Thematic Interests of Mark Tribe

     Mark Tribe is an artist who follows his themes throughout many different medias and processes in order to explore new ideas.  He has worked with everything from sculpture and collage to web design and social art.  Tribe incorporates all of these medias, often together, to explore how our western culture communicates and interacts.  He then delves deeper to show how our society is influenced and even controlled by our media and different forms of communication and their controlling forces.  Almost all of his art works have the ability to be controlled and often continuously changed by the viewers and participants of the works.  This factor allows his themes to be further expressed as the societal arts that they are.

            Tribe grew up with a father (Laurence Tribe) who was a constitutional scholar and writer, and this opened up the political world very early for him.  Growing up in San Francisco, California, Mark got his BA in Visual Art at Brown University in 1990, then returned to California for his MFA in Visual Art from the University of California at Sand Diego in 1994. “He is the co-author, with Reena Jana, of New Media Art, forthcoming from Taschen Verlag in 2006. His art work has been exhibited at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, and Gigantic Art Space in New York. He has organized curatorial projects for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, MASS MoCA in North Adams, and inSite_05 in San Diego and Tijuana”[1]  Tribe has all of these experiences and resources to become an amazingly dedicated artist who’s works continue to allow our culture to think and grow.

            Mark Tribe has long been interested in art that allows the viewer and society as a whole to participate within the work.  He is very interested in how this changes the piece and makes it malleable and ever shifting.  This aspect of Tribes work is evident in his 1994 piece called “Carpark” that he created in collaboration with Steven Matheson and Nina Katchadourian.  For this piece the artists have separated out the students into different sections of the parking lot around the Southwestern College in California based on the color of their car.  Tribe describes the piece when he says, “By choosing the parking lots as the focus of our attention, we transformed parking from a process in which individual drivers compete for space, into a kind of game in which the entire community participated.”[2]  By forcing the drivers to park in certain lots, the artists were illustrating how we are constantly submitting to daily little institutionalized rules and regulations.  By disassembling the process of such a basic act as parking, Tribe is questioning all the simple little assumptions in life.

            Next, Mark Tribe grew frustrated the lack of communication within the art community and recognized the possibility to fill this gap through the Internet.  In 1996, he founded “Rhizome.com” as a small email listing between artists.  Over time this site has grow into a “dynamic, interactive platform, rich in historical resources and updated continually with new art and commentary by a vast community.”[3]  In 1999 Tribe created another website of this type called “StarryNight” that used stars instead of text to represent different links.  The stars shone brighter based on how often the site viewers selected them, so the most popular links were the brightest.

             Yet even though “Rhizome.com” is just a tool he has created, Tribe has transformed it into a work of art.  He has done this by allowing it to grow and evolve into the interactive and constantly updated site that it is today.  He has again allowed the outside culture to mold his work and change it.  This site becomes like an experiment where Tribe shows the viewer how they can create their own lines of communication and functioning without the governmental and corporate influence that we all live with in our daily lives.

            Tribe explores this theme further with his two works called Revelation 1.0 and Revelation 2.0.  The pieces in this series are created when Mark Takes the Amnesty international and the CNN websites and strips them of all text leaving the image “reduced to geometrical compositions of color fields and photographic images.”[4]  This is the artist’s way of taking away much of the media’s influence through the text, and allowing the viewer to have an unbiased opinion based solely on the images.  What’s interesting in these images is that despite the text being erased, there is still quite a bit of biased opinion in the presentation of these images through the forming of the geometric shapes and the placement of the images themselves.

            Mark Tribe again combines the means of a viewer interactive artwork and an open source community in series called the Port Huron Project.  These works are “a series of reenactments of key New Left speeches from the 1960s and 70s, presented to examine American democracy by considering today’s political situation in context to that of the 1960s and 70s.”[5]  For these reenactments Tribe has hired actors to give the speeches and has invited specific people and passersby to join the crowd while he videotapes the speech.   After cropping and finalizing the video, Tribe then posts the film on utube.com and shows them in exhibits.  However, the whole art piece is in the post-production film rather than any emphasis being on the speech at the time it’s given. 

