"Street View Landscapes," A photographic exploration of 'Google Street View'
"Highway Sign, Philip, South Dakota, USA"
This series explores the nature of landscape photography through imagery culled from Google Street View’s extensive visual database. Landscape photography, by definition, is a passive form of photography, one that relies on an uncontrollable source of beauty: the earth. Landscape photographers unflinchingly appropriate this beauty as content for their art, and in doing so they claim authorship of a force that exists independently from their gaze. Incidentally, Google’s monumental visual mapping project, Street View, has captured many images that share formal and compositional similarities to landscape photographs produced by artists.
"Ice Hut, Spitsbergen, Svalbard, Norway"
Since landscape photography is a diluted form of appropriation art, the main difference between these two sources of imagery is artistic intent. I chose to not only embrace this passive approach to photography, but to take it one step further by shedding my camera altogether, in favor of decontextualizing and reframing photographic compositions initially captured by Google. Instead of applying an artistic eye to the physical outside world, I have chosen Google’s seamless visual map as my photographic terrain, and curation as my method of creation.
"Countryside in Winter, Kirkenes, Norway"
I have chosen a refined selection of images found within this virtual reality, specifically those that function as “fillers”–images used primarily to maintain a sense of visual continuity throughout the interactive map. Without these images, the Street View interface becomes essentially a guidebook, highlighting only specified destinations and addresses. It is the “filler” image, photographed blindly and by chance, that not only stitches together this digital world, but that exposes a more humble reality. Overlooked by most users seeking specific locations and points of interest, these photographs reveal a beauty in landscapes we have unconsciously chosen to ignore.
Elizabeth Eisenstein is an artist currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Her work centers around the photographic image, both in the traditional sense of the term (film and digital photographic stills) as well as appropriated digital imagery found primarily online. She is a 2012 graduate of New York University with a BFA in Studio Art. View more "Street View Landscapes" on her website.
Binary code translations of well-known texts in Emily Lazerwitz's"digital hand-typed tapestries"
"Nibbles for Tea," Translation of Alice in Wonderland chapter 7
Artist statement: “My practice focuses on the intersection of art, craft, technology, and language...I have been working with digital means to weave traditional designs. My laptop becomes my loom and each keystroke a stitch. They are hand-typed, line-by-line from left to right just as they would be done normally. They are hand-made digital pieces: an oxymoron. The technology loses its sense of speed and effortlessness. It is clear how painstaking the process is...” Read More
Digital Tapestries: I create work that takes language, and in the case of my tapestries, manipulates it so that it cannot be understood. I do not change the content of the text or make it illegible. The ability to read the text is still possible, but most would not have the time or desire to attempt to read it.
"Down the Rabbit[worm]hole," Alice in Wonderland chapter 1
I chose a text that means something to me. Recently they have been related to mathematics, such as chapter 7 of Alice in Wonderland, or textiles, such as the myth of Arachne. I translate the chosen text into binary code through an algorithm. The algorithm converts each character including spaces into a number and then that number is further translated into an 8 bit number consisting of 0s and 1s depending on its relationship with the powers of 2. Then I take these numbers and add spaces to them. The spaces correlate to a pattern. The pattern is based off of textile patterns that I think are relevant to the text. Sometimes they are more literal in their relationship and sometimes not. I finish when the last digit is in place.
It should be noted that spaces are not read in binary code, and therefore do not change the meaning of the code. Thus, if the pattern was inserted into the reverse algorithm, the text would read back exactly as it was. Hence, the content of the text has not changed, simply the context, several times over.
Once the process starts my decisions become more absolute. Like any system, the more decisions one makes, the fewer options there are. None of my work is entirely finished. There still are more options. I like to think I make a textile when I finish a work; however, a more accurate description would be a textile pattern. The process itself is weaving, yet the outcome is one that has far more potential than a traditional textile because of the very reasons it is not one.
Emily Lazerwitz is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art at the University College London. View more digital tapestry works on her EAS profile here.
Look Again: Formation of Mixed Race Identity through Revisitations of Ukiyo-e
"M" from "Two Portraits" (Figure 1)
The current era of globalization and immigration has brought about an America in which nine million individuals, or 2.9% of the population identify as mixed race. The search for the understanding of this identity becomes increasingly important as society begins to identify “mixed race” as a racial category and subject it to the same prejudices and discrimination as other minority races. Today the mixed race individual is often projected through a lens of celebration, exoticism, or otherness that simplifies the individual. Thus, it is increasingly important for the personal accounts and experiences of mixed race individuals be represented. Processes of self-exploration are vital starting points for generating counter-narratives that expand the meaning of mixed race identity in today’s context.
