Week 1: “ Art in the Age of Digital Distribution by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, from New Media Art”
By: Dziedzom A. Bansah
While reading the Art in the Age of Digital Distribution by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, from New Media Art, many artists caught my attention. One artist that caught my attention was Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon artwork. Shu Lea Cheang is an artist who works in film, video, installation and web spaces. Her famous artwork, Brandon is a web project that uses the internet as a means to explore and tell Brandon Teena’s tragic story. Brandon Teena was a transgender male who was raped and murdered in Nebraska in 1993. The artwork depicts different images of “disembodied human form, once-live chat rooms on the subject of crime and punishment, and graphic moving images in order to illuminate the wide-reaching effect of Brandon’s life and death” and makes the viewer question human sexuality and it’s effect in society. Another project, which she worked on was her film Fresh Kill, made in 1994 about the issues of gay rights, environmentalism and the government intruding in family driven narratives. The film was screened at the Berlin Film festival and Whitney Biennial, New York. Shu Lea’s projects are important because they represent people’s sexuality, especially depicting gay rights. Her projects shows how society should be accepting of people’s sexuality.
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/shu-lea-cheang
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/15337
Ken Goldberg is an artist and a professor at University of California-Berkeley. he and his students investigate robotics, automation, art and social media. Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana created the telegarden in 1995. It was an art project that allows the users to see and interact with a remote garden filled with living plants. The users can plant, water and monitor the progress of their plants using a robotic arm. Infiltrate is another artwork by Ken Goldberg, Pietro Perona, John Bender, Ilan Lobel and Karl Chen. Infiltrate is a rectangular fish tank, filled with 6 koi fish, that sits on a platform in the center of a room a spotlight. 
There is a video projector that shows the worldview from the fish’s perspective. Ken Goldberg likes making artwork based on nature, as shown with his two artwork of telegarden and infiltrate. Both these artworks are important because they depict to people how nature is in the sense of growing plants and also seeing the world through the eyes of a fish. http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/art/infiltrate/