Tim Stutts: ITP Project Blog

The assignment was to create a montage in Photoshop that tells a story. I chose to use a game of foosball played on the ITP floor. Opacity, arrows, and overlapping images are used to describe a possible sequence of events from the time when the ball comes into play, until the first goal is scored. I was inspired by David Hockney’s “The Scrabble Game”, where a montage implies the passing time and multiple perspectives–a film storyboarded out in one still.

On a free afternoon, I decide to check out the Chelsea art scene. Boarding the X line at 4th Street, Washington Square, I travel in a soy-powered hyper-train and head northwest. On the train I am bombarded with moving advertisements controlled by eye-tracking software, incidentally designed by a former colleague, Lucas Longo. Originally intended to be a market research tool, the software is now also implemented to keep ads within a viewer’s field of vision. Looking down the aisle at an attractive young woman, I am unable to keep a CG Parrot out of view. The words “Parrot Paradise at the Bronx Zoo,” are scrolled onto a virtual banner that follows the bird. “Buggar off!” As a side note, British slang has completely taken over the former American slang, which fell out of popularity, once the hip-hop community shifted to UK Dubstep and Grime music.

Arriving at the 11th Avenue stop, I dismount, and walk past a stand selling pills—some nutritional, some experiential. I purchase a pack of “Protein Overload” and “Good, Serene Day,” and take them with a shot of aerosol water molecule assembly spray, solar cooled by my fleece Anthroplogie jacket. Anthropologie went to menswear several years back, once they realized their clothing could cater to aging pseudo-hippy mid-thirties males, like myself. I exit the station refreshed and ready. The sky is colored with pink smog—the city’s recent attempt to make air pollution prettier.

I’m in the Chelsea now. I have my doubts about this industrial, ultra-hip district in West Manhattan and all it’s pretentiousness. Today though, I decide to have an open attitude, and ignore the fact that this is essentially an art shopping mall for New York’s wealthiest, where current trends manifest themselves into art objects that sell for thousands of dollars.

A little background on the art world of 2016: The term “art objects” arrived on the scene about five years ago, when digital interactive works become so commonplace, that the “new media”—aside from it’s use as an historical reference point—was dropped from the art curriculums. The Chelsea, a monument on materialism, had become the natural final resting place of sold physical art. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, they are all still here.

I head to the Bitforms gallery on 20th Street. It’s located on the second floor of an unmarked brick building. I don’t know what to expect. These days, galleries do not announce what work is in show via the web. After all, the virtual reality and graphics capabilities of the modern duo quintuple-core processor with integrated video RAM are so resolute, that gallery goers would not need to make a trip out here in person to experience this. I enter a barren white room filled with minimal canvases. Bright light and hum from the air conditioning are the only other elements. These works feature highly detailed photographs of classically posed figures that are impossibly beautiful, framed in marble cut like ancient Greek architecture. The skin of the subjects are covered in a white body paint, giving the bodies a synthetic quality, as if they were rendered in 3D software from ten years back. In one of the photos, the body of a nude woman is reclined in some kind of prototype lawn chair, gazing up at a cloud of golden geometric patterns. In another, the face of a woman is covered in thousands of eyelashes. Finally my attention moves to the picture of a man with an outreached arm, whose crotch is conveniently hidden by a scarf-like piece of fabric suspended in midair. This is the kind of art that wealthy flat-owners around Central Park purchase for their flats—the perfect compliment to the historian with a lavish life style. Off to the side of the space, rests a text about the human face—one of the first books I’ve seen in a while. I flip through it and I’m reminded of a time, as an undergrad, when I had to lug these things around from class to class.

Speaking of class, I had to get back to ITP to prepare for an evening class. As a resident artist, I’d been investigating advanced audio synthesis techniques, in addition to teaching a course called Neural Networks for the Rest of You.

All and all, an interesting trip.