Project: Killer Entertainments : By Jennifer Terry : Designed By Raegan Kelly
You can view Killer Entertainments Here
This project is composed of three different screens in which clips are played on. The viewer decides when to view these clips and if they want to view them or just skip to the next one. There are also a series of dots around the screen in which content is written about various topics related to the clips. At random while playing the clips they will stop and certain words will come up on the screen, sometimes leading to longer descriptions, and other times simply fading off the screen when your mouse scrolls over.
The whole project is about the war in Iraq, and the video clip are various clips taken by soldiers, mostly from hand held cameras taped to their helmets. The clips are mostly of different firefights, and there is a disclaimer as the viewer enters the site explaining that they are disturbing.
The aesthetics of the three video screens is very interesting. It gives the viewer the option to play more than one video at a time. It gives the viewer a sense of surveillance. The information around the screen can be read while watching the videos. It is a very interesting project that would take a lifetime to go through everything.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Act/REact Exhibit
Scott Snibbe’s Deep Walls (2003)
Camilla Utterback, Untitled 5 & 6 (2003)
Deep Walls is an interactive display that, at first glance, is 16 loops arranged in a grid, constantly playing. Once the viewer steps into a certain area, they find that one of the boxes in the grid is a video of themselves, doing whatever they are doing. Once they step out of the area, they find themselves as a constant loop on one of the 16 boxes.
While I was at the museum, I observed a couple for a while and their reaction to this. They were hesitant to even step in the frame at first, slowly testing out the grounds, not really fully understanding what was happening. When they realized how the apparatus worked, they started experimenting. One of them would walk into the frame and fall over once they hit the “edge” of the frame, as if it were a solid wall. They had a mock fist fight in one frame. And, my personal favorite, the guy grabs the girl and kisses her and, after about five seconds, the girl pushes him away and walks out of the frame.
What this array of loops soon became is an anonymous diary of this couples time in this museum, up for everyone who passed by it to see. This interactive piece differed greatly from Camille Utterback’s Untitled pieces. The Untitled pieces were like huge canves in which the viewer interacted with in many complex ways, creating a kind of “wake” that eventually made an image. After the viewer leaves, however, there is not much evidence of the viewer being there, as the pattern on the “canvas” is much too complex to understand. The artist, Utterback’s pieces, is more important and more evident than the viewer.
With Deep Walls, though, the viewer becomes more important than the original artist. Since the concept is a very simple concept, easy for anyone to understand quickly, the artist is forgotten quickly, as the people up on the screen are more important than the person who set up the display. The phenomenon I’m trying to get at is that the viewer’s become the artists. That is exactly what happened with the couple I was observing. They were attracted to this piece because the piece was not simply just reacting to them – they were creating the piece. More than just being fun, because everything the viewer does is recorded and looped forever, the viewer puts his or her own stamp on the piece.
Utterback’s Untitled pieces lack this recording aspect to them. They instead just react to the viewer. The viewer, however, is able to experiment much more with the media because of its extreme complexity. As I was playing with one of these pieces, I started noticing the subtleties of how certain movements I made destroyed certain aspects of the piece and how it, at the same time, created others. It gives the viewer the sense that they are “painting”, which is Camille’s intention behind these interactive pieces. I’m not sure how it gives this impression, but something about the background of the piece (or, I should say, the slow healing process) gives it a sense of brush strokes and paint. This piece, instead of being a diary, is more like a poem. A very complex poem that not even the poet understands (the poet being the viewer).
In connecting the arguments I gave to guest John McKinnon’s lecture on Monday, October 13th, he talked about a lot of the same aspects. He compared Utterback’s Untilted pieces to a painting that the viewer creates, and showed us an interview of Utterback in which she explained how she had to make the piece simple enough so that the user could easily understand that they were interacting with the media, and yet complex and subtle enough to interest the viewer for a long time. This is exactly what happened to me as I was interacting with the piece. I began trying to figure out how to manipulate the piece in certain ways and to see how it really functioned.
John McKinnon also talked about the Deep Walls piece, showing another video with a Scott Snibe voice over. Snibe described the viewer’s reaction to the piece, talking about how they were usually hesitant at first, not at first understanding how they interacted with the piece, until they discovered themselves in one of the boxes. Once they realized more about the piece, that it loops after the viewer steps out, the viewer becomes more comfortable with it and with the anonymity of the silhouettes. This is exactly what I observed with the couple at the museum.
