Artist Pete Ippel Featured in Living Bond Society Newsletter

The international social fraternity, Phi Delta Theta recently interviewed Artist/Athlete Pete Ippel in regards to his unique philanthropic gift. Feel free to download and read the Living Bond Society Newsletter – Fall Winter 2009.

Pete’s gift to the Fraternity is quite unique. In addition to naming Phi Delta Theta as a beneficiary of an IRA, he plans on providing Phi Delta Theta with artwork. After reminiscing about the Fraternity house at Cornell—the plaques on each of the doors with names of past tenants, the knight statue, and so on—Brother Ippel decided to donate his artwork as a nest egg to pass forward.

“I may not have huge stacks of cash to donate but I do have huge confidence in my art…,” he says.

“It’s like buying stock in [myself]. I’m a talented artist—here’s the artwork I made at a particular time in my life and it’s a gift.” With his apparent zest and love of life, Pete Ippel has proudly joined the Living Bond Society.

“Phi Delta Theta has been such a great experience for me,” he says, “that I want to support it and keep it going for those that come after me.”

During his tenure at Cornell University, Pete’s efforts with the social advocacy group Renaissance and the New York Alpha Chapter of Phi Delta Theta resulted in many positive changes on campus including development of the CU Tonight Commission, creation of concerts and a greater variety of activities (Slope Fest) during the Slope Day celebration, and establishment of the first alcohol-free fraternity housing on Cornell University’s campus.

Artist Statements Develop Over The Years

Presently I am applying for the Artadia grant for residents of San Francisco. I’ve been working on revising a 300 word artist statement. A wonderful byproduct of sorting out my computer files, and getting everything indexed on one machine is that I can see my growth. Below are a variety of iterations on an artistic statement of purpose starting with the most recent and working backwards:

October 2009

I am a blue whale with information filtering baleen who is constantly seeking a nutritious meal. My ultimate desire is to discover where abstract relationships inform and enrich so that all will benefit from my research and explorations. I create art to draw relevant connections and to comprehend the delightful complexities of life.

I strive to express my intent clearly so there is maximal perceptual effect with succinct and prescient information, regardless of the medium.

Interactive social space, the augmented reality of the ubiquitous Network, is my ocean. As boundaries converge between online and offline the essence of interrelated nodes is revealed. The strongest pathways are those that are nurtured by human interaction.

In my practice, photography and writing are constant while drawing, installation, and performance punctuate my narrative life-stream. Each lived act is a moment to make artistic decisions.

As an athlete I know that discipline and creativity go hand in hand. As an artist I train every day. By utilizing the camera and the Internet to increase my facility, the tools become transparent and embodied. Just as a basketball player responds spontaneously to a defender so does the artist to afferent stimuli.

I achieve success when my technique provides self awareness and the act of living leads to radiant moments of intuition. I am set free and liberated from the restraints of time and space to make artistic choices in the present.

The news become the nows: convergence and singularity come to fruition and temporality folds in on itself. Being and focus are only manifest from cyclical revisiting, assessing, and growing; an iterative process that advances the conceptual underpinnings of my work. When I effectively transduce the energy of inspiration to the generative moment that follows, the resulting forcefulness of expression is undeniable.

June 2009

The beauty of our earth inspires me, and I strive to acknowledge the wonders of the natural world by expounding on intuition while maintaining a clear focus on my life as an artist. As an athlete I understand the rigors of repeated practice, and it is undeniable that creativity and discipline go hand in hand.

I have an expanded view of the role of the artist, and as such I have executed projects that integrate digital drawing techniques, various mounting methods, collage, and found objects. My art is simultaneously influenced by technology, while intuitively responding to the embodied experience of life.

Each work has a self-contained reality and often a forthright sense of place. Through the choice of bright colors, condensation of space, and manipulation of visual cues, I create experiences that imply phenomena and images that exude their thing-ness. That is, the unique properties of the subjects depicted are emphasized. What my artwork lacks in verisimilitude, it gains in joyful complexity and honest wonder. I have been gradually getting larger with my practice.

Presently I am working on an ambitious four by eight-foot piece of paper, and I want to move even larger, yet I have run out of wall space in my bedroom.

I have continued to create new art through all of this, and still maintain an exhibition record complete with solo shows. My commitment to pursuing a life as an artist is unquestionable.

