Tergel: Reflections on Christopher Baker

I discovered a new artist named Christopher Baker who is presenting at the Art Institute in Chicago. My friend mentioned him to me when I was telling her about my idea to make Instagram feeds physical. His website can be seen here: http://christopherbaker.net/

I have spent some time exploring his page and looking through his artwork. He is interested in digital media and the digital era. I am looking to his artwork for ideas as well as inspiration. He is an example of an artist working with new media in creative and spontaneous ways.

I am going to critique his Twitter feeds artwork called the Murmur Study, on display in Chicago. It is an installation of 20 receipt machines continuously printing tweets by hashtags. He wrote code that mines through popular hashtags on Twitter and every second, the receipt machines print out the new tweets. Every night, the paper rolls have to be refilled.

Baker installed the machines very high up on the wall, creating a line of long, narrow receipts that hang to the floor. On the floor is a mess of the papers, just piled on top of each other.

Visually, I don't think the piece is successful. I think that removing the feed every night reduces the amount of paper on the floor, diminishing from the shock value of the piece. Furthermore, I can't find the relevance of the receipt machines in the piece. I understand that in terms of machinery, it is a simple machine that prints text, but the tweets are written as receipts, not as original tweets. I think this also removes the Twitter aspect from the piece. The physicality of the receipts do not successful reference what Twitter is. I would have liked to see the receipt machines spit out more realistic tweets. I am hoping to do something similar, but not with Twitter, but Instagram.

His message revolves around the idea of the status update and questions their purpose, especially when they are collected, archived and saved. I think the way that my work would differentiate from his piece is through topic. I am discussing the relevance of likability and popularity within these digital sharing mediums and what they say about our identity and how we see ourselves. My art is about the suggested meaning of all this chatter and how we as users and receivers of information internalize and use that information to form identifications and beliefs about ourselves.