing, and be so busy, It is a chance for me to excel, It allows me to research, through this I find the things about life that interest me as well as new things that I never even knew about__ all making me a more well rounded person, more interesting to myself. I like creating my art because Its something about myself that I can contribute to my world, even if just one other person understands the importance or sees the beauty, at least I touched someone, every time I do, I am making a connection to my world, and I am living in the moment for myself and my well being.

My most recent work: what makes it exciting is that it is so intricately beautiful and primitive and yet so machine-like and strict in an architectural sense. I am expressing myself in patterns, not words that can be construed and misunderstood. My language has very clear words to convey and definitive opinions and yet you perceive it from your own viewpoint, my patterns react just like a good listener who can always see the opposite side of the argument or be bettered from the contribution of others. What’s also exciting about my most recent work is that I am making math accessible to myself, whereas it was a very intimidating subject to approach before.

I prepare for an artistic session thorough research, Internet, library, and conversations with the people around me. I write down all my ideas, I experiment with my ideas, I look at what other artists have done, I write lists, list of things to do, lists of things that I’ve always wanted to do, have or make, tons of lists., I read books, I go for walks, I meet new people, I consciously interact with my environment more. All of this takes a great deal of time. My life is a preparation for artistic sessions.

I use the materials that I do, which is basically everything except oil paints, because I like experimenting with a variety of media. The reason why I prefer media that is dry as opposed to paint that does not dry for a very long time is because I like to have the option of being either subtractive or additive, and its easier with dry media, as well as the fact that I like to work under pressure and that doesn’t happen when your medium is too slow.

Right now, the most technically challenging medium I have tried to use is machinery. I am at a severe disadvantage when it comes to figuring out gears and mech. Engineering type things like that.

My shapes are something I have been working on for about a year now, I am trying to understand who I am through my artwork, I have a goal of being able to mathematically identify my mind’s system of mark making, or rather patternmaking through the randomness of my shape art.

Things I make:
Books, pattern-shapes (2d), jewelry, clothing,

Who am i?
Ashley Simone Marchetti-Burton
Grew up in potowomut, East Greenwich RI, on the water
Horses, trees, water (beaches), meadows, all influence my art

What do I do?
I do 2d and 3d work. I like to work in a series because I like to research in depth, and analyze through many different media and/or concepts, I like to work medium sized, its more ergonomic for me, I like it to be displayed where you can’t miss it. Somewhere where you work and will be interacting with it. (Near doors, in your hand, watching it move, etc.)

I make art in my room/studio
My environment impacts my art, as far as memories and how I perceive my world. I make art at all times of the day. I like to work in the morning. Pieces usually take me a month.

Important messages to communicate:

Even though you are ignorant about your world, at least try to care, thinking that it’s ok to not give a crap is so much worse than at least trying understand your world.

Be who you are, because who you are is who you need to be in order to be happy, and happiness is the key to everything.

Understand that you are disposable and vital. Physically we are frail beings with highly complex and delicate systems, but in the war against machines, humans will always prevail because we can love and have compassion. Those things are too powerful to be reproduced or stopped.

breaking progress

I have been working on my shapes of earth, venus and mars. I havent ordered the gears yet simply because everytime i try to, I never know what i am supposed to order. So I emailed Harry Avakian, an Assistant professor of engineering at wentworth, and i asked him to possibly help me figure out what i need to specifically identify my parts to order them. I thought about making my own gears, but conceptually, the gears would seem more like a piece of my art to me than indifferent machinery, which is more what I am going for with my statement. I also read a very interesting article about the controversy over the mathematic fractal analysis of Jackson Pollack's work. Fractals basically identify through mathematics the system one uses in their methods of mark making, specifically pattern making. This is exactly my goal for this semester, one which i have tried to go about in the only ways i currently know how. But there is a physicist who teaches at Boston College, who I have also emailed, who is working on Pollack's fractal analysis. I have asked him to possibly meet with me to discuss how he goes about this analysis. So that I might try to do it for myself, or at least get to a new plateau of my research. The article was in Art News Feb. 2007, called "Fracas over Fractals."