August 2004

Pete Ippel Artist Statement

Hypermodernity is the conceptual groundwork for my present body of imagery and videos, insomuch as it serves not only as a thesis, but also as an explanation.

HYPERMODERN: pronunciation: ‘hI-p&r’mä-d&rn. From Latin hyper-, and modernus, also from Latin modo, just now. 1 : above : beyond : SUPER- involving recent techniques, methods, or ideas : UP-TO-DATE.

In my own words: A forum for expression and research influenced by technology.

Whether the work manifests itself as a website, performance, action, sculpture, video or two-dimensional piece, it is likely touched by some aspect of mediation through the mechanical or digital. This mode of production has lead to an artistic practice and a series of works that speaks to the personal, yet maintains an open avenue for viewer affect.

May 2003 first year MFA review

Peter Ezekiel Ippel
PERSONAL STATEMENT

Issues of mediation, sexuality, technology, and computer / human interaction lie at the core of my work. Leaving behind the rural beauty of Ithaca, New York to live in the ultra-urban environment of Market Street, the busiest area in San Francisco, has led to analytical artistic responses where creative intervention in the cityscape is a primary concern. The constant inundation of imagery, the influx of information, and the decrease of human contact both in the physical and virtual world have acted as a catalyst that drives the artist to divert the bombardment, and solidify the role that an activist / artist plays in society.

Utilizing the web as the primary vehicle to promote and display artistic agendas, “hypermodern.net” acts as an online melting pot where the interplay among destruction / construction of identity, corporate fronting, and virtual space all combine to form an amalgam of artwork that serves as a forum to open communication and spark a dialog among those that view it.

For certain individuals Ebay has become a lifestyle, an extreme use of the service where people are a slave to their auctions, so dependent on checking up that it interferes with daily functioning. According the DSM-IV, the manual for diagnosing psychological disorders, this would be a criterion for a type of obsessive-compulsive behavior. Commodiphilia, diagnosed as assigning value to valueless objects in the off chance that it may be worth something to another disparate individual, is an artist coined term that references both the commodity, and the sexual perversion of pedophilia. “Obay.info” critiques the mega-consumerist culture that surrounds Ebay, and is both a visual pun and a cautionary piece that succeeds when the user questions why they are so involved with buying and selling of the most mundane possessions.

“Free Memory” is an event created to open a discourse between what memories consists of in terms of ephemeral human thought, and that of a data driven memory model of a computer. The event is initiated by the anonymous gift of a floppy disk to passers by and concludes when the box of disks is empty. Unbeknownst to the receiver, the artists memories, documented in photographic form, are present on the disk thereby transferring both ephemeral, and concrete memory.

A Perecian celebration of the everyday, “Market Street All-Stars” elevates the members of the1049 apartment building by placing them in their own online comic book series. The stories driven by actual events will humorously depict what goes on in these single men’s lives with an edge of social commentary and tongue in cheek gravity.

Most recently, identity and signifiers have become paramount in the conversation between the warm organic body the cold flatness of the machine. Rejection, rejuvenation, and the sloughing off of routine have resulted in the video documentation of internal contradiction. The disparate relations among the individual personalities mediated by their conversations result in a series of short pieces that enter the greater mind space of day-to-day existence in a confusing technological world.

It is becoming more apparent that the Freudian and Lacanian discourse revolving around humor, respect, and social status are currently of the utmost concern. Literally playing the role of the jester, humorist, asshole, and nerd all has allowed for explorations into other art making practices separated from those bound to the computer. By unplugging, the same concerns of mediation, sexuality, technology, and computer / human interaction are examined in a more visceral and perhaps more thorough way.

October 2002

Issues of mediation, sexuality, technology, and computer / human interaction lie at the core of my most recent work. Leaving behind the rural beauty of Ithaca, New York to live in the ultra-urban environment of Market Street, the busiest area in San Francisco, has led to analytical artistic responses where creative intervention in the cityscape is a primary concern. The constant inundation of imagery, the influx of information, and the decrease of human contact both in the physical and virtual world have acted as a catalyst that drives the artist to divert the bombardment, and solidify the role that an activist / artist plays in society.

January 2002

During my undergraduate years, I have developed my academic, artistic, and visual concerns in a manner that is both representative of my growth as an artist and as a person. As I have been engaging with my surroundings and creating works it has become evident to me that I am interested in three main juxtapositions: memory and fantasy, virtuality and reality, and tactility and non-existence. These relationships deal with perception of surroundings, and when combined with narrative and the art object have led to many successful works.