In both these pieces, to different degrees, the viewer becomes the artist. This differs greatly from virtually every other form of media, in which there is a sharp distinction between the viewer and the artist. With these pieces, this line becomes more blurred. I think that is the purpose behind interactive artwork: to inspire. By making the viewer become a part of the work, and by making them, to some extent, the artists, these pieces inspire the viewer to create their own art.
Camilla Utterback, Untitled 5 & 6 (2003)
Deep Walls is an interactive display that, at first glance, is 16 loops arranged in a grid, constantly playing. Once the viewer steps into a certain area, they find that one of the boxes in the grid is a video of themselves, doing whatever they are doing. Once they step out of the area, they find themselves as a constant loop on one of the 16 boxes.
While I was at the museum, I observed a couple for a while and their reaction to this. They were hesitant to even step in the frame at first, slowly testing out the grounds, not really fully understanding what was happening. When they realized how the apparatus worked, they started experimenting. One of them would walk into the frame and fall over once they hit the “edge” of the frame, as if it were a solid wall. They had a mock fist fight in one frame. And, my personal favorite, the guy grabs the girl and kisses her and, after about five seconds, the girl pushes him away and walks out of the frame.
What this array of loops soon became is an anonymous diary of this couples time in this museum, up for everyone who passed by it to see. This interactive piece differed greatly from Camille Utterback’s Untitled pieces. The Untitled pieces were like huge canves in which the viewer interacted with in many complex ways, creating a kind of “wake” that eventually made an image. After the viewer leaves, however, there is not much evidence of the viewer being there, as the pattern on the “canvas” is much too complex to understand. The artist, Utterback’s pieces, is more important and more evident than the viewer.
With Deep Walls, though, the viewer becomes more important than the original artist. Since the concept is a very simple concept, easy for anyone to understand quickly, the artist is forgotten quickly, as the people up on the screen are more important than the person who set up the display. The phenomenon I’m trying to get at is that the viewer’s become the artists. That is exactly what happened with the couple I was observing. They were attracted to this piece because the piece was not simply just reacting to them – they were creating the piece. More than just being fun, because everything the viewer does is recorded and looped forever, the viewer puts his or her own stamp on the piece.
Utterback’s Untitled pieces lack this recording aspect to them. They instead just react to the viewer. The viewer, however, is able to experiment much more with the media because of its extreme complexity. As I was playing with one of these pieces, I started noticing the subtleties of how certain movements I made destroyed certain aspects of the piece and how it, at the same time, created others. It gives the viewer the sense that they are “painting”, which is Camille’s intention behind these interactive pieces. I’m not sure how it gives this impression, but something about the background of the piece (or, I should say, the slow healing process) gives it a sense of brush strokes and paint. This piece, instead of being a diary, is more like a poem. A very complex poem that not even the poet understands (the poet being the viewer).
In connecting the arguments I gave to guest John McKinnon’s lecture on Monday, October 13th, he talked about a lot of the same aspects. He compared Utterback’s Untilted pieces to a painting that the viewer creates, and showed us an interview of Utterback in which she explained how she had to make the piece simple enough so that the user could easily understand that they were interacting with the media, and yet complex and subtle enough to interest the viewer for a long time. This is exactly what happened to me as I was interacting with the piece. I began trying to figure out how to manipulate the piece in certain ways and to see how it really functioned.
John McKinnon also talked about the Deep Walls piece, showing another video with a Scott Snibe voice over. Snibe described the viewer’s reaction to the piece, talking about how they were usually hesitant at first, not at first understanding how they interacted with the piece, until they discovered themselves in one of the boxes. Once they realized more about the piece, that it loops after the viewer steps out, the viewer becomes more comfortable with it and with the anonymity of the silhouettes. This is exactly what I observed with the couple at the museum.
In both these pieces, to different degrees, the viewer becomes the artist. This differs greatly from virtually every other form of media, in which there is a sharp distinction between the viewer and the artist. With these pieces, this line becomes more blurred. I think that is the purpose behind interactive artwork: to inspire. By making the viewer become a part of the work, and by making them, to some extent, the artists, these pieces inspire the viewer to create their own art.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Blue Velvet Project
Instead of discussing “articles”, I am going to discuss “projects”, since that is what my journal is really about (refer to the previous post).
The Project I am Discussing is Blue Velvet, By David Theo Goldberg & Stefka Hristova -
Design by Erik Loyer
You can view Blue Velvet Here.
