Recycled Art

Green Turtle

Status - Endangered

The green sea turtles, which inhabit the oceans near Africa, the Galapagos, Indonesia, and other tropical oceans worldwide, are among the largest turtles in the world. They can grow to be upwards of 700 pounds and have a lifespan of over 80 years.  Unlike most other sea turtles, green turtles are herbivorous, feeding mostly on seagrass.  Tens of thousands are hunted each year for their meat and eggs, and thousands more are caught and killed in fishing nets.  Additionally, human activity near beaches threatens the turtles’ nesting grounds.  Since the early 80’s, numerous conservation efforts have tried to protect and repopulate the green turtles, however the population is still in decline.

Assemblage

3D Figure

Evolution

In this particular future, humans have created the technology to upload their consciousness into robots.  People are able to live their life as a robot, retaining only their thoughts and personality, while their physical body lies dormant, linked to the machines.  After years of being mass produced in factories, these robots are affordable for almost anyone. Consumerism still exists fifty years from now, although people want to accessorize their robot selves instead of their actual body.  Attachments of all sorts can be built onto the figure, ranging from garden hoses to weapons.  Clothes fitted for normal humans are still used by robots.  The wealthy tend to wear suits and formal wear, while the lower class prefer their default exoskeleton.  Despite this new stage of human evolution, society continues to function normally, though some would argue that this utopia leads humanity down a dangerous and immoral path.  Although this technological singularity has created a new vehicle that the mind can inhabit, it remains to be seen whether these robots will change the meaning of what it means to be human.

#4

“If You Build It” is a documentary about two artists/architects who start a high school class in a small town with the goal of improving the community and teaching kids design skills.  The school district decides to not pay them to teach the class and only give them a small budget, which although later in that year they upped the budget slightly, they still never paid them as teachers.  The kids they taught had no idea what the class was about at first, and because of this, the movie does a good job of showing the kids’ grown, both in skill and attitude towards the class.  The projects start out simple with the students learning basic building and designing skills and soon after build their own chicken coops.  The coop project was a really great idea by the teachers because, while it not only tests and builds upon the kids skills, it also serves a practical purpose.  The school is in a rural area, so many of the kids’ families own chickens.  The film shows some of these new coops being used after the project.  The main project for the class illustrates the intent of the teachers to improve the local community.  Each student was to submit a design for a structure that would serve as a local farmers marker, and the winning design would be built to scale and used by the residents of the town.  Because of time constraints and money issues, the building doesn’t get built before the school year ends, but some time after the two teachers and some of the students are able to finish.  The film ends by showing the farmers market still in use some time after the teachers leave to a new and more fiscally prosperous job in the bay area.  Overall, this documentary does a great job of showing how art can be used to make the community a better place and improve the lives of people, whether or not they were involved.  While the fact that the teachers weren’t getting paid may have been overused to build sympathy and respect, it wasn’t necessary because their passion to their craft and devotion to the kids and their projects was pretty spectacular.

3

Bodymaps is a collaboration between cellist Jeffrey Ziegler, composer Paola Prestini, and Erika Harrsch.  This concert featured not only Bodymaps, but four other pieces as well.  The first, Listen Quiet, is also a collaboration between Harrsch, who created the visuals that played on a large screen behind the cellist, and Prestini who wrote the music.  The video was of two people touching and kissing each other with a bunch of colors going on.  It complimented the music which had an ethereal and drone like quality to it.  The next three pieces performed by Ziegler were works by John Zorn, Philip Glass, and Perez Santiago.  Bodymaps was the last piece of the program and the featured work.  Once again, a video created by Harrsch accompanied the music.  This piece was very different from Listen Quiet; it was faster paced, more virtuosic on Ziegler’s part, which also translated to  faster paced visuals, and it had a more prominent backing track.  Much of the video featured body parts into animals or bursting into colors and shapes in a somewhat psychedelic manner.  The music would alternate between slower, drawn out passages and faster, technical parts that showed off Ziegler’s skill.  As with Listen Quiet, the music and visuals perfectly complimented one another, although at times I found myself paying more attention to the video and letting the music run in the background, although I don’t think that’s because the score wasn’t interesting.  After the performance, the three answered questions from the audience and talked about the creation of this piece and their other collaborations.  Overall, the program was very well paced and Bodymaps was a great example of an excellent multidisciplinary piece.

Lecture 2

The second lecture was Steve Lambert’s.  He began by having everyone close their eyes and imagine having a superpower, and what they would do with that power.  He said he would return to this later and started talking about his work.  He has a very strong sense of humor that clearly manifests itself in his work, such as in his first project that he talked about in which he drove around with a marquee sign and took pictures of it in unusual places.  This, for him, was more of a way to have fun than to make serious art.  Not all of his art is so lighthearted though.  The fake newspaper that he worked on with the Yes Men was a political statement against the Iraq war.  The papers were distributed in a way that if a person picked one up without prior knowledge, they would probably believe it at first, and many did as shown in a video.  The newspapers has probably attracted more widespread attention than any of his other projects because of the absurdity and realistic presentation.  Another project of his that was a big part of his lecture was his capitalism sign.  A billboard that says ‘Does capitalism work for you?’ prompts people to push either a yes or no button.  A video showed people’s reactions to and reasons for choosing an answer.  This was yet another political statement that seemed to want to make people question their relationship with the government and the problems it may cause, even though there isn’t really anything they can do about it.  Finally, he returned to the superpowers question that he started off with.  He said that his superpower was art, and that it gives him the ability to influence people’s thoughts.  His work definitely seems like it has the intent to change people’s minds on certain topics and the potential to do so.

Lecture 1

Erika Harrsch began by talking about her butterflies project.  Photographs of different butterflies from around the world were put in display cases as real butterflies would be, but the body of the animal was replaced with a vagina of a woman who’s from the same part of the world as that particular butterfly.  She worked with an entomologist to ensure that the butterflies were represented accurately and that they came from the same area as the women.  As shown by this project, her art is very research based.  She mentioned that makes art like a scientist in that she tries to be an expert on the subject, or at least work with someone who is.  This butterfly project is meant to deal with themes of migration and identity, both of which are present in many of her other works as well.  Another of her projects that is identity based is her monarch passport project.  This involved making realistic passports for monarch butterflies that, during their migration, cross borders into more than one country.  She presented this project by setting up a fake immigration office near the US-Mexico border and handing them out.   While many of her works have a quasi playful tone to them, this fake passport office was more mean than anything.  For someone who wants to cross into the US illegally looking for a better life, or has family who wants to, seeing an immigration office handing out passports would like like a godsend, but after finding out that it’s all a ruse, I’m sure some would be disappointed or angry.