New Media Reflection

     

Today we had a speaker, Prof. Benjamin Bellas, show us examples of art using New Media. I especially like the pieces he showed us by Arcangel, particularly the one of the spliced videos of cats playing pianos to recreate an classical music. The way that the artist uses the medium to create a juxtaposition of new and old to make the 'new' versions seem ridiculous was a very successful concept. I also like the art exhibition with the hacked bowling video games that play themselves. I think  that when you see the idea put in such a  way, it makes it seem stupid to spend money on a video game to recreate an experience that you could easily have in real life. One thing that does strike me about the pieces where the artist recreated old paintings using video game technology, is that although the new medium made the paintings look absolutely ridiculous, there wasn't necessarily less skill involved in creating the new pieces. Creating physics engines, character skins, and all the other elements in the video game pieces must have taken hundreds of labor hours.