Vuk Cosic

Vuk Cosic, the man widely acknowledged for coining the term net.art, used a program and ASCII characters to create one of his best-known projects, ASCII History of Moving Images. Vuk Cosic used software to transform still frame images. He used ASCII characters, a set of numerical equivalents for typed letters and symbols that allow computer programs to talk to one another, to take the place of pixels in the image to create shadows and figures. After changing the still frames, Cosic quickly ran the images in succession to re-animate the original piece. Vuk was not the first to use these characters in art but this different way of recreating images goes with a long list of other ways Cosic has used to reproduced images.



The man who coined the term "net.art" has used the computer in an artistic way with this project. A few movies and television shows that he recreated in this way can be found HERE. These recreations have a futuristic look to them. It is cool that he used ASCII characters which were created in the 1960's to change classic videos in an artistic way.

I thought the videos and shows that Vuk Cosic chose to do were interesting because they spanned many genres from classic to pornography. With such a wide variety though, the art can be respected and enjoyed by a larger variation of people which is one idea behind New Media Art that brings people from all backgrounds together.

Umbrella.net

Created by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki, Umbella.net look visually at mobile computer networks that connect spontaneously between mobile divices. This piece features white umbrellas with mobile devices attached to the shafts of the umbrellas. These umbrellas were operated by various people at various events. When participants would open the umbrella, the bobile device would attempt to establish a connection with other computer equipped umbrellas in the area. The color of the umbrella was created by LED lights in the umbrella to indicate the connection status, red signified that the mobile device was trying to establish a connection with the and blue means that a connection has been made. The umbrellas were chosen for aesthetic reasons and the creators "... believe these transitory networks can add surprise and beauty to our currently fixed communication channels."

This project embodies New Media art in how it involved a group of people to create the final product. This collaborative effort brought together people from all backgrounds, from architects to engineers, as well as designers and artists. As with many New Media projects that I have come across, the idea came up in a context other than an artistic one. Umbrella.net came up in an engineering context but had an artistic charm to it which allowed it to express an idea in a different way.

What caught my interest with this project was the want to find out more about the colored umbrellas. I think that to better relate to connecting to a network, Green LED lights would have been a better color for being connected to a network than the blue LED. On everything that I have ever seen, green means connected and red means that there is no connection. This change would have allowed a clearer understanding of the umbrellas and the mobile devices attached to them being connected with each other. I did like the dotted lines between the umbrellas to show that all the umbrellas were connected to one another because it was visually easy to understand.

This project was found on Mark Tribe website and the site can be found HERE.

This image was my original one turned in a week ago. The baby was intended to symbolize people in general that were being pushed to eat healthy. The fast food symbols were thoughts of those people and what they would rather have over healthy food, symbolized by the green baby food.



This above image is my second attempt based on the critique received from the first image. It seemed like people were having a tough time grasping how the baby knew about fast food in the first image. Instead of changing the baby to an adult or child I decided to change the "thoughts" of the baby. I thought popcorn suited the image better.