Nostalgic Technologies and Contemporary Artists

Week 12 - Devices of Wonder, Amber Phelps, and Risa Horowitz

Monday's class was split into two parts, part of it was dedicated to reading the University of Chicago Chronicle article on "Devices of Wonder" and viewing the online exhibition, and in the second part of the class we had a short artist talk from Amber Phelps Bondaroff, a current grad student at the U of R. Amber uses a lot of older, re-purposed technology in her work, and much of it is very lo-fi (or as she seemed to call it, no-fi) and although short, I found her talk very interesting and her artwork really engaging.

image via getty.edu

After viewing the online exhibition and discussing the article in groups, we chose one device to talk about further. My group chose the Chromatrope, which was the one I found most interesting. It used two circular lenses that would rotate around each other when the crank was moved, which gave the illusion of movement within a still image.This reminded me a lot of the AR Art software Ned Bartlett showed in his lecture, because it was providing layers of information and added another layer of realism to a still image. It also spoke to the nature of realistic 2D images - we were viewing it through a lens, which puts in the position of a viewer, and the experience is significantly different than experiencing crashing waves in person. 

On the Wednesday of that week, we had a guest lecture from Risa Horowitz who did an artist talk and shared her artwork throughout her career. I took my intro to 3D class with Risa and was familiar with some of her work through that. Her interest in play, amateur vs. professional, and conceptual art were very evident even in her intro studio class, and I really enjoyed being able to see a more thorough view into her bodies of work. Risa started off her lecture by giving us a definition of creative technology that stated that an art work uses creative technology if it requires as much discussion of the technology involved as it does the art itself, and then quickly told us her art work does not fit under this definition even though it does require use of creative technology. However, the use of different technologies (film photography in her early self-portraits and very high-tech telescopes in her current work with Saturn) as well as the collaboration in her art practice (seen in "Thirtieth Year by Day") make her work an excellent example of creative technology in contemporary Canadian art.

image via risahorowitz.com