Artist Research: Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist. He was born in 1957 and is currently based in Beijing. His probably most famous for his collaboration with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics. He is also a political activist. He has spoken out against the Chinese government's stance on democracy and human rights.
Because his outspokenness, Weiwei was put in jail for 81 days without any official charges. His album The Divine Comedy tells the story of his experience with the Chinese authorities. "Laoma Tihua" is my favorite song off the album. This song paints a vivid picture of the police breaking into Weiwei's home and beating him with lyrics like "Why are you breaking in? To teach you a lesson, kid." The album is a powerful way of explaining the experience of a political dissident speaking out against an authoritarian government.

The Divine Comedy album cover

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Project 1 Artist Statement

Everyone lives somewhere. Whether it is a house, an apartment, a dorm room, or a cardboard box, everyone has some place to go to at the end of the day. This place is familiar. It is reassuring and comforting. This space is so familiar, we often take it for granted. How aware of your surroundings are you? Can you describe your home in detail to someone who has never been there? Would you be able to tell if something in your home was missing or altered? If you could, how would you react? I want to explore these questions with this project. I want to alter the everyday events that occur in a house in order to make people appreciate and be more aware of what they have.

Artist Research: Peter Burr

Peter Burr was born in 1980 in Brooklyn, NY. He specializes in computer animation and creates abstract environments that draw inspiration from the immersive quality of video games. In the past, Burr produced art under the name Hooliganship and created a video label called Cartune Xprez. He has received many grants and awards such as a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), a Creative Capital Grant (2016), and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship (2016). He is currently a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University's Center for the Arts in Society. Burr's work Cave Exits premiered at Images Festival in 2015. This work plays on the idea of retro dungeon crawler video games. The viewer is surrounded by four screens with constantly changing abstract images and videos. This is a reference to the procedural generation of the levels of those video games. This work has been shown at Fenway Park in Boston, MA; 3-Legged Dog Art & Technology Center in New York, NY; and The Bank Hil

Final Project: Artist Statement & Instructions

sojourn (n.) - a temporary stay. This installation is a music video for the title track from my recently released EP. I filmed this video while I was home for Thanksgiving break. I only used one camera to film my younger brother wandering through Ocean City, New Jersey. We grew up in a town five minutes from there, so we have plenty of fond memories going on amusement park rides, playing mini golf, and eating ice cream. I wanted to capture this sentiment even though we have both grown up. The DIY-ness of the video is intentional as I wanted it to look almost like a home video. We all have place from our childhood that evokes happy memories. One of those places for me is Ocean City. I sojourned home for Thanksgiving, and I wanted to show you all a piece of my home. Instructions: 1.) Turn on computer and projector. 2.) Open the Mad Mapper file "FMX 463 Final." The video will loop. 3.) Play the "Sojourn" audio file. An iteration has completed when the song pl

FMX 463

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