Agustin Lara

Art 381

May 10, 2015

Artist Lecture

Joel Swanson

            Joel is a digital artist whose themes incorporate the materiality of language, indexicality of art/language, quirks, glitches, inconsistencies of language and the technologies of language.  When he first started to show us his art I wasn’t to intrigued by it, I was rather bored.  I didn’t appreciate the fact that it was just words until he went on to talk about the different ways people used them and the impact they had, suddenly his works seemed a lot more interesting. The piece that I found most interesting was here/there. The piece itself is twelve feet by two feet; it’s a big piece.  He scanned and printed the words here and there however the printer didn’t print them right however the misprint is where all the magic happens. The smeared words create a different aesthetic feel than if the words would’ve just gotten printed normally.  Another piece that he talked about was his “Speak & See” piece. I tried researching it outside of the lecture but I couldn’t find anything on it. Swanson however did say that it was going to be an installation where whatever you said would be illuminated on the screen as text.  In the end his neon signs and misprints won me over and I became a fan of his work.