MUTO by BLU

This is about as far from my own work as you can get, but is so creative that I feel the need to feature it here. I first watched this in one of my art classes in high school – I think it was AP Portfolio – and now, four plus years later, it is for sure still one of the coolest pieces I’ve ever seen.

While not a direct source of inspiration for me regarding content or media, it’s the idea of doing something new and creative, and fusing together things that are commonly done just not together (in Blu’s case, stop motion animation and graffiti) that inspires me. The scale is also fun. My work is always very portable and clean and handheld (think artist’s books and decks of cards) but Blu knows no limits and scales entire buildings.

Currently, I’m working with the “Missed Connections” notes that people leave on Craigslist, specifically, those for the five boroughs of New York City. As the largest city in the nation, there’s no telling what people will write on there. I’m extracting only those written about people seen on the trains since the extensive subway system is so unique to the city. I’m coding the notes I find by borough, time, date, gender looking for gender (m4m, m4w, w4m, w4w), age, and train line, and making faux metro cards for each person. Our senior seminar class show is being installed tomorrow(!) so pictures will hopefully be up soon.

However, my presentation of this data is a little lackluster and I’m trying to step out of the box a little more as I continue on with the semester. Blu could’ve just done the sides of buildings, but in MUTO and other works, he trapezes sidewalks, tunnels, alleys, cars, any and every type of surface. His style doesn’t change, but he pushes it to a new level. I know my style will always be meticulous and pretty clean-cut, which I’m finally okay with, but doing strictly metro cards is a little blah and hopefully as I move forward, I can channel my inner BLU.

design and the elastic mind.

This is just too much inspiration for me to handle. Especially the “mapping” and “harvesting the internet” collections.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/index.html

 

i want you to want me.

This may very well be the most ingenious project I have ever seen, and is totally and completely up my alley.

“I Want You To Want Me aims to be a mirror, in which people see reflections of themselves as they glimpse the lives of others.” – Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar, February, 2008

I Want You To Want Me pulls data collected from online dating sites and organizes it all into five major movements:

1. Who I Am (“I am…”)
2. What I Want (“I am looking for…”)
3. Snippets: includes Openers (opening line of profile), Closers (closing line of profile), Taglines (subject line)
4. Matchmaker (pairs people based on an algorithm applied to their profile descriptions)
5. Breakdowns (most popular taglines)

On a 56″ high-resolution touch screen, viewers are invited to touch any of the hundreds of floating balloons that represent the dating profiles found online, each of which encapsulates a 3d silhouette. The balloons themselves are coded as well: blue is male, pink is female, brighter is younger, darker is older. Touching a balloon exposes the text extracted from that person’s dating profile in a thought bubble overhead, and touching it a second time pops it.

Each person and movement of this installation is unique and distinct, yet everything fits seamlessly together in the collaborative environment Harris and Kamvar have created. The varying movements of the balloons create dynamic constellations that allow them to float, spin, meet, and burst. It as if each silhouette is a character stuck in this intricately coordinated video game, but the thing is, we are those characters and that video game is the online world we have constructed for ourselves – one that we are now reliving and replaying in the third person through the installation. The combination of surrogate authorship, viewer participation, connection between strangers, virtual reality, archiving & organization of data, and the poignant nature of the ever popular theme of love all make this a solid, smart, timely piece.

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Minus the digital technology aspect, I hope to base my show in this same principle of archiving, exploiting my own natural borderline-obsessive tendencies to order anything and everything. I am far from a neat freak in everyday activities, but when I do gather information or generate ideas, I compulsively create some sort of ordered system to make sense of it all. Though the ideas of love and relationships may be cliché, I think they’re so overdone for good reason – that is, their universal appeal and immortality – and there must be a space that I can carve out for myself to examine those themes in a unique way.

Straying slightly from my initial ideas of being purely inspired by the patients at Bellevue, the idea of connections between strangers still persists. Thinking back to that summer, I was as fascinated by the people of the city outside of the hospital walls as I was by the unpredictability and chaos of the ER. Essentially, I had just never seen so many people before in my life. As simple-minded as that sounds, I honestly believe I witnessed people of more subcultures and backgrounds on a ten-minute train ride than I did in the seventeen years I spent in my suburban hometown, where I consistently encountered the same rotation of familiar faces (neighbors, friends, teachers) at the same rotation of familiar places (school, grocery store, movie theater, McDonald’s).

The internet that Harris and Kamvar use as their reservoir of inspiration and material is even bigger than New York City, and maybe if I’m going to do something involving networks of people, I should go beyond my personal experiences and look there too.

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project’s website: http://iwantyoutowantme.org

nikki rosato

Brian: Trumbull, CT (2009)

Cut Map, 8″x10″

Couple: Boston, MA (2009)

Cut Map, 14″x10″

Untitled (2010)

Cut Map, 5.5″x9″

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Nikki Rosato received her BA in Studio Arts from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently working toward her MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

In one of her bodies of work, she cuts away the landmasses from maps, leaving only the winding streets, roads, and rivers to form hollow silhouettes. The unique lines of the cut maps mirror those that cover actual human bodies to create ambiguous yet compelling characters.

In some pieces, the silhouette of a single person is formed, one whose facial features are absent and whose identity is defined only by the remnants of the map Rosato has meticulously altered. I found myself diligently tracing the familiar highways and roads of “Brian: Trumbull, CT” to try to find my own hometown in Connecticut, generating a feeling of an immediate and oddly intimate connection to the now humanized silhouette. In other pieces, Rosato carves out multiple figures. The lines of the map define the borders for the distinct individuals and dictate the distance between them, yet simultaneously intertwine them through selective but unexplained routes.

I hope to explore this concept of constructing both distance and connection between people, from strangers to acquaintances to lovers. As an intern in the ER at a level I trauma center in the heart of New York City during the summer of 2009, I worked directly with patients of every type of population imaginable. The intense hospital environment highlighted the stark contrast between my personal experiences growing up in the quiet suburbs of CT and those patients who had come to the ER as their last hope, yet through conversations and close interactions over the course of working hundreds of hours, I discovered just as many similarities and connections. With rotations of new patients and cases every day, I began to question to what extent our perceptions of distances (geographic, socioeconomic, racial, emotional) between people are accurate or valid, and to what extent we can bridge them, both consciously and subconsciously.

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artist’s website: http://www.nikkirosato.com

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All images posted with permission of Nikki Rosato.