Michael Takeo Magruder's work focuses
on melding art and media. The media as we know it now
can be seen as a result in the boom of technology in
the past century. Because of this marked rise, art has
also been heavily affected. It has opened new expressions
and materials to express art. The connection between
science and art, however, is not unique to the twentieth
century. If one were to use the Euclidian mathematics
as a very early example, technology brought about the
perspectidal drawing of the Renaissance with its geometrical
theorems and trompe d'oeil effects. As artists became
better and better at manipulating this technology, the
artwork produced reflected what the eye saw, literally,
as opposed to what the eye perceives. That is, an Egyptian
or Medieval table was depicted as a flat square because
that was the artist's perceptual memory of the object
even though a table drawn in perspective is a trapezoid.
The camera is a more recent tie between art and technology.
With the advent of the camera in the late nineteenth
century, there came a question of the rendering realistic
forms and figures in painting or sculpture. Painters
had to redirect their focus; if realism could be easily
captured by a machine, what purpose was there in depicting
the same thing with paints. Movements there in depicting
the same thing with paints. Movements from the late 19th
century onwards were in one way or another affected by
this invention. There came an increased interest in abstraction
as a way to transmit ideas. For example, Minimalism which
concentrates on the elemental and geometric representations,
mirrors science and technology in the impersonal manner
that it presents its subjects.
Abstraction then grew out of a two-dimensional plane
to encompass new spaces including sound and time when
television and the movies came to the fore. The inclusion
of time as a fourth dimension in video art is drastically
different from the paintings and even the photographs
of days past; those froze time, some say even killed
the subject as that moment has passed and will never
happen again. This fourth dimension allowed the viewer
and the artist to explore changes not only in the piece
itself but in the meaning.
Some refer to this way of communication as new media.
Videos can be considered templates for or inclusive of
Net art. Like video, it involves the fourth dimension
of time as well as sound. And like the camera, it has
a technological, mechanical, scientific origin that is
still too recent to take for granted. Unlike most video
installations, however, net-art has the ability to access
a very large audience. Also, the speed at which this
medium is changing is unprecedented. The very notion
of the web still contradicts traditional art forms, that
is, making something that will last forever.
Takeo seems to tackle this conundrum not by ignoring
the link between art and technology (here in the form
of the media) but by emphasizing it. His works are composed
from digitised extracts of raw information collected
from a variety of international media sources. The media
fragments are processed via a predetermined protocol
which results in the creation of a single binary data
file - i.e. the artwork in its pure state of existence.
These compositions are then transcribed into an eclectic
mix of artefacts which our visual senses can assimilate,
ranging from futuristic stained-glass windows and digital
lightscreens to architectural installations and ephemeral
video projections.
The featured piece in this essay is called |reconstruction|
and is listed according to the artist's titling scheme.
The
breakdown of a captured webpage sampled at a finite
moment
in time
into
three
primary constituent elements: image, text, and code.
The extracted elements are then each translated to a
single html page with an embedded repeating flash file.
The flash file, which is spectator influenced, cycles
through one-third of the RGB spectrum (RtoG GtoB BtoR)
in a defined manner and will return to black once spectator
interaction ceases. The result is a morphing field with
an infinite number of visual states. The (image) and
(text) components are self explanatory... however the
(code) element is a bit more obscure - it is the webpage's
stripped down table structure squeezed into the 'canvas'. |