The reason for this is because while the crowd is being recorded they are very ware that they are being recorded, and it shows in the final product.  This shows the viewers of the artwork in a very obvious way that everything they are seeing is being staged and controlled. Mark Tribe says of the process: “The process of documenting the events infects the events themselves. The cameras are very present; they intrude into the event in a way that emphasizes the mediation that is already taking place in the very act of reenactment.”[6]  This emphasizing of the mediation between the speech and the video goes along with Tribe’s long time theme of an institutionalized media leading to an institutionalized culture. 

Tribe I also using these recorded speeches in a more obvious way.  He reenacts these in order to inspire people to feel like they can do something about the present political state. “Tribe reenacts speeches to amplify the echo of history and address problems of the present. He looks at Vietnam to talk about Iraq and insists on [their] continued relevance.”[7]  In fact this whole series was inspired when Tribe noticed that his students at Brown University were quiet and nonresponsive despite the political turmoil going on every day.

Mark Tribe is an Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where he originally received his BA.  He continues to work with digital media, and is has recently worked on a project called “Star Spangled Cover” in which Greg Tate and Andre Lassalle play guitar in front of green screen.  These screens are then filled in and the video is broadcast on utube.com.  Tribe continues to create socially and culturally explorative works that allow the viewer to interact with the works, and evolve along with the art.

 

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[1] “MCM Faculty and Staff: Mark Tribe.”  Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.  <http://www.brown.edu/Departments/MCM/people/tribe/> (August 25, 2009)

[2] Tribe, Mark.  “Mark Tribe’s Portfolio.”  MarkTribe.net, (August 19, 2009):  <http://www.marktribe.net/art/>

(August 27, 2009)

[3] “Rhizome”  Rhizome at the New Museum (August 27, 2009): <http://rhizome.org/info/>  (August 27, 2009)

[4] Tribe, Mark.  “Mark Tribe’s Portfolio.”  MarkTribe.net, (August 19, 2009):  <http://www.marktribe.net/art/> (August 27, 2009)

[5] Whipple, Elizabeth.  “Port Huron Project Comes to Oakland August 2.”  Oakland Museum of California  (July 2, 2008): <http://www.museumca.org/press/press_port_huron.html?month=08> (August 26, 2009)

[6] Ulke, Christina. “Politics by Other Means.”  Journal of Aesthetics and Protest

[7] Del Pesco, Joseph.  “Mark Tribe, The Liberation of Our People: Angela Davis 1969/2008 DeFremery Park, Oakland, CA”  X-TRA 11, no 4 (Summer 2009): 30-32.

Advertisement Analyzing

           An advertisement is successful when it causes the viewer to feel a fulfilling emotion, then promises more if they meet certain needs.  Usually those needs are the purchasing of some product that will then miraculously bring out the stirring feelings again.  The key elements of an advertisement must then be the element that causes the emotion, and the element that conveys the message of how to get more.  The way that both these elements of advertisement convey their own message is often through the use of basic formal elements of design.  Using Apple’s new Mac operating system’s advertisement as an example, we can see many of these elements being successfully put to use.

            The first thing I notice when I look at this ad is that the balance is nonexistent because the leopard causes much more weight to the right when compared to the text on the left.  This creates a slight tension right from the beginning that provides a bit of that emotional buzz that the viewer is looking for.  The spatial mass of the snow leopard takes up almost half of the ad, yet the fact that only a fraction of the leopard is showing means that the proportion of leopard to the viewer is quite large, and thus menacing.  This is yet another element that lends to the emotional excitement for the viewer.  The spots of the leopard use the inherent repetition of the animal’s natural camouflage to create an inwardly radiating repetition that draws the eye towards the center of the face and the predator’s eyes.  The eyes are the focal point of the image that causes a thrill of excitement when you stare into them.  All these elements of design work together to bring the viewer a quick feeling of excitement that will leave them wanting more.

