Extra Credit: Aram Bartholl Lecture

Aram Bartholl's work closely relates to the realms of art and technology, specifically the connections between people and different networks both physically and digitally.  This is obvious in his WoW piece that he did in both Laguna Beach and Korea.  In his piece, Bartholl recreated the floating name tags that are paired with every user on the online RPG game, World of Warcraft.  He did this using clear plastic and cardstock letters.  The artist stated that this piece really highlighted the clash of cultures depending on where the performance piece took place.  Some bystanders in Laguna Beach assumed that the names signified that the participants were political candidates.  Participants in Korea were yelled at from across the street.  Bartholl went on to elaborate that if he were to do this piece in Germany, nobody would react or bother to say anything.  This difference in reactions was a pleasant side-effect to Bartholl's artistic comment on self-identification and all the information we give out to others on the internet and then juxtaposing this fact onto real life.
Bartholl went on to talk about his other pieces, including his QR Code series, which combined the organic touch of fingerprints and paint strokes with the human illiteracy of digital QR codes.  He also mentioned his CAPTCHA Project, which questioned the relationship between humans and viral software entities.  Bartholl put the captcha codes onto business cards to ensure his clients were human instead of viruses.  He also appropriated the letters into the urban environment amongst graffiti letters as a sort of comment on an exclusive group of "real humans only" gang.  Other projects included Forgot Your Password?, which composed of books of leaked LinkedIn passwords; and Dead Drops, which included sealing USB outlets in concrete in an urban environment.  This piece was my favorite, because it sort of forced the participant to actively go out and seek places to share art, music, and ideas.  Despite the drawbacks of possibly virus downloads, I think the piece is an ingenious comment on the gap between being glued to your screen and actively participating in the word.  I feel that Dead Drops abridges this gap, and it's truly amazing that it brought so many people together simplistically.
The artist's work relates to my own in the sense that I am also interested in the field of art and technology, and I enjoy exploring the ideas of relationships between people, especially happenstance encounters between strangers.  I am doing this now in a photography series in which I explore the relationship between people and inanimate objects.  The viewer doesn't quite anticipate the bond I highlight, and exploring peoples' personalities really gets me excited.  However, Aram Bartholl takes the idea into a much more in-depth realm of online communities that do not interest me personally.  Overall, I found Aram Bartholl to be a very interesting character, and I incredibly enjoyed working with him in his figure-drawing workshop.