Drop Dead Gorgeous

The question of the week dealt with the artist Daniela Edburg, and her series of picures "drop dead gorgeous".  The question was:

 "In the series Drop Dead Gorgeous, what do you think are then links between the objects, gender, and context?"

I noticed that everyone in this series are female, and are in mainly places where you would expect to find a typical female, for instance in the bathroom, the kitchen, the home in general.  That could be a link between the gender and the context.  The only link that I could think of having to do with the objects is that they are things that people like a lot, and sometimes treasure a little more than they should.  For instance, a certain kind of candy, a certain type of ink,  certain foods ect.
    I suppose what the artist could have been getting at was that in such a mundane world for many females, being trapped into expectations created by their gender, they cling to the few things that they like in life, but sometimes cling a little too hard.  It might have to do with how obsessed some house wives become with simple things, like a certain kind of candy.  I've seen this happen before actually.  Mom mother was a stay at home mom for my brother and I while we were growing up, and we spent a good deal of time in twenty years or so stuck in the house, doing house things.  My mom must have washed dishes and done laundry at least a million times.  I suppose all of these boring and repetitive, almost mind numbingly tedious tasks were rewarded mostly with her own stash of her favorite candy which she would share with nobody, but always seem to be eating.  Her favorite candy happened to be circus peanuts, the little marshmallow peanut candies that you can only find in a few stores anymore.  She would flip whenever she found out that someone had found her candy stash.  That candy was like blood to her.

Map Visualization

Here it is!  My commute on campus from my dorm to my classes.  I feel like I never see my car anymore.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/193/mapgs.jpg/

Response to "Is Google Makign us Stupid?"

I wasn't actually able to find the article in question on the AVT280's blog, but I have a response to this question.  I don't believe that Google would make a person any more or less stupid than using a wrench would.  Google is a tool that actually enhances human productivity and knowledge, it doesn't take any away.  One could have asked the same thing about libraries when they were first created and asked "Are libraries making us stupid?"

I suppose that the biggest issue about the information on google is that it's just handed to us, and that the normal person doesn't have to do much of any research on their own.  That's not a bad thing when the answers to a lot of your questions are found in the same, convenient place.  The one thing one would have to watch out for is invalid information on google, which is entirely plausible.  We just need to keep our senses of what is or isn't plausible about us, and google is pretty much just an upgraded form of a library, which don'e make people progress into stupidity in the least of ways.  

"Buff"

For another class assignment, we were to look at a series by an artist and decide what it was that he was trying to express with it. The images he created were all screenshots or photos from pornography, except the people in the images were taken out, leaving nothing but a white silhouette.  I wrote this in response:

"BUFF"

I feel that the project that the artist that created the works of art for the collection "buff"  could have done what he did the achieve the following things:

• To prove a point about how people who are involved in porn don't want to be there and probably regret their pasts, and wish that they could erase that part of their lives.

• To protect the identity of probably mistreated women in porn, while still respecting that some people think of it as art, with the combination of photography and video work.  

• To make a point of "erasing" pornography in small scale, something that he wishes to bring large scale in order to stop the mistreatment of humans stuck in such a situation in which they would have to resort to such a thing. 

Alexander Apostol

Alexander Apostol, although I can't figure out how to switch his website text to english, so I can only understand a few of the words, is as I understand a really amazing and hard working artist who deals mostly with architecture.  He somehow has the time and money to create whole buildings that don't look inhabitable, but are just there as works of art.  I'm impressed. 

I suppose he works with architecture because it is the most mundane and common of things.  Everyone in the world probably spends most of their time indoors, or at least where I live.  Heck, in academia where I am right now, it's lucky for someone to have enough time to go outside and see the sunshine!  So Alexander takes these most viewed things, and changes them up a bit by making something a little off on them, like a lack of doors, or window panes that don't actually look into a room, which is a little shocking to the viewer and creates extreme interest.  It's like if you walk your dog around the same path every day for years on end, and then suddenly someone had painted the pathway green.  You would surely notice, even though people hardly notice the pathway they walk on.  

His website is http://www.alexanderapostol.com/07_residente.php.  Check it out, there are some really nice pictures there. 

Something I drew:

I really wanna post something that I drew here, but I'm not entirely sure how.
Edit:  I suppose I can just stick it over there in the side margin.  That's my profile picture on Facebook right now, It's how I feel sometimes when say, people are tailgating or something like that.