Artist #1

The first artist I found through my research was by the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists.  This caught my attention because I have not been exposed to a lot of protest art, especially not female protest art. After continuing my research I found that this artist’s work was a reaction to her frustrating discovery of predominately male technology-artists.

The artist created a pie chart machine. This machine reads data from a 1971 report of the featured works at the Las Angeles County Museum of Art. The report reads the gender on the lists then computes and creates an actual pie to display the data. The message of this data is to recognize that less than 1% of artists on display at the time were women. This bold statement exhibited by a pie is very interesting. I interpret the pie as symbolic of the traditional female role at the time. The piece almost says that women are meant for baking pies not art. Each pie is actually edible too.

Artist #2

Scott Draves created a work of art called electric sheep. The project is a collaboration of computers around the world. Essentially, if a computer with the program installed goes to sleep it will communicate with other programs around the world. Sheep is the term given to the abstract pieces of art that the program creates. The shapes morph into different works as it communicates.

Draves emphasizes the “live form” of these works. Users can actually vote for their favorites to keep that gene pool “alive”. Mutations are introduced into the sheep genes just as in real life. The stronger the audience feeling toward sheep, the longer they live. The project can be downloaded on a Mac, PC, Android or iPad.

http://electricsheep.org

Artist #3

La Bastille is a giant Tetris game projected onto a building at Brown University. The project ran from April 14-22, 2000. The project only ran for a short time and is now put away in storage. This was the largest installation to ever be produced in Rhode Island at the time. It was visible all the way from I-95.

The giant Tetris was made of eleven custom-built circuit boards, a twelve-story data network, a personal computer running Linux, a radio-frequency video game controller, and over 10,000 Christmas lights. Students and faculty could play the game in real time. The project was projected on the fourteen story tall sciences library on the Brown campus.