Comparative Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway and Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance.
The comparative analysis is a writing assignment designed to help you prepare your final project. The comparative analysis is a two-page essay in which you juxtapose two elements or examples from media and learn something anew through your comparison. One way to go about this is to critically analyze one of your elements, then the other, and then draw a comparison between the two.
Your artworks that you select can be wide-ranging, although one of them must be digital media. The two compared artworks also must be specific artifacts that you can cite, not general themes or categories. A painting might be compared with an artwork that comments on digital identity, with each one cited at the end of your essay. A generic idea of painting is not sufficient for this essay. The objects you select to compare may have a similarity in purpose – but across cultures and time. Perhaps you know of an artifact you are interested in writing about – then you may want to consider what artifact in the past predates this type of representation, or perhaps resembles it – in another context. This should be a time-traveling, cross-media exploration, so try to choose artifacts that contrast one another. Please remember that at least one artifact should be digital.
Be sure to write about DIGITAL art and not something that lives within the realm of popular culture (such as music, music videos, films, video games, etc.).
The artworks you select must be specific works that you can cite, and not general themes or categories. Also, please select work that fits into the category of “art” and not a commercial product. Please select a work of art to analyze and explore – not communications media or general technological inventions or processes. It is advised that you do not talk about or give the definition of digital art in general, or explain what it means to be an artist or what art means to you – those are for a different type of essay. This is a deep dive into specific artworks, not general introductions to the genre. Please also don’t include an introduction to how you discovered or why you like the work, as this is more personal and less analytical. Think critically as you examine digital art and try to find connections across digital art forms, through their concepts and form.
Consider the following questions: how does the work you examine compare to another that communicates similar themes across cultures or across time?
What is the political, creative, or social motivation for the art work?
How would people react to these different works piece in a different time or place?
As you write your essay it is important that you contextualize the digital within society, within digital communication, and art. It is not important that you describe in detail how you found this piece or why you selected it.
Using MLA citations, your bibliography should include citations for the media that you compare, along with at least one scholarly journal or text on one of your media examples (this scholarly reference should be an article that you find through our library resources and online searching of journals, not a link to a relevant web site).
Think critically and be creative.
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