Collage!

Here's a collage of images that I made for my website about Baltimore. This is a list of the word associations I have for some of these images, and the city in general: Believe, hypocricy, 'Boh, Hampden, Christmas, Hon, Baltimorese, Pink Flamingoes, John Waters, Art, drag queens, fabulous, the book thing, redemption, homeless, the block, debauchery, heroin, death, crime.

website

I made my first website! Hopefully my final project will end up being better than this, but hey it's a start.

B-mo'

I plan on creating a parody site based on the city of Baltimore. After perusing the official Baltimore site, I realized how boring the city must seem to people who haven't spent much time there. There is a lot of emphasis on touristy things like the inner harbor, but nothing about what Baltimore is really all about. My site will focus on topics like crime, drug use, free books, drag queens, the "Believe" campaign, christmas lights, and The Block.

http://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/
http://www.baltimore.org/
http://www.christmasstreet.com/index2.html
http://www.ci.baltimore.md.us/believe/press.html
http://www.bookthing.org/
http://www.mvcd.org/

oyl

The website entitled "Real Costs" by Michael Mandiberg is an interesting project, which acts as an interesting social and political commentary about consumerism in America. The age of the internet is all about instantaneous gratification, having the world at your beck and call whenever you please. With the advent of online-shopping, we have the capacity to comparison shop more efficiently than ever before. Since the internet is a constantly-changing entity, it provides the only possible venue for this type of art installation to work. The monetary conversion used in the program is based on the actual costs of oil at the time. Therefore, without a constantly changing program such as the internet, the effect of the real-time conversion would be lost. Also, the project is strengthened by the fact that the internet is a relatively "green" entity, in that it doesn't consume any paper products or oil to generate the massive amounts of information available on the web. The only energy consumption involved with the internet is that which is needed to connect a computer to it. However, since there are various ways of getting sustainable energy for the electricity needed to connect to the internet, it could theoretically be a totally green institution/entity/etc.
This artwork fits into Sterling's description of the internet because a project like this could only survive on such a relatively unregulated system. Although the project is very benign in practice, it is quite subversive in nature. The idea of the application is to get people to start thinking about their own oil consumption, and on a larger scale how much we as a nation tend to take for granted our fossil fuels. It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of thinking that our government would like to erradicate, keeping our CO₂ emissions far out of the minds of most Americans. I think that an even more effective use of this program would be to calculate the amount of oil that actually goes into the production of the goods in question, including the manufacturing process and transportation. This would probably be a much more extensive application, though, and somewhat unrealistic given that more than a simple calculation would be needed.

Postcard Proposal

my two postcards are going to create a relationship between edgar allen poe and Divine. The postcard on the left will show the scene from poe's The Raven, and the heart from The Tell-tale Heart will be on the armchair. In the right postcard, the image of Divine from the cover of Pink Flamingos will be shooting the heart in the other postcard. It's as if Divine is the one killing the old man in The Tell-Tale heart. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to find a decent picture of Divine, but I might have to alter the image on the other postcard because I don't know if I'll be able to get the right kind of images that I'm looking for.

Dolphin Brains

I entered a contest on worth1000 called "Animal Zombies." Considering the fact that it's my first time ever using photoshop, I don't think I did too bad. You can vote for it here! Anyway, here it is:

right now write now (William Burroughs' article)

Although Burroughs' article about cut-ups seems at first to only describe an artistic movement, you can begin to see after reading for awhile that the article itself is art. One of my favorite passages in the article is "Greek philosophers assumed logically that an object twice as heavy as another object would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to push the two objects off the table and see how they fall. Cut the words and see how they fall." I also appreciate Burroughs' assertion that "all writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read hear overheard." This reminds me a lot of the remixing article we read earlier in the semester, as it relates to the "history of sound" used as a library for music; poetry and prose are nothing more than remixes, taking samples from the "history of words." I do have a question about this article, though. It seems to me that we have come up with words and language throughout the history of our existence in order to be able to convey emotion and thought to each other. Therefore, by randomly cutting and pasting words into new artforms, is there really any meaning to the piece besides the fact that it is a cut-up? If the words and sentences no longer mean anything, then how can the artwork as a whole mean anything?