Blue Velvet is one of the projects in the Difference article of this journal. It is a flash animation that I feel is the best of all I’ve seen so far in this journal. It is about Hurricane Katrina and discusses in the introduction how it dives into the history of New Orleans, making the viewer aware that the disaster of Katrina was not just an act of nature but a complex web of political and social histories.
The actual project Blue Velvet captivates the viewer from the beginning with a well made static image of a cityscape, with a red button in the lower right corner with the word “begin.” Once you click it, text starts falling from the sky and going in and out of focus as it moves around the screen. There are very peaceful sounds of the ocean.
If you click on one of the words, everything changes. The word falls through the cityscape, turning it shades of gray instead of shades of blue and green, while the sound instantly changes to what sounds like an African drum circle. To explain everything else that happens in this complex transition would take a while, but basically the whole point of view of the screen lowers, so that the viewer feels that he is in the earth, and a short article is given relating loosely to the word that was originally clicked.
The evidence that this project points out refers mostly to how segregated New Orleans was before the hurricane and how this has come to be over the years. Because of this segregation, there was more hazards and less assistance or safety measures taken in the poorer areas like the 9th Ward.
The Project I am Discussing is Blue Velvet, By David Theo Goldberg & Stefka Hristova -
Design by Erik Loyer
You can view Blue Velvet Here.
Blue Velvet is one of the projects in the Difference article of this journal. It is a flash animation that I feel is the best of all I’ve seen so far in this journal. It is about Hurricane Katrina and discusses in the introduction how it dives into the history of New Orleans, making the viewer aware that the disaster of Katrina was not just an act of nature but a complex web of political and social histories.
The actual project Blue Velvet captivates the viewer from the beginning with a well made static image of a cityscape, with a red button in the lower right corner with the word “begin.” Once you click it, text starts falling from the sky and going in and out of focus as it moves around the screen. There are very peaceful sounds of the ocean.
If you click on one of the words, everything changes. The word falls through the cityscape, turning it shades of gray instead of shades of blue and green, while the sound instantly changes to what sounds like an African drum circle. To explain everything else that happens in this complex transition would take a while, but basically the whole point of view of the screen lowers, so that the viewer feels that he is in the earth, and a short article is given relating loosely to the word that was originally clicked.
The evidence that this project points out refers mostly to how segregated New Orleans was before the hurricane and how this has come to be over the years. Because of this segregation, there was more hazards and less assistance or safety measures taken in the poorer areas like the 9th Ward.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
On Vectors Journal...
I have been following an online journal named Vectors Journal. A link to it is here.
My journal is actually very interesting. It took me a while to realize how to work with its structure, but now that I’ve gotten into it, I really enjoy it (unfortunately they only seem to come out with one article a year).
It starts out with a main title and has an introduction to this month’s article. Then it has a group of links to the right that link to different “Projects” (which is really what this online journal is all about). Once you click on the link, you are brought to another page in which you’re given another introduction for the project, an author’s statement, a designer’s statement, Peer responses, Credits, and a link to view the actual “Project.” There are five of these projects for each article. The “Project” usually consists of a flash based page and, in most cases, interactive. They usually focus in on one current issue and orient the project around all aspects of it. Most of the projects I’ve looked at do not make concise arguments as one might usually see in articles, but instead present evidence in a somewhat bias way. The interactivity aspect of it, however, captivates the viewer, making them want to dig deeper and deeper into the project in order to discover some sort of “evidence.” The evidence is placed there by the author, but the viewer has the feeling they are discovering it for themselves (and I guess, in a way, they are).
Because of the way this journal is set up, I will be writing not about the entire articles in the blog but about the specific projects. It would be very difficult to write about the articles in their entirety, and makes a lot more sense to write about the individual projects, which are much more specific to one issue and easier to draw conclusions from. Because of this, I will be writing about the projects in this journal.
Another thing that is interesting about my journal is how little it actually talks about art or the artwork it’s showing. The art seems secondary to the social issues these projects are addressing. Because of all of this, it is hard to write about the questions posted on D2L that we are supposed to address. I guess I shouldn’t say it’s hard – it’s just not straightforward. There is no clear-cut answer to any of the questions in D2L about this journal, though it is easy to infer a lot of these answers.
So I guess this is a disclaimer then, telling you reading my blog that this discussion of Vector’s Journal is not going to concise or based on hard, concrete evidence, but instead based on my own inferences, biases, and educated guesses. Though, in my opinion, that’s all knowledge is anyway.
