Subject – Consuming mass media is a video art piece that brings to light societies over consumption of media through a smartphone. The video starts out of the artist eating a sandwich but the video is in reverse so it is like the sandwich is coming out of him. After the first part is done it cuts to the making of the sandwich. It copies off of popular YouTube cooking videos and shows what was really in that sandwich.

Content – The meaning of this piece is pretty straightforward. The artist is bringing to light of our over consumption of media and our usage of smartphones. In the beginning of the video the artist edited it with him eating the sandwich in reverse implying the media is coming out of him just as much as he consumes it. The second part of the video is very interesting as he copied the style of YouTube cooking videos to show the making of the sandwich. These types of videos get millions of views and it was smart to take a format of something popular to bring awareness to the peoples eyes.

The Electronic Disturbance Theater was founded in 1997 by Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Stefan Wray and Carmin Karasic. Taking the idea of the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the EDT members used their real names. As a collective, they organized and programmed computer software to show their views against anti-propagandist and military actions, mobilizing micro-networks to act in solidarity by staging virtual sit-ins online and allowing the emergence of a collective presence in direct digital actions.

A second iteration of the group, called Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, included Brett Stalbaum, Amy Sara Carroll, Elle Mehrmand, Micha Cárdenas, and Ricardo Dominguez (professor).

Subject –

This is art piece is called The Electronic Disturbance Theater it was hacktivist art project against the war in Mexico against the native people. The founders were Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Stefan Wray and Carmin Karasic. The work of art was a server overload on the Pentagons website as well as the Mexican Government website and the white house website. People at home where able to download a java applet called Floodnet and do a virtual sit in and tell the applet what website to overload. Today we know this as a DDOS attack.

“The ability to neutralize practically any website on demand — what’s now commonly referred to as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack — was a powerful new tool for global civic disobedience.”

– Colin Lecher from The Verge

Content –

The goal of this art work by this artist collective is mainly to state at the time the internet can be used as a space for peaceful nonviolent protesting. They made a stand against the US, UK, and the Mexican Government. The artist’s also could be stating a new frontier of how humans interact with civil rights putting a stronger voice to the people.

Subject –

FloraBorg is a interdisciplinary art work that was a joint project with Elizabeth Demaray and the Rutgers New Brunswick engineering department. FloraBorg is a robot plant that uses senors and other technical elements to read the plants needs such as sunlight, and water. The bots drive around finding the best source of sunlight and when the sensor goes off for a need of water it drives to the nearest source.

Content –

The artist intention of this work could be to insinuate that like us plants have needs and actively living. And just because the plants may not be conscious like us humans they still have worth. By giving these plants autonomy this pushes that thought further. Another intention of the artist could be that She was coming up with an innovated idea on how to take care of your house plants and having a busy work life.