Artist Lecture

I attended a great artist lecture last night at USF and heard a talk by Siebren Versteeg. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and is here for the semester working on a community arts project in the Sulfur Springs area, a project for Graphic Studio, and several other projects. I was really interested in the interactive pieces he created with a never repeating stream of images. One was called Triptych which consisted of three LCD screens that were hooked up to a computer continually searching for triptych images. Then there was New York Windows which is a piece that is always regenerating itself. The viewer is able to interact and search around the piece by use of a touch screen as it is constantly regenerating itself. Versteeg enjoyed the chaos in the streets of NY when he first moved there and this piece was created to keep the chaos alive.

Another great piece was CC2003. Versteeg took short loops of newscasters that had a closed captioned-like type beneath them to make it appear as if they are saying things like 'Okay, here is where I get all cool' and 'I guess I have a lot to say.' He was able to do this by having an inter net connected computer program that had an output to a wall mounted television. The TV displayed the newscaster loops with the real time diary feeds on the bottom which resulted in a closed caption looking television screen. There are video installations of them on his website.

Check him out! He had a great sense of humor and I would definitely go hear him talk again!

www.siebrenversteeg.com

Artists of the week

I watched a great documentary on Sally Mann the other day called What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann. Mann is followed around as she embarks on a new project and continues older ones. It touches on the controversy that arose in the work that she is best known for, Immediate Family, in which her three young children were her subjects. The film highlights her life as an artist and the challenges she still has to face. Two thumbs up!

On Saturday I watched another documentary showcasing the life and works of Georgia O'Keeffe (it was simply called Georgia O'Keeffe). The film shows the working relationship between artist Georgia O'Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, how it leads to love, then reveals their complicated relationship and how it effects her life. When the film starts off O'Keeffe is already an artist and I would have liked to know more about what originally led her to her work. The film also fails to mention that the 21-year-old that comes into their lives (the woman Stieglitz has an affair with) was married with a new baby. Keys points are missing that would have offered a better understanding of their lives and a better movie.