Nova Jiang and Heather Dewey-Hagborg

          Today there are many new artists out in the world. When looking for ones to research I decided to find artists whose work-exemplified qualities that I found appealing. One of the main things that attract me to art today is its influence and effect on society. After recently participating in crowd sourcing projects and also creating one for Digital Media, art work that involves the audience as a participant has been catching my interest more and more. From the Eyebeam Art and Technology Centers web page I found two specific artists that attracted based on their use of participants in their artwork. These artists are Nova Jiang and Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Nova Jiang was a fellow at Eyebeam in the fall and spring of 2011, while Heather Dewey-Hagborg is currently a resident at Eyebeam. While both of these artists involve their participants they work within different subject matters and concepts, making their works completely different and diverse in many ways.

            Nova Jiang has received her master’s degree from the Design Media Art Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her works has been exhibited at festivals, galleries and museums all around the world. The locations range from the 01SJ Biennial in San Jose; the Sundance film festival in Park City, Utah; Sonar in Barcelona, Spain; Glow in Santa Monica, California; the Japan Media Art Festival in Tokyo, Japan; The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Milan Public Design Festival in Milan Italy and many others. She has also received grants and fellowships for her work.  Nova Jiang has received a Skowhegan Fellowship and an Eyebeam Fellowship. In addition, she has been awarded a Black Rock Arts Foundation Grant and a Sculpture Space Grant.

            The work Nova Jiang produces engages with the evolving definition of public space. The idea behind this comes from fostering a sense of community through the work. This in turn creates situations that allow people to related to each other in unexpected ways. Furthermore, individuals are then becoming curious about their surroundings and the people that are in them. Nova does not necessarily ask fellow artists or specific strangers to be collaborators, but instead she has strangers be the collaborators in her artwork. The artwork that Nova has produced range from gallery installations to public participation works. The most recent works include Creatomatic and Ideogenetic Machine. Creatomatic is software designed to accelerate the imagination and prompt inventions. Ideogenetic Machine is an interactive installation. This involves portraits of participants that are generated into a comic book that is created live using custom software. The images are capturing using a camera and a database of drawings. These create narratives based on news and events.

            While all of Nova Jiang’s art was intriguing to me, there were two specific pieces of work that stood out to me. The first of which is Moon Theater. This installation was exhibited in 2008 at the Glow Festival in Santa Monica, California. Not only was it an installation, but also, it was an interactive shadow play installation that involved the 200,000 people who attended the festival. Nova Jiang and fellow artist Michael Kontopoulos created this piece to create an opportunity for communication and expression amongst members of the large crowd. The moon serves as the screen, or backdrop, and the members of the crowd are the performers, despite being complete strangers. In her description of the work, Nova Jiang explains that the moon as a unifying element to the crowd, because it stands as a symbol to the members of the crowd. The moon is something that each and every one of them can recognize.

            The second piece of Nova Jiang’s work that caught my interest was her project entitled Alternate Endings. The project was first created in 2009 at the Milan Design Festival in Milan, Italy. Nova Jiang and four costume designers teamed up to replicate the clothes worn by visitors of the festival. Each day a different bright colored fabric was used to replicate the clothes in both cut and style. After the items were replicated they were given to the participants as a gift for them to wear. They could choose to wear it while socializing with each other or walk the streets of Milan. On the last day of the festival everyone who participated was invited back with their new clothes to attend a party with the rest of the participants. Through this project Nova Jiang and her team explored the concepts of social exchange and using art as a gift. They also investigated the process of how group and individual identities are created, and how they were affected in response to the project.

            Many of Nova Jiang’s works involve the audience directly and make them participants in the installation or project. Others are interactive where the audience can take part in her work by doing something not as extreme, such as make them visually interactive to the audience. Nonetheless, Nova Jiang focuses on involving the crowd of viewers in her projects, which makes them apart of the work and the process that it is made. I personally find myself extremely interested in works of art that I allow me to contribute, such as crowd sourcing, or even works of art that have an interactive aspect. According to CSMonitor.com and their January 14, 2011 article, Crowdsourcing: The art of a crowd, “The impulse to work collectively is not new…The ‘60’s avant-garde was very interesting in eliminating the boundaries between artist and audience.” This also shows that it is not rare to find someone like myself who is interested in being involved in a work of art.

           
When it comes to Heather Dewey-Hagborg, her work is not quite as focused on involving the viewers, but nonetheless she incorporates them within her work in a unique way. Heather Dewey-Hagborg received her Bachelors in Arts from Bennington College and her Masters from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Her work has been shown internationally at solo and group exhibitions, performances and events. She is also the recipient of countless grants and awards.While she currently teaches as an adjunct Professor of Art and Technology at New York University, she is still working as an information artist. Dewey-Hagborg is interest in exploring art as research tool and using it for public inquiry. Her work questions the perceptions of human nature, technology and even the environment. Furthermore, her work investigates the connection between art and life.

            Much of Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s work is in collaboration with Future Archaeology. This collaborative group consists of Brooklyn-based artists who explore the cybernetic nature of ecosystem. Dewey-Hagborg’s projects are based off of the ideas of sound, robotics, learning and conceptual. The two that interested me the most were based off of the ideas of learning and conceptual.

The first piece of Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s that I was interested in is entitled Stranger Visions. In this piece Dewey-Hagborg collects genetic material from public places that people leave behind, most of the time without even noticing. Dewey-Hagborg focuses on genetic determinism and the potential for a culture based off of genetic surveillance. Dewey-Hagborg’s second piece that caught my interest is Spurious Memories. In this piece Dewey-Hagborg is creating creativity by constructing electronic structures that are inspired by biological forms. Software creates new facial images that embody the knowledge of the machine being used; each code is unique and as the process continues the machine interprets new and ambiguous stimuli in different ways. By enabling the creative capacity of machines Dewey-Hagborg is examining how human beings come up with ideas that are new, and consequently how these can be transferred to machines.

Heather Dewey-Hagborg does not explicitly involve the participants in her work as Nova Jiang does; nonetheless, her audience serves as her main source of material. While Dewey-Hagborg uses strangers as a source to produce her work, most of the time unknowingly, Jiang physically brings in the viewer as a participant or collaborative unit to the work. However, I can relate to the work of both of these artists, and I can also see similarities in their work despite the differences. Both artists make the audience the basis of their work. They are aware that the audience wants to view the work and that many members of the audience want to do more than simply view the work, and instead be able to be involved in the work and even participate. As I viewed Nova Jiang’s work I felt an instant attachment and desire to participate in it as well. At the same time, when I viewed Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s work I felt a desire to participate in many of hers as well, but I also was interested in how I could relate to the work that she was presenting.

Nova Jiang and Heather Dewey-Hagborg are both excellent artists who are involving their audiences in their works and breaking the borders between viewing art and creating art. These Jiang and Dewey-Hagborg are allowing their viewers to become participants and even take on the role of being the artist. They are changing the world of art and expanding their audiences are, all by simply allowing them to be involved.

Links:

http://www.eyebeam.org/people/nova-jiang

http://www.novajiang.com/

http://deweyhagborg.com/

http://www.eyebeam.org/people/heather-dewey-hagborg