Portraits – A Salute To My Colleagues

A brief look at the key issues or concepts we read about/discussed in “The History and Theory of Digital Art” class:

The main concept I took from this class is that collaboration is essential to succeed. Our world is heaving with remarkably talented people, each with their own diverse strengths and belief systems. We all have limitations, but when we combine our abilities we’re limitless; we are the dream team! At the beginning of the module Mike asked us, “What is the most important element for learning?” Most, if not all of us, stated people. Interacting with people is vital to our capabilities to learn and develop. Throughout this class I learned from people, not assignments or textbooks. My opinions were questioned, my beliefs were questioned, and my values were questioned. I learned that I was wrong, but that I was also equally right. We all were. There is no right or wrong answer. We are all trying to discover our way through this life and there is no user manual. For many of us, myself included, we do this through self-expression. Art is, for me, what distinguishes us from animals. This innate ability, need almost, to express ourselves is unique to humans. My project is an acknowledgment that my classmates* are the key issue to this semester.

I downloaded everybody’s art projects from Blackboard, and everybody’s explanatory text from that submitted art project. I then visually combined all of these artworks into a mosaic, showcasing all of our work together into one piece. This mosaic was then superimposed over each individual artists portrait, becoming a joint collaboration of artworks and artist. I took the explanatory text and combined it with everybody else’s into a story, a joint collaboration of writing and writers. I then took it a step further by combining both the visual art and the textual art and made individual posters that showcase the collaborative artworks, the individual artist, and the artists written contribution to the collaborative story as a quote beneath the portrait, forming a joint collaboration of written and visual art, artworks and artist, individuals and the group. Each poster is the artist individually and the class collaboratively. It is contradictory as, from a distance, it is visually the artist, but up close it is also the entire classes artwork.

I guess the point is that we are all individuals and all talented, but there is so much more to us than the superficial. Underneath the surface, if you look real close, you’ll see that we are all made up of lots of different people.

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.”
– Chuck Palahniuk

Click on your portrait, your art is there, literally painted all over your face!

“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
– George Bernard Shaw

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Collaborative Art (Writing):

Bring Out Your Art

Right, so I have stuff… Last year I dug out one of my old poems – really old, more than 3 years old and the image shows the full text, including the second ‘verse’ which I edited out shortly after I wrote it – most of my stuff benefits from editing. It can be interpreted or viewed in many ways. It reflects the emotion of the inner soul of a human; it reflects the desires of the human mind. It was published in a newsletter about 7/8 years ago as part of a mini-business we had to set up for a school project, but we started it originally as we didn’t really have any type of creative outlet or platform for our writing. I struggled with this assignment at first because I don’t generally do the whole artistic expression thing. It’s just not part of my life. I have a few pieces tucked away as I love spending time (when I have it) dabbling, but just for my own fun! I do have an ETSY store, which I open from time to time! Some pieces I just pop on my blog and call it “dead art”.

Most of this dead art comes from the dark ages of the late 90’s. Two sulky indie kids in feather boas and butterfly wings launched a fanzine about the band blur called ‘Beamzine’. Looking back on it now, I see we were way ahead of our time. In spite of the cheap photocopied, stapled together, handwritten layout, the ‘zine’ was full of what would now be called fan fiction and international collaboration. We wrote odd short stories based on nothing more than song lyrics or photos of the band. We ‘collaborated’ with two Icelandic penpals who sent us photos and translated interviews from the Icelandic press. I still think a lot about the subjective nature of our communication with each other. There is so many layers and facets to this. I am always trying to pare this down somehow and find the simplest and cleanest way of representing it, but it continues to elude me. I believe that words are ‘slippery’. There is so much slipperiness between our thoughts, all the external and internal stimuli that compose those thoughts, whatever form the expression thereof takes, and the interpretation by the receiver of, let’s call it, ‘the message’. I shot and edited a visual message in Toronto in the summer of 2010. Not much more to say about it other than it was one of the most enjoyable, chilled out summers I’ve spent and I tried to convey that in a short story I wrote as a demonstration of my understanding of poetic forms. They don’t seem to have survived the transition from my old laptop to my current laptop. That should give you an idea of how important they were to me. However I have always loved creating ‘artefacts’, although I’m not so much into personal self-expression through art. I have had so many thoughts on what these artefacts should be, but as yet I am not exactly sure what the process is. In the interim and while I find out exactly, I will tell you of my 2014 so far:

I walked from Seville to Santiago de Compostella in Spain, on the old Roman route on the Via de la Plata. In a tiny village called Lubian, I met a most distinguished English man – elegant, well dressed – no small achievement on any trek, and as one does on Camino, we finally got to talking and his story is truly remarkable. I’ve dug deep into my personal archives and – despite my better judgement – created a mood through these stories. I think there’s some debate as to whether that counts as art, since I’m simply following instructions to recreate stories conceived by other people, but I couldn’t think of anything better. I see our lives as circular, interlinking with so many other, ripples touching the lives of other’s, and seeing how far they can extend and how long they can last.

“Green water of memories
souls deep
washing up the corner
roiling back the room
sparkling foamy life
slicing the hollow wave edge
surfing outside your souls
carving empty mindfulness”

Authors:

Tolulope Awojuola*
Mike Cosgrave
Cara Groome Travers
Emma Donovan
Stephen Deninger
Anna O Donoghue
Eileen Hegarty
Jasenka Jones
Anne McIntyre*
David Nelligan
Mary Sheehan
Johannah Duffy*
Sarah Levy

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Collaborative Art (Portraits):

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Who wrote what?

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* P.S.  Let me explain why I chose certain classmates and left out others.  I took EVERYBODY who posted in the “Bring out your Art” forum on Blackboard with the exception of people who DID NOT post both visuals AND writing.  Sorry to Deirdre Bane, Chris Gray, and Mark Cosgrave.  I represented all these people in alphabetical order, they DO NOT go in order of who I perceive to be better.  My apologises to Tolulope Awojuola, Anne McIntyre and Johannah Duffy who are not represented in the visual portraits.  This is simply because I could not access photographs of you. Either you are not on Facebook (where I got everyone else’s pics) or you had no pics of yourself posted.

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