Jett Vivere

Jett Vivere
Jett Vivere is the October 2008 Digital Color Artist of the Month. Jett was born 1987 in Paisley and raised in Ayrshire, on the west coast of Scotland. With a history of art in the family, Vivere took an interest in art at a young age and has been a keen artist ever since. After studying fine art and having successful end of year shows and exhibitions in Glasgow and Edinburgh she has embarked on a career as an artist with work on exhibition in various galleries. She has been influenced by many artists including Peter Howson, Gerard Burns, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol.

Vivere’s work, like the artists who inspire her, is unique, stylish and quirky. Unafraid of creating bold images that make a visual statement, she chooses color wisely, using it to create a bigger impact on a large scale. When painting, Vivere uses oil bars for their flexibility and greater control than can be achieved by the direct application of the oils by hand. The simplicity of the lines and marks on the canvas belies the work and preparation required to produce such dramatic images.

Long Beach SoundWalk
Among the exhibits at the September 2008 Long Beach SoundWalk were:
* A room filled with about a dozen roundish sculptures hanging from the ceiling. Each is a bundle of electronics and each emits different soft sounds.
* A Tower of Babel sculpture. You speak or make noises into the nearby microphone, and the sculpture distorts and echoes the sound, mixing it with previous sounds.
* Household percussion jams, where people play mostly pots and pans, but other household items also.
* A station where you select a musical work and listen to it through headphones. The piece is distorted according to the ambient sound level in the room. The quieter the room, the more distorted the sound is.
* Laptop computers hanging by wires from the ceiling. Participants swing the computers, which have motion sensors and play sounds based on their motions.
* Gossip. Two pairs of nude female mannequins separated by some distance on the sidewalk. Tell a juicy secret to one pair, and it's broadcast from the other pair.
* An installation which translates the shape of mountain peaks into sounds. Hundreds of photos of Colorado mountains were digitally traced. These outlines, which resemble the shape of audio waves, were imported into an audio editor. The resulting low register audio waves resemble the rumbling of the earth itself. The installation displays the mountain photo and the wave form, which is traced through as the sound plays.
* A room with four large drums in front of loud amplified sounds. Ping pong balls which are suspended on strings from the ceiling bounce on the vibrating drum heads.
* A virtual maze in which the "walls" are merely sounds which you hear through the large stuffed toy mouse-head headphones you wear. This was called "Mice pace" (get it?).
An art calendar listing Southern California Art Walks, Open Studio Tours, & Art Festivals can be found at: http://DigitalConsciousness.net/directory/artcalendar.php

New Contemporary Artists and Galleries
The following artists registered in the last month. To view the work of an artist enter the artist's name at http://DigitalConsciousness.com To see these most recent artists go to http://DigitalConsciousness.com/new/
Doriana Rada. Spiritual art from Albania.
Taylor Denis. Artist and author from Sweden.
Richard Whincop. Realistic oils from the U.K.
Gilbert Abric, Moustafa Al Hatter, Joseph DiSipio, Kevin Barr, Donna Willis and Nirvana Blues have added new artwork to their galleries. http://DigitalConsciousness.com/gallerylist.phtml

Ad-free Galleries With No Commission
Artists with Digital Consciousness Gallery Service can create and edit on-line galleries from a control panel. These galleries contain no ads and are among the most prominent pages on Digital Consciousness. Artists may sell artwork from their galleries free of commission. Gallery Service requires registration and $30 a year. Registration is free and registered artists may create an Artist Page without purchasing Gallery Service. Registered Artists can use the Edit link at the bottom of their Artist Page to edit their Artist Page or to upgrade to Gallery Service.

Burning Man 2008

Burning Man is an annual week long arts festival that takes place in the Black Rock desert in Nevada. This issue of the newsletter describes just a few of the installations there.

Tantalus
Tantalus is a life-size stroboscopic zoetrope. The mechanism produces an illusion of action from a succession of static pieces. It tells the tale of Tantalus, who stole ambrosia from the Gods. His punishment was to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches. Whenever he reached for the fruit, the branches raised his intended meal from his grasp. The Tantalus zoetrope at Burning Man presents a revolving Uncle Sam hat. A man's arm reaches for an apple, or golden watch. The object goes up and down, but it is always just out of reach.

Tantalus is the creation of Peter Hudson, a San Francisco visual artist who has installed zoetropes at Burning Man since 2000. In 2000, Playa Swimmers was featured in a Time Magazine article about the art of Burning Man and in filmmaker Renea Robert's award-winning documentary, Gifting It. In 2001, Possession, a collection of six hands strategically placed on a model. In 2002, Sisyphish which depicts strobe-lighted swimmers in motion. In 2004, Deeper; in 2007 Homouroboros and this year Tantalus. Peter Hudson is the September 2008 Digital Color Artist of the Month. http://RenownedArt.com/digitalcolor/

Babylon
The largest installation was Babylon, a 10-story steel frame tower rising 100 feet into the sky, with a stairwell to the top. It was built by union workers out of recycled materials to specifications that allowed for tear down. The festival is a "leave no trace" event, so everything is temporary. The process of quickly and cleanly building and tearing down a structure so big it would be fair to call it a skyscraper is in itself a work of art.

