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Michael Takeo Magruder
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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'.

 
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Site: http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns004/ns004_i.htm