I am a half Japanese, half American individual and through the practice of traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking, influenced by the Ukiyo-eprints of 18th Century Japan, I examined my personal narrative. The phrase “Look Again” is loosely translated from the Japanese phrase “mitate”, a genre of Ukiyo-e in which prints reenact or parody classical literary or historical scenes within a contemporary setting. In my work I reset the stage for mitate-e so that my self and my world represented the contemporary, and the mitate-e of Edo Japan became the classical.
"T" from "Two Portraits" (Figure 2)
I carved high quality Japanese shina and cherry wood with Japanese knives and used rice paste to adhere Japanese sumi ink and watercolors to handmade washi paper. The challenge of recreating Japanese printmaking in Portland, Oregon illuminated the difficulty of transmitting history into a new time and place. The preservation of a traditional Japanese craft required a delicate and hands-on process that became as vital as the product. My actions of hand carving and hand printing became an act of identity-forming, as I became both mentally and physically closer to the unique art of Japanese printmaking.
M and T (Figure 1 and 2), show female bust-length figures modeled after the Edo period okubi-e format. Both figures are based on Kitagawa Utamaro’s close up beauty portraits which use physical characteristics to categorize women. By portraying the multiracial bodies of my sister and me, the difficulties of categorization based on physical terms are brought to light. M and T, reveal the inadequacy of such a system by representing physical features for which there are no real categories, the gestures—picking at eyelashes, pulling out hair— physically embody the anxieties that accompany societal tendencies towards categorization. Unlike Utamaro’s portraits of women caught unaware in their “natural state”, the prints capture self-conscious moments where the subject is aware that their features are displayed and examined. This reflects a common experience for mixed race individuals: Just as an art history scholar might look at an Utamaro work and attempt to decipher the rank or category of the woman depicted, so too do people examine mixed race individuals based on their physical characteristics and attempt to identify their race.
"A Childhood Story" (Figure 3)
A Childhood Story (Figure 3), retells a non-traditional personal narrative through traditional Japanese storytelling devices. Read from right to left, the story itself loosely follows the characters of my sister and me.
"A Childhood Story" detail (right)
The story depicted is a piecemeal of personal memories, aural storytelling, old photographs, and even Google Maps. It highlights the fragmentary nature of exploring personal narratives, which plays a vital role in the formation of an identity. I show this fragmentation through a non-linear timeline: in the center a recent painting of my sister hangs in the hallway of the house where she is still a child, silhouettes of my sister and me all grown up are perched upon a roof while our younger selves sit for photos in the room below, to the left my grandmother plays with me as a baby while my adolescent self bathes in a natural hot springs a short distance away.
The narrative begins on the right with the Western-inspired, one-point perspective used by many ukiyo-e artists. This breaks down in the second panel where three dimensional space is represented with simple diagonals rather than a vanishing point, as was done in very early Asian paintings.
Through these varied perspectives I explore multiple facets of my world, from my childhood home in Oregon to my mother’s Japanese hometown, from my infant-hood to my adult-hood. As a single “big picture” they represent the unique complexities of my history and my identity. This reflects a freedom from categorization, from being forced to choose between my American identity and my Japanese identity. Those identities, like the visual elements within this triptych, are intertwined and inseparable.
"A Childhood Story" detail (center)
The universal mixed race experience is near impossible to convey, as a similarity in racial heritage is by no means a significant commonality between individuals. Yes, students now have the option to self-identify as “mixed race” on standardized tests, but what does “mixed race” really mean? For both Two Portraits and Childhood Triptych, the personal experience takes center stage as I shuffle through family photographs and hunt through memories in order to convey an experience that is honest and untold.
I combine the “western” views I learned growing up in the United States with my new knowledge of traditional Japanese printmaking in order to create an image that is rooted deeply in both Japanese and American cultures. Through learning and performing methods of Japanese printmaking I created a tactile and intimate connection with an exquisite tradition, and participated in the transmission of knowledge and history that is vital to my identity.
By resisting the urge to attempt to come to a universal conclusion about mixed race identity and by denying that my experience fits into some kind of category for what it means to be mixed race, I assert perhaps the few truths on the matter: that each experience is unique, that each identity is formed differently, and that each story that is told has the potential to open up a dialogue for further illumination of what the mixed race identity is.
Maria Maita-Keppeler is a recent graduate of Reed College where she studied Studio Art with a focus on Japanese Woodblock Printmaking. She is currently living in San Francisco, California and working on organizing the EAS “Translations” show while pursuing her passion for playing music.
Alberto Schiavone, a young Italian author, writes about Via Padova, a street extending through an immigrant neighborhood in Milan, and where the tensions between ethnic groups sometimes turn into street fights. Old and young residents of the city are struggling to cope with the demographic changes brought about by the waves of immigrants from foreign countries. Immigration is a recent phenomenon in Italy, a country that for more than a century exported labor. Via Padova represents the changing mosaics of Italy’s cities, and the tension that arises through urban transformation.