last project

I am working on 3 shapes. They are Earth, Mars, and Venus. I have started Earth and finished the drawing for earth. I now need to find the gears. I need an engineer of some sort to help me with purchasing the gears. I need some with motors and some without. The piece starts with the general theme of humanity and its delicate balance vs. machinery. It goes right along with my schindler's list piece. I find this theme extremely prevalent in todays society. we are being replaced by machinery all the time, every day a new job can be done more quickly and efficiently by a machine. It is just as important to note that even though the fear is among us that someday machines will take over. That could truly never happen. The essence of humanity can not be reproduced. that is what my piece is about. the earth is fragile, our solar system is fragile, and so are we as humans, both physically and mentally. Both function in very particular ways to support the existence of our life. I am also doing mars and venus because earth lies in between them both and has a very particular space. also earth has a planetary harmony of 3:4, which is produced by mars and venus. i am using a book called a "little book of coincidence".

where I want to take my next project

After the painting, I have decided that I am not a huge fan of paint with my shapes. I like the cleaner, more architectural look of my shapes, i think it makes them more hypnotizing. I want to draw them on Masonite or something substantial to implant gears in the place of some of the circles. I want them to move and engage people in their movement and intricacy, as well as the concept of how they were created, the mathematical language of visual randomosity. I want spur gears, they are perfect for what i am doing.



I think that the gears give the impression of machinery and the idea of people vs machines is a very interesting topic for me. This is an issue people have been dealing with since John Henry. It is still a very real political, economic and cultural issue. will people overcome the machine? or will the machine oversome us? In my opinion, the machine can never be equivalent to human life or the compassion and spirit of life. no matter how complex computers will be made, they can never replace humans, but they will change our progress, they have , are and will change our lives. So it is important for me to address this issue, seeing as how i am vastly unfamiliar with many aspects of the computer, They kind of scare me a little bit, like a tarantula caught under a glass, they fascinate me and yet i will probably never lift that glass. It is important for me in my life to know that i am unique and cannot be recreated and manipulated, as if i were a dime a dozen.

that is the intent of my next piece. to address this topic of humans vs machines.

proogress on new project

My project for the moment is to paint a pattern/shape for myself. I had been working from a basic system to recreate the saved jews from Schindler's List, but now i am more interested in creating a system to i dentify my patterned shapes. I have come up with these numbers:
3,1,7,22,6, 5.2,12, 34.23,132, 11.41,10, and 18

These numbers were gathered from data that i know about myself.

Physical Data:

my height= 5.2
my weight= 132
my shoe size= 7
length of my hand (thumb to pinky)~ 6

I decided to factor in the fact that making the painting would be a "happening", and so I am documenting it by using:

The Time i started the painting: 10:18 am
and the date of the happening: 3/1/07

in taking in the nature of much of the work i create, I realized that i have an aesthetic infatuation with the ratio of 3:1

I figured out that my weight(132) divided by my age (22)= the length of my hand (6)

to me time can be represented visually through expansion of circles.

On a wall clock, 10:18 is equivalent to 178 degrees.
178 degrees divided by my height (5.2)= 34.23

Using the 3:1 ratio, ----> 34.23:11.41

Krystof Wodiczko

Between 1981 and 1992, Wodcizko realized more than 70 Public Projections in
Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, United States and Poland. He has developed several public intervention instruments beginning with Personal Instruments (Warsaw, 1969), First Vehicle, 1972, Homeless Vehicle, 1988-89, Poliscar, 1991, Alien Staff, 1992, and Mouthpiece, 1994.

Wodiczko is internationally renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. Since the late eighties, he has developed a series of nomadic instruments for both homeless and immigrant operators that function as implements for survival, communication, empowerment, and healing.

