Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, known by her stage name Lady Gaga, the 25 year old US pop singer songwriter diva has become the first person with more than 10 million Twitter followers on the micro blogging service. Lady Gaga’s response on Twitter to her followers was “10 Million Monsters! I’m speechless, we did it! It’s an illness how I love you”. The monster being a reference to her enormously successful world tour named “The Monster Ball tour”. Justin Bieber another pop singer closely follows Gaga with nearly 9.7mil followers on Twitter, and President Obama third with 8mil. Britney Spears another pop singer follows next with 7.8mil and US television personality Kim Kardashian close fifth with 7.5mil. Gaga has the number one spot on the Forbes annual list of most powerful celebrities.

Inspired by Edwin Kee http://ow.ly/51wPI image source http://ow.ly/51xjk

Sarah Burton the UK fashion designer and creative director of fashion label Alexander McQueen has confirmed she was commissioned to design Kate Middleton’s wedding dress on her marriage to Prince William. As the former head of Women’s wear and prior to her elevation to director on the suicide death of the label’s founder, Burton had created designs for many celebrity names including Cate Blanchett, Lady Gaga, and Michelle Obama. Burton’s design for the dress was subsequently created by the Royal School of Needlework. Burton who also designed the Bridesmaid and afterparty dresses, described the process of working with Middleton as an experience of a lifetime. Burton had earlier come to the notice of Middleton when attending the 2005 wedding of Tom Parker Bowles, son of Camila, with Sara Buys a fashion journalist.

Inspired by Imogen Fox ow.ly/4KzQn image source TimeInc ow.ly/4KzNO

Hello world this is the queen of Twitter (August 28th)

“Hello world this is Lady Gaga queen of Twitter”, expressed Lady Gaga dressed in a typical Gaga outfit with Twitter symbols on her video message to fans announcing that she has passed Britney Spears with the most followers on Twitter.  Confirmed by the social media statistics service Famecount.com, that along with the 16 million Facebook friends, makes Gaga clearly the most popular online celebrity. Coming up fast though and predicted to overtake her within months is Justin Bieber, said to be adding 800,000 new Twitter followers each month.

Political Arts | Ian Bunn Visual Artist

My digital art work is essentially politics and art. It’s about iconic people, places and events of our day.  Recorded visually through daily compilations of manipulated digital images, posted online and disseminated via online media and social networks. The works are diaristic in nature that metaphorically record a spectator’s experience of the contemporary digital age.  The resulting work intentionally has a painterly aesthetic acknowledging my historical painting practice.

Adapting Pop Art’s notion of mass media imagery into a context of the contemporary digital age, the work draws on a myriad points of reference. Utilizing fractured images to provide an allusion to the digital noise pounding away daily into our sub consciousness.  The work is essentially popular culture arts, diverging from the traditional Pop Art notion of a pronounced repetition of a consumer icon, instead this work focuses on the deluge of contemporary digital content. The compilation of the fragmented imagery is vividly distractive, not unlike cable surfing or a jaunt through Times Square.

This digital photo manipulation art work is premised on the basis that Pop art in its beginnings, freeze-framed what consumers of popular culture experienced into iconic visual abstractions. With the advent of the techno age, visual information circulates in such quantities, so rapidly and exponentially, that to comprehend a fraction of it all becomes a kind of production process in itself.  Hence this work considers fragmented elements of Popular Culture through an artistic and conceptual exploration of specific people and events of the day.