Creative Context Art Project 2

Creative Context Project

Creative Context Art Project

Response

Mercy.  Small.  Weak.  Helpless.  Bloody.  Despair.  Furry.  Meat.  Skin.  Cruelty.  Horrific.  Vicious.  Empathy.  Naked.  Scary.  Frightened.  Organizations.  Radicals.  Extreme.  Death.

New York

Convergence Culture

Photo taken outside of Chatham's Art and Design Center (ADC)

Taken with iPhone 3G, edited with Instagram application

convergence culture (noun): 1. the intersection of older and more modern forms of media  2. the merging of different kinds of media  3. the interactions between media  4. the culture that emerges these definitions

Examples:

• The telephone and the camera have become the camera phone.

• Fan fiction - literary genre in which the author takes elements and/or characters from popular culture (i.e., movie, book, etc.) and uses them to write a new story.

• Avatar (2009) becoming the highest-grossing film in history lead to other movies borrowing certain elements of Avatar, most notably the 3D technology, available but rarely used before.

The photo above is another example of convergence culture: a sculpture, found on a university campus, was captured with an iPhone and edited with an third-party application from said iPhone.  As alluded to earlier, telephones and cameras lived harmoniously yet separately for hundreds of years.  Had the camera phone been invented earlier than circa 1997, no one would have bought it; it did not yet have a niche to fill.  Until society called upon the need for such a device, people were perfectly content with shlepping about both their cameras and their "mobile cellular phones."

The Internet has come to include more than what our computers can give us.  We can access an infinite, ever-expanding universe of information from hundreds, if not thousands, of different devices.  No wonder it is referred to as the ""information superhighway," when we can go from one place to another in nearly no time flat.  If one were to imagine what the Internet would look like if tangible, they may imagine something similar to the sculpture above.  It zig-zags and swirls; it has bumps and rolls, sharp turns and soft angles.  From one perspective it appears relatively simple, yet from another, it more closely resembles a busy inner-city highway.