The Sheep Market

The Sheep Market" by Aaron Koblin is a series of 10,000 simple images of sheep drawn by online workers. In style the sheep range from the hard to decipher drawings to the extremely detailed. The sheep were drawn in a program by Amazon called Amazon Mechanical Turk. The sheep may represent its caretaker in real life, the Sheppard can either be foolish or wise, and thus I believe is the point in the art. Sheep characterize its Sheppard, just like, for instance, a Football team characterizes its Coach.
The Sheep Market is a net art. It takes the newest capabilities of internet based systems and uses them competently to make art.
To me this is an impressive piece of art, and you can easily get lost in the art and all the different Sheeps that are on the piece. I think it’s enjoyable to look at all the different combinations of different artist portrayals of the animal.

War in the Art of Videogames

Artist Jacob Schuman has made an online exhibition that is compromised of six games that explore a different take on the aspects of war. What the artist tries to convey is the not act or the skill required to win, but the motivation behind conflict and war. One of the games on display is “Conker: Live & Reloaded”, which uses fantasy to paint a real picture of the tragedies of war by recreating the invasion of Normandy, as seen in the movie “Saving Private Ryan”. Another game called the “Peacemaker Game” allows its players to play the news, solve puzzles, and figure out a way to bring peace and diplomacy in the ever ongoing Middle East crisis. There is no room for violence and a player fails in the game when tension and bloodshed is still present. A Successful player however can win the noble peace prize. Another game, the online multiplayer “America’s Army” is played by artist Joseph DeLappe who plays under the screen name, “dead in iraq”. During the game DeLappe catalogues the names of all real U.S soldiers who have died since the conflict started.

I thought this was interesting, especially the peace maker game, because we live in a technological driven society. While videogames are a big part of most American’s lives. Video games that depict war are and have been one of the most captivating in terms of realism of actual war situations. It seems like violence is driven so much in our culture that we are immune to it, and it almost seems normal. Instead of having games that promote peace, we have games that not necessarily promote violence, but ignore peace as a solution for conflict.

Thirteen Ways of Looing at a Blackbird

Edward Picot, whose web art interpretation of Wallace Steven’s poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, has a Ph.D in English Literature. His interpretation of Steven’s poem is a flash piece that visually shows what the artist talks about in his poem. When you visit the website, you can interact with the piece by clicking on a tree, each part of the tree braches has a number, and the user can thus interact by clicking on one of the different thirteen tree branches, and find out for themselves the thirteen different ways of looking at a blackbird.

The overall mood that I get from the piece, especially in the beginning, is that it is mellow, and has a dark tone to it. Although it has lots of different pictures and bright colors in it, I still feel it is mellow. It is an interesting piece and one that can be visually stimulating for young children to learn and dive deeper into poetry.

Big Buck Bunny

"Big Buck Bunny is the second short 3D computer animated cartoon from the Blender Foundation". Blender Foundation produces films to motivate expansion of and encourage use of their popular eponymous free software 3D modeling and rendering package. Big Buck Bunny is in the same league as Dreamworks’ animation quality. The project was made without the restraints of a mainstream company such as Dreamworks or Pixar. When one buys the movie on DVD, it includes the model, texture, animation, and rendering files in the making of the film.

This may seem like a typical animation release from a small company, but what struck me while reading this article is that Blender Foundation is using a Free Culture License under Creative Common’s Attribution Licence (CC-BY). Basically meaning that if you buy the DVD, you actually own the work, and Copyright will be unable to stop you if you decide to share it or even rework it. Basically Blender Foundation is aiming to encourage other animators out there to do what they like with their work. Given that they give you the source material and production files for the film, you can essentially remix the movie at the same quality as the original, and do whatever seems right to you. I have never heard of a free license until today and to me it sounds so different than anything out there in mainstream media, especially in the restrained copyright society that we live in today.