This week Emma Wade who is an artist, came in to give us our working in digital media lecture. She works mostly with installation pieces and went to NCAD for her masters and then did a internship at the Guggenheim which she really enjoyed. She works out of Redspace which is a collective studio/office space for different creative businesses/artists which is a great idea for sharing resources with others and having different people from different backgrounds to talk about work with. I know in Redspace they have web developers, film editiors, a record company and other artists working out of the space.
Emma then talked out some of her pieces of work. The Human Utopian Generation System (H.U.G.S.) seemed like a good idea when she explained it. That people would be able to feel hugged, consoled, and a human connection but the finished product did not end up the way I thought it would. She explained that the orignal idea would have lights and that operated in different ways and the jacket (which a designer helped her build) would be much more complete. The finished object just looked like a big yellow bin bag with a hoover attached to the side.
Another piece was the Rexotrek which was supposed to give a dogs eye view of the world, which again is a really good idea, but the cameras that record the images are shot from the collar of the dog so you just get a downward view looking onto the ground. So you really see the world from a dogs neck view.
The piece I enjoyed the most was “The Cheerup” which was such a simple brillant and wonderfully executed piece. The harder/longer you stand on a mat the louder the cheers of people coming from two speakers on each side of the mat sound, which I just think is so great.
It was interesting to hear a person from the very creative end of the spectrum talking, but it shows how much work can polarise people into loving and hating different things. I would consider myself a fan of different art forms especially those that mix technology with art, like Emma did with her H.U.G.S. piece and the “Rexotrek”, but I think it shows that if you don’t really have a great handle on technology and are able to build and design pieces of hardware yourself it can be really difficult to bring your concept fully to life.
