Multimedia

MULTIMEDIA

Multimedia is a product of media which makes the audience interact with the product. Multimedia is something that immerses the user and makes him/her be in control of the product. Such things like websites, games, certain books, DVD's, interactive TV's and many more.

Games can be seen as products of multimedia because they let gamers interact with the game. Games such as Grand Theft Auto 4, Sims etc immerse the gamer and make them feel a part of the universe. The reason being because these games have a massive universe in which the gamer can explore
.

YouTube is another form of multimedia because the world famous website allows the user to control the site allowing them to choose links to videos of their choice, upload videos, communicate with other users on video pages and become fans of YouTube members.

Post Impressionism

POST IMPRESSIONISM

Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet. Post-Impressionists extended Impressionism while rejecting its limitations: they continued using vivid colours, thick application of paint, distinctive brushstrokes, and real-life subject matter, but they were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, to distort form for expressive effect, and to use unnatural or arbitrary colour.

The Post-Impressionists were dissatisfied with the triviality of subject matter and the loss of structure in Impressionist paintings, though they did not agree on the way forward. Georges Seurat and his followers concerned themselves with Pointillism, the systematic use of tiny dots of colour.

AFRICAN INFLUENCES ON MDOERN ART

During the early 1900s, the aesthetics of traditional African sculpture became a powerful influence among European artists who formed an avant-garde in the development of modern art. In France, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and their School of Paris friends blended the highly stylized treatment of the human figure in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting pictorial flatness, vivid color palette, and fragmented Cubist shapes helped to define early modernism. While these artists knew nothing of the original meaning and function of the West and Central African sculptures they encountered, they instantly recognized the spiritual aspect of the composition and adapted these qualities to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.

Here is an example of a Cubism painting on the far right, called Woman Playing A Guitar by Pablo Picasso, and an African painting on the left. Notice the similarities between the African painting and the Cubist painting.

German Expressionist painters such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner of Die Brücke (The Bridge) group, based in Dresden and Berlin, conflated African aesthetics with the emotional intensity of dissonant color tones and figural distortion, to depict the anxieties of modern life, while Paul Klee of the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) in Munich developed transcendent symbolic imagery. The Expressionists' interest in non-Western art intensified after a 1910 Gauguin exhibition in Dresden, while modernist movements in Italy, England, and the United States initially engaged with African art through contacts with School of Paris artists.

Modernist artists were drawn to African sculpture because of its sophisticated approach to the abstraction of the human figure.

ART NOUVEAU

Art Nouveau (1890 - 1905) was an art movement that peaked at the beginning of the 20th Century. An international movement, style of art and applied art, Art Noueveau, also known as Jugendstil was characterized by organic, floral and other plant inspired motifs, as well as highly detailed curvilinear forms.

Here is an example of Art Nouveau decoration:

Staircase of the Maison and Atelier of Victor Horta. This building is one of four Horta-designed town houses in Brussels that are together recognised by UNESCO as "representing the highest expression of the influential Art Nouveau style in art and architecture." (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau)

Having a strong influence throughout Europe, Art Nouveaus fifteen year peak ended in 1905.

Examples of Art Nouveau style patterns:

Although Art Nouveau fell out of favor with the arrival of 20th-century modernist styles, it is seen today as an important bridge between the historicism of Neoclassicism and modernism

IMPRESSIONISM

Impressionism was an art movement that began in the 19th Century and gained significance in the 1870s and 1880s. The name of the movement came from a piece of art created by Claude Monet called Impression, Sunrise.

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, Sunrise), 1872, oil on canvas, Musee Marmottan

Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.
Impressionism also describes art created in this style, but outside of the late 19th century time period.

On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt (1868), Claude Monet

Impressionist art is a style in which the artist captures the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it. They paint the pictures with a lot of color and most of their pictures are outdoor scenes. Their pictures are very bright and vibrant. The artists like to capture their images without detail but with bold colors. Some of the greatest impressionist artists were Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot and Pierre Auguste Renoir.

While the term Impressionist covers much of the art of this time, there were smaller movements within it, such as Pointillism, Art Nouveau and Fauvism.

Dada

DADA

Dada is a movement that peaked between 1916 - 1922 and mainly involved visual arts, literature, poetry and graphic designs. Beginning in Germany in 1916, it was a collaberation between artists of several nations, including Germany, France and Switzerland. It was seen as an anti war movement and the early Dada works produced were of protest art. The movement chose the name “Dada” by inserting a slip of paper into a French dictionary and choosing the word it landed on, which happens to mean a hobbyhorse or child's toy.

The image above is called Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch by Hannah Hoch. in Germany, 1919.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art, it was "anti-art." For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics, the Dadaists hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics.

FUTURISM

FUTURISM (1909 - 1914)

Futurism was a social and artistic movement started in Italy in the early 20th Century Italy. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, and then western Europe started to take notice in the movement.

The Futurists practiced in every medium of art:

• Painting
• Sculpture
• Ceramics
• Graphic Design
• Industrial Design
• Interior Design
• Theatre
• Film
• Fashion
  
• Textiles
• Literature
• Music
• Architecture
• Gastronomy

The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth, violence, the airplane, the car and the industrial city. The Futurists wanted to represent the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they did. They were passionate nationalists.



Nikolay Diulgheroff was a Futurist artist who produced many paintings, along with the one on the right.

This painting, called L'uomo razionale, created in 1928 was painted by Diulgheroff and you can tell that it was a product of Futurism as the shapes look like metal squares and objects which you would see in an industrial area.

This is further evident in the use of colour. In my opinion, I believe Diulgheroff used the grey colours to represent the industrial times as metal's usual coulor is grey.