Without a Trace

Without a Trace was started by Jody Zellen. She started a site back in July of 2007 where she stripped comic strips of the text leaving only empty thought bubbles. She combined these wordless images with tracings she did of the New York Times. She did this everyday for a year. Each day a comic image,her tracing, and three random words from the original comic strip were posted on her site. 

Without a Trace stresses the "remains", what is still left when everything else disappears. I think that Zellen was trying to leave enough evidence of her tracings to provide memory of what was there before. The combination of the word bubbles, the tracing, and the three words are used together to evoke a memory or feeling. I think that her idea is clever and it took her a lot of time to make Without a Trace.

Absence

Absence

For this series I focused on homeless people and how unimportant they are to most of us. We see them everywhere in D.C. and we usually just ignore them as if they aren't even there. We treat them as if they are nothing, like they are invisible. I actually went to D.C. and photographed people interacting with homeless people (who were not happy to get their picture taken). Well, there was really no interaction at all. Everyone just walked right passed them, most without even looking at them. Some people even looked scared of them. Although I am guilty of this myself, I wanted to do a piece for these "invisible people". I wanted to draw the viewers' attention to them instead of away from them. I made only what we see visible, their clothes, their signs, and their cups for donations. We never notice the actual person behind these things.

Skin Products

Perfume

Hair Products

For this series, I chose to change how we see advertisements. I took three ads out of a magazine. Each ad is for a different product by a different brand, but they each test their products on animals. I found that by changing the actual product to pictures of these poor animals I change the entire mood and meaning of the image. Instead of these ads welcoming you and making you want to buy their product, they now make you think about how that product was made. 

Interview with Charles Cohen

In the interview, Charles discusses his Buff Series. This series consisted of pornographic images with the figures cut out. Instead of people in the pictures, there were white-filled silhouettes. Cohen describes how the initial reaction to his piece is expectation. Due to the setting and position of the pieces we expect nudity. We then start to question what is happening and this sets up the "abstract effect". The immediate experience is no longer transparent and we begin to ask questions. During the interview, Cohen also describes how the work revolves around the presence of absence and how the idea surfaced.

I found this interview helpful to better understand the Buff Series and Cohen's perspective on the pieces. This series was actually derived from two photographic series. Some of the characteristics of the pieces  were not planned such as the love/lust differences in the series. I discovered that the main purpose in Cohen's work is to provoke thought and the buff series definitely achieved that.

Sensitive Rose

Sensitive Rose by Martha Gabriel is a unique website that brings people together in a strange, but artistic way. The "rose" is formed by mobile tags or codes. Each person has their own tag based on his or her desire in life. The codes must be deciphered before they are communicated to others, much like in real life. Your desires are usually not clearly stated when you first meet someone, they must be figured out like these codes.

When I went to the website it asked me for my name and my desire in life. There is a drop down menu of common desires to choose from. After I choose one, I am given a mobile tag that is then sent to Sensitive Rose. Each desire has its own mobile tag and a collage of dots of the same color. The different color dots accumulate to form the rose. I found the project intriguing because you can see how many people share the same desire in life. Although the actual website was quite simple, its function is complex. You need a mobile tag reader just to decipher your code. 

The Freesound Project

The Freesound Project is a website that focuses completely on sounds or noises. The site does not contain music or spoken recordings. Instead, it consists completely of samples of noises. The Freesound Project goes beyond the limitations of just music and brings raw sound into the spotlight. On the actual website there are endless sound files uploaded from users that you can click on and listen to directly from the page. Not only can you listen to these sound files, but you can comment and download them as well. You can also interact with other Freesound users through Shoutbox. 

The originality of this project intrigued me immediately. I have never really heard too much about "sound artists," but this website brings them to your attention and completely focuses on them and their pieces or sounds. I listened to a few of the sound files and most of them were basic everyday sounds that one would not even notice. To hear absolutely nothing but a bike riding past with no picture to associate the sound with was a brand new experience for me. The sounds were raw and didn't need anything to complete them or take away from them.