my website, sugardew.com, was recently compromised by a hacker. he/she went by the handle "crackers_child" and his act/mark was to replace all of the site's index files (the first file you see automatically when you navigate to a particular directory) with an (aesthetically unforunate) page that proclaims that he "was here" and also the helpful warning message, "protect yourself!"

though i sound variously pissed, i was surprised to find that i'm not at all. it is always a little titillating when something extremely out-of-the-ordinary happens. i was more interested in the implications of being hacked. one can't help but think that, if it weren't for the actions of people like him, no matter how benign or even motherly (protect myself? okay.), there wouldn't be a need to "protect oneself" in the first place. he is being the very virus that he advises others to protect from. perhaps this is some sort of smug patronizing on his part. for that, i AM a little annoyed.

okay but... what does this have to do with art?

in a sort of random, tangential way, this relates to something i've been thinking about furiously for the past few weeks: if every act is inherently meaningful and fraught with dense associations, as the gurus of postmodernism will have you believe, then what distinguishes good art from bad art? how can anyone form any basis for such a judgement? and on that note, does this not make mr. child a skilled (i admit you have to be pretty skilled to hack into my server) artist?

his act raises issues - like the sanctity of space on the internet, the nature of privacy and whether it even exists on the web... for one, we are led to think that the internet is much more secure than real life - for the simple reason that laypeople don't code and therefore can't read past the very limited interfaces set out for them. so internet graffiti seems impossible (even though it isn't... sigh). conversely, we think of street graffiti as a matter of course, because access is so easy. the side of a brick building is clearly public - anyone can reach out to touch it and leave a mark. the irony lies in the anonymity of the act being enhanced online - it is almost impossible to trace a skillful hacker, and i tried for a while until finally giving up. the sense of "privacy" therefore acts both for and against you - you're far less likely to suffer from a graffiti writer's whims, but also less likely to track down the perpetrator after the fact.

i've often wondered what it would be like to be a true hacker. the act of invading apparently secure spaces plays around richly with the idea of private and public spaces on the web - we think of webspaces as all public spaces because they are openly accessible for themost part but unlike a true public space (in real life) we cannot leave our mark.

i'm actually really tired so i'm not sure i'm making any more sense at this point...

i'll leave with this final thought: at MIT, students have this ongoing tradition called "hacks," which is an environmental modification or practical joke on campus that has to be done surreptitiously and be removable. Ideally it is a clever installation/play on the environment that generates a certain amount of laughter and also notoreity points for the cheeky ingenuity of the MIT student body. Famous example includes sticking a police car on top of the great dome, complete with box of donuts. Perhaps this is what a hack should be for the real world, not just for MIT.

actually i lied; i do have other things to report. i got The Corporation and then In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger last week and watched them. i got them from the tufts media library -- if you guys have tufts id cards from your academic semesters you can check out stuff from the media library. it's free and theres a 3-day loan period. they have a good selection of documentaries and old classic films, and some new releases too.

anyway here my random completely biased personal thoughts on these 2 films:

The Corporation
Amazing.. I literally left off watching it in the middle and wanted to go design some posters. Instead I got a snack of bacon from the fridge, immediately felt very guilty, absolved my guilt by hiding the bacon via ingestion, and returned to the television. The film clearly has a political agenda but it says it well, passionately, with conviction and footage and expert testimony. I felt like it was a really good overview of topics that should be looked into further on their own - like environmental pollution and child slavery. Kind of like a survey course in corporate injustice. I thought the comparison between a corporation and a mentally unsound person (surprising eye-opening fact that, in the eyes of the law, a co. IS a person!) was effective. The hokey sequences of old ads and old ad spoofs helped make the awful truth humorously bearable, but ironically, simultaneously it renders the actions of the corporations more pathetic, immature, irresponsible. They kind of act to diminish the huge scary threatening-ness of the idea of the corporation through their cheesy cartoony retro-ness. I liked it a lot - might be worth seeing again to get all the facts missed. But a lot of the images stick in your mind persistently. And woot, Ziin AND Chomsky!

