While reading Art in the Age of Digital Distribution, I came across Hannah Hoch who was sort of a familiar name to me. Hannah Hoch was a dadaist who was one of the originators of photomontage. Photomontage involved gluing images onto paper and creating full images made out of cutouts. Hoch who was influenced by women’s rights, often depicted women in her work (mostly in the years 1926-1935), and who were a central theme for her work. Hoch found her source material for her photomontages in magazines, catalogues, newspapers and journals. Hoch clipped and rearranged these images into a chaotic yet carefully arranged composition that usually had a message. She metaphorically equipped herself with a kitchen knife referring to the stereotypical roles of women in society, in order to cut and compose her photomontages. Hoch often used images of gears and light bulbs to show that women were seen as machines to cook and clean just like in the image below. Throughout her compositions there are figures of women actors, athletes, dancers, and gymnasts, so part of the sub text in her work were the “new roles” of women in post war Germany.
The second artist I chose to research about is Michael Mandiberg. Mandiberg is an artist, designer, scholar, and programmer. He creates conceptual art projects, design objects, and publications about environmental impact. Mandiberg usually uses laser cut out letters to present a message in his art. Mandiberg is also the creator of the Firefox plugin that focuses on the real environmental cost of a global economy on TheRealCosts.com. This type of art project brings information to the viewer through data visualization to help better understand the issue. The Real Costs is one of Mandibergs examples of “internet art.” The project created in April 2007, calculates the distance between the two points that you traveled and inserts emissions data into travel related websites (ex. Orbitz.com, Delta.com). The objective of the Real Costs is to bring awareness of the environmental impact of certain choices made by the everyday internet user. By presenting this environmental information to the place where the decisions are being made, it will hopefully impact the viewer. The plugin pulls each flight information from the page and calculates the CO2 produced just like in the image below.
