Jennifer Schmidt
Jennifer Schmidt came to the University of Nevada Reno and gave a lecture about her work during the last four years. While she had relatively strong concepts, and interesting work - I must admit she may have been the worst presenter I have ever seen. She consistently read long blocks of text from her artist statements to speak about the work. It is my strong opinion as an artist that if you REALLY know your work, you are able to talk about it, not read about. At the end of her presentation, we were able to ask her questions. I asked Ms. Schmidt the origins of one of her materials. She did not know what it was called, furthering my belief that she doesn't know her work, and that she is making mostly from instinct.
Aside from her lack luster presentation skills, I really enjoyed a few of her pieces. In particular, 'Psychedelic Swatch', and a collaborative piece she worked on titled 'Wish You Were Here.' Psychedelic Swatch was a more or less an animated .gif file made from images of fabric swatches she made while she was an artist in resident in the south. This piece was colorful and fast, as it's name implies, each image of fabric was shown for a thirtieth of a second. It was disorienting in a really mesmerizing, and beautiful, way. With 'Wish You Were Here,' Schmidt and a team of artists took a postcard turnstile rack and filled it with greeting cards that could have a message recorded on them. Participants would leave messages for the participants that had not yet gotten to the work. When the second wave of participants engages with the cards on the turnstile they hear the message the first wave played, and have the option of erasing it or leaving it.
One of her better talking points stemmed from her talking about interactivity in the art world and how we are only now starting to define how to negotiate them. It comes back to a question of play, do you want to try the game or not? And how long do you want to participate for? The questions we ask ourselves when designing what the interface may be for one of these interactive works must first start with, "would I want to do this?"
Lastly, I found it relatively difficult to find a connective thread between one project and the next. Often you see multimedia artists play around with different media, but there is a conceptual tie that links the bodies of work all together. She seemed to skip about, not carrying a conceptual tie with her.
Eddo Stern
One of my favorite, and most articulate, lecturers from the Spring 2010 was Eddo Stern. He creates various physical objects that interact with people and the internet, and internet based communities. Often with net art the viewer/participant is bombarded with images and color and bright glittery text. In his case, the participants probably didn't even realize that they were participants. Stern embedded himself into the US Army's online gaming platform and waited for other players to engage him before completing an automated performance for those that approached him. His work is wrought with political undertones, but I believe he is facing them in an almost whimsical way.
Every material an artist chooses speaks to what tone the work will set, well Stern used Lego's in some of his sculptural case mods. He is able to comment on the silly things we do as a counterculture of digital nerds and take it to the extreme. Does a computer need to have a modified case to look like an aircraft carrier? Probably not, but Stern believed that it can be turned into an art object, a mechanical ready-made.
Another whimsical attitude in his work came from some of his appropriation of figures from Role Playing Games, or the RPG community. He used the avatars of character from Everquest, World of Warcraft and others to make moving sculptures, and projected 2D time-based imagery. Normally these characters would not be taken so light heartedly, but Stern paired them with Led Zeppelin MIDI music, or had the characters looping in silly actions.
His lecture format was different than any I had ever experienced before, he encouraged the audience to ask questions as we went. This was very effective, often I feel like I have questions that I forget by the end of the lecture. The only problem I had with this format was that Stern probably got more questions than he was expecting, and didn't know when to cap them - he didn't really get to finish his presentation because of that.