In the last decade, Wodiczko has realized more than seventy public projections in Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. Since 1985, he has been honored with eight major retrospectives at such institutions as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum Stuki, Lodz; Fundacio Tapies, Barcelona; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford; and the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Wodiczko earned his MFA in 1968 from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland, with an emphasis on architecture, industrial design and the visual arts. Before coming to MIT in 1991, Wodiczko was on the faculty for a visiting professor at the Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux Arts, California Institute of the Arts, Cooper Union School of Art, University of Hartford, New York Institute of Technology, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Ontario College of Art, Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, and Warsaw Polytechnic Institute. He lectures frequently around the world and has conducted seminars on such topics as:

the history and theory of the avant-garde; the theory and criticism of public art; nomadic design; art, identity and community; design, technology and ethics; the art of counter-memory; and interrogative design.

Photography, Sculpture and Industrial Design

A more recent political public intervention turns real estate sandwich boards into actual architecture by adding tent fabric to the existing hinged frame structure. Located in neighborhoods in the process of gentrification Occupancy, 2003, playfully comments on the need for affordable housing, not more high-rise condos for high-end clients. It reminds one of Krystof Wodiczko’s 1988 Homeless Vehicle Project in which the artist provided makeshift shelters out of shopping carts. The ensuing outrage from both sides of the political spectrum (the carts were inventive but hardly adequate accommodation) was precisely the dialogue Wodiczko intended. Koh has also produced Squat, a work which commemorates the use of construction sites as temporary housing.

more about this



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Essays addressing aspects of public art written by Wodiczko have appeared in October, DIA Art Foundation's Discussion on Contemporary Culture, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, Assemblage, Grand Street, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Art In Theory, 1945-1995, and numerous exhibitions catalogues. Volumes of his writings have been published by Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and recently by MIT Press. Wodiczko's work has been exhibited in Documenta, the Paris Biennale, the Sydney Biennale, the Lyon Biennale, the Venice Biennale and other major international art festivals and exhibitions. In 1998, Wodiczko was awarded the Hiroshima Prize for his contribution as an artist to world peace. From 1995 to 1997 he was Director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies where he now heads the Interrogative Design Group.

Alien Staff

No aliens, residents, non-residents, legal and illegal immigrants, have voting rights, nor any sufficient voice or image of their own in official "public space." When given a chance by the media (mainstream or ethnic) to communicate their experience or to state their opinions, demands and needs, immigrants find themselves framed and silenced. Feeling set-up by preconceived categories of strangeness and difference, they have no chance to convey the often unbearable complexity of their lives, the world of differences between them and the confusing and antagonistic voices within each immigrant group, family or individual. These are the strangers in the process of becoming non-strangers, double aliens in de-alienation. The Alien Staff is a form of portable public address equipment and cultural network for individuals and groups of immigrants. It is an instrument that gives the individual immigrant a chance to "address" directly anyone in the city who may be attracted by the symbolic form of the equipment and the character of the "broadcasted" program. The Alien Staff resembles the biblical shepherd's rod. It is equipped with a high-tech mini-monitor and a small loud-speaker. A video player is located in a special shoulder bag. The small size of the monitor, its eye-level location and its closeness to the operator's face are important aspects of the design. As the small image on the screen may attract attention and provoke observers to come very close to the monitor and therefore the operator's face; the usual distance from the immigrant, the stranger, decreases.



The Mouthpiece

The Mouthpiece is a piece of equipment for strangers. It covers the mouth of the wearer like a gag. A small video monitor and loudspeakers are installed at the center of the instrument and in front of the user's mouth. The monitor and the loudspeakers replace the real act of speech with an audio-visual broadcast of pre-recorded, edited, electronically perfected and quicked searched statements, questions, answers, stories, etc.

The Mouthpiece "replaces" the immigrant's actual act of speech with the moving image of the immigrant's lips and the sound of the immigrant's voice. It is designed to be as attractive as contemporary virtual reality gadgets. The clear resolution of the liquid crystal screen of the video monitor attracts viewer's attention. The small size of the screen (no larger than the actual size of human lips) forces viewers to come close to the user's face in order to see the image of speaking lips and to hear the voice clearly. Thus the distance between the immigrant wearing the mouthpiece and the viewers, non-immigrants and other immigrants, decreases physically and, hopefully, psychologically as well.