Brainfire
A few hours after dark the artist himself fired up the structure releasing fuel into the ceiling of a small open building. In calm conditions there is mesmerizing, creeping, undulating fire suspended overhead. In windy conditions there is still a partial coating of the fire just beneath the ceiling.

The Apocalypse Lounge Dinosaur Spider
This is a gigantic mechanical beast that looks like a dinosaur, but has eight legs so may be a spider. Three years in the making, it is powered by a single truck motor geared up enough to move the 7 ton object. It tromped across the festival straining to make a step, but doing it, pausing and then making the next. It was two stories high and people climb up and ride on the top story. It cannot turn. It makes loud thumps as it goes and stirs up dust as it pounds the earth.

Bummer
A super size Humvee measuring 38 feet long x 18 feet wide x 16 feet high. Half of the Hummer was painted in military khaki and the other half in bright sporty colors. The headlights were bright enough to bring day to night. The taillights were a shadow show.

Altered State
A symbol of the United States Capitol becomes a mirage of mythical creatures fabricated of elaborately carved white steel. Each cut is rendered in the archetypal graphic style of Pacific Northwest Coast Indian imagery. Gymnasts climbed the interior swing and as intended, a government building was transformed into an Altered State.

Temple of Community
A thirty-foot-high rendition of an origami crane. On the playa, the crane symbolizes the act of letting go – of people, places, feelings, ideas – making wishes, discovering hope, finding peace, and building the wisdom, happiness and longevity of a community that is united in this experience.

Shiva Vista
A circular fire installation with an elevated performance platform in the center. Sixteen large propane guns fire in rhythmic sequences while fire performers, dancers and musicians play along with them. Twelve of the guns are arranged in a 100 foot circle and four more are located at the corners of the platform, controlled from an elevated platform just outside of the circle. It is a place where humans and machines enter into a fusion of fire, movement and sound.

Flamethrower Shooting Gallery
Modeled after a county fair-style shooting gallery, this provides a new twist on a long-standing American tradition and pokes gentle fun at the American fascination with firearms and personal power, as well as the Burning Man fascination with fire and radical self expression. It does this by allowing and encouraging participants to literally play with fire and shoot things.

Emerald Portal
The Emerald Portal was originally made for Burning Man 2006. It is based on 3-dimensional sacred geometry heart chakra colors and incorporates the Quasar Wave Transducer, a subsonic nonlinear dynamic analog feedback device. It is made of specially painted plywood and has seating both within the lower area and on a raised central platform. The outline is a steel tubing version that clearly shows the geometry of the structure and can be climbed on. It catalyzes a personal connection to the Emerald within the participant's heart chakra and facilitates a connection to the Earth and Galaxy's energy bodies.

New Contemporary Artists and Galleries
The following artists registered in the last month. To view the work of an artist enter the artist's name at http://DigitalConsciousness.com To see these most recent artists go to http://DigitalConsciousness.com/new/

1. John Torode. Abstract expressionism
2. James Faulkner. Digital collage.
3. Tony Blue. Blutography art, a form of photo-illustration.
4. Cynthia Fusco. Landscape and nature photography.
5. Lewis Liu. Reproduction of famous oil paintings.
6. Liz Rogers. Transparent watercolors.
7. Paul Bonnie Kent. Brilliant abstracts and other offerings from Emilia Romagna, Italy.
8. J P McLaughlin. Image creation from Scotland.
9. Jett Vivere. Dramatic impressionistic oils from Ayrshire, Scotland.
10. Rollo West. Oil and colored pencil animals and wildlife.
11. Cody Wilkerson. Digital graphic photography.
12. Peter Hudson. Life-size stroboscopic zoetropes.
13. Kristina Wentzell. Landscapes and florals.

Gilbert Abric, Kevin Barr and Nicholas Caputi have added new artwork to their galleries. http://DigitalConsciousness.com/gallerylist.phtml

Ad-free Galleries With No Commission
Artists with Digital Consciousness Gallery Service can create and edit on-line galleries from a control panel. These galleries contain no ads and are among the most prominent pages on Digital Consciousness. Artists may sell artwork from their galleries free of commission. Gallery Service requires registration and $30 a year. Registration is free and registered artists may create an Artist Page without purchasing Gallery Service. Registered Artists can use the Edit link at the bottom of their Artist Page to edit their Artist Page or to upgrade to Gallery Service.