Preview
Description
Robert Rauschenberg (1925 - 2008), American
More Distant Visible Part of the Sea, 1983
Color offset lithograph with embossing and collage, Ed. 21/125
Purchased with funds from William E. Kelly, Jr., ’74
La Salle University Art Museum, 15-G-3694
In much of Robert Rauschenberg’s work, he combines found or appropriated objects and images fashioning them into new works of art. His oeuvre serves as a link between the early use of collage in Cubism and Dadaism to its Post-Modern manifestations. Rauschenberg often incorporated technology into his work – both in technique (e.g. incorporating commercial printing techniques) and in subject (e.g. making works on space exploration).
Information technology focuses on how data is organized, stored, searched, shared, combined and presented. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are designed to promote the sharing/appropriation of data, which in the case of the La Salle University Art Museum’s implementation of the EmbARK Collections Manager API includes image data.
In CSC 343: Client-Side Scripting, the students take Rauschenberg’s More Distant Visible Part of the Sea as their inspiration to create a web-based collage that uses the Art Museum’s API as their source of images and data. The students initiate their search at
http://artcollection.lasalle.edu
and collect accession numbers which serve to identify the works in subsequent searches, e.g.
This artwork’s rectilinear composition lends itself to a course exercise in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Grid Layout. In addition, CSS filters allow for some image manipulation that might aid in creating a more visually coherent piece. The assignment includes the use of data beyond just the images either in the design or in the interactivity (e.g. displaying information about a constituent work when the user’s mouse is over it). Incorporating the data brings in JavaScript’s new fetch functionality and standard techniques such as parsing in addition to raising technical difficulties such as cross-domain requests.
Thomas Blum, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Expanded Literacies
- 5. Information Literacy
- 6. Technological Competency
Effective Expression
- 9. Creative and Artistic Expression
See this object in the Art Museum Online Collections Database:
http://artcollection.lasalle.edu/Obj5070
Rights
Collection of La Salle University Art Museum; Artwork © Rauschenberg Estate/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY http://artcollection.lasalle.edu/kiosk/rights.htm