This week in our lecture we were showed the Photosynth video from ted.com. I thought this video was pretty amazing, showing how thousands of other people photos from flickr can be arranged to create a full picture/model of a building. I watched the video a number of times back at home and then found many other very interesting videos on the ted.com site.
So this week in the lecture we learnt about such concepts as the long tail, re-mixability and co-creation. Web sites such as wikipedia, myspace and facebook have all been built using the co-creation concept. I find this pretty amazing that some of the most popular sites on the internet have started from a very simple yet popular idea, and have then been created by the users themselves. In a way I guess co-creation works like building a house, in that the web site creators create the initial foundations and then the occupants build the rest of the site.
‘STENCIL ME BANKSY’
http://stencilmebanksy.wordpress.com/
Shane Jensen
3037867
For my Production Project A, I decided to curate an online exhibition called ‘Stencil Me Banksy’, for a British graffiti artist who goes by the name ‘Banksy’. I chose to curate the exhibition involving Banksy’s artwork because I absolutely love the artwork created by this artist, and find that this style and technique is definitely a huge influence on the way I produce my own artwork. I find that stencil graffiti is very different to that of free hand graffiti because most stencil artist use their art to voice their opinion on large political and social issues. I also feel that the general publics are generally more accepting of stencil art than they are of free hand graffiti for this very reason. I find myself very drawn to the art of Banksy because many of the political views portrayed in Banksy’s artwork, are issues that I also feel very strongly about. Banksy has a way of voicing these political opinions in an almost cheeky manner, which helps to get the message across to members of the public who would not otherwise take any notice if it was just plainly written on the wall.
I decided to use WordPress.com to create my online art exhibition after having a bit of a look around the site, and it seemed like it would do a better job presenting my exhibition than any of the other blogging sites out there. The ability to be able to create multiple pages within the blog means I was able to create more than one gallery page, as well as a brief biography page and a welcome page.
I felt that in the case of Banksy it was very important to be able to provide the gallery viewer with a light biography, and to explain the fact that because Banksy is a graffiti artist, very few people know the real identity of the artist. It is very unusual for the public not to know the true identity of an artist as widely known as Banksy. Although this collection of paintings is not an overly large collection I felt that it was very important to display Banksy’s overseas works, and works within the United Kingdom in different galleries. This is because this message that Banksy is trying to advertise of ant-war and peace over in Palestine and Israel is very different to those messages being advertised back in the United Kingdom. I chose the simple layout that was used, because the white background and predominantly black lettering doesn’t take any emphasis of the pieces of artwork, while also being aesthetically pleasing and un-fatiguing on the viewers’ eyes. I chose to display the pieces of artwork straight up and down in a line because I feel that especially in the United Kingdom gallery, it creates almost a timeline of Banksy’s art. This allows the viewer to be able to establish a progression in Banksy’s work and also establish a noticeable change in the political views of the time in which the pieces were painted. The navigation bar across the top of the pages, and down the right hand side of the pages give it a bit more of a website feel rather than feeling like a simpler blog page.
SOURCES
BANKSY Wall and Piece 2006, Century, The Random House Group Limited, London.
artandmusic.wordpress.com/2008/07/, Redefine Magazine Arts Blog, published 13/07/2008, viewed 07/04/09.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy, Wikipedia The Free Encylopedia, Banksy, published 08/04/09, viewed 06/04/09.
www.banksy.co.uk/, Banksy, published, viewed 06/04/09.
Unfortunately I missed my NMP tute this week, as I’ve been sick. I found the lecture this week very interesting indeed because it made me think about a lot of internet design structures that I see used in most web sites I use. I’ve never really thought that much about how internet sites are structured and it wasn’t until this lecture that I noticed there is a basic structure that most sides are designed to. Things like; a heading at the top of a site, navigation menus down the left or across the top of a site, links colored blue. These things I just take for granted when viewing an internet site. Taking into account that I am designing an online art exhibition for assignment one, my knowledge from this lecture will indeed be a huge help to make my exhibition site easy to view and easy to navigate.
© BANKSY
© BANKSY
© BANKSY
Production Project A, I hadn’t really thought about this assignment until my tutorial yesterday. I’m thinking I might curate an online exhibition (Opt.2) of either; music from a record label that a friend of mine owns and runs, or artwork from a favorite stencil artist of mine. The online stencil art exhibition may be easier in terms of getting permission to use the pieces of art, because this ‘Banksy’ artist is anonymous.
HTML?…..CSS?….. Until class this week HTML has always jus looked like a whole lot of very confusing codes to me, and to tell you the truth I really didn’t have a clue what CSS meant or what is was. When broken down I was actually very surprised as to the technical simplicity of both these. This is not to say that I now totally know how to create a web site using both HTML and CSS, but I’m defiantly on my way to understanding the basics of both.
LIQUIDATED LOGO © Banksy
