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."
Carter himself is a really interesting artist, who himself is a product of the internet. He is very much an advocate of open-source art, and all of his work is copyright free, and in fact he encourages his work to be distributed across the internet. As he states on his
blog:
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-รก-vis the internet.
http://bradleycarter.com
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." 
So this will eventually be the blog! Woo Hoo! Never made one of these here things before, so it'll be an adventure!
