Final Paper

Aram Bartholl                                                   Eduardo Kac

 

  Aram Bartholl and Eduardo Kac are two contemporary artist that use Digital Media and technology in their works. I chose two pieces of art to compare and contrast. For aram i chose the work "First Person Shooter", for Eduardo i chose the work "Time Capsule".
  Aram Bartholl is an artist that was born in Germany and has been working in berlin for most of his life. He is an artist that works with technology and the internet. He studied architecture at the university of arts in berlin. His artowork tries to show the relationship between digital data and everyday life.He tries to bring technology to physical life. He asks the questions, "In which form does the network data world manifest itself in our everyday life? What returns from cyberspace into physical space? How do digital innovations influence our everyday actions?” He is an artist who does performance pieces as well as interactive works. He also has installations and discussions where he talks about day to day life in the era of Google, Facebook, and Twitter. 

  "First Person Shooter" was a work that Aram Bartholl did in 2006. This work consist of a To Do Kit with an image of a first person shooter game. The game he chose to use was Couner Strike. This was a popular computer game that came out in 1999. The game has a view of a person's arm holding a maching gun. What he did in this work was have people cut out their own glasses which had the image of the gun. This was a view that each person had in real life when wearing these paper glasses.

  The purpose of this arwork was to show the violence that there is in video games. The virtual weapon is brought into physical space. People that participate have a view of what it would be like to have a machine gun everywhere they look to. This project also shows how different our everyday life is from the virtual world. It shows that the virtual world is very seperate from physical and human life.



  Eduardo Kac is an artist that was born in Brazil. He lives in Chicago and that is where he works now. He is an artist that also tries to show relationships between physical life and technology. He is known as a Bio Artist. His art consist of technology and science together to make a performance or an art experiment. Kac merges multiple media and biological processes to create hybrids from the conventional operations of existing communications systems.
  "Time Capsule" is one of his most famous works. This was a performance piece in 1997. The performance is of Eduardo planting a microchip into his left ankle and after that he registers himself into the world wide web. He performs an interactive webscanning of his body. He registers into a database for pets. He did this performance life in a webcast, it was also televised on Television in Brazil.


  He registered himself on to the database above, and this was read in Chicago. The work was to show the difference between technology and physical life. He did this to show how close we are with technology. We are tied to technology. Microchips are not inplanted into humans but they might be in the future, and this is what Kac is trying to express. He explains that, "In "Time Capsule", the presence of the chip (with its recorded retrievable data) inside the body forces us to consider the co-presence of lived memories and artificial memories within us". The memories that humans make can co exist with memory saved on computers.
Both Artists tie technology with everyday life. They both do performances, installations, and discussions where they express how technology impacts our life. Their works bring technology and digital instances to physical life. I found it reall interesting because we use the internet everyday and techonolgy is part of our everyday life. Both works have an impact and show us how technology will only get bigger and soon the internet or anything dealing with technology might be something very physical in our life.

Cited Work
http://www.ekac.org/timcap.html
http://www.datenform.de/fpseng.html
http://datenform.de/blog/
http://www.ekac.org/figs.html