Yes, but, is it photography??

[Darin Boville]

So this wasn't 100's of thousands of cans? 40 cans? So this is a contrived scene? Rather misrepresentative isn't it?
Kent

Surely you say this in jest? As I said before, I find there are serious conceptual problems with Chris' work but this aspect of it--reproducing the cans (or whatever) from a small set or originals seems to be right at the very essence of the work and one of its attractions.

It makes perfect sense to me and adds a little intellectual interest to the work that it was created with something akin to the production process--producing mass quanties of an item with a streamlined and directed process. In fact, hearing some of the details of the process as Chris describes them makes this aspect even more interesting as what he describes sounds to my ears like a real production process (not as simple as it might at first appear) rather than just some dude using photo-mosaic software.

The conceptual problems still remain:

1) The work (not the artist) seems unaware of the fact that it is a huge, wasteful print.

2) The connection between the micro image and the overall image (The Denali logo and the Ansel Photo; the cans and the painting, the dollar bills and Ben Franklin's portrait, the other objects which become geometric patterns of millions of themselves) do not seem to add much value to the overall work.

--Darin

[Kirk Keyes]

but with the obsessive qualities of a Philip Glass
composition.

I guess I would have said Kraftwerk instead of Philip Glass...

[Greg Lockrey]

Answer is "B".

2*pi*r = circumference. Solve for "r", and the all you really need is the difference in the two circumferences to do the calculation. So:
3 meters/(2*pi)= 0.477 meters => 1.56 ft

So really more of an army crawl than hands and knees...

I personally suspect long term changes in solar flux (output) to be the driving force for planetary temperature. Stars are constantly changing in output, and it takes so little for it to change in the course of a a few hundred or thousand years to make a potentially big change in the temps here. And we only really have about 20 years of high resolution data (from satellites) and about 600 years of low resolution data (from sunspot counts) at this point that I think this theory cannot be discounted.

And I'm not a geotech scientist, just a chemist. But I took my thermodynamics classes in college.

As for Chris' art, they are not photographs, they are photoillustrations.

Chris - I'm curious as to how one makes images like this - you must start with the larger image that has been digitized so it's made of pixels. Then you must assign new images to each pixel based on the color content of the original pixel. Is there some software what does this in a semiautomated fashion or is a pretty hands on process?

Thank you Kirk. I wonder how many"felt" that the answer was "C"? My final for Chemical Thermodynamics (My freshman year 3rd Quarter) was to answer this question: Accererate a 10 gram solid Gold sphere to 1000 m/sec. It travels 2000 meters during a 50 C atmosphere at STP. It hits a block of ice. What is the temperature after the 10th time constant? Now I do not recollect some of the other controlling factors but that is the jest of it. I'm with you on the sun also.

[Kirk Gittings]

Kirk,

Kraftwerk doesn't have enough edge.

[Ole Tjugen]

They are photographically based art, much like collage, as in Ulesmann's work, but with the obsessive qualities of a Philip Glass composition.

Thanks for bringing this back on topic, and at the same time stating so eloquently how I feel about these pictures.

Slightly off topic - did anyone else notice that some of the Denali logos are spelled "Denial"?

Even more off topic: Check out Milanković cycles. They're well described and documented, and a part of all climatological models. Sorry - solar output variations are not a valid excuse for the current warming trend.

[Greg Lockrey]

And there are truck loads of money to made by scientists and environmental groups. See, no crisis=no funding. My brother is an astro-physicist working in Arizona on a government (taxpayer) funded project. The 'holy grail' of science today is not discovery, it's getting funding. Either from the taxpayer or some private source. So yes, 'voodoo' science does take place and more than many would believe. If a scientist does tow the popular line, he/she is not going to get funding for their research. This is fact not fiction.

By the way, I am not anti-science just anti 'voodoo' science and far too much that is merely theory is being stated as fact. That's not science, it's speculation.

Now this gravity thing. That's something I can get my head around.

As to the photos in question, I find them very well executed but trite, cliche' and condescending.


Kent

Thank you for giving us a real life example Kent.

[Peter Sills]

The "Is it Photography" question seems moot. It's like asking if Rauchenberg's combines are paintings or sculptures. Maybe the better question is how well the work fits our understanding of Art.

To do this, I'll default to the only good defenition I know which is the Utilitartian rule.
(Anything created by people with no utility is art).

Doe this Art have more Utility than Esthetic? Is it more about the message? Are the political messages delivered from the work a utility of the work? If we remove the messages from the work, does the work hold up?

Pete

[Oren Grad]

Getting away from what any of us individually thinks about the art, the science or the politics, how effectively will this mode of expression realize Chris' larger consciousness-raising objective? Is it likely to "connect" with an audience that is uninterested in conceptual art for its own sake? Why or why not?

[Ralph Barker]

I suspect the average viewer will get stuck on the "cool" and never mentally progress to the "why".

[chris jordan]

Oren, that's a toughy. One thing I try hard to do with my work is keep my feet on the ground. I run my pieces past my friends who have no interest in conceptual art, and listen carefully to their feedback, and I try to stay away from hoity-toity academic art theories. My hope with my new series is to keep going with an aspect of my previous work, which was that it was able to reach a wide public audience that weren't necessarily art afficionados. My Intolerable Beauty series appeared in all kinds of non art-related venues (stuff like yoga magazines, fashion magazines, blogs about random cool stuff, etc.) because its message was simple and clear. Unfortunately the new series will be difficult to reproduce in magazines and on websites, so the work won't reach as wide an audience that way. But my hope is that it will make it into museums and the original pieces will be seen by viewers there. The larger art museums have a couple of million people pass through in a few month period, and the majority of those people are not high-end art afficionados; they are tourists, school kids, and other members of the public who just go to art shows (just look at who is in the lobby of MoMA on a random day and you'll see what I mean). So hopefully if my new work gets into some museums that way, the full-size prints will reach a wide audience, and pass along the message that the little JPEG's can't do anyway. That's all just my hope though; what ends up happening will probably be something very different, because it always it...