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ENTS01EMMA O’DONOGHUE

02CHARLIE DUCK

03ADA BY ATAK

04NILS VOKER

05LIGHT DRAWING

06WALTON CREEL

07MARK CLARSON

08PHYSICAL FICTION

Enda O’Donoghue is an Irish artist who has been living and working in Berlin since 2002. He originally studied computer programming before changing to visual art and has worked professionally as a web-designer, Internet developer and in various dot-com businesses. His artwork is directly influenced by his experience working with digital technology, computer programming and the Internet. As an artist he has continuously worked and exhibited in a wide variety of media: photography, video, net-art and interactive media but painting remains the backbone of his practice.

The images in Enda O’Donoghue’s paintings all come from the Internet. They are all other people’s images, digitally found images. Searching through popular online social networks and blogs on an ongoing basis, he compulsively collects and catalogues photographs that he finds. The photos which he works with are most often the throw-away shots which otherwise gather digital dust buried away on hard-drives, camera chips, mobile phones or uploaded and then lost or forgotten someplace on the Web. With each image he paints he is meticulous about tracing the ownership and requesting permission, partly as a way of dealing with the anonymous nature of the Internet and also a reaction to the issues surrounding online privacy and copyright. The process of painting from these images is slow and methodical, firstly dissecting the image into sections on paper and then working over periods of weeks or months to reconstruct the image section by section as a painting. Echoing and playing with the nature digital image processing and compression algorithms, the painting process is highly analytical and methodical and yet filled with randomness and inviting of errors,

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was recently featured at the 2010 Expo in Shanghai and in 2009 he had a solo exhibition in New York at the Irish Arts Center. His work has also been shown in Copenhagen, Paris, London, Toronto and throughout Ireland and Germany. Over the past few years he has also been involved in organising and curating a number of group exhibitions in Berlin.

This is an extremely interesting approach to painting. It is also quite odd to mimic online photographs, and as he says on his website, poor photographs at that. The process, through the rich and treasured painting medium is beautifying the ugly. To take what is poor, artistically speaking and to transfer it to something that typifies artistic beauty is a interesting concept. Whether these paintings are commenting on the sometimes ugly nature of the Internet, or merely experimenting between two formats, or even in this case, three. Shifting photography to the Internet realm and then changing it further, back into the physical world through painting. It could be relating photography back to its origins, back to when photography could only exist physically. But the main issue these paintings attempt to confront is authorship. A topic that has become huge with the emergence of the Internet, especially when concerned with creative fields. Graphic designers for example are being replaced by amateurs, with websites continously asking for participation. Photographs are uploaded onto Flickr, videos are uploaded onto Youtube and Wordpress allows the user to design their webpage. This is something Andrew Keen discusses, and will be discussed in depth later on. O’Donoghue’s process of taking something which he did not create, and then painting it to create something that is his own certainly confuses the line of authorship. Personally beautifying the Internet is something I certainly would encourage.

The images following, by illustrator Charlie Duck, certainly depict a harmony of both traditional drawing and computer drawing. When furthering the research to discover the concept behind these pixelated drawings it becomes unclear whether my own analysis of the juxtaposition of hand and digital production is correct. The last of Duck’s images shown here, confusingly titled on his website, Untitled (The Mist), is described as exploring mechanical processes within traditional drawing. However the other drawings contain no information regarding their concept. Duck does explain his dislike towards computers in an interview with Grafik magazine, when asked to choose between digital and analogue, he replied: “Analogue without a doubt. I avoid using computers as much as possible. There is so much that is lost in the translation of an original work into a digital image, and then, in turn a printed reproduction. I always lose faith when it comes to that point with a drawing. It’s important to me to be able to create the process I want, independent of any digital process. I like the fragility of original works, and the idea of something existing as a one-off.” So it is possible that the pixelated drawings explore hand rendered and digitally rendered imagery. Regardless of this, I certainly see these images portraying the presence of the computer, or technology as a whole in contemporary society. Again, personally, the pixelation process evokes a negative viewpoint. Each drawing is intricately

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drawn, as with all of Charlie Duck’s work, but is then distorted, or more strongly put, disfigured through enlarging each area to mimic oversized pixels on a computer screen. An extremely interesting concept and one that contains very much the same principles as with my concept, vague as it is at this stage. The underlining to the concept being the

physical against digital. This idea very much originated from printed media (books, magazines) appearing more and more online, to my disgust.

As discussed in the introduction to Charlie Duck’s work these images could well por-tray technologies effect on traditional art forms, in this case on the simple pencil draw-ing. The subject in these two drawings could strengthen this concept, with the skull representing death, implying the decline of physical formats or artistic outputs.

The images following, by illustrator Charlie Duck, certainly depict a harmony of both traditional drawing and computer drawing. When furthering the research to discover the concept behind these pixelated drawings it becomes unclear whether my own analysis of the juxtaposition of hand and digital production is correct. The last of Duck’s images shown here, confusingly titled on his website, Untitled (The Mist), is described as exploring mechanical processes within traditional drawing. However the other drawings contain no information regarding their concept. Duck does explain his dislike towards computers in an interview with Grafik magazine, when asked to choose between digital and analogue, he replied: “Analogue without a doubt. I avoid using computers as much as possible. There is so much that is lost in the translation of an original work into a digital image, and then, in turn a printed reproduction. I always lose faith when it comes to that point with a drawing. It’s important to me to be able to create the process I want, independent of any digital process. I like the fragility of original works, and the idea of something existing as a one-off.” So it is possible that the pixelated drawings explore hand rendered and digitally rendered imagery. Regardless of this, I certainly see these images portraying the presence of the computer, or technology as a whole in contemporary society. Again, personally, the pixelation process evokes a negative viewpoint. Each drawing is intricately drawn, as with all of Charlie Duck’s work, but is then distorted, or more strongly put, disfigured through enlarging each area to mimic oversized pixels on a computer screen. An extremely interesting concept and one that contains very much the same principles as with my concept, vague as it is at this stage. The underlining to the concept being the physical against digital. This idea very much originated from printed media (books, magazines) appearing more and more online, to my disgust.

