The Power of Experimentation: Using New Media in Art

Art: It’s always quite easy to think of paintings, drawings, scribbles, etc. Of course, we all know that art is not just limited to this. Experimentation and the “why not”’s have lead us to new discoveries and methods never before dreamed of. As time and technology progress, we will always be provided with new mediums and approaches to art forms. Below, I will show you some examples of some artists approaches to new mediums and the different views they use and the reactions they can produce.

Experimental film and video is highly under appreciated. However, it is a lot like science. These aren’t just a bunch of crazy, wild, and irrelevant things thrown into a timeline. These are experiments and studies. Future artists can take the good from these and use them as inspiration and eventually perfect them into an art form.  It’s all progression. Today’s film views are so different from those of the past, and we need to respect the brave artists who went outside the lines and experimented to achieve new visuals, emotions, and installations.

Salvador Dali is commonly known for his surreal paintings and wild creativity, perspective, and unconventional methods. Below is his take on film, which also includes one of film’s most memorable moments (if you have a soft stomach, I recommend skipping the first couple of minutes).

Un Chien Andalou – Parte 1 & 2

Andy Warhol has always been an icon for unconventional and new explorations in art. Surprisingly, aside from his vast collection of physical artworks, he also has a wide variety of video works. The following is a mind expanding video that is composed of very quick cuts of both video and stills, interlaced in different fields (think of them as photoshop layers) with many different lighting effects. The incorporation of music, which also progresses to experimental, meshes quite well.

Andy Warhol – Exploding Plastic Inevitable

The Unfinished Swan is a fantastic video that is actually derived from 1st person video game shooters. Ian Dallas created a program that let’s him shoot ink in a completely white environment that not only defines its space, but can create stunning visual images using the presence of all color, as well as the absence of it.

Ian Dallas – The Unfinished Swan

The Third and the Seventh was actually recently introduced to me by Jeff Havel. What is so fascinating about this video is that is 100% pure cgi with nothing authentic about it. Usually, when we hear cgi video, we can easily think of the progression that film has made over the years with the popular movies Shrek, the Incredibles, Monsters Inc, and the like. All of those films are so visually fascinating that you can just look at it and wonder “wow, how did they do that? That looks so real! How did they manage to include that much detail in motion with just a computer?” Well, this video is almost like a look into the future of cgi. Pure inspiration.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman. (HIGHLY Recommended to watch in full screen)

And then there is my own shameless self plug This was a college video I made in which the experiment I had to do was to use only 10 shots. I didn’t limit it to straight up video shots, I included 1 shot of cgi and 1 still.

Dreams and Shadows – Pete Kruvczuk