New Media Art- Week 1 post
After reading Art in the Age of Digital Distribution, the two artists that caught my eye were Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Olia Lialina. Jonah Brucker-Cohen caught my attention when I read about how he was one of many artists that created works that involved audience participation. One of his most recent works is “Please Don’t Like This” made in 2015, it is a social experiment that tests a person’s will to like or not like something. The metric count is actually the number of people who failed the experiment, even though they were asked to like it, the number actually represents the amount of people who lack self-control. I thought this was an interesting concept because as a person who uses social media, likes to me, are a form of communication that let other people know your interests and bring more attention to different sources of news. People are constantly compelled to like things even though a post may hold no purpose what so ever, and the fact that this experiment tests the idea of what a like can truly mean goes against societies willingness to like what ever they see on social media.
For my second artist I chose Olia Lialina, an internet artist, who is also a well known experimental film and video critic. One of her most famous works, which was discussed in the article, is called “My boyfriend came back from the war”. It is an interactive Web page that shows the audience a series of images and text through a series of frames and the story unfolds through the audiences actions. Another of her famous works is a web comic she made called “Zombie and Mummy”,
which was designed to be a sub par series of these two characters. There are 18 different stories of Zombie and Mummy are displayed with titles of animated font and the number of the comic. I enjoy this concept because usually illustrators and designers create comics with the intention of creating a story with a beginning, climax, and end, but the intention of this piece is to create a comic that gains popularity even though it does not have an interesting story. People spend so much time trying to create interesting stories and illustrations to go along with it, to hopefully build popularity, and Zombie and Mummy was made with that opposite intent. This just goes to show you how easy it can be to gain recognition for your work even without putting much effort into the process of it, or atleast making it look that way.
