Gif it up already

I love bad puns. Have I ever mentioned that? Well now you know. Bad puns = good things. Speaking of things that are so bad that they're good, I've made an interesting assortment of .gifs over the years that could  fit the description.

My love for .gifs spawned a while back when I first started using tumblr during my freshman year of high school. Back then I really loved photoshopping simple little graphics with song lyrics on them, partly because it got me a lot of attention and followers, and partly because, you know, art. Even though it was stupid art. So I did that for awhile before I thought, hey you know what people would really like? You know what would maximize the hipster rating of my silly images of song lyrics? If I made animated silly things of song lyrics!!!!!!

1. The Smiths 2. Bright Eyes

Eventually I moved away from animating text to animating images. I was drawn to that type of hipster-ironic-girly-psychedelic aesthetic. I don't really know how else to describe it. 

It wasn't until college that I started thinking about the medium and about the .gif's place in my art practice. I like how it is an exclusively web based medium. You can't put a .gif in a museum, for instance. I mean, I guess you could but it sounds very silly. At that time I was also thinking about being a teenager in the suburbs, and how creating .gifs - a sometimes very tedious process, since I animate frame-by-frame - was something I did to kill the boredom accumulated from living in such a sleepy, small city. That led to the creation of these

I really like how evil and wormy these two (three?) characters look, and I think the animation is pretty mesmerizing too. I like to think that I was like these things when I was a teen (... I'm still a teen?). I had like really evil thoughts, loved fantasizing about revenge, but I was perceived as a sweet little girl. And I really like that contradiction. I'm glad I found these things! I kind of want to do more work with them. 

Anyways yeah.... That's all I got for today. I should go back to finishing my essay. Love <3

IDE poetry

I posted this on tumblr and got a decent response from it, so I think it's a sign that it works and it provokes feelings in people and that I should continue doing it.

I'm definitely not the first person to do poetry that is as visual as it is textual. And I'm not the first to use screengrabs to change the way text lays on a page. Part of my inspiration actually came from this piece I saw floating around the internet

Problem is, I have no idea who wrote this... so if someone else does, please let me know!

I was talking to one of my dearest friends, Ben, yesterday about writing poetry in a coding environment, and he mentioned another conceptual layer: code is always in the background. No one really knows what it looks like. It's hard to read and understand. By writing poetry in a programming environment, maybe I will subvert that. Give people an insight to what programming looks like. Write things in a plain language that is frank and easy to understand.

The next step is to write algorithmic poetry - poems that I don't write myself, but instead use an algorithm to write it for me, like this entry in the 2011 Mathematica One-Liner Challenge:

This line of code nearly generates adjective-noun pairs who are anagrams of one another. It's very dada-like and so creative! I really want to learn more programming so I can do something like that.

Anyways, that's it. Finals are coming up and I have two papers to finish so I shouldn't be blogging anyways :P Much love.

Bod y electric

I am creating this blog as a way of documenting my thought processes in regard to my art practice. As an artist who is interested in going public with her work, I think it's important to document those processes in a public place! Maybe create a forum to facilitate discussions, or a space where I could bounce ideas off other people and get feedback... at the very least, I'd contribute to some google searches.

The title pretty much says what I want my art to say (and is also a clever pun if I do say so myself). I want to talk about bodies. I want to talk about technology in relation to bodies, to people. I want to examine the gap between the virtual and the real and bridge it. And then I want to make it wider, tear it apart. I want to question technological determinism. I want to contribute to the marriage of art & technology. But most of all, I want my art to do something...

Most of this blog will document the self-learning I'm about to embark on over the summer in preparation for the special studies course my friends and I arranged over at UCSD. We have a group of extremely talented folks - programmers, artists, designers - who all have an interest in doing hands on work with technology such as augmented reality or programmable matter. In particular, I'm interested in designing electronics for fashion. I don't want my designs to be just aesthetically pleasing though, I want it to say something as well. I really admire Japanese designers such as Rei Kawakubo or Yohji Yamamoto precisely because their art says something. They design in such a cerebral and meditative way, and I want to do that with my art.

The graduate student who is helping us - also one of the coolest human beings ever - lent me her lab's extra Arduino Lilypad to play with over the summer, along with conductive thread and conductive fabric tape. This summer I'm planning on learning some basic electrical engineering stuff.... hopefully I'll be proficient enough to do some really great work next school year. I'll also be learning how to make clothes by hand. And how to operate a sewing machine. So not only will I have some new skills by the end of the summer, but some new clothes as well haha! This all sounds like a lot of work, but CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

Well. That's all for now, I think. If you're reading this, thanks for reading. Stick around, and I'll be sure to make it worth your time :)