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In cooperation with Christien Meindertsma, a designer from Rotterdam, I’ve developed an installation for her exhibition at the MU in Eindhoven (Netherlands), an exhibition hall for contemporary art and design. The exhibition was called “Makers & Spectators” and was about the human perception and the way we look at things. The installation consists out of two parts. A viewing box with replaceable Images of a range of different objects like a chicken, a slice of bread and much more. While the visitor is looking at one of these images an eye-tracker within the viewing box records the movement of the eyes. The second part is the robot, hanging on three ropes from the ceiling on top of a large pile of paper sheets. It reproduces each point the visitor has looked at with a thick marker on the Paper by moving the same way as the eyes did. During six weeks the robot has produced a big amount of large scale images showing how objects were perceived by different people. Monique, working for the MU, came up with

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ER“Dotje” as a nickname during the last days of building up the exhibition. It’s Dutch and simply means “dot” but it’s also used as a pet name for little boys. So it’s a quite adequate name as during programming and building up the whole thing it truly did behave a bit stubborn from time to time.

This machine creates light drawings. It is more a development platform for an upcoming project than a finished robot. So I’ve been very surprised about the enormous feedback and dozens of blogs writing about it. Thanks a lot for this. So I suppose it’s time to come up with a bit more information:

It’s a three-wheeled platform that is able to draw images with coloured light using rgb-leds mounted on the top. While the robot is moving a photo is taken with a long exposure time. The graphics are created on the computer. A program then reads the image file and sends wirelessly the data to the robot which converts it into motor movements and turns on and off the light with the given colour values.

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The image above is the only one shown in these pages that is different to the pixelated method shown previously. Also this is the only image that the concept is known to be concerned with technologies effect on traditional mediums. It shares much of the same principles to the pixelated drawings, in that it in some way distorts an image. I believe this to be less effective than the previous drawings, as the recognition to technology is harder to distinguish. However, it is also a more original idea, as pixelated imagery has been used far more. The image above is the only

one shown in these pages that is different to the pixelated method shown previously. Also this is the only image that the concept is known to be concerned with technologies effect on traditional mediums. It shares much of the same principles to the pixelated drawings, in that it in some way distorts an image. I believe this to be less

effective than the previous drawings, as the recognition to technology is harder to distinguish. However, it is also a more original idea, as pixelated imagery has been used far more. The image above is the only one shown in these pages that is different to the pixelated method shown previously. Also this is the only image that the concept is known to be concerned with technologies effect on traditional mediums. It shares much of the same principles to the pixelated drawings, in that it in some way distorts an image. I believe this to be less effective than the previous drawings, as the recognition to technology is harder to distinguish. However, it is also a more original idea, as pixelated imagery has

The terms gun and weapon are practically interchangeable. From hunting to war, self defense to target practice, the gun has been a symbol of power and destruction. Art and entertainment have both taken the same approach to he gun. Traveling Wild West shows had gunslingers that shot crude silhouettes and names, but this was done to illustrate the shooters prowess. Some artists have used high speed film to capture a bullet slicing through its target, while other artists have melted guns into

sculptures.When I decided I wanted to make art using a gun, I was not sure what direction I would have to take. I knew I did not want to use it simply as an accent to work I was doing, but as the focus. My main goal was to take the destructive power away from the gun. To manipulate the gun into a tool of creation and use it in a way that removed it from its original purpose, to deweaponize it.During my first experiment I came across the concept of creating an image hole by hole on a surface. I also figured out that canvas would be too stressed by the process of a rifle firing many bullets into it. I moved on to aluminum and, with further

experimentation, I figured out exactly how far apart my shots needed to be and that moving beyond .22 caliber was simply too destructive. When the aluminum was painted beforehand, the blast of the gun knocked off a tiny amount of paint around

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Mark Clarson is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. He was born in Dallas, Texas in 1973. Mark Clarson received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the University of Chicago.His work has been exhibited at the Body Builder and Sportsman Gallery in Chicago (Tony Wight Gallery), Tacoma Contemporary, Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, and the Brenda Taylor Gallery in New York as well as numerous group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the country. Clarson began working within the tradition of portraiture while attending graduate school at the University of Chicago in 1996. Clarson created a series entitled Old Haunts for which he made photo-novella inspired photographs that encompassed complete original theatrical sets and the casting of professional and amateur actors. This body of work soon culminated to become a 16mm film (entitled Old Haunts) that was exhibited with a complete theatrical set at the Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery in Chicago in 1997. In 2008, many of the photographic images from Old Haunts

were exhibited at Tacoma Contemporary in Tacoma, Wa. In 1998, Clarson exhibited his Mardi Gras Portraits at the Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery in Chicago. In this series of work, Clarson traveled to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and made “Girls Gone Wild” style portraits using a disposable 35mm camera. Clarson had these images enlarged to life-sized prints (approximately 30”x40”) and exhibited them with a video piece entitled Spankbank. In this series, Clarson was interested in contemporary documentary portrait photography as it related to the relatively new development of online publication and content dissemination.

Presently, Clarson is creating a series of oil paintings based on Polaroid portraits that he purchased off of the website eBay. In this body of work, Clarson continues his interest in portraiture while examining issues relating to privacy, narrative, class, and the internet.

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