Recently in art Category

Kevin Kelly has a great post today on CT2 about vizuality, or visual literacy. Specifically, he writes about tools that are emerging to assist vizuality in regard to annotating and cross-referencing text and moving images.

The most intriguing thing he covers is an immensely popular Japanese video sharing site called Nico Nico Douga. Seeking to make a more integrated hybrid of Youtube and forums, the site offers users the ability to comment on videos while watching them. But rather than have the comments show up below the player, the text in superimposed right onto the video. If a video gets too crowded with text, old comments drop off to make room for new ones. A typical frame from a Nico Nico Douga video looks like this:

Sometimes the text obscures the image beyond recognition, this is called a "danmaku":

Although the site has millions of users and is the 6th most visited website in Japan, it has had little cross-over success, largely due to the fact that users have to sign up for an account before watching any videos, and the sign-up screen is all in Japanese. Kevin Kelly provided a helpful link to a short English language guide to the phenomenon on a blog called Metagold. You can also watch the video I pulled those stills from.

I'm sure there are more capable scholars than me thinking about where Nico Nico Douga fits into the visual history of the Far East, but I couldn't help but be reminded of Japanese printmaking. For one thing, most of the videos on the site are collaborative, as viewers make mash-up upon mash-up of their favorites. Printmaking is also a medium that lends itself collaboration of all kinds, from assembly-line production of early mass-market woodblock prints to posters of Hokusai's Wave selling in Hobby Lobby. But perhaps the most intriguing parallel is the text superimposed over the image by someone other than the artist. Many Japanese prints bear red stamps on near the edges of the image. These were not a part of the original image, rather they are marks of ownership added later by various collectors who have owned the piece over the years.

When I was in college I took a Medieval art history class. We had to write a big paper about some work or idea or artist. I decided to write about the idea of "monstrous races," these were illustrations of far-out savages thought to dwell in the uncharted lands of the East. Crusaders and missionaries took these depictions seriously, as these were the people they expected to either convert or kill. While these drawings carry the taint of some pretty extreme xenophobia, they are still endearing to me. One of my favorites has always been the guys with faces on their torsos:

I had the idea recently to use Photoshop to recreate some of my favorite monstrous races. I decided to start with the torso-face guys. Without even trying, my search for a good photo of a shirtless man led me to Mr. Matthew McConaughey, the most unapologetically shirtless man of all time. If torso-face men ever to evolve, I believe they will come from Mr. McConaughey's seed.

Here's a new video I made called Too Much Confusion, part 1.