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.

Artist7: Andy Cavatorta

Andy Cavatorta is another one of those artists able to blur, if not outright ignore, boundaries between the arts and sciences. Educated at MIT, Cavatorta developed his eclectic art style, combining robotics, music composition, computer science, and sculpture. He is arelatively new artist, but his work at the MIT Media Lab has already gotten him a great deal of renown. His work caught the attention of musician Bjork. He ended up creating musical robots for her recent tour. Called 'Gravity Harps', Cavatorta and his team of engineers and sculptors assembled the harps and mounted them on a large frame. The harps, once mounted, swing back and forth like pendulums, using the gravity and mass to hit the note at the proper time. The thought and planning behind the piece - I consider it installation art - are set 45 degrees from one another along the axis of the horizontal pole on which they're mounted. Here's a video of a demonstration....

In a Make Magazine interview, Cavatorta discusses the elegance of letting gravity set the rhythm of the notes. I find this surrender of control, purposely allowing the physical world to have a direct and very visible hand in the creation of a piece, allows for a relaxing sort of commune with the physical forces around us - gravity, in this case. It seems like Cavatorta's intention was to let physics be the main actor instead of himself. Often the rules and limits of nature can feel constraining and claustrophobic, but the Gravity Harps demonstrate this regularity in nature not as limits but as tools for creation. 

Artist6: Kris Kuski

Artist Kris Kuski successfully pulls together the wash of passion found in Rococo and Baroque while still maintaining intricacy not often seen outside of delicate clockwork machines. His pieces combine sculpted marble with bits of metal - sometimes bullets - and plastic, each tiny piece working in concert. The figures in his work are inescapably reminiscent of Renaissance marble sculptures like Michelangelo's David and often deal with equally ancient characters and stories, applying them to modern events and concepts.

Kuski's use of the ancient and archaic in his modern work is meant to incite an introspective look into humanity's past. He says, "...humanity is doomed if they can't see the result of repeated historical rise and falls. Perhaps it is as simple as we just aren't smart enough to save ourselves." Religion is also a common theme. He often depicts religious symbols, architecture (e.g. churches, steeples), and scenes with weapons, commenting on religion's violent history. Kuski tends to fixate on the dark and grotesque, showing death and dismemberment in many of his pieces. He discusses in Professional Artist using these shocking images as an analogies to loss - loss of freedom, loss of love, etc. Perhaps these images are intended to push the viewer out of their perceived stupor and complacency and spur them to act, averting Kuski's apocalyptic projections. 

Kris Kruski's meticulously assembled work, applying both ancient and modern techniques, puts the audience in the Plain of Limbo, caught between the ages of human history. He's attempting to force the viewer to view ancient disasters and events not as distant stories but as pieces of the collective human memory. His work argues that we should carefully observe our past and apply the knowledge and comprehension yielded to present and impending woes.