prosthetic knowledge

Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: The Gaming Canvas

A collection of items from the Prosthetic Knowledge Tumblr archive and around the Web, taking a brief look at creative works that bring gaming literacy to the canvas plane.

View the whole submission here

Artist Rob Sherwood

Rob Sherwood’s work is about finding a depth of perception, literally and metaphorically, in a flat-screened world. He considers himself a painter but his practice has always allowed some time for conducting experiments with various lens based media.

Attracted by the way digital technology blurs boundaries between physical and virtual space, his paintings can be seen as taking the grid for a visual metaphor of human cognition. Whether each square is interpreted as a pixel, cell, bit or atom is consequential to it being first and foremost just a painted mark.

Recently he has begun translating his aesthetic sensibilities and theoretical interests into objects. As with his grid paintings, these works tamper with an apparently rigid system and find creative space in a subjective interference. The suggestion is that models which appear strict or sterile can combine meaningfully with subjective fields of feeling, whether in the algorithms of the internet or those of a painted pattern.

[text taken from Frederica Schiavo Gallery]

The artist also has a Tumblr blog here

for(){}; - projection mapped video game on canvas

Playable art by Brent Watanabe features acrylic hand-painted canvases mounted on wall, with sprites projected on surface - video embedded below:

In for( ){ };, there is no beginning or end to the game, just collecting and wandering, birthing and consuming, an arbitrary point system rising until your inevitable death and the birth of another generation. It is a game mechanism without the game. An addictive but essentially aimless experience.
The piece is a triptych of playable acrylic paintings, controlled by the viewer using a NES controller.

Link

NOTE: It has come to my attention that the paintings were put together by Seattle-based artist Cable Griffith, and was shown in his solo exhibition at Kittredge Gallery in Tacoma, called, “Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start.”

You can check out more of Cable’s work here

The Art of Owen Schuh

Mathematical art based on network systems:

Owen Schuh draws his inspiration from mathematics and complex organic systems. In particular, he is fascinated by simple sets of well-defined rules that generate unexpectedly intricate and nuanced structures. His work is painstakingly created by hand, using at most the aid of a pocket calculator.

More Here

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: Surveillance Painting

In this submission, three painters whose work replicates the visual grammar of New Media: Enda O’Donoghue, William Betts, and Kon Trubkovich.

Dongi Lee 

Four examples of recent work by South Korea’s most well-known Pop Artist:

Gallery 2 presents Dongi Lee’s solo show Garden of Uncertainty. Lee has spearheaded pop art in Korea and is well known for the character, Atomaus. The exhibition brings 13 paintings he produced from 2007 up to the present together, focusing on showcasing the broad spectrum of his world through diverse pieces we have never met under the same roof.

Mixture of seemingly inharmonious elements

Lee has attempted to combine the medium of acrylic painting with diverse subject matter and expressive methods. He created the Atomaus character through the combination of two celebrity cartoon characters, Atom (Astro Boy) and Mickey Mouse. Since 1993 when Lee first conceived Atomaus, he had no intention of lending any identity to the character. Likewise, he would not give any identity to this exhibition. In the show jolly, familiar works like Atomaus Eating Noodles and Flower Garden are harmonious with pieces that address profound, gloomy themes such as death and violence. His pieces on display vary in medium: animation images, SF images, and abstract images. In the Double Vision series produced in 2008, Lee fused heterogeneous genres into one scene.

Diverse references of K-drama, K-pop, art history, and philosophy

His work refers to pre-existing images rather than creating ones. Lee referred to Robert Morris’ conceptual work for I-Box; appropriated Caravaggio’s painting for A with the Head of A; and reinterpreted Freud’s portraits and religious themes. Works addressing his recent concern for K-Pop, or the Korean wave (Hanryu, the increase in popularity of South Korean entertainment and popular culture) is dominant. (In the art scene the term K-Pop is used to refer to different meanings, pop art that was pervasive since the late 1990s in Korea.) One example is a work that portrays Super Junior, an idol group. Lee took the motif of a Woman with a Mobile Phone from the image repetitively appearing in Korean dramas. He views drama characters perfectly manipulated as imaginary images similar to animation and game characters. Lee points out that contemporary people gradually become accustomed and desire to identify themselves with such images. These images have ambivalent features, sublimity and abstractness despite their superficial existence.

