Homework #1

I am very excited about starting my third Blogger blog for my new media class with Dr. Richard Jochum! I am curious about everything, so I am interested in trying out new technologies to experiment with different possibilities to create something that is meaningful to my growth as an artist and a teacher in training. I am mostly a painter, but I have used computer and mobile devices to aid my artistic practice-- for researching ideas, taking pictures, and making sketches and digital drawings. From this class, I am most excited about using broad scope of current art and design software to further the possibilities in creating a world (still in development), which I am developing for my personal project.

When I think of an artist who works with new media, I immediately think of Olafur Eliasson. I encountered his work when I visited Germany in 2011, and I was blown away by his work. I love how he is able to conjure up a different sense of psychological space through his body-centered experiential installations. In an interview for the GOOD blogazine (http://magazine.good.is/features/berlin-based-artist-olafur-eliasson-doesn-t-just-create-art--he-deploys-it), Eliasson reveals his creative process:

A work of art is never something static. It's always something on the move and in a process. The process starts with an idea, or a thought, but having an idea is not making a work of art. The creativity and the quality of how it touches the work and transforms our idea, our thinking into doing. How do I suddenly start to make a model? Should I paint it red? Should I scale it up? Should I push it into the context? Should I integrate the context in a more productive way? Should I involve more scientists? and all these steps essentially represent creative choices. And it is within these creative choices that the creative idea gains its potential by touching the world. Deciding whether to make it red is not creative, but to see what role does making it red mean to the world, and how does that produce the work, and how does that work influence the idea of red--this is where the creativity, I think, is to be found.

Of course, the creative process for every artist is uniquely their own, but there is also something to learn for all of them. However, one thing that I keep finding about all true artists is that they never stop questioning. Question leads to another question, which leads to more questions. And I think that is the beauty of making art with any kind of medium that he or she chooses.

As for an institution that primarily exhibits new media artists, I think of the New Museum in the Lower East Side. Founded in 1977, the New Museum began with a daring vision to devote on spreading contemporary art when there was no other museum or gallery on the same page. Contemporary itself requires a daring personal vision, and I am grateful for the founder Marcia Tucker for paving the way for artists to gain opportunities to exhibit their works.

Experiencing Carsten Holler's amusement park themed exhibition a couple years ago was awesome. Contemporary art is hard to define these days, but I respect the museum's direction. It has been very "new media" and conceptual for the past few years, but they also recently had the Chris Ofili exhibition, so I assume that they accommodate all kind of art--including traditional media art.

While the New Museum has a short history, it has been a pioneer in advancing and promoting new ideas for the general public. Foremost, the New Museum is the first museum to lead a museum-led incubator that combines entrepreneurial support and its stimulating environment to create a creative community for artists of all genres to develop products, value systems, and hybrid networks. This incubator only began last year, so I am curious to see what happens when the museum launches the IDEAS CITY festival in a few months.