For a speechless stranger living in a culturally, politically and ethically unnatural situation, wearing an artificial and artistically concieved speech act equipment is a natural thing to do. In today's migration era, the wearer of the Porte-parole appears as a prophetic story-teller and a poetic interrupter of the continuity of established life in public space and dominant culture. This stranger becomes an expert and a virtuoso in the technology and the artistry of speech, equipped to speak better than others who have yet to overcome speechlessness in their encounter with strangers.

The Mouthpiece is a further evolution of the Alien Staff as the next generation of speech equipment designed for immigrants. The previous instrument was meant to operate as an attribute, an artiface, a reliquary, a portable memorial to recall in public the "private history" of the immigrant experience. It functioned as a third party between immigrants and non-immigrants and among immigrants themselves; it functioned as the immigrant's double, and as an inspiration for the dialogue between the segregated worlds of the people who entered into conversation around it.

The new instrument is a more radical type of equipment than the Alien Staff. It is directly attached to the body (the face) of the immigrant, becoming an extension of the body. The user himself or herself is no longer delegating power to the instrument, but is integrated organically with it, transforming him or her into a kind of cyborg, a virtual subject.

The Mouthpiece points to the absurdity of any attempt at depriving speech rights in a democratic society. It responds to the actual political process and experience of such deprivation, while at the same time it helps to translate this disadvantage into a new advantage. In other words, it is an instrument whose function is to empower those who are deprived of power. It is designed to assert the universal communicative rights introduced by the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France, assured by the First Ammendment to the Constitution of the United States and guaranteed by most national constitutions since. An implication of those declarations is that no artifice can be created to restrict communicative rights and conversely, no artifice whose aim is to aid in the exercise of communicative rights can be legally banned. Its basic purpose is to provide a means of saying all the things that must be said and that no one wants to hear. In doing so it does not prevent anyone else from doing the same. The Alien Mouthpiece is thus a democratic artifice.

The Mouthpiece allows its owner to compose and pre-record his or her acts of speaking and to replay and reenact it later in a particularly chosen time and place in private or public situations. This process reinforces a specific kind of power already acquired by immigrants, the artistic power of speech invention and storytelling. The storyteller has always been forced to develop an art of speech in order to tell what has usually been untold and for which there is no ready-made metaphor. The storyteller creates a stituation in which repressed feelings, translated into stories, can be effectively expressed. The wearer of the alien Mouthpiece is a storyteller who is an expert in technology of speech in the cyberspace era, an alien who has arrived in a xenophobic land and who looks strangely familiar to us who have yet to overcome our speechlessness in the face of our repressed fears.

This project, like the previous alien Staff, creates an artifice that provokes or inspires communication or translation, a display of what is usually hidden. The instrument suggests an acknowledgement of the richness and complexity of people who combine both "natural" and "artificial" qualities of life. This means that feeling artificial (not at home, alienated from oneself or others) becomes a process that can open up new questions and introduce the possibility for different identities and communities beyond nationalisms and fixed notions of difference, crossing social and psychological boundaries, meeting on new common ground where the strangeness can be shared.

"Aliens" equipped with specially designed instruments might appear perfectly natural in the contemporary migratory environment of global strangeness. Exposing their own disintegration and displaced identity, they provoke and inspire the larger process of the disintegration of identities among non-immigrants. They may spread the communicable (contagious) process of the exploration of one's own strangeness. They might help create new links and affinities between immigrants and non-immigrants on the basis of the recognition of their common strangeness.

With the use of digital technology, the process of recording and editing the image and sound of a speaking mouth will become an artistic endeavor. The process of composing and pre-recording each speech act in private is psychologically, politically and artistically as important as the public live performance and its social discourse.

