Digital Media 350s Joel Swanson visiting Lecture By Victoria Vallis Spring 2015 Have you ever looked at a word and pondered what it means backwards? Joel Swanson does just that, as he explores double word meanings and palindromes, only in large artistic format as neo gothic digital narratives. His art work is motivated by literary theory and exists as a series of installations, both real and virtual, that explore the nature of language through his concept art boot camp. Swanson visited the University of Nevada at Reno recently with a very inspiring look at his art, which investigates the indexicality and role of language. Swanson’s major influence came from Joseph Cosuth’s 1 & 3 Chairs. Based on this work, Swanson wrote the code for a 3-d chair and thus placing the chair into a new realm or paradigm. As an artist and writer who is the Director of the Technology, Arts & Media Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Swanson teaches courses on digital art, media theory, and the history of design. He received his MFA in digital art at the University of California, San Diego, with a specialty in Computing and the Arts. Quirks and glitches run our world both in the analog and digital realm. Another of Swanson’s mentors was Sol Lewitt and his 35 phrases. Linguistic and literary theory form his work, which ranges from digital art to sculpture to interactive installation. His work explores the technologies of language, their materials, and their significance. He revisits the questions posed by the Conceptual language artists of the 1960’s and 1970’s, but in light of contemporary digital technologies. He is particularly drawn to the complexities, glitches and quirks within linguistic systems. By analyzing sentence diagramming, he focuses on those spaces where language breaks down by lineating text. Swanson's work attempts to be made accessible to the public and has been shown in various national and international venues. His playful artwork which uses Led lights as words has been exhibited nationally and internationally including a recent solo show at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, The Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery of Toronto, the North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art and the Orange Country Museum of Contemporary Art. He frequently uses adverbs or prepositions to define the percentages as meanings in language change. In 2011, Swanson's topic was words and their meanings, as he displayed “Here, there, this ‘n that” in neon, describing the way English is read. He orchestrates an array of materials, including ink, aluminum, steel, neon and various photographic and digital techniques, to expound on his ideas. Whether his art is a large word of 13 feet reading “Sincerely”, a blinking computer screen, or a “Speak ‘n see” sign using Christmas lights, he explores the technology of language. Another work that mustered much attention is his wallpaper of ampersands. The conceptual artist Swanson’s Denver-based show begins with a wall that's been covered with 25,000 hand-drawn ampersands. It took Swanson, using a pen, a ladder and a laser level, five days to do it, something that adds a performance aspect to the show. The results are hypnotic and thought-provoking, and winds up as abstract conceptualism. As with much of his conceptual work from flattening boxes to study their basic patterns, to diagramming airports, his works are a cultural commentary. This impression of forcing the viewer to think more is reinforced by one of his simplistic hanging sculptures, "Logic Only Works in Two Dimensions", a three-dimensional rendition of the mathematical inequality symbol for less/greater than, finished in black monochromatic paint. Similar to his other 3-d palindromes, such as “Radar”, he presents a large in your face social commentary about his fascination with language, be it French, English or any other from around the world. “Wish you were here”… The questions I asked at his lecture were… Who makes your neon creations? (subcontracted) How do you change twitter feed to Morse code? (programming)