Artist Blog Post

The Artist I chose to write about in my blog is Nova Jiang. She is currently doing an exhibition piece called the Ideogenetic Machine. It is a program she has developed that takes pictures of the people visiting the exhibition, loads them into a computer program and develops an image of them in her style of drawing. These images are then placed into a comic book. This concept is novel for a variety of reasons. The computer program is designed to never repeat itself. The pages and stories that it generates are unique. In addition it provides blank speech bubbles. After visiting the exhibit, the person can go home and download a free pdf of their comic book. In essence Jiang is stimulating interaction between people and technology as they act out the various scenes in the comic book and creativity on the part the of gallery visitor because they are encouraged to fill out the blank speech bubbles.

Jiang works with two programmers, Sephiroth Li (obviously a fan of Final Fantasy 7) and Andres Colubri, in order to render the images into what resembles hand drawn portraits. Jiang’s concept for this piece is very ingenious because it makes the viewers of her artwork not only part of her artwork, but involved in its creative process as well. It is a fascinating concept because she is sharing the process of creating art with the people coming to see it. Not only do they get to watch it being made but they are a part of its making. It involves the admirer of the art in a new and creative way.

Jiang’s concept is really captivating. According to her bio, one of her main concerns in creating art allowing people to relate to each other. She also wants to share the creative process with them. The Ideogenetic Machine seems to incorporate both of these concepts. The images that are produced by the machine are still a work in progress. They are very comic book in appearance but lack color. I don’t know if she is planning on trying to make the images in color or not, but none the less, the images seem to invoke a desire to create.