Advanced video editing, digital enhancement and transformation of both the image and the sound of the speech (through the most recent Macintosh software) is critical to the project. The technology of video production will help to create a metaphoric synthesis of often overlapping and displaced memories, fragments of experiences, statements, stories, words and sentences, all of which correspond to the unstable identity of the stranger who is living through the pain of displacement and becoming. Electronic montage will allow for changes in the speed of the lips on the screen and the change of frequency characteristics of sound, for dubbing, correcting, playing with and multiplying accents and gender indicators. Fragments of films and other videos can be inserted and other people's lips can be juxtaposed with the immigrant's, for example.

The careful choice of locations and situations for the performative use of the Alien Mouthpiece is crucial. Official events and symbolic environments are the best, because they are the least expected situations for immigrants. The presence of a group of Mouthpiece users is also essential. The image of a crowd of aliens appearing as if they have just landed from another planet (which happens to be our own) is most desireable.

In the next stage of development of the project, a portable computer and additional electronic devices will be added to allow for quick searching through a large repetoire of pre-recorded speeches using the operator's voice as a command. In this way the immigrant will have a greater variety of speeches ready for all anticipated situations and will be able to choose the appropriate video tape to respond immediately to any question. As portable equipment improves technically, links to satellite communications and the Internet will allow an immediate dialogue among Alien Mouthpiece users, enabling an exchange of experiences and coordination of their presence and their actions nationally and internationally.

what is my language?

It is amazing to me that Geometry has so many ways in which it can be used. What also amazes me is how they represent such complex meanings literally, conceptually, and meta-physically. I am dealing with how I am expressing my visual language. I have patterns that I deal with that aesthetically mean something to me, but I am trying to find out why. The first reading really helped me understand the structure/ non-structure metaphor of patterning in general, not just in reference to Islamic art.
I first needed to know what semiotics meant, it means:
the study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior; the analysis of systems of communication, as language, gestures or clothing.
I am communicating through the geometric shapes I create; I just don’t know what I am communicating. This reading helped me to look first understand that there is a projection, and there is what is projected. They are not always the same. Geometry is the language of propositions, and “to the proposition belongs everything which belongs to the projection: but not what is projected. So then I had to realize that geometries are looked at in 3 categories, imaging, kinetic and conceptual. I am mostly interested in the imaging and the conceptual. “Imaging geometry is the aesthetic of visual harmony based on the abstract geometrical patterns.” This is important for me to articulate to myself. It helps to understand that interpretation is very hard to distinguish, and yet it can still be “articulated” through the more concrete mathematical aspect of geometry, which they all share, as well as through the more conceptual artistic aesthetic of the shapes produced as well as the way in which they behave together as a composition. They “induce a perception process.”
The second reading helped me in my research as far as, making kinetic geometry more visual for me. I see how the decisions made as far as color juxtaposition, and linear rhythm allow for a space to be perceived in a particular way, to have specific meaning through ambiguity. What is difficult for people to grasp is the specificity of meaning in geometry when they are not used to communicating in that way. It can seem vague in meaning, but it isn’t. It follows a certain mathematical rubric, as well as communicates to each other in a definite way. That way being through color, line, movement, composition or variation and also architectural placement.

through the last week or two i have been searching for known ratios and standards within geometry which are all mathematical, i have found some ratios on circles within circles that was helpful.

All creation is the interweaving of cycles. From Galactic manifestation to subatomic waves, the universe is a vast spectrum of cycles. The cycles of birth and death, summer and winter, day and night, in-breath and out-breath weave the fabric of life. The ancient rishis (Yogi's who purified their body/minds and directly experienced the fundamental forces of creation) experienced the underlying unity of all cycles as the breath of Brahma and the ubiquitous periodicity of the universe as the rhythm of the life breath of a single harmonious Living Being.
-more on the golden ratio-




the above picture is the basic 4 constants of circle expansion.

