Creative Cogitation

For a while I have been think­ing Social Media Birds was not the best title, and then I am talk­ing it over with some­one at the Sun­nys­lope Art­walk and the phrase Binary Birds pops out.  At least its allit­er­a­tive, so I think that is going to stick.

Tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties dis­tracted me from paint­ing, as well as the end of tax sea­son & some out of town com­pany (which was fun, but not pro­duc­tive).  Then it was imme­di­ately back to doing Spring shows, but in Phoenix AZ USA it is start­ing to get pretty hot; yes­ter­day was around 96 F & it was prob­a­bly a lot warmer on the black top. I have one more show on May 20th, then noth­ing else sched­uled until Sep­tem­ber in New York City.   Here is a pic­ture of me schmooz­ing patrons at the Val Vista Lakes Com­mu­nity Mar­ket Sat­ur­day May 8, 2010.

Jake Beck­man with patrons at the Val Vista Lakes Com­mu­nity Mar­ket May 8, 2010. Photo by Kristina Konen.

Yes, I am work­ing it.  I used to say, “My art had bet­ter speak for itself, because I stink at it.” At this last show, one patron com­mented that I com­mu­ni­cated my abstract sub­ject mat­ter very well. Even I can learn. 

I call my lat­est paint­ing iPod Tweety.  It is such an obvi­ous deriva­tion I am sur­prised it did not occur to me imme­di­ately.   I think music shar­ing is one of the fore­run­ners of social media.  Remem­ber peo­ple cre­at­ing and hand­ing out CDs of their favorite tunes?  I know some peo­ple with hun­dreds of songs on their iPods, but these days an iPod is so much more than a music player, it’s and enter­tain­ment device,but my paint­ing ref­er­ences the music usage.

iPod Tweety by Jake Beck­man. One of Jake Beckman’s sig­na­ture Binary Birds dances to tunes on its iPod.

In addi­tion to the title, iPod Tweety, which is the ASCII binary string at the extreme right, the code also reads: iTunes, eMu­sic, Rhap­sody, Nap­ster, Ama­zon, MP3, Zune, down­load, Songs from right to left and top to bot­tom.  When I debuted this work at the April Sun­sets on the Plaza a young woman was plead­ing with her par­ents to buy it, but they did not relent so it is still available-for now.

For more details about iPod Tweety see  its art page at AKAJake.com.

What do you all think? Do you like it? Hate it? Think it’s deriv­a­tive dreck or haute pop?  Inquis­i­tive minds must know.  I have two more Binary Birds in the works.  Stay tuned.

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.