Artist11: Kit Webster

 

Kit Webster, in this Hugo Create article, describes himself as an audiovisual artist, new-media artist and light sculptor. He uses technology heavily, making it a vital part of his art identity. His often large installations employ LEDs and LCD screens running various visual programs and patterns along with sounds and music. In the video below, Webster's Prismatica installation is demonstrated, with a repeating visual program running on an LCD TV with prisms distorting the image into fractals:

Much of Webster's work is focused on innovation and the future, pushing boundaries and using new tech in new ways to make new kind of art. In the article he says:


"I have visions about highly detailed sonic and visual environments that are presented within the gallery space. Imagine some of the incredible light shows you have seen at nightclubs involving lasers , lighting and video, Take this and focus more on color and geometric patterning.It would be almost like decoding the mathematics of the space."

He also discusses the role of science and analysis in his work. The cognitive process and exercise of analysis shows itself in his work, as Webster develops his understanding of light and space using his art. He even mentions how the gallery space felt, at times, felt more like a laboratory. Webster's interdisciplinary approach, reaching from many fields to create interesting and new forms of expression and communication, heralds a growing movement where people from all disciplines become more actively involved in creating art.

Artist10: Joshua Davis

Joshua Davis  is a graphic designer, programmer, web designer, and avid gardener. He was one of the first and most influential Flash artists. He refers to himself as a 'design technologist', using tech to push how he does art and what he creates. Here's a video of Davis explaining his life and work:

 In the video he discusses the computer as being purely a tool in his art. He specifically tries not to use the computer for inspiration, choosing instead to pull from his love of flora for the driving force behind much of his work. He takes flowers from his garden and scans them. Using what looks like Flash (and maybe some Processing), he writes a program which compiles and manipulates the images. He talks about letting the program run and playing with variables, not knowing what the result will exactly be. He lets the art run its course, allowing the finished piece to coalesce from his random tweeking.

Davis relies heavily on 'chaos' and chance to create many aspects of his art, letting programs run until he sees something he likes develop. This seemingly haphazard relinquishing of control is a rarity in programming. Often, the goal of the programmer is to conceptualize and control each minute detail and operation of a program, but Davis has specifically written his programs to work completely differently from this norm. He gives his programs only faint parameters that it stays within, allowing the code to work itself through, pulling from chaos something appealing to the human eye.

Artist9: Berndnaut Smilde

Berndaut Smilde is a photographer and installation artist. His work, always somewhat neat and tidy, is quite varied, as he makes sure to set each of his series apart from one another. He's made small models of the installations are being shown in and large sculptures made of air ducts. In his artist bio, it's explained that Smilde transitional spaces" in rooms drive much of his work, creating much of his art in these spaces - doorways, arches, etc. He finds value in the spaces that lie between other spaces, using them as analogies to understand the idea of a conceptual space between construction and deconstruction (or another such sets of opposites). Smilde, according to his website, does much of his work on site, within the "transitional space" of the particular piece, constructing and photographing installations in doorways and staircases in an attempt to understand the space.

One particularly interesting installation piece of Smilde's are his cloud installations. His process and concept are explained in this Washington Post article but, to sum up, he closely the controls humidity, temperature, etc in a space to create conditions conducive to sustaining puffy, white clouds indoors for a short period of time. The "clouds" are really fog machine puffs, which people at the exhibit can witness as he photographs the fog before it dissipates. Here's a video of a cloud-making exhibition:

Artist8: Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow is an artist obsessed with content. Commenting on the human condition and teaching his audience new concepts. Using science, math, philosophy, ethics and literature in his work, he builds a rich experience with his art and words. He disdains shallow and mindless tasks and has taken a personal vendetta against work possessing little or no content. He attempts to push boundaries, pushing those working in his medium as well as the medium itself. Jonathan Blow creates video games.

Many people don't consider video games a valid medium for artistic expression. They don't see the blossoming community of artist video game makers. With markets more often flooded with shallow games like Call of Duty, many games with something important to express go unnoticed by those uninitiated into the gaming world (I'm not necessarily criticizing 'shallow' video games here...I'm just stating a fact about trends and awareness). In his own blunt, sometimes narcissistic, often pretentious, and always engaging manner, Blow has taken up arms against this trend in the video game medium. Here's an interview where he addresses the issue. This is a good video of him discussing the human condition and and how game design can positively and negatively interact with this condition:

His game Braid, one of the most celebrated indie titles in gaming history, creates a memorable and engaging experience. The game centers around regret, human relationships, and, in particular, the concept of time. Each level is designed around some aspect of time, having the player learn to adapt to and exploit time to accomplish goals and progress, pushing the story and experience further. He's also working on a new game called The Witness, which is supposedly going to be equally as cerebral and engaging games in history. Blow is perhaps the most visible and well known video game creators who are also creating art. With his work, he's pushing video games toward becoming a known and accepted creative medium capable of making valid and momentous contributions to art.