(1.2) Ida Appleboorg

     Ida Applebroog is a painter currently living and working in New York. Even though she is traditionally a painter, technology is a large part of her process. Her work focuses on the themes of gender, sexual identity, and violence and politics. In her works from 2003 titled Art in the Twenty-First Century, Power, she starts by using traditional processes like working with clay, and then continues to make it more complex and multi faceted through the use of technology. She starts by modeling the clay into any form, usually based on her own feelings and not with any particular end goal in mind. She then poses the models and they take on their own lives and dictate what the want to say—each piece creates its own meaning.
    This is where technology comes in. The camera takes on its own life in her eyes as well. The end result is unpredictable and she never knows what is going to happen until she can see the contact sheets. She chooses the backdrop, the lighting, camera angle, etc—even though she controls all of these elements, she never gets the same results. Digital technology is unpredictable according to her. The next step in her process is to give these figures their own characteristics and traits  through digital editing software. She collects hundreds of images of hair, eyes, mouths, but never noses, and different types of clothes. These images can come from anywhere from magazines, to doctors offices or more.
    Much like me, before this point, she has has no previous experience with digital technologies, so she went to workshops to increase her digital literacy out of necessity for her project.