More examples of this exhibition can be found here. There is also an old site by the artist dedicated to his cartoon creation, Atomaus’, here

The Art of Hong Zi 

Artist creates works with distortion effect by painting on threaded canvas which is subsequently rethreaded. It is easy to see a connection to contemporary technological distortion aesthetics, but is actually inspired via a Buddhist background:

Hongzi’s works are the products of two repetitive tasks - piling up colored threads and breaking them up again …

… If so, what is the reason why the task needs to be emphasized? It is needed to consider that the career of Hongzi started from her Buddhist painting. Furthermore the effect of her career as such appears strongly as shown in her comparing her works to sand mandala or her introducing the themes of her works as the process of generation and extinction. If it is the case, it will be no problem to say the laboriously repetitive work for tying and untying threads is the transformed form of the laboriously repetitive work for producing Buddhist paintings. When considering such repetitive work is the process of practicing asceticism to empty the minds, there is no reason not to say Hongzi’s task is also an another form of asceticism. Hongzi’s task facing the fact there is no fixed form, tying and untying threads one by one, looks to be so faithful to the teachings of Buddhism.

You can discover more of the artist’s work at their website here

Mechanical art: Japanese scientists unveil robot calligrapher

Second of two news stories that could get you thinking about the future of technology and art museums.

A robotic system that can imitate and perform calligraphy of masters of the profression - via RT:

Japanese researchers have found way to preserve the centuries old tradition of calligraphy. They have created a robot that memorize artist’s brush strokes and recreates art and calligraphy.

The robot needs to be taught before it can create something. The artist starts drawing calligraphy while his brush is attached to the robot’s mechanical hand. It remembers each move the artist makes, the pressure on the brush and the angles and then just copies them, Agence France Presse reports.

“The device is endowed with a motor that moves as the person moves the brush. And then the moves are recorded digitally. Then the robot uses the same motor to produce the exact same moves,” Associate Professor Seichiro Katsura of Keio University explains.

The aim of the robot is to preserve the traditional Japanese calligraphy and can also be used to recreate other pieces of art.

More Here

On a side note, I first heard about the story via News24, but strangely uses a distracting example of Western art to the story!?!?!?

Paintings of Kristoffer Zetterstrand 

Artist whose work (since 2002) combines space, perspective, historical fine art and the presentation of video games:

I work with painting. For some years I have experimented with virtual still lifes, often in the form of stage design in which I explore how two-dimensionality (and painting) relates to computer-generated 3D worlds. I am interested in visual spaces created online, in computer games and 3D programmes, and especially in what happens when the illusion is shattered and the underlying construction emerges -like when there is a bug in a computer game. I am interested in visual failures, which I try to use in my painting. Among other things, I have produced paintings based on the landscapes that you can see only if you are “dead” in the online game Counter-Strike, and paintings with motifs created by crashed landscape generators used in film and computer game production. Presently my work process is like this: I start by sketching the motif in 3D on the computer, where I can move the scene about, rearrange pictorial elements, redirect the light, reposition the camera, and so on. I sculpt the architecture and the various parts of the environment and dress the parts in different textures, which I often sample from images of my own earlier paintings, from pictures I have found on the net and screen dumps from computer games. I also use a lot of material from my art archives, which comprises some sixty-thousand paintings. While working with a sketch on the computer, the simpleness of the tools means that I can follow my impulses and try out new angles, change backdrops and pictorial elements, redirect the light, rearrange the shadows, etc. For me, the 3D programme is a tool that I use intuitively when I construct my motifs. The scenes are often influenced by the dramatic composition of computer games, where familiarity with some kind of mythology is essential in order to play the game, in a similar way as an artist relates to art history. That the end result is painting is a prerequisite of my work. The physical aspect of painting and the space it allows for improvisation and painterly reformulations of the motifs are the most important parts of the process. You could say that when it comes to the painterly part of my work process, I improvise on a theme that I have determined on the computer. 

