-
Digital Dreams: New Works by Students from the Digital Media Program, and: Artists in Cyberspace: 2D/3D Introductory Authoring for the Web (review)
- Leonardo
- The MIT Press
- Volume 34, Number 1, February 2001
- pp. 81-82
- Review
- Additional Information
Leonardo 34.1 (2001) 81-82
[Access article in PDF]
Exhibition Review
Digital Dreams:
New Works by Students from the Digital Media Program
Artists in Cyberspace:
2D/3D Introductory Authoring for the Web
Digital Dreams: New Works by Students from the Digital Media Program Students of Shawn Brixey, professor of digital media, University of California, Berkeley. Pacific Film Archive at the Berkeley Art Museum.
Artists in Cyberspace: 2D/3D Introductory Authoring for the Web Students of Clay Debevoise, visiting professor of media arts, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California. <http://www.clayd.com/students.htm>
My reviewing of university students' digital artworks in their first public presentations was pleasantly informed by enlightening discourse with their instructors, Professor Shawn Brixey of U.C. Berkeley and Clay Debevoise, visiting professor at the San Francisco Art Institute. Both Debevoise and Brixey nurture independence with a "hands-off" attitude while students select and develop their own curiosities. Brixey presented Digital Dreams at the Pacific Film Archive, and Debevoise shows on the Internet web-based artworks created in his class "Artists in Cyberspace: Introductory Authoring for the Web."
One of my initial questions to Brixey, an artist skilled in a variety of electronic formats and chair of the Digital Media Program, was why he is particularly engaged with video. His reply was that video is an appropriate tool in an academic setting; it is the digital mediator for all digital disciplines. Brixey is enchanted with this architectural representation of time. "Pick a perfect moment, a meaningful eternity" is the class's first assignment and appears to be a central idea in Brixey's art.
Brixey's class offers the ideal place for students who major in disciplines other than art. Students with even the slightest propensity for or interest in creating art can comfortably air and develop this interest in the video class. Here, decisions [End Page 81] for spending a lifetime in a chosen profession are altered or confirmed.
Brixey and Debevoise are conscious of new disciplines filtering into the digital artworld along with new technologies that hybridize the resultant art. Brixey showed 15 video tapes that he had nurtured for technical know-how and narrative realization. Mini-DV was used as the capture format. The works illustrated an array of computer-based editing and effects techniques.
The first work, Dancing Plants, by Rachel Rein, was a medley that gyrated to rhythms of changing plant personae. In Haarm-Pieter Duiker and Westley Sarokin's Deli Line Two, I vicariously experienced marketing frenzy, with two copies of the same video being played side by side, out of sync, to achieve a dizzying effect. The work alternated rapid dissolves and slower frame rates to create blurry, delayed looks. Colors lapsed into grays, making grocery aisles look like quirky cemeteries. An abrupt ending prevented me from regaining my equilibrium to linger on the producers' images poised with their shopping carts. Brett Simon's 100% Perfect Girl, an adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami, was the professional "smoothie" of the group. The excellent pacing and innovative camera work of juxtaposed still images almost compensated for a cultural confusion of melodrama and verisimilitude.
Brixey encourages technical innovation. Danny Dinh filmed his recurring dreams through a scratched piece of plastic placed over the lens of a camera strapped to his bike pedal, filmed a dancing girl through an accidentally dropped camera, and took apart and modified digital signals before putting them back into the video image. Brixey made his keen awareness and astute solutions available to the class.
I was disappointed at the lack of cultural and political commentary among the presentations, so I was delighted to see Claudia Mercado's Natural Enemy, a cry against Manifest Destiny and political injustice in Mexico. Although rough in execution, its emotional power was refreshing. Justin Fone and Tim Hon made a more polished cultural commentary in their The Illuminaries. Here, breakdancing and graffiti were interwoven as impressive and gripping entertainment.
While the "perfect moment" is central to Shawn Brixey's agenda...