WRITTEN FOR DIGITAL BOUNDARIES EXHIBIT AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
ABSTRACT
The Princess Series is a narrative of a modern-day princess who found herself grown up without a fortune. Presented as a series of Flash animations, each story depicts her daily struggle to save her soul while trying to survive in the corporate world by making junk mail. She courageously faces the dilemmas, contradictions, and paradoxes of modern life. She questions her own emotions, ideals, psychology, gender, and identity, all in the hopes of a happy ending.
The work can be presented on a variety of mediums such as computer screens, projectors, and plasma screens. Still images can also be scaled to any size for print.
INTRODUCTION
The Princess Series is a series of Flash animations (currently 20) that can be viewed at prettysite.com. On the home page, there is a list of animations with a brief description and a thumbnail image for each. When the user clicks on one, an animation starts playing in a pop-up window (550 x 350 pixels). The format of the animation is similar to a slide presentation with each frame showing characters in simple motion (often in loop). There is a text at the bottom of each frame and an accompanying voice over. By default, each animation plays all the frames automatically in sequence, but the user can also manually navigate through a story by using a set of controls similar to that of a video deck. Each story takes several minutes to view. The style of drawing is flat, simple, but colorful. It mimics the shallow perspective of neoclassical compositions.
Each story has a theme, usually a struggle of some sort. Here are some examples: The princess struggles to balance her duties in the tower with her creative work. The princess finds herself not only a prisoner of the tower, but also of her own social anxiety. The princess revisits the pain of her teenage life. The princess attempts to get recognized by the fine art authorities. The princess’ repugnance to eating meat deepens when she learns how animals are raised. Etc...
Technically, the Princess Series is relatively straight forward. The only tool used to construct it was Macromedia Flash. The images were drawn directly in Flash. The voice-over was recorded using Digidesign Pro Tools.
My artistic work has always been about self-examination both from subjective and objective points of views. The Princess Series is a thinly disguised story of my own life. Other works of mine can be viewed at wolanczyk.com.
I intend to continue building on the Princess Series, and to use it as a platform through which I express a multitude of my artistic concerns. It thus has no singular conceptual underpinning. In the following, I will describe three most pertinent aspects of my work.
VERTICAL CULTURAL BOUNDARIES
The word “multicultural” is ordinarily used to connote fusion of various cultures from around the world. Although I do address this type of multiculturalism in my work, my primary concerns are with those associated with various socio-economic classes. In other words, my concerns are with vertical, as opposed to horizontal, cultural differences. Traditionally fine arts has been a culture specific to economic elites. I believe that the Internet has the potential to open fine arts to other classes. That is, through the use of the Internet, fine arts could become a more democratic medium like film and music.
Although anyone can walk into a gallery to experience art, in today’s market-driven art world, the success of an artist is ultimately defined by the buyers who can afford to pay the price. The buyers, in this sense, necessarily influence the aesthetic value of art. Thus fine arts as a culture becomes part of the culture of the affluent class which is largely foreign to the people of the lower classes.
Just as the Internet encourages exploration of various cultures from around the world, it could also encourage fine arts to cross socio-economic borders. The nature of the Internet is conducive to such transformation. Digital art on the Internet can infinitely be duplicated. The notion of originality is irrelevant. It can be accessed from anywhere and by anyone via the Internet. No viewer’s experience is more privileged than that of others. These qualities discourage buying, collecting, and trading of Internet art. They contradict the traditional mode of operation in the art world which privileges the economic elites.
I grew up in a middle-class family, and so I identify with the middle class. I cannot sincerely relate to the culture of the upper class. For this reason, I often feel alienated from the institutions of art. I have always wanted to make art which the general public can relate to, but the art world alienates the audience I care the most about. The Internet allows me to bypass the art world and speak directly to my audience, about the issues that are closer to their heart.
CAPITALISM AND ROMANTICISIM
I believe that romanticism is a necessary ingredient of capitalism, especially in the US where the gap between the rich and the poor is extreme. The American dream is to achieve the lifestyle of a prince or a princess, as frequently seen in Hollywood movies. It is this dream that allows many working class citizens to tolerate their less-than-ideal living conditions. When money is worshiped to the degree that it is in America, trying to keep one’s soul intact becomes a struggle.
My father, a Polish immigrant who escaped Nazi Germany, grew up with nothing, but taught his children the value and the power of imagination. He would often make me elaborate paper crowns, in which I would hold imaginary court in our apartment. This is an aspect of my childhood I still cherish to this day, and in many ways, the Princess Series is an extension of my childhood imagination. The crown worn by the princess can be interpreted as a symbol of faith in life. It is what gives her the courage to go on despite many adversities she faces.
SUBVERTING THE MYSTIQUE OF ART
Today’s art world is highly market-driven, but it pretends that the aesthetic value of art is independent of monetary concerns. In reality, being an artist is so filled with monetary concerns that they naturally influence her art. In fact, they should, since part of the function of art is to honestly reflect the world we live in. Yet, the art world prefers to turn a blind eye on this reality in order to preserve the noble mystique of art we inherited from the past.
In my work, I deliberately try to subvert this notion of art as something noble and beyond monetary concerns. Many of my animations contain overt requests for money in the form of donations by using PayPal’s payment system. The majority of the art world would probably find this gesture distasteful or vulgar, but my intention is to reveal the reality of being an artist in today’s art world. In some ways, I feel that begging for money is preferable to being dependent on the whim of the affluent class.
There is also a myth that artists are exceptional people, cultural elites who are above the concerns of ordinary citizens. In my work, I present a portrait of an artist as a common person whose concerns are no different from those of others. Many artists have mundane jobs like everyone else. I do not believe the condescending myth of the artist as someone whose awareness is higher than that of others, or someone who stands on a higher ideological ground. For this reason, I depict an artist/princess who is forced to accept moral and ideological contradictions such as making junk mail for a living.