The inexact but close coordination of the circle expansion /contraction ratios for the basic four (real domain) math constants that form a group from several different perspectives illustrate an example of a Gurdjieffian TI-DO shock or bridging energy in an octave process. The TI-DO shock fills the ascending TI interval to the next octaves’ fundamental
DO to exactitude, thus completing it. These constants were coordinated by ancient builders when they erected structures based on 2 orthogonal axes using the math relations of phi, the golden section, and two for the north-south axis math relations and e, base of the natural logarithms, and pi for the east-west axis. The PI Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt and the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, are two examples. I have also found that the B4C are coordinated by a rule of exponents such that a new constant is created which is the least-mean-square error optimized value of the number which is simultaneously a root of each of the 4 constants where the index of the root is very close to an integer of 3 digits or less. This optimized value I designate HC (Heleus’ constant) equal to 1.0060427, which is simultaneously about the 80th root of phi, the 115th root of 2, the 166th root of e, and the 190th root of pi. HC approximations and its integral and simple rational powers abound ubiquitously in tables of math constants ( such as Steve Finch’s). The basic 4 constants also coordinate by summing to just over a straight angle when represented as circle expansion/contraction ratios created by stacking tangent circles of that common ratio inside a characteristic angle and bringing all four angles to a common origin. When this is done, the sum exceeds a straight angle by about 3.57 degrees, which as shown here, characterizes a TI-DO shock.

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progress critique

I have refined my project quite a bit since last week. I have decided that my project will be a series based on how much i am learning about computer -based visual data, as well as a statement about what i feel is a very real danger in our society today. The strategies of Marketing.

I have decided to start with what i know. I had a lot of ideas for this one first piece. I had too many ideas. I wanted to use the Hollerith's Punch cards as the data. I wanted to use the different numbers that were punched out that mean what religion, what type of prisoner, how they "departed" all of this was categorized and cataloged by the Nazis with the help of IBM. However, I cannot find a lot of specific data on specific people. It is also difficult to convey the meaning to the audience through just a few words alone, much less visually. I would rather attempt it using specific data, if i can find it, and with vector graphics and a more technological form of visual data.

I found a website that has a list of Jews, its Schindler's List. at the top of the column of 5 digit #'s beside each name was the label "H No" which i can only assume must be the Hollerith number. so i have decided to use the punch card identification numbers as my data.

Schindler's List

I have also decided not to busy the piece with many different references to the numbers and the machines. I am going to copy, or rather get a print of, a Hollerith punch card. i found a web site that has the different models that IBM put out. I think this will serve quite nicely as my background.

The Hollerith Punch Cards

The way i have chosen to visually display this data is of my own design. I am creating these people as geometric, irregular shapes. The numbers will be represented using metrics. for Alexander Adler, H#: 69107, I have created a shape that has corresponding sides to his ID #. 6in. (or 3in.+ 3in.), 9in., 1in.(or 1in. circumference of a circle), 7 in.

project for portfolio and discussion

The progress that we made in our discussion of our ICA trip inspirations and the work that the visit inspired us to do, was great in seeing where everyone is coming from, what types of work that they like to do, what motivates them. My inspiration was Julie Mehretu's Dispersion piece. I liked the combination of man made marks with the visual data that she transferred into a markage with software programs, either Auto Cad or Adobe Illustrator, I found it to be exciting in our new age of technology. This age is becoming more and more a development into new realities and seeing new dimentia. It is important to never deny this development as people often do, its important to also make sure that the personality of the human touch is not lost either. I think that this piece makes that profound statement. My proect so far is to try and discover my identity within this new technological era, there is a copy of my identity somewhere in the world that i have never known about, that i never gave authorization to create. I want to discover that identity and reveal its individual marks, the patterns within the data (through the use of data mining), that make that identity mine, and no one elses. I also don't have the intention of letting my unknown identity float away with time, I intend to capure it back for myself, i intend to touch it with my human hands, to personalize it. Then, it will become a part of me again, one that I know and understand and can hopefully come to terms with.

This process will require me to learn much about new software programs, like illustrator to create vector graphics, and SQL Server 2005 to data mine the information. It will also be very difficult to find all of that information, all of the information that private marketing firms and the government has on me.