Artist Entry 3

One artist that I found on http://www.rhizome.org/ is Jordan Tate. He is a 3D and digital artist who also works with digital photography. He graduated from Miami University with a Bachelor’s of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies, and then went on to obtain a Master’s of Fine Arts in photography from Indiana University. Jordan is a Fulbright scholar 2008-2009 and is now a permanent faculty member at Alberta College of Art and Design. He is most known for his “Contemporary Dictionary of Sexual Euphemisms” a piece of artwork which reflected a change in culture that is occurring.
Tate also runs the contemporary art blog http://ilikethisart.blogspot.com./

His artwork on rhizome is a collaboration of his work and the work of Adam Tindale another faculty member at Alberta who teaches in the department of Interaction Design in the Media Arts and Digital technologies. Lossless 23, is a digital piece that takes digital photos taken of older photos and applies a “pixel sorting process.”The artwork is then a piece which focuses on the information or data in the computer rather than an image. The process rearranges the metadata so that strange changes occur in certain areas of the photo as a result of altered values of hue, brightness, and saturation. The resulting pictures are rather “photoshop-esque.”

The concept behind this piece is that the information is not changed or lost but just reorganized. This could be a comment that the portraits themselves are real people and they are reorganized and altered overtime. Yet, the people remain the same people and you can still recognize them. The original pictures that are used are faded and pastel-like. They look as if they were of a different era and cause the extreme hue changes to look out of place and bizarre. Because it does look a bit random, my initial reaction to the piece is less than fantastic, because I don’t find the piece grabbing or aesthetically pleasing. However my opinion changed because of the background that I could gather from the artist’s description. So much of creating a meaningful artwork is based on the conscious individual choices that are made during the process. So, conceptually, the piece has a lot more to offer.

All information and images taken from Rhizome Art Base