Henry Darger
I was less excited about this, but it was still worth the 1.5 hours. The approach to the artist was mainly biographical. The narrators/researchers who wrote this clearly thought that turns in Darger's work are a direct one-to-one consequence of his monumental life experiences. I think most art historians could argue with this assertion but it could be valid. as for his actual work, they talked a lot about his work in a narrative, descriptive sense. They didn't so much analyze it as read it aloud and showcase it. they did this thing where they animated his artwork via digital means, a la old school reading rainbow. i thought the film could have done without that - sometimes it just felt a bit too gimmicky and unecessary, like a pop-up book. in general, the film felt like it barely skimmed the surface of the mystery of the man. there were so many more depths to plumb but it didn't. like why did he use color so unnaturally? why did he feel the need to work so big? why exactly did he think little girls have penises? or even choose little girls? was he really crazy or was it just a front? instead the film just indulged in the quaintness of his reclusive personality, the painful drama of his early life, the funny little opinions his neighbors had about him, not to mention that crazy animated illustration thing. and the characters kept repeating, over and over, how they were so amazed at the sheer amount of work he did -- kind of an amazing fact, yes, but no need to dwell repeatedly on quantity when so much could be said about quality... anyhoo, all this is not to say that these aren't important in their own ways but... something's missing. i'm not satisfied. or maybe i've just been going to art school for too long.

i don't have a lot to report this week, except that i forgot to report last week, and that I FINALLY REINCARNATED MY WEBSITE! i spent 2 days and nights literally doing nothing but coding, drawing, scanning, coding some more, tweaking, loving, hating, loving again, finally uploading this. and now i'm behind in all of my tufts classes and several other nagging obligations and yes it feels great! it's still not done but at least it's finally well underway. a website is never done, anyhow!

it's here: yup here

(it will soon be moved to just plain sugardew.com)

i am so elated.

A bunch of weeks ago I took out Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library from the SMFA library and I've been working my way through it since. It's really dense, really amazing stuff. It takes me like half an hour to really read each spread. The text is tiny and the microscopic drawings are immaculately executed. But mostly I'm fascinated by his interwoven narrative structures, how the arrangement of different comics on a single page create an interplay of meanings and associations. I've been looking at different narrative structures since Chantal has suggested to me that I weave four or five different voices throughout my project (I'm thinking each will have a different perspective or character: the corporate, the factual, the emotionally charged...). Mr. Ware uses color, aesthetic style, size, positioning, and typefaces to distinguish the voices, and I'm beginning to see how I might apply this to my own project. The clear difference however is that his is a familiar comic book format whereas mine is a fake company report. I have less graphical bits to work with so probably I'll have to rely more on positioning, size, and typeface. This should be fun.

On a completely not related note, I dragged my boyfriend and housemates to the ICA on President's Day and spent 2 hours with them in the Bank o' America Art Lab. Yes the one for the rampant little kids. It was shamelessly awesome. I colored a pair of binoculars and made this collage involving Chiho's gassy girl and some transparencies. You guys should really check out the Art Lab when it's open for the ICA "play dates." And don't let anyone tell you you're too old to be in it. The organizers were so amused/thrilled that we were so into it that they took a bunch of pictures of us and kept laughing. =P

This entry seeks your opinions and answers to this statement/question. Much of my spare hours are spent pondering it, and here are some of my thoughts:

So, many people draw distinctions between design and art. In some cases, practically speaking, there is a difference you can feel but maybe not describe. I mean that it is often easy to look at, say, a piece of furniture at IKEA and say "that's the work of a designer, not an artist," or vice versa. Like an ad on the T - also definitely design, not art.

So here are some differences I can isolate: It appears that a "design" is something that is created to achieve some specifically proposed end, one that is often commercial. It is a very calculated, defined process. Art is more free-form, more openly suggestive. Sometimes (often?) it does not have a specific end, but leaves meaning very open to viewer interpretation. One could also simply point out context: art belongs in a gallery space or some other hallowed art-space. Design belongs in utilitarian environments.

