I read two articles at Gizmodo while browsing my RSS feeds this afternoon. This first of the two is about a biker whose protective helmet is painted to look like a Lego biker’s helmet. You know, red helmet with a “clear” visor revealing the yellow, smiling face of our Lego man. Here’s the picture of it:

I at first laughed, and thought about how cute his helmet is (“I’ve had this helmet since I was ten years old.”) I also imagined what it would be like when he’s driving down the street, stops at a stoplight, and looks over to the mini-van on his left only to see a few kids in the back of the minivan saying “Look Mommy, it’s a Lego man” and the mother saying “Yeah, honey, that’s great” without looking over at all. Or what if he was in an accident and was thrown from his bike. I can see the driver lying face up with his arms and legs spread out knocked unconscious or worse with a big smile of the “face” of his helmet. Kind of creepy actually.

Anyway, then Gizmodo showed me another image of a rug that is only 1/4 put together and it looks like a jpeg in the olden days of dial-up modem, slow internet. In fact, I can distinctly remember being VERY happy the day I discovered I can have multiple Internet Explorer windows open at a time, as to load images and web pages in the background so I don’t have to see them load line by line. Anyway, this rug looks like that, but it’s a real rug. Here’s the image:

There are few things in art that are so difficult and time consuming yet so unmistakably nerdy that they cannot be cool. Art crafted in real life that is made to look like something computer related is amazing but I imagine the artist’s fingertips stained the orange tint of Cheetos Cheese Puffs with long black hair pulled back into a pony tail. There’s just something innately uncool about it, unlike other “natural” art forms meant to represent technology (i.e. photo-realism in painting.)

I then thought about a concept a former professor of mine and friend Rick McPeakSteve Heilmer (Thanks Bekah!) has championed called “Juxtaposynthesis” which is the combining of two relatively opposed ideas in one piece of art. There’s probably another term for it as well, but that’s the one RickSteve uses. The rug is a physical piece of art that serves a very unnecessary purpose which is to make a floor look more appealing. A 1/4 finished rug is even more useless since it cannot even properly accomplish its given purpose. Similarly, a jpeg is a generally useless collection of numbers which form the representation of a noun. A jpeg that isn’t fully loaded is even more useless, because it does not properly display its representation, or cannot fully accomplish its purpose, whatever the purpose of the image may be. I find this combination of the physical rug, which is already its own physical thing that represents itself, with that of the idea of a “not-fully-loaded” jpeg, which is trying to represent something that, as a thing, it is not.

There’s quite a bit of philosophy behind a photographed image, particularly a digital one. A photo is a representation of something that exists in nature at a particular point in time, and from a particular perspective both in its physical visual perspective, and how its received (which one could say has infinite “particular” perspective.) A digital image is composed of lines of code that an electrical machine is programmed to “read” and then display in a way that a human can also “read.” When a computer misreads the image, or hasn’t finished reading it for whatever reason, we get these half loaded, blurry, fuzzy, strangely colored images that look much like the photo of our rug. In a way the computer misinterprets the intent of the image by its incorrect display. Even machines are subject to the fragility of communication.

The rug on the other hand. What it is trying to say is a misinterpretation of the “image” of the rug. It is made to look like a jpeg image that has not fully loaded. I do not think it is necessarily commenting on it though, it is rather, just a nerd-influence art project, which is kind of sad actually. I want it to say something about how we communicate, or how we listen or don’t listen. I want it to say something about the autonomous life we live behind keyboards and LCD screens. I want it to say something about the objectification of woman through internet pornography (which gives me a fantastic idea about a sculpture project someone should do of a “pornographic” image of a woman that is only half loaded, like our rug. Hmm, who out there who sculpts that would like to do that?) I guess not everything has to have a sociopolitical message. Art for art’s sake, right? And given that, I do think the rug is cool. What are your thoughts?