Artist’s website here

Found a message in my inbox today:

Hello, my name is Benjamin Bridges and I am an artist. I really enjoyed your website and thought you might be interested in my work. You can check them out through my tumblr page. Ben

Luckily, I’m in a good today - check out Ben’s art Tumblr here

Greg A Dunn 

After studying and graduating in Neuroscience, Greg devoted his time painting the microscopic parts of the brain on gold leaf in an Asian ink style:

I enjoy Asian art. I particularly love minimalist scroll and screen painting from the Edo period in Japan. I am also a fan of neuroscience. Therefore, it was a fine day when two of my passions came together upon the realization that the elegant forms of neurons (the cells that comprise your brain) can be painted expressively in the Asian sumi-e style. Neurons may be tiny in scale, but they posess the same beauty seen in traditional forms of the medium (trees, flowers, and animals).

I admire the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean masters because of their confidence in simplicity. I try to emulate this idea.

In October 2011 I finished my doctorate in Neuroscience at University of Pennsylvania. Since then I have been devoting my time to painting.

More Here

The Art Of Tomokazu Matsuyama

Fantastic work from Japanese artist whose paintings combine the old and the new, and the flat with the fluid - a layered technique that, in some ways, combines various notions of art from Modernism to the current Adobe aesthetic.

The smaller images above do not do the works justice - click on them for a higher resolution version to note some of the details, how parts can be Pollock-esque yet others are controlled by pattern.

Check out more of the artist’s works at his website here

Art of Kong Byung Hoon (공병훈)

Artist creates series of oil paintings of various cartoon character figurines (both Eastern and Western) which re-enact scenes from classic fine art.

Google Translated Artist Statement:

I am a masterpiece of classical art of four trillion figures by incorporating a comic book character will work. This classic image of each character and the story of the conflict is in order to screen the configuration of the elements of the classics, and several characters in comics Figures consist of this noble and solemn, based on the classic story of the story deals with the light of modern common.

  Cartoon movies we see mainly the configuration of each character’s personality is made by the story, but the character’s history, spatiality and time when the province changed the nature can not evolve any yiyagideun I will use these points. For example, in one of my work with American cartoon characters from Disney’s Tinker Bell Smurfs, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse cartoon Sonic and Crayon Japan, South Korea Pororo cartoon, game Angry Bird character and appearance of the character will range from the contents of a classic encounter. I ‘peuraedeurik Jameson’ means, according to neutral or critical pungjana motives and goals of their own, without any historical nonsense by a desire to work, so my work belongs to the pastiche.

  A canvas of classic and contemporary stories in the stories are different, each very different from each other, the subject of the story and characters, even the markedly different backgrounds can see that, so any story by story of the conflict can not be completed, original meaning is lost. one side of the story when you try to deploy the other side the same way that the story is interrupted, or when one of these two stories at the same time, not just as concentrated. Thus in the works increases, the story becomes more and more incomprehensible. a story that clearly will not be able to deploy. personality is too strong to bring up stories to one story every single one you can not deploy properly, or from where, do not know what the story was going to while everything is meaningless, ie the inner personality of each character is that the lack of.

More at the GAGA Gallery here (Korean)

3D Pac-Man Street Art 

Trompe L’oeil painting by Leon Keer:

3d street painting made in Venlo, The Netherlands. Inspired by Arcade’s video game Pac-Man from the 80-ties.

Flickr photoset of the piece can be found here

New Work From Viktor Timofeev

Artist inspired by 3D gaming architecture has taken a new direction in his paintings. Before, it was much closer to wireframes, bold geometric angular shapes and light washes. Now, whilst still retaining his eye for ‘cyber-architecture’, has upgraded his pallette to create richer abstract worlds.

You can follow his Tumblr blog here