Artist Statement – Kacie Loura
This website is a project that is playing with the idea of education and art. The idea is that it is a dynamic work of art as well as an education resource. The interface could be potentially user friendly, or just plain annoying depending on your perspective. The visual aspect of it is friendly. However the constant playing of flashy gifs could be seen as a flaw.
I don’t want to make the interface impossible to use, but it is a comment on the Aesthetic of Failure. The article entitled “The Aesthetics of Failure” by Kim Casone, mostly focuses on music. However, the theme of the article is about how the evolution and failure of technology has lead to artists embracing those failures. I have implanted this glitch/failure aesthetic into my website by using a picture with scratches and light leaks as the main photo. Then on top of this, the image is divided up into smaller sections, which are constantly glitching and twitching. This aesthetic brings the work to life, but it is a fry cry from traditional art.
I also took inspiration from Nick Briz’s work and the ‘In Between’ article by Domenico Quaranta. Nick Briz’s idea of being an educator within is art was really intriguing to me. All of his work has artistic intent, but it also has an underlying message to teach you something. His topics usually center around privacy, net neutrality, or other controversial topics. I took the basic idea of combining art and education by making a piece of art an educational resource for how to make the art itself.
The threejsplaygnd by Nick Briz is a great example of this. The work is interactive and allows you to play with the code in order to learn it. My website does not work exactly like this, but it gives you a interactive art piece that can we read backwards. By this I mean you can start from a finished piece and learn how to make it, or at least learn the tools on how to make something similar. I wanted to make something that was applicable to many people and many artists, not something that taught you how to make a very specific effect on a very specific picture.
The article ‘In Between’ speaks to this piece because there is a question of which part is the ‘art’. The whole website is art in itself. However, the picture as a whole could be viewed as an individual art piece; as well as each GIF could be seen as its own art piece. This makes the piece dynamic, and digital in nature. There is no physical element that could be printed and displayed in a traditional art gallery to encompass the whole piece. The piece must be interacted with, or at the minimum the piece must be displayed in an Internet browser to play correctly.
Works Cited
Briz, Nick. Nick Briz. Web. 7 December 2014. http://nickbriz.com
Briz, Nick. _playGnd. Web. 7 December 2014. http://threejsplaygnd.brangerbriz.net
Cascone, Kim. "Cascone, The Aesthetics of Failure." (n.d.): n. pag. Cascone, The Aesthetics of Failure. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.
Quaranta, Domenico. "In Between." Art and the Internet. London: Black Dog,
2013. 24-33. Print.