As a dual degree student at Cornell University, and the owner of my own business, I have had the opportunity to explore academia and the professional world to a great extent. I am enrolled in two colleges concurrently (College of Arts and Sciences in the psychology department, and the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning in the fine art department). My goal when I decided to take this course of study was clear. I wanted to draw as much from the university as possible, while maintaining a rigorous academic schedule, and having a full life within the Cornell community.

Clearly, I have maintained that vision, and this spring I will be continuing to pursue the digital realm with upper level classes in three-dimentional animation and digital music composition. The instructors are leaders in their field, and I am quite excited to develop my skills further. My own thesis show, scheduled for May, will maintain it’s current trajectory down the digital path, and this spring’s projects will be a progression toward an installation that will be both thoughtful, and provoking.

The ambition that I have to continue my education at the graduate level is unparalleled. As the book is closing on my career at Cornell, I look forward to continuing my studies that will lead to a masters of fine arts degree. The constructive criticism that I will receive from peers as well as faculty will be invaluable in the continued discovery of digital media. With the constant shifts in technology, as well as the social climate, there is no doubt in my mind that I will be working hard at documenting, exploring, and experimenting with the contrasts in life. As a professional, practicing artist, I have the desire to push the perception and interpretation of digital art and to question what is acceptable, while continuing to delve into the relationships between memory and fantasy, virtuality and reality, and tactility and non-existence.

Blogging to Be Clutter Free

So I’ve been reading some books about how to become less dependent on objects, and more dependent on life and relationships…Specifically The Artist’s Way and Let Go Of Clutter and I think the Internet holds the key to a clutter free lifestyle.

Things that have helped clear my life and open my time.

In addition, I have been thinking a lot about how to make a transparent lifestream, and proposed the following Ultimate WordPress Plugin…here it is:

Scan the hard drive and post files to the blog synced with tags and time stamps, if there were multiple files (drafts) there could be digest posts…visibility would be set to invisible unless the user specified otherwise.

The folks over at Fabricatorz have begun working on AutoStat which is working on the system level and will start to make this goal a reality.

It’s about making connections and sharing across large data sets.

Time To Preblog

After reading Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, my aunt Linda’s recent death, and the subsequent re-connection with family, I have been spending much of my energy thinking about cycles, relationships, temporarily, directionality, and scale.

Convergence, overlap, pattern, and sequences also draw my attention. I will be releasing my writing in the order it was written starting on August 24, 1993. The works will be available inside hypermodern.net organized with relevant categories and tags. Individual spiral volumes will also be grouped in series. The format will likely change as I discover the optimal way in which to make individual entries navigable.

The purpose of Preblog is to take longitudinal data that wraps around August 1997 and to discover a paradigm shift around public/private, young/mature, and pre/post Internet access that started when I got a laptop, left for college, and was granted access to the Internet. For a complete project description you can find the initial proposal to Rhizome which unfortunately did not lead to a grant.

Encyclopedia Britannica states that a memoir is:

History or record composed from personal observation and experience. Closely related to autobiography, a memoir differs chiefly in the degree of emphasis on external events. Unlike writers of autobiography, who are concerned primarily with themselves as subject matter, writers of memoir usually have played roles in, or have closely observed, historical events, and their main purpose is describing or interpreting those events.

Preblog skates the line between a memoir and autobiography in a few key areas, specifically addressing the following:

    artistic maturation
    digital crossroads
    interpersonal relationships
    family life
    athletic performance
    humor
    romance
    development of self
    goal setting
    positive self-talk (affirmation)

For many pioneering artists and scientists, impactful research begins with experiments on the self. I intend, in both a qualitative and quantitative manner to evaluate these writings to create a data-set that will be MINE (personally) and that I will MINE (data). Essentially hypermodern.net is becoming what I have always intended it to be: a reflection of the lived intuitive artistic experience to be culled for inspiration and understanding. After all, we have nothing to lose but our illusions.

Nothing To Lose But Our Illusions: An Interview With David Edwards
by Derrick Jensen

Originally published in the U.S. in The Sun magazine, June 2000

If what’s wrong for me, on a fundamental level, is wrong for the planet, then saving the planet isn’t about trying to be righteous and green; it’s about saving your own life, and the life in the world in the process.

Read the entire article at medialens.org.