Lecture Reviews

Matteo Bittanti           

I was really excited to go see Matteo Bittanti because I had heard of him before, and had been a fan of Game Scenes for a while. Matteo is a man that takes the same pass time (video games) that I have and turns it into his passion and career in life! He is a creator and finder of video game art from all over the world!
Matteo Bittanti originally from Milan, Italy starts off his lecture by saying he has one goal in life, and that is too “procrastinate professionally.” If you ask me that is one of the greatest statements I have ever heard!

Matteo takes elements from videogames and creates them into art. He doesn’t just take from video games, he also places art into video games. Something really funny that Bittanti talked about was how during the Obama campaign, Obama was trying to reach the younger crowds (video gamers), to go out and vote. To accomplish this Obama’s people placed campaign ads in popular video games. Bittani, being the quick thinker that he is, creates spoof images of Obama ads in other video games. Needless to say Obama’s campaign team wasn’t too happy about it.

Bittanti takes video game art in Game Scenes to open our eyes to the world of games around us, and inspire everyone’s stereotype of a lazy video game player to become artists themselves. He is trying to show the world that there is a lot more to video games than what meets the eye. For example he showed us this game video that he made for his friend that killed himself by jumping off of a building. He created it to try to get a point of view of what his friend was thinking before he jumped. That project in itself was very profound as a piece of art, but all created with a video game.
So kids the moral of the story is get off your asses set the book down and play a video game because you never know what will come out of it.

Check out Matteo Bittanti’s site at: http://www.mattscape.org/
And check out Game Scenes at: http://www.gamescenes.org/

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Paho Mann

Well to start off Paho Mann was the first artist lecture I had ever been too, so I really didn’t know what to expect. Mann has lived out most of his life in New Mexico, and that is where his art took off. He has gotten fine arts degrees from fine colleges like the University of New Mexico and Arizona State University. As of now he is working in a university located in Dallas, Texas.

Mann has a very special classification of work. It is photographic classification and realization. With more of his recent projects he wants to inform his audience about the consumption problem that the world, but mostly, the United States has in our daily lives.

To accomplish this he started off with taking pictures of medicine cabinets. He wanted to try and find out facts about the person depending on what he photographed in their medicine cabinet. What he came to discover was that most medicine cabinets don’t have very interesting secretive items in them. So after thinking it over he decided to do the same kind of project, but this time instead of medicine cabinets he would photograph junk drawers. No matter where you are you can always tell the kind and or type of person just by looking and studying their junk drawer. At least that is what Mann claimed while describing his project. After all of his classification pictures of drawers and cabinets he came to the conclusion that most of these were similar, as in they had similar items in them, rather than different.

The next brilliant thing he started to classify was every item he owns. He photographed every single item he owned, down to the change in his pocket, and categorized them by size, material, color, shape, etc…. He then took it a step farther and placed them into a live internet database were people could interact with his art and project by selecting what category they wanted to see.

Then to top off his presentation he talked about his most proud accomplishment. The city of Phoenix, Arizona actually gave him a grant to bring together the same techniques from his other projects to classify and categorize the trash that came into the city dump. He accomplished this in a project called “Sort.” It is now part of an ever growing live internet database to educate people about waste and consumption.

Thank you Paho Mann for exceeding my expectations of this artist lecture.

Check out his website at: http://www.pahomann.com/index.php