Lecture Reviews

Lecture review

Matteo Bittanti

November 4, 2010

Matteo Bittanti’s lecture was an extremely interesting experience for me, being a person who enjoys both art and video games, albeit separately, it was really interesting to hear what he had to say on both subjects and how they tie together. His work was interesting to say the least. I was especially frustrated with his slowing down of Street Fighter, as a gamer of course. I love Street Fighter and definitely think that this work accomplished his goal of making it “annoying”, which is exactly what it was to somebody like me who is so used to playing the game at its expected ridiculously quick pace.

I enjoyed his comparison of arcades to gallery spaces, as it is obvious that these games compose of so many different aspects of art, and using that space to engage with your audience of kids is a really interesting way to look at it.
One of the questions I would have for him would be more about his past and personal experiences with video games. From his work I can tell he is tied to the old school aspect of games and their style, as well as the new, complicated, highly visual games of the modern day.

Lecture Review

Cory Arcangel

Due to an insanely hectic schedule with a full course load and work, and having to leave town numerous times for different personal matters, I was only able to attend one live lecture.

As you can probably tell from my artist comparisons and other things I’ve done this semester involving game art, I really enjoy taking something and manipulating it to become a new piece. This is exactly what Cory Arcangel does with his work. His comment on pop culture and how he uses it also echoes my lifestyle. I also am immersed in different cultures, specifically pop culture, and I love seeing something like that being manipulated into something new. So I definitely identified with that aspect of Cory. The fact that he started with his style while studying programming is really funny to me. Coming from a programming background, and then deciding to just manipulate things with the sole intention of messing with other people is just really amusing to me.

I am a huge fan of mash up music such as Girl Talk and Super Mash Bros, so his Beach Boys/Ghetto boys mash up was very interesting and cool to me. I thought that this was a good representation of his style which is taking something, and basically making hit is own through disassembly and reconstruction. I enjoyed seeing Super Mario Clouds again, something we looked at in class.
It is interesting to me also because with modern emulator technology on computers you can actually remove foregrounds and backgrounds and sprites of super Nintendo games, which you could easily use to make similar art.

Many of the youtube comments were pretty harsh, accusing him of “stealing” and not really having any artistic merit because of this. I disagree, I think that him, much like many other mash up artists, he is simply manipulating data that is already inputted and making hit his own in order to express his own idea.

His lecture style is a little loose, and he didn’t seem to really be sure of what he was trying to convey to his audience, but overall it was an interesting lecture and afterwards I looked into more of his art. Very amusing stuff to me.