It's not that easy, though. Is guerilla advertising (like billboard art) design or art? Barbara Kruger, the Guerilla Girls, etc. tread that middle line. Art and design are in essence kind of similar. They are both manipulative in that they seek a certain reaction from the viewer. Neither is passive. This manifests itself in varying degrees, yes, but good art, like powerful design, always has to be evocative or provocative, I think.

I like to think of the art/design thing as a continuum, with art on one end and design on the other. Except this line really has several different dimensions and it wraps around and ties itself in knots. So it's not really a line at all. That's because I think it's possible to look at something that is CLEARLY art or design, and ALSO see it as the other. For example, is it humanly possible to say that an ad in a fashion magazine, is ART? Yes I think so. I think if you put a fashion magazine ad in the right frame, whether physical or mental, it becomes art. I think there's some sort of artistry even in the most straightforward attempts to convince you to buy something.

Maybe the ultimate question now is why we feel this intrinsic need to draw a distinction at all. Maybe it has to do with a certain sense that design is somehow a form of "mass" art or "shallow" art or "aesthetics-oriented" art. Somehow inferior to "real" art. But if both are intrinsically involved in the creation of meaning and the manipulation of viewers, is this to say that design creates more shallow (or nonexistent) meaning than art? Does a powerfully composed anti-war poster say anything less valuable than a 5-foot-tall painting at the Whitney Biennial? I'd have to say no.

Agree/disagree but don't remain silent.

After my first ill-fated post disintegrated into the ether, I have decided that I will not write about anything relevant to my project after all. Instead I will tell you about Gregory Shaker, an artist I found through an art and technology blog. His work falls under the category of "interactive art," and he works extensively with electrical parts, computer hardware, and other tidbits of engineering cleverness. His most successful works, I think, are the ones that harness the almost magical capabilities of modern technology to get people to rediscover and reconsider familiar situations.

One of my favorite works is "subway skylights." As an almost-daily patron of the Red Line, I often find myself pondering the way that underground travel warps (or diminishes) our sense of space. We pop from one stop to another, and the destinations become gradually disassociated until they are practically discrete in our minds. Our sense of orientation within and relationship with the larger world is rendered obsolete. It's teleportation, or magic, or a damn shame. Enter Shaker: he challenges whether this is desirable at all with a simple but elegant statement: a lcd screen mounted on the ceiling of subway cars. The screen plays a video that shows the world above passing by as the train runs - a view looking up of buildings, clouds, etc. The realism is heightened by the fact that this is actual footage shot above ground along choice NY subway routes. Furthermore, the video's high framerate and special detection software allows for it to play at the same speed that the train runs. I can only hope that they'd mount something like this one on the MBTA someday.

Another one of my favorite works is the energy fluxion band. Not only was this an engineering feat in and of itself, it gives us something to think about. It is a simple LED visual indicator of the amount of detected electromagnetic energy in the wearer's vicinity. By making visible the invisible, Shaker reminds us of our dependency on technology and humankind's power to alter the environment to such a subtle but powerful degree. He also raises issues about possible danger to our bodies via the ubiquitous radiation. Plus it's much more stylish than an iPod nano.

In short, I really admire his work because it marries technology and art in a way that few people can achieve. It takes a lot of knowledge and tinkering just to build something like these. He also expresses many of his concepts with such clarity that I think his art is highly accessible to anyone who is curious and willing to wield that curiosity. Unlike a lot of other public art (say perhaps esoteric twisty metal sculptures long favored by corporate plazas and institutions of higher learning), subway skylights is public in the true sense - that most anyone who sees it will come away having hatched a new and unusual thought about their everyday commute.

For Shaker's other works, check out moodvector.com

how are you today? i will be communicating with you weekly on mondays. stay tuned.