Art being a creative way of visually expressing imagination, skill and talent, some artists have found a way to link art and technology to come up with some of the most amazing pieces today.
Ben Rubin, a media artist from New York City was born in 1964, Massachusetts, Boston, says that he has been drawing all his life; though there was a time he did not do too much art. He took AB Computer Science in Brown University in 1987 and later went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for MS Visual Studies in 1989. Mr. Rubin also became a critic in graphic design after teaching in the Yale School of Art in 2004. He has worked for 25 years in television, and owns a marketing company called The Mint in Brooklyn New York which makes promotions for social media and also television networks.
Mr. Rubin has also has a number of exhibitions to his name. Starting as early as 1993 with The Tuning of the World in the Nickel Art museum in Calgary, art in the Anchorage in Brooklyn all the way to Madrid for the Ministerio de Fomento with Habitats Techtonicas in 2001. The same year he teamed up with Mark Hansen at the Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Some of his works are situated in the collections of the San Jose Museum of art, the art institute of Chicago and the Science Museum, London and some of his work has been publicized at the MoMA, Whitney Museum in New York, and other worldwide venues. He has in turn been appointed to craft a large-scale public art work for the New York Times Building, the University of Texas and the City of San Jose among others.
The Shakespeare Machine which was commissioned by the New York City’s Percent of Art initiative as an on-going restoration of the landmark institution and completed in October 2012 is an art fitting, which is site-specific and long-lasting.
It was Rubin’s large-scale multimedia sculpture creating a clarifying display of the Shakespearean dialect. It pauses as the Public Theatre lobby’s chandelier and organizes pieces of the texts according to various attributes that are arranged into motion guidelines of an infinite number of texts. 37 display panels one of each representing Shakespeare’s plays, appear in luminous characters of the moving texts. Ben Rubin himself said that his goal for the Shakespeare Machine was to generate flashes of the wit and passion that existed at the time of these plays’ creation.
For his achievements in the field of public art; he received the Public Art Annual Award in 2012, and later went on to win the CoD+A Public Art Award in the category of Public Spaces in 2013, his work was included in the 2013 Public Art Network year in review.
Mr. Rubin has operated closely with some key figures including architects, performers, theorists and artists. Mostly he has collaborated with Mark Hansen in projects like Listening Post (2002), Movable Type (2007) and together with the Elevator Repair Service presented a performance, Shuffle, that reviewed text of three 1920s American novels
In 2011, Ben Rubin took art to another level as he found a creative innovative way to pass time during his daily routine commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan by doodling on his iPad. If ever you’ve ridden the New York City subway you clearly experienced it first-hand that there’s never a shortage of peculiar and bizarre incidents. Subway Doodling is simply cartoon characters which are humorously integrated into certain or immediate surroundings. These characters are incorporated in photos next to subway riders who are unaware and find themselves starring in social media avenues which has drawn more than 52000 followers.
Mr. Rubin started drawing humorous creatures in the subway environment on his iPad that gave it the social media sensation termed as Subway Doodle. In kind of a funny way these subway doodle creatures, from a wide range of sweet and cuddly to scary monsters, took the representation of the New York subway riders themselves.
He then jumped into sharing his creations on social media some years back as a place to archive them but in an unexpected way took the internet by storm. Most of his monsters are furry blue creatures with a weird-looking facial or body attribute, sometime come in a beautiful form such as unicorns and chicken holding flowers. Those who want more should visit his official Subway Doodle website.
He enjoys making these creatures around unsuspecting people who are in their own world which is part of the humour though he sometimes asks friends or family to pose. It is not as a way to make a statement, but from the humour that comes from it. It is just a creative way to pass time in what could be a boring subway ride and brings some kind of fun to people who are seated on the subway, not imagine being having a ridiculous creature sitting next to them.
