MoMA artist assignment

The piece I chose for this assignment is called Les Disques by Fernand Leger. It is an oil painting that uses abstract geometric figures (mainly disks and rectangles) to create a cityscape depicting the view from a railroad car. The disks are meant to represent wheels and the slanting vertical rectangles are meant to represent shafts. There are also many human appearances (engineers on the left and conductors in the middle) despite it being made solely of geometric figures. The painting mostly uses earth colors like ocher, brown, orange, and green. It also uses a lot of gray scale colors, which makes sense as it depicts machinery. Here's the piece:



































 The painting was created in 1918, toward the end of World War 1. It is the first in a series of many paintings which center around the theme of "disks". The artist, Fernand Leger, spent the last three years of the war "in the French army's engineer corps" (MoMA website), which was where he got the inspiration for this piece. He firmly believed in the relationship between man and the machine. He called the people in his Disk series Homo faber, or "Man the maker", who then became protagonists in his mechanical universe (collectionsonline.lacma.org).

My immediate aesthetic response to this piece (and the reason I chose to do it) was that it was so colorful. The use of thick borders to highlight certain shapes, along with the contrast of the colorful disks to the gray scale shafts really make the piece stand out.

I think this piece is successful because it shows how even though man has created something bigger than himself, he still manages to control it. This is shown by the way humans are depicted--small, in a huge mechanical world, but in controlling positions.

I think the painting's interpretation is inverted today as compared to when it came out. At that time, technology had just started becoming a part of people's daily lives (especially with the implementation of the assembly line in creating automobiles). Man had created a huge clockwork world, but he was still in charge of it.

Today, man is surrounded even more so by technology. But instead of us controlling it, it controls us. Apart from being completely dependent on our laptops/macbooks/phones/iPads for almost everything, our entire existence depends on technology. If by some random chance (this is just a thought experiment, I really have no idea if this is even possible), the sun were to emit a solar flare with such an intense electromagnetic field that all computers stopped working , it'd be as close to apocalypse as we're ever going to get. Banks, transport, stock markets, governments, and everything else that depends on computers will stop working and our whole world would come to a standstill. How then can we say that we control the technology we created?

Here is my attempt to emulate the piece. The zip file containing the project can be downloaded here.

 

ISTA 401 intro

My experience in programming is pretty much limited to what I have learned in CSc 127A, which is an introduction to programming using Java. However, I liked the course enough that I now am  a CS major.
My experience in art is also pretty limited. As a kid I loved everything related to arts and crafts--I'd always take the art elective and work on projects in my free time. My favorite medium was oil pastels. It all stopped once other things started taking precedence--school, books, golf, writing, poetry. I'd love to start creating art again and I'm really excited about learning creative coding this semester.
One media artist I really like is Kurt Schneider--he works with singer Sam Tsui to create youtube covers that integrate different videos of themselves playing different instruments/singing background vocals. Here's a video in which they perform an acapella cover of "King of Anything" by Sara Bareilles.


Here's another one in which Kurt Schneider plays the piano, acoustic guitar, electric guitar and electric keyboard for a cover of "Titanium" by David Guetta ft. Sia.


 The second artist I really like is Nevena Nilolcheva. She first works on pen and paper and then enhances it digitally. I love her work because of the vivid colors and its ethereal quality. The way she incorporates subtle textures into her work is really beautiful.

The third artist I really like is Miwa Matrayek, who performs beautiful shows using music, shadows, and art. This video shows her projecting her work on the screen and manipulating it with her shadow. 

It shows three scenes.In the first one, she becomes an island in a creation tableau. I love how the stars are projected, and how they rotate as the seasons change to show the birth of mankind, discovery of fire, extinction of a species through hunting, and finally, the conversion of all trees into a funeral pyre for the man. 

The second one shows her walking through the cityscape. I love the music arrangement here. It's simply mindblowing.

The last scene shows her creating domestic scenes in shadow and video using magical streams of light. I love the way the city surrounds her, as though she is manipulator of it all.