Author: Amy Youngs

Radicant Bodies

| Amy Youngs

In Botany, to be radicant is to have roots that grow above the ground. This form of rooting allows plant species to mobilize, adapt, and grow on any surface. During an unprecedented moment of remoteness, our proximity to the tactile, irregular, and bumpy surfaces of everyday life in the classroom, in our labs, and our studios are suddenly smoothened, stretched thin, and illuminated through our screens.
RADICANT BODIES highlights the work of students who have found new ways to enact senses of creativity, community, and care during an incredible shift in our relationship towards technology and social proxemics. Our bodies negotiate distance and intimacy; the line between visibility and surveillance; what is organic and inorganic, to make sense of the complex terrain and interfaces we find ourselves traversing today. Student works featured in this Spring’s Art & Technology exhibition are selected from their courses in Digital Imaging, Internet Art, 3D Modeling, Moving Image Art, New Media Robotics, Computer Animation, Graphic Novel, Art Games, Sound & Image, and Studio Practice.

Art & Science of Roots – ART 5101

| Amy Youngs

Professors Iris Meier and Amy Youngs will co-teach an interdisciplinary Art and Science course in Autumn 2021. We will do science experiments and art projects which culminate in a collaboratively designed and built art installation. Example artwork from past classes: Unbecoming Carbon: traveling in intercellular space and Where Rocks are Fed to Trees.

poster describing Art & Science course with picture of a hand holding roots

We welcome interested graduate students and advanced undergraduate students from any discipline. Contact youngs.6@osu.edu or meier.56@osu.edu

Visiting Artist – Stephanie Rothenberg

| Amy Youngs

Stephanie Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary art draws from digital culture, science and economics to explore relationships between human designed systems and biological ecosystems. Moving between real and virtual spaces her work investigates the power dynamics of techno utopias, global economics and outsourced labor. She has exhibited throughout the US and internationally in venues including Eyebeam (US), Sundance Film Festival (US), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art / MASS MoCA (US), House of Electronic Arts / HeK (CH), LABoral (ES), Transmediale (DE), and ZKM Center for Art & Media (DE). She is a recipient of numerous awards, most recently from the Harpo Foundation and Creative Capital.

Artist Website: http://stephanierothenberg.com/

When: Monday, March 8, 12pm EST.

Contact Amy Youngs youngs.6@osu.edu for zoom link.

With thanks to the Department of Art Fund to support visiting artist presentations.

Can You See My Screen?

artwork by Ada Huang
| Amy Youngs
3D render by Ada Huang. Text and poster design by Dalena Tran and Hirad Sab.

The contemporary moment is one of unprecedented transfiguration. A constant tug of war where institutions, communities, interests, and most importantly, individuals coincide in an undulating state of deformation and alteration. Those boundaries that defined our movements and occupations have blurred to the point of non-existence, facilitating an amorphous space for constant activity. Shopping for winter clothes while attending a lecture, replying to business emails at the dinner table, or participating in job training while taking the subway, the established limits of social and personal spaces are expunged, and with that, so are the boundaries of the individual. And while this shapeless chimeric reality in its unparalleled distraction and discontinuity demands the individual’s utmost awareness and participation, it continues to expand its disciplinary practices to every crevice of daily life. The punch clock is now next to the bed; better wake up, sunshine!

Nothing is ever finished anymore, and no one is ever done with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the factory, and the household subsist in a simultaneous state of coexistence. And it is at the dawn of this new day of bewildering complexity and anomalous virtual convergence that I ask from you, from you the eternal surveilling gaze, from you my mentor, my peer, my adversary, and my friend: the audio seems to be working, but can you see my screen?

EXHIBITION ARTWORKS

 

Alumni Snapshot – Sarah Hockman

| Amy Youngs

Sarah Hockman, (BFA 2016) visited the Studio Practice course this semester to share her career path with us. After graduating, she researched jobs online while traveling to California in her van. Her first job was at Unity Labs in San Francisco, as a Virtual Reality Lab Assistant. Her creativity and working knowledge of emerging technologies were very helpful skills for this position.

Eventually, she sought new challenges. She had quite a bit of experience working in animation and video as an Art & Technology major, and she knew she really enjoyed it. She aimed her job search at smaller companies, which would allow her to have more creative control of projects and she found a great match as a Motion Graphics Designer at Avalanch Media in Salt Lake City, Utah. After a few years of working there, she decided to leave so she could go on a long bike trek in Spain.


