Art Event: Natalie Jeremijenko

On November 19, Natalie Jeremijenko came to the DPC to promote her art and environmental awareness.  Natalie Jeremijenko is an art professor from NYU that combines art and engineering to create projects that promote environmental awareness.  She founded the Environmental Health Clinic, a place where people can come and express their environmental concerns and develop a locally optimized solution.  The sentiments behind the Environmental Health Clinic were to create an external and shared version of health between people and the environment.

Past projects of Jeremijenko include bird perches that trigger recorded messages when birds land on them.  The messages are symbiotic, telling people to feed and respect the birds.  She has also organized biochard samba parties, where people get together and burn papers to create biochard, which sequesters carbon from the atmosphere.  Among other projects, she has been part of the creation of the butterfly bridge, which helps butterflies follow flower to flower by planting flowers and hooking them to power-line poles.

The Butterfly Bridge, from environmentalhealthclinic.net

My favorite project of hers is the amphibious architecture she created in the rivers of New York City.  This is made up of buoys with sensors that trigger LED lights to turn on when fish swim under them.  This reminds the people in the city that fish actually live in those rivers.  A phone app also allows people to feed the fish through the buoys, which will in turn cause more fish to swim under the buoy sensors.  This is an example of the environmental reciprocity that is Jeremijenko's goal.  She wants people to be able to work together with the environment and the animals within it to benefit both sides.

Amphibeous Architecture, from Animal Architecture. Org

She promotes city farming through agbags and vertical farming on the sides of buildings.  To prevent competition with rural farmers, Jermijenko advertises the uses of flowers in cooking.  By growing flowers in cities, they will be able to filter the air and not raise food prices.  The flower petals are high in nutrients when they are first plucked and can be used in a variety of dishes, including black pansy vodka.

Jermijenko uses her art to advertise her hope that we can save the environment through not radical change, but simple deviations to our normal lifestyle.  She wants to make self-interests of one person into a collective interest of a community.  The Environmental Health Clinic is in communication with other similar organizations throughout the world, and even though they all have different problems, they can use similar experiments that locally make sense yet can develop features that can be shared to other places.  Jermijenko works forward to create in her audience a shared public memory of a possible future, that will come true if we all work together for a reciprocal relationship with nature.

George English Web Design

Dark Gallery, from g30dud3's DeviantArt page

George English is a web designer from the United Kingdom.  Known as g30dud3 on DeviantArt, English posts images of his web layouts.  Not much personal information is shown about him and I am unsure if the designs are actually part of uploaded websites.  He also creates traditional artwork with oil pastel and pencil, focusing primarily on landscapes and nature, such as flowers.  His photography likewise revolves around scenery, either man-made places or natural forms, such as plant life.

DesignCritique Submission, from g30dud3's DeviantArt page

The web designs are visually pleasing and easy to navigate because of their simplicity.  His design, Dark Gallery is simple with four main links to main categories within the site:  Home, About Me, Gallery, and Contact.  The main focus of the website is a single image, probably taken by George English himself, and a textured background.

His other work, DesignCritique Submission, contains more content but still maintains a streamlined appearance.  This is possible through the use of small thumbnails and organized columns of information.  The layout is cut into two main columns, one that is 3/4 of the whole screen, containing the majority of the text.  The smaller column contains the ads, which are organized in a small, square order, and the About and Team information.  The simple banners color block the page, making it visually stimulating without being overwhelming.  The color choices are mostly similar colors, black and two shades of blue, making the smaller examples of pink and orange stand out from the rest of the screen.

With my limited experience with web design, it is hard to comment on what could be executed better.  The designs are successful because of their simplicity while maintaining interest in the viewer.  The first design, Dark Gallery, does so with its gorgeous photography being placed in primary focus.  The second design, which was made for a Design Critique Contest, maintains interest with its color blocking techniques and simplicity itself.  These designs are easy on the eyes and flow well, making them successful.

Further Website Progress

I added another story to the website.  The overall appearance still needs work.
Interactive Storybook

Project 3 Progress

Here is the link to what I have so far of my web design project:
Interactive Storybook

So far, I've connected all the links to the main story.  I started illustrations to add to the story and am also thinking of a second text.  The website itself does not look very interesting yet and that is one of the most important things I need to work on.

Art Event: The Beehive Collective

Detail image from Mesoamerica Resiste
from the Beehive Collective website

On November 12, the Beehive Collective came to the Boyden Gallery to speak about their recent work, Mesoamerica Resiste.  The Bee Hive Collective is a group of artists based in Maine that create intricate prints made of didactic imagery, creating modern day visual fables.  Their art depicts cultural and political issues that are paramount in the world today.

In creating these works, the artists use real life examples from people that encountered the depicted issues first hand, traveling to other countries to hear from rural communities.  Mesoamerica Resiste depicts the ongoing colonization of Mesoamerica, from the arrival of Europeans to the corporate take over that is facing them today.  The front of the work is called Plan Mesoamerica, which is a twist on a cartographer's map from when the Europeans were colonizing Mesoamerica.  On the outskirts of the map, where depictions of the rulers of the expanding country would have been depicted, the artists created representational forms for the economic colonizers, such as NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, which is depicted as a Judge with scales of injustice for siding with corporations at the expense of people and communities.

