Video Art

Performance Art

Xerox Project

For the Xerox project I chose to place my body parts on a mirror, which resembles peoples outer appearance.  My goal was to create a new sort of organism that contains my body parts but come together in an unusual way.  This challenges the viewer to put the pieces together for themselves and interpret what kind of creature/ humanoid they see in this project.

Grid Art

It is a picture of Plant Hall with a beautiful Tampa sunset in the background.

DADA Manifesto by Hugo Ball

At first, the dada manifesto comes off as absurd, hard to follow, unconventional blabber.  But as you dive deeper into the manifesto and continue to read, it begins to shed some light on the world at the time and the urge to step out of societies pre-conceived norms of how to live. This excerpt exemplifies just that,

"I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m'dada. Dada mhm dada da. It's a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don't want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people's inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. Mr Schulz's words are only two and a half centimetres long."

It is about starting something new, a manifesto that focuses largely on the role language plays in a society, and how language limits the way in which people can perceive and experience the world.  The dada movement attempts to push past the boundaries of language and to explore the world of dada, dadaism, dada life, dada this dada that ooooo ahhhh daaaaa dahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.  Nothing is wrong in dada, it aims at decontextualizing objects and turning them into art, just like the legendary fountain piece of 1917 by Marcel Duchamp, which was a urinal turned upside down signed by the name R.Mutt.  It challenged people to abolish the ways in which language and social norms affect our every life, and unleashed the possibility to turn everything and anything into a working art piece. 

TI994A

The TI994A was released in June 1981 as an early home computer.  It was important because it was an improved version of TI-99/4 model released at a lower price that made it affordable for the average American at $525.  It came equipped with a keyboard, speech synthesizer, RF modulator, and a cartridge.  It was the first domestic computer with a 16-bit processor and allowed people to perform a wide array of functions from word processing, to playing games, to storing a good amount of data on the CPU's RAM.

Alan Turing

Alan Turing is considered the father of the computer.  He envisioned and designed the Turing machine, which was a device that could be given a certain set of rules that could be programmed to compute or solve an infinite number of problems.  He really was one of the most important people and his work with pushing the boundaries of mathematics and computers was the start of the digital revolution. 

Turing also designed the programming system of the worlds first commercially sold electronic computer, the Ferranti Mark 1. This is a huge deal because before this computers were not available commercially at the time, they were only for businesses that could afford them and had the space for them which could take up many rooms.  Turing's work also proved to be an extremely effective contribution to defeating the Nazis.

 

"Turing arguably made a greater contribution to defeating the Nazis than Eisenhower or Churchill. Thanks to Turing and his 'Ultra' colleagues at Bletchley Park, allied generals in the field were consistently, over long periods of the war, privy to detailed German plans before the German generals had time to implement them."

Richard Dawkins August 2009 

 

Despite Turing's remarkable work, he did not receive the recognition he deserved because of his sexual orientation.  When his house got broken into by a gay man that he was there with previously, he reported it to the police who then proceeded to arrest Turing because homosexuality was illegal at the time.  Because of his marvelous work they offered him "treatment" rather than imprisonment.  The hormone treatment to rid him of his homosexuality caused horrible side effects and eventually he could not focus his study on artificial intelligence anymore which eventually led to his unfortunate suicide.