With her work portfolio and a solid network, she is able to find clients as a freelancer now. Check out her website here.

 

Some of her advice to students included:

  • reinvent your brand regularly
  • maintain an up-to-date website
  • don’t get too fancy with your resume
  • make time for your own creative projects
  • make sure to enjoy your life, too!

Alumni Snapshot – Charles Hairston

| Amy Youngs

Charles Hairston graduated in 2013 with a BFA in Art, focused in Art & Technology. He is a Producer and Motion Graphics Designer at the Ohio Channel, a service of Ohio’s public broadcasting stations. He is also the Creative Director and Founder of Faesis.

Charles recently presented his work and his career path at “Art & Tech Career Talk” for the undergraduate students in Studio Practice, taught by Amy Youngs. He discussed the work he does at his day job, how he landed that job, which began as a paid internship, and how he slowly, but surely, built his own creative content agency in Columbus, Ohio. He started before he even graduated from Ohio State University and, though he recently changed its name from Nuge to Faesis, the focus is still on producing visual storytelling content in the form of videos, motion graphics, branding, and illustration.

Charles Hairston shared his journey with the students, his philosophy of networking, and the importance of valuing – and getting paid for – the creative work one does.

An example of a video story he has made for the musician Andy Milne. His company’s list of clients includes The Columbus Foundation, Making Midwest Fest, Medical Mutual, Artfluential, and The Ohio State University.

 

Dalena Tran and Hirad Sab join Art & Tech

| Amy Youngs

We welcome this dynamic duo into the Art & Technology area in the Department of Art this year. As a team, they will fill the position as Visiting Assistant Professor, teaching courses, working on their research and participating our creative community.

Both earned their MFAs from the Media Arts program at the University of California Los Angeles in 2020. Their creative practices span widely across the field of new media art –  from interactive web comics to algorithmically-generated 3D animations, to music videos. They occasionally create artwork together and their live, audiovisual performances have been exhibited at MoMA PS1 and ICA London.

Dalena Tran hails from Salt Lake City, Utah, where she received her BA in Film & Media Arts with Honors from the University of Utah. She creates stories and situations that entangle subjectivity and temporality in response to notions of voyeurism, hegemony, memory, and the phenomenon of media. Her work has been featured in O FLUXO, Assembly Point, Flat Journal, Adult Swim, and Nowness.

Hirad Sab is from Tehran, Iran. He received his BS in Computer Science from the University of Utah. In conversation with emerging technologies, his work reflects on current political, social, and cultural realities intertwined with a critique of technoculturalism and technopositivism. He has exhibited at The Wrong Biennale, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, CHAO Art Center, and The LOW Museum of Contemporary Culture; and it has been featured in Der Spiegel, W Magazine, NPR, Vice, Dazed, and The Guardian.

Cloud Crusher – Spring 2020

| Amy Youngs
logo for exhibition
* show online now, click to visit *

We are collected, crunched, and curated by surveillance capitalism as we move through real and virtual spaces. New and improved pleasures, fears, insecurities, and desires are constructed for our consumption; continually forming and reforming us along the way. We experience our own data shadows and code bodies. Our data fingerprints possess a mirror of us, with in-depth knowledge about who and what we have become.

Image created by Kaylie Reynolds in Art 3000 Digital Imaging, Spring 2020.

Can we be who we are, or have become, without our quick connections to search engines, our constructed social media selves, friends, and our surveillance data? Does it matter?

Though we might imagine the internet as an immaterial, fluffy cloud, it is actually the largest coal-fired machine on the entire planet *. Our server clouds are crushing us. And with 90% of the internet being advertising, it is both paying the electric bills and simultaneously fueling global warming through increased energy use – and material consumption of the earth.

  • What does it mean to be a human animal in a technologized world, where our means of connection is also a major cause of global warming?
  • Can we decolonize technology and communication infrastructure?
  • Can we maintain artistic integrity when we use technological tools?
  • How can we work towards a connected future that moves beyond the green-washing narratives Big Tech sells us?
  • Can we crush the cloud, confront the environmental challenges, design a greener internet, while remaining connected?

Cloud Crusher is the Spring the Themed Art & Technology Exhibition, where students explore these ideas and themes through their courses in Digital Imaging, 3D modeling, Art Games, 3D Animation, Moving Image Art, and Studio Practice.

In keeping with our virtual teaching and physical distancing, this exhibition will be exhibited online starting April 24th, 2020.

Visit show

 

* Lozano, Kevin, Can the Internet Survive Climate Change? The New Republic,