The World Trade Organization, depicted as a Judge
From the Behance page of Nathan Vieland, one of the inkers of the Beehive Collective

 The poster opens up to find another depiction, showing communities as animals fighting against the consumerist expansion.  These images are depictions of some of the many stories that the Beehive Collective recieved when they traveled Mesoamerica, asking the stories of individuals and communities.  Swirling speech scrolls are adapted from Aztec cultural roots, swirling together and flowing throughout the piece, allowing the animals to fight back against the technological forces.  An example of the adaptation of speech scrolls is included within the first detail image.

Some scenes are taken more literally than others, including the scene of the invading army being physically pushed back from a snail.  This was based off of a picture of a woman pushing back the shoulders of a police officer forcing their town to relocate.

Detail of Mesoamerica Resiste,
from Nathan Vieland's Behance page

This work took the Beehive Collective nine years to complete.  It was a collaborative piece entirely drawn and inked by hand before being scanned to create prints, blowing the image up to four times it's original size.  The Collective uses their prints as learning materials and take them with them when visiting schools and other outreach programs.  They enjoy the reproducible quality of their work, as when presenting to an age group too young to fully understand, they let the children color the poster and interact with it in that way.

Their presentation of their work was fascinating and made the audience think about what exactly is "free trade" and what the effects of it were.  Their depiction of activist artwork is captivating and really causes the message to sink in.  At first glance, their art style is overwhelming, but upon closer look, the many details are intriguing and make the audience want to delve into the stories that the pieces tell.  I look forward to seeing the Beehive Collective's future works.

Project 2

Identify Yourself: To Chat

Identify Yourself, an article by Krystal South, delves into the idea of how the internet plays a strong role on personal identity.  South follows her personal interaction with the internet, showing how she grew to become dependent on the constant feedback and connection to it.  As a generation, the majority of us are deeply intertwined in the internet, constantly searching for more information, new ways to interact with others, and new ways to express ourselves.

The section of her article that I found the most engaging was "To Chat," which focuses on how text chat has changed how we think and communicate with others.  We tend to think in ways that we can relate to plain text, wondering how we can make our thoughts a single Facebook status or Tweet.  Online text chats allow us to not only communicate with people that we would not ordinarily talk to in person but also allow us to real life friends in other ways.  Facebook allows me to "talk" to high school friends that have moved hours away to go to college and still feel somewhat connected to their lives and also provides me with a new way to communicate with people that I am physically close to, ranging from normal text to the new Pusheen cats in the chat box.

Image from pusheen.com

Chat also allows us to maintain a control over the conversation that we cannot have in real life.  If you have a conversation with someone in person and they make you upset or angry, they have the opportunity to notice this through your facial features, vocal tones, body language, language delivery, and other physical features.  In an online text chat, emotions are indiscernible, and a single sentence could be interpreted a variety of ways.  This can be both positive and negative to relating to other people, as if you're trying to remain calm, you don't have to reveal emotions that you think will jeopardize the conversation or make your relationship with someone awkward.  There have been several conversations that I have had over text chat because I knew if I said it any other way I would become too emotional and might strain the friendship I had with the person.  Yet at the same time, if you cannot understand someone's emotions, then it can be hard to connect to them, creating an emotional divide between the two of you.   Misunderstandings can also arise, as you might be perfectly calm, yet the other person reads your tone as angry and responds in what they see is appropriate to the situation.  Pure lines of text are highly influenced by the reader's personal emotion and sometimes you can read the same conversation in several different tones purely based on your emotion.  Long distance friendships put a strong emphasis on text chats, as they are much easier than phone calls and video chats, which are slightly more connecting than pure words.  Yet at the same time, chat can leave a person wanting, as these emotional interpretations are tiring and in many ways lesser to hearing the person's voice.  Sometimes though, that desire for control over the conversation, such as the ability to choose your words beforehand and reserving your emotion for only when you want it to obviously show, can make a text chat seem much easier and allow you to connect with someone when otherwise you have no courage to speak with them.  Finding the confidence to flirt may be easier in Facebook chat than in person, but it may also be more indirect and less personal.  The multitasking of the internet allows us to send many people a message at the same time or be reporting the whole conversation to a third party without the other person realizing, something that is difficult to do in face-to-face conversations, so sometimes text chat can seem highly impersonal.

Online chat seems to be a compromise between convenience and communication.  Chat allows a person to connect to many people over the world, yet it is difficult to connect to someone in exactly the same way that you would in person.  My mother, who grew up before these emotionless ways of communicating with others, will be the first person to tell me that important conversations should be face-to-face or at the very least over the phone.  Yet in many situations it simply seems easier to send a message via text or chat, most likely a reflection of our current absorption into internet culture.