Beamer Video

To cover both parts of the theme, I chose to have the audio portion be christmas-y and the video be end of the world-ish.  I wanted to keep the music simple and without too much editing so it would wouldn't overshadow the video.  I picked a Zakk Wylde version of an old english song called The First Noel, and just cut it down so it wasn't so long.  For the end of the world part, I picked a war theme because that's all that the news has been covering for the last few months.  Everything about Israel had the news talking about world war 3 and the apocalypse so it made sense to do something related to wars and violence.  My intent was to have cheery, christmasy music to go along with the explosions and dead people in the clips that I put together so there was an obvious disconnect between the two.

Prospectives

The first presenter of the panel played his video called 'Unattended Baggage,' which was a short narrative about a faceless family man who makes a bomb in his garage and leaves it in a public place.  According to him, the goal of the video was to try to humanize a terrorist.  He did this by making him seem like he lives a normal, Americanized life.  He makes coffee, has dinner with his wife, and makes a bomb in his spare time.  He purposely shows no faces and as few details as possible about the actual person to avoid any stereotypes, so the audience sees a human, rather than a person of any race.  He wanted to show that a terrorist can come from any background and doesn't always look like how many people think they look like.  The next piece was a video game for ios devices called 'In a Permanent Save State.'  The game depicts the afterlife from the point of view of dead Foxconn workers who committed suicide because of working conditions and bad treatment.  It deals with real people, events, and politics, and is meant to be a serious game rather than just pure entertainment.  Because the theme of the game deals with controversial human rights violations, apple pulled it from their store.  He didn't go into detail about his intent with making the game, but I imagine that the topic of the dead workers was meant to call attention to the situation to hopefully inform people of what the game is about.  The last person's piece was called 'Art in the Info Epoch."  It was split into 2 parts and was meant to show similarities and differences of people in two groups.  The first was pictures of prisoners who's faces were trisected and always mismatched with different parts of someones face, and the second was the same thing but with politicians faces instead.  His intention was the show that a lot of these people represent similar ideas, images, or lifestyles, specifically the politicians.  He talked a lot about the occupy movement so it was clear he didn't like most politicians and rich people of power.  The piece was meant to show his opinion that a lot of these people have the same agenda, or the same ideas.

Marclay-Tinguely Sculpture

The goal of this project was to create a functional record playing device using the works of Christian Marclay and Jean Tinguely as influences.  We were supposed to imagine what would happen if Marclay, who worked with vinyl records and the non-musical sounds they can produce, and Tinguely, who created sculptures out of junk and found objects, met and co-produced a sculpture.  I took a traffic cone from the side of the freeway to use as a gramophone style speaker, and decided from there to use a common theme throughout the piece.  I picked a construction theme using an electric screwdriver to spin the record and a few toolboxes as supports.  The record I picked is Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, which is at times pretty disjunct and complicated, and also simple and elegant.  I tried to convey this by having almost every individual piece loose and not permanently connected to anything while still trying to make it look like an old record player. 

Paul Demarinis Lecture

It seemed like the overall theme of Paul Demarinis's work, or at last the work he talked about, is what he called 'media archaeology.'  By this, he meant using old and new technology to create his art.  One example of this he gave was a piece where he used lasers to play vinyl records.  The lasers were basically bringing the old, outdated technology back to life.  I thought this was pretty interesting because usually the only way to properly play records is on an actual record player.  The lasers were playing them just as well; you could actually hear the music pretty well.  Another aspect of his work that I noticed was that he uses items that aren't usually associated with art pieces.  He talked about a project of his where someone would hold an umbrella, water would fall on top of it, and depending on what part of the umbrella got hit with water, different sounds and music would play.  There would be a sort of conveyor belt that would drop water, so the person could move to a different spot to change the music.  It is a cool use of using the environment to change the outcome of the piece.  Overall, I thought it was fascinating that he found ways to use technology in some outlandish and incredible ways.  He seemed to really embrace new technology and art forms while still holding on to what existed in the past.
Questions:  Does he consider his sculptures with the lasers art or some sort of new invention or use of technology?  What did he intend to come about from his piece with the lights under the bridge since he implied that few people even knew it existed?  Because his art involves a lot of complicated technology, does he approach their creation from an artistic standpoint or a mechanical/architectural standpoint?

Pico Mapping

Diptych

I wanted to make a video that was blurry and black and white like one of the examples we saw.  I did this by filming out the window of my car as I drove for a couple hours.  I sped it up and made it black and white, and put a couple blue filters on it to give it a kind of eerie feeling.  For the sound, I put in a bunch of clock ticks that don't match up with each other.  I wanted there to be a sense of consistant time, but also franticness and disorder to match the video aspect.

Machinima Expo Panel

I watched the panel discussion on filming documentaries inside virtual worlds like Second Life.  Of the three guests they had talking about the subject, one common theme in all of their opinions was that any virtual world is as real as the real world.  One person said that the graphical representation of a real person inside of a virtual space is enough to make the space real, and that Second Life is just an extension of people’s reality.  Because there is a real person behind the animated characters, filming their actions in the space can be considered a real life documentary.  When discussing the legitimacy of virtual documentaries, one guest said that even though it all takes place in a game environment, it still requires a long stay inside of that environment like a normal documentary.  According to them, making these kind of documentaries come with certain advantages over other forms of media.  The budget for making them is significantly lower than it would be for a real world documentary, probably because there’s less equipment and personnel involved.  Also, they believe that making machinima provides more freedom of expression than any other form of media.  Because of this, they feel machinima is able to reach a wide range of people.  They see positive reactions to older people, while at the same time negative reactions from younger people.  Because some people have different definitions of reality, they can have completely different experiences or opinions of machinima.  Because of all this, they see machinima positively expanding the documentary scene.

Prospectives Animation

Animation Progress

My general idea for the animation is to have the letters and numbers in 'prospectives 12' and the body parts of the person flying around the screen, some bouncing off the edges and some disappearing off screen and at the end have them fall into place with 'prospectives' being above the person and the numbers in each of her hands.  I haven't decided what I want to put in the background, but it will probably be something involving red colors like the poster.  It's kind of a simple idea but I think 5 seconds might be too short to try to make something more complicated.  I'll probably use mostly photoshop animation to do this since it's the only animation tool I have some experience with
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1 minute sound

Click to hear music file