The first artist I upon whom I decided to reflect on the blog is Bradley Carter. I came across his work through the New Museum's rhizome.org website. I was particularly interested in looking at interactive web art for the first piece, because it was a facet of digital media art that really fascinated me. Narrowing down the vast amount of works in the catalogue through the "interactive art" tag, I came across Carter's work Ballentine, and was really intrigued by it. Ballentine is a drawing of a bird that Carter created very recently--in December using Photoshop. He is approximately 20,000 pixels tall and 30,000 pixels wide, which Carter says puts him at about twenty feet by thirty feet at seventy-two pixels per inch resolution. The thing that I found which makes this piece really exceptional is that Carter created every single pixel of the bird using one pixel scribble lines of only red, white, yellow, blue and black colors. After the last class, and seeing how absolutely tiny a one-pixel scribble line is, I was really amazed at the amount of work that Carter put in to the piece. The work is in fact, so large that Carter coded it into an API environment similar to Google Maps so that viewers of the work can zoom in and pan the image to really investigate it. Carter, on his own blog, describes the internet as Ballentine's "natural environment." 
Since Pepperdine, I've been interested in Internet art. A painter or draftsman by trade, I wondered specifically what an "Internet drawing" should look like. I'm not talking about uploading photographs of static drawings made in the physical world. Rather I'm interested in drawings that use the Internet itself as a medium... like charcoal or graphite. Think of the possibilities: interactivity, infinite duplication and sharing, and unlimited size to name a few. The definition of drawing that I prefer to work with is "A mark that transforms a ground." By this definition, a website could most certainly be considered a drawing.I really find it interesting that he's such an advocate of free, interactive art via the internet, and especially his relationship as an artist to the internet and the affordances it's provided him.
Carter has produced a number of other works besides Ballentine, including a few more single line sketches (black and white). He elaborates why he has been so interested in drawing using the single-pixel pencil lines, saying that he wishes to work against the stigma that art created using a digital media is somehow "cheating" because the computer affords such a wide variety of techniques, whose parameters were set by software programmers (also described by Carter as artists) and not the individual artist himself. By drawing single-pixel lines, he is physically filling in every single pixel, and therefore has "had his hands in" every single aspect of the piece---no small feat for a piece the size of Ballentine. He has also created a series to protest the inadequacy of search engines to catalog and understand visual media the way that they do text, whereby he writes a "love letter" to Google, and superimposed on that, he has a secondary message denouncing the search process using text created in images that the search engine cannot see.
Love Letter to Google
explanation
All in all, I found Bradley Carter to be absolutely fascinating given our experimentation with the pencil lines last class, and the really stunning piece he's created through millions of tiny pixels he pain-stakingly filled in. Additionally, I found the things he had to say on his website and blog to be intriguing as well, considering his viewpoints and philosophy vis-á-vis the internet.
http://bradleycarter.com
This artist seams really interesting and i really like how he is all about sharing his art publicly. His technique for the bird seams so tedious but its amazing how by drawing pixel by pixel he can create a piece of art so massive and detailed. I also like how you touched on the idea of how images are so poorly organized on the internet and how his love letter to google was in response to that.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading and learning about the artist Bradley Carter. This is the first time i have seen an artist willing to give away his work, requesting that those viewing his site spread the images he has created to other sites, desktops, etc. without asking for any sort of payment. The detail he creates by using one pixel thick tools forms a layered look to his work, giving off the impression that the bird, to me, is actually made up of something else, a non digital material. When I first viewed his work, I had originally perceived it as wool, containing finely separated and woven, or felted, strains of different colors. Discovering that it was created digitally gave a new perspective on the digital media and what one may create using computer technology.
ReplyDeleteHi all! (this is bradley carter). It's great to hear what you have to say about my work. It helps me understand better how others perceive what I am trying to do. And I'm impressed you were willing to read through all that text on my site! Anyways, thanks for the shout out.
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