artintelligence

I would like to draw your attention to a new website for the Kikit Visuosonic project http://www.visuosonic.org/  I was involved with KikitVisuosonic in its early stages and hence have some particular insight into its mission. Two artists are involved: Maurice Owen  an Russell Richards. As with most significant art the founding idea was quite simple, to create an interaction between sound and interactive digital visualisation. From the beginning, however, this simple notion contained within itself the longstanding goal of attaining a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art. (more…)

Humanity’s self-image was redefined in the modern era not by art but by the mass medium of photography. Take for example the photograph from the American Civil War reproduced here (click image left). Previously artists had mythologized war as heroic due to the fact that their patrons were the ones who waged the wars. But the photographs of carnage during the American Civil War (1861-65) represent one of the first occasions when the general population could begin to see war and human behaviour from a much more pragmatic and demythologised perspective.

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The term ”quiddity” as used in art theoretical writing refers an aesthetic that places emphasis upon the objecthood, or objectness of the work of art rather than its representational or metaphorical aspect. Such emphasis is principally associated with American minimal art which was presaged by Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting 1951 (artintelligence) and began in earnest with Frank Stella’s black paintings in the late 1950s. Stella’s black paintings were self-referential, they were  paintings about painting. In this sense they paralleled the work of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns who foregrounded the materiality of painting.  There is also a family resemblance between the semiotic blankness of John’s American flag paintings and Stella’s use of black stripes.

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