AnthonyFontana.com

Avatar Meets Girl
a machinima animaiton by FONTANA

This body of work is the first by the collaborative husband and wife team known as Fontana. By reflecting on individual personalities and real world identities, similarities between virtual world persona's are expressed through emotive animations common to the Second Life avatar, yet intriguingly unique. These works begin to examine the emerging language of machinima (machine-made-cinema) and its role in the continuum of traditional cinema language; machinima that documents and expresses the memories and experiences of avatars. Through a large aggregation of images, videos, and installations based on the accumulated inventory of the Fontana avatars, Anthony and Sandra supply the viewer with information that is both identifiable and indifferent; bridging connections with those who understand the virtual world phenomenon and those who have not yet begun to understand its impact on society at large.

Fontana 2.0:
Exhibit in Second Life - Summer 2007

Read more at the Heldscalla website.

Fontana 2.0 was an exhibition of work that focused on the web 2.0 ideology of socially motivated peer production and recontextualization of the artist himself through previous works. This work was displayed at the Heldscalla Foundation in Second Life during the Summer of 2007. The show consisted of two separate bodies of work:

ReCon(Text) #2
Using elements from previous works over the past two years, this interactive work calls for audience participation in two ways. First, gallery goers may interact with the control panel located on the gallery floor to change the images along the left wall. In doing so, many variant compositions emerge. Audience members are encouraged to alt-zoom-in and take screenshots of the compositions they create then upload and add them to the animated slide shows off to each side. My hope was to engage the audience through collaborative creation of new compositions and narratives.

The documentation video of this show will be posted here soon.

YouToo
The other set of works in this exhibition explore the modes, speed, and content of information transfer in the Web 2.0 era. The cornerstone of this series is the image titled "YouToo". Mona Lisa represents 500 years of critical discourse on one singular work of art. I am very interested in the rate at which society must process and evaluate new media. Does meaning emerge through the combination of transient images, and if so, when does one stop to contemplate and understand that meaning?

NMC Connect - February 2007

The first symposium of artists in Second Life took place at the New Media Consortium's virtual campus in Second Life in February of 2007. The work exhibited, titled "Hello N00b," was my first foray into site specific comics; or a comic strip created in or about a specific place. The work illustrated the transition of the character 'n00b', a yellow creature from my 2005 digital image "I'm still a n00b," into a three dimensional entity in the virtual world. During the exhibition of the work, my avatar "rode" on n00b's back, flying around the exhibit and speaking with other avatars. The basis for this work later evolved into the concept for my first machinima animation "Machinima Paradiso".

2005 Digital Images

My past series of digital works have juxtaposed the cartoon image against intensely mature themes provided by digitally manipulated photographs and computer screenshots, to examine “the evolution of bathroom stall art”. The sometimes overtly sexual nature of the images challenges the viewer’s sensibilities and confronts their expectations of the “cartoon” being marginalized as something “just for kids”. This remains an issue for the world of comics and sequential art where they dispute the common perception that while literature and fine art are perceived as adult mediums their combination is relegated to childhood hobbies and men in tights. These works led me back to my passion for the medium and the creation of my own graphic novel.

The Hope Show

2005-2006

MFA THESIS WORKS - 2004 - NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

"...Intimate, dense, and idiosyncratic digital images..." -John Fraser, Chicago Artist

"The aesthetics of such obsessive probing combine fastidiousness and industry with a fascination for the things we are taught to look away from. At its source is an instinctual grasp of the metamorphic potential of all things, and a determination to pursue mutations of the ‘natural’ into the ‘unnatural’ that defies squeamishness."
-Robert Storr, Eye Infection

Exactly What I Said

2003-2004