My journal is actually very interesting. It took me a while to realize how to work with its structure, but now that I’ve gotten into it, I really enjoy it (unfortunately they only seem to come out with one article a year).
It starts out with a main title and has an introduction to this month’s article. Then it has a group of links to the right that link to different “Projects” (which is really what this online journal is all about). Once you click on the link, you are brought to another page in which you’re given another introduction for the project, an author’s statement, a designer’s statement, Peer responses, Credits, and a link to view the actual “Project.” There are five of these projects for each article. The “Project” usually consists of a flash based page and, in most cases, interactive. They usually focus in on one current issue and orient the project around all aspects of it. Most of the projects I’ve looked at do not make concise arguments as one might usually see in articles, but instead present evidence in a somewhat bias way. The interactivity aspect of it, however, captivates the viewer, making them want to dig deeper and deeper into the project in order to discover some sort of “evidence.” The evidence is placed there by the author, but the viewer has the feeling they are discovering it for themselves (and I guess, in a way, they are).
Because of the way this journal is set up, I will be writing not about the entire articles in the blog but about the specific projects. It would be very difficult to write about the articles in their entirety, and makes a lot more sense to write about the individual projects, which are much more specific to one issue and easier to draw conclusions from. Because of this, I will be writing about the projects in this journal.
Another thing that is interesting about my journal is how little it actually talks about art or the artwork it’s showing. The art seems secondary to the social issues these projects are addressing. Because of all of this, it is hard to write about the questions posted on D2L that we are supposed to address. I guess I shouldn’t say it’s hard – it’s just not straightforward. There is no clear-cut answer to any of the questions in D2L about this journal, though it is easy to infer a lot of these answers.
So I guess this is a disclaimer then, telling you reading my blog that this discussion of Vector’s Journal is not going to concise or based on hard, concrete evidence, but instead based on my own inferences, biases, and educated guesses. Though, in my opinion, that’s all knowledge is anyway.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
The Creative Act
Chris Schasse
Film 202:605
10/2/08
Paper #1: The Creative Act
Bear Garden
After watching the film for the second time (and even after the first time) I get the impression that someone has died. Someone died and the lingering sense of darkness and mourning are still there. The kind of mourning that comes without crying or any kind of release. The stale darkness that stays with me, almost demonic, but a demonic force that does not captivate me completely. Like the calm before the storm, or the calm after it. Almost the feeling that I’m about to be attacked, but for now I am safe. Or maybe the attack has already been made, and the enemy has withdrawn.
This film, in my mind, plays with time. I don’t know if something is about to happen or if it already has. So while watching it I am stuck in the middle, unable to decipher what the present is. Maybe the film is trying to get the point across that time is a cycle, and that the past and the future don’t exist, and all there is is the present.
In these two paragraphs I have attempted to do what is talked about in the Marcel Duchamp quote. I (the spectator) have attempted to interpret this film’s inner qualifications to add to the contribution of the work. I realized through the process of taking notes that this film is really just meant to be experienced, and not to be analyzed into too deeply. The actual images and symbols and music and sounds do not have much meaning by themselves or in relation to each other, except as a whole experience. As the viewer experiences this film, the film puts them in a trance, much like the feeling of meditation; the feeling of Zen. It makes the viewer question the inner parts of his or her mind, and not what the actual film means or is trying to get across. It makes the viewer conscious.
Andrea does an excellent job creating something extremely abstract and yet, at the same time, mixing lots of tangible sounds and images, giving the viewer the impression that they are ‘looking through’ something. She does this by the use of people in the background and overlaying images and manipulating the actual film through scratches or whatever else. An image of a man’s face appears a couple of times throughout the film, a face which is hard to decipher. It creates a gap, making the viewer have to fill in who the man is, and why he is there. The voices in the background also contribute to this gap. What is the source of the voices? What are they saying?
She uses color very well. At one point the sound of a siren is heard, and a series of red images were shown with the sounds of war in the background. At another point an inverted image of a church (at least I perceived it to be a church) came onto the screen , and after that everything was blue and dark, and she intermixed sounds of the water, and the whole experience felt very spiritual (this is the point when I had the greatest sense that someone had died).
The first scene in this film invites the viewer right away to question what is happening. As the camera goes through the yellow garden of flowers, there are voices which are hard to decipher in the background. It makes the viewer wonder what’s happening, and from the start of the film the viewer is questioning and trying to fill in the gaps. This scene gave the viewer a feeling of suspense, like something was going to happen soon. After this scene, it goes to images that give the viewer the impression that they are