            The next step in this advertisement is to show the viewer in a clear way how to go about feeling these fulfilling exciting emotions again.  Obviously the text provides the most obvious clue as to where to find the product.  However, the ad also uses elements of design to tie the leopard to the product in an emotion and subconscious way.  The circular shape of the head is in a clearly connected to the capital ‘O’ in “Mac OS X.”  The light value of the blue color is almost white directly above both the head of the animal and the capital ‘O’.  This is also used to connect the operating system and the leopard.  These connections create a unity between the animal and the product.  This unity provides the viewer with a strong subliminal message that they will find the same fulfillment with the product as they have with the provided image.  The viewer will then subconsciously remember the advertisement and hopefully then go out and buy the operating system.  Even if they don’t buy the software immediately, the ad has left a mark so that whenever the viewer sees the Mac OS X Snow Leopard software they will associate the product with the feelings they felt when they first saw the leopard.  This means that the advertisement has successfully provided a short emotional fulfillment and provided a clear message as to how to go about finding more of the same fulfillment.  This is what makes an advertisement successful.

The ad for the Mac operating system found on Apple's website

Digital Art’s Relationship With Western Culture

     Digital art has introduced many new ideas and technologies into western society that has adapted and transformed our culture into what it is today.  As the abilities of our creative softwares and computers advance, so do the capabilities of the quality and quantity of information available to the masses.  We receive more stimulating and expansive information from advertisements on the internet to receiving news programs on our cell phones.  People are able to communicate quicker and with nearly anyone in the world, and it’s all become almost effortless.  
As the abilities of the digital art world multiply, so does its accessibility.  Growing numbers of people have access to the computers and software necessary to begin creating digital art, and programs such as photoshop and painter are becoming core curriculum material for any art major and many high school educations.  This allows for a greater access to the art community and society’s creative energy as a whole.  People are able to simultaneously explore both the expressions of the culture and world around them and the inner workings of their own soul within a few clicks of the mouse and a couple swipes across the Wacom tablet.
This unlimited expression and ease of exploration has lead our culture down an interesting path.  While our art becomes more demonstrative and revealing we begin to explore deeper and more thoroughly into the psyche of our culture and the instincts that make us human.  Our society has discovered the ability in digital art to create the alternate universes which we’ve always craved.  With these virtual universes we can create a whole new type of art that will test our emotional reactions and our insights in a very creative and original way.  These emotional responses and instincts are some of the building blocks that make up our personalities as a whole.  We can discover any hypothetical situation recreated with exquisite detail and explore our reactions and feelings towards these situations provided by the content and context of the art.  
The development of digital art and its uses has had a very concrete link with the development of our culture and society.  Our culture has the expectation of quick results, flashy entertainment, and an abundance of everything.  It stands to reason that we would expect to have access to the ability to express ourselves in an artistic way without the years of training and education required to master some of the analogue arts such as traditional painting or sculpture.  Instead, we demand something that we can learn to use quickly so that we can begin utilizing the tools right away.  Also, rather than focusing on one “subject” of art, we want tools that will allow us to recreate or simulate any type of art you can think of.  We want to be able to take a digital picture on our cell phone, crop and digitally enhance it, then integrate it into a collage which we can then post to Facebook five minutes after taking the photo.
While these programs and softwares are able to mimic many of the characteristics of numerous types of art, they will never be able to replace them.  However, that is not the role of digital art.  By allowing many new, “uneducated” minds to the art community, digital art introduces fresh ideas and concepts that allow others to think in a whole new way.  Also, digital art’s expansive properties and accessibility to different art simulations allows for a blurring of roles and boundaries for which western culture seems to have an amazing talent.
Our culture has helped create and shape digital art and continues to do so.  We use it as a tool, much like any other type of art.  This tool is simply faster and more convenient to use because our society demands that it be that way.  In return, digital art has shaped the way that our culture expresses itself and explores the inner workings of our society.  As our culture continues to explore digital art, this art will continue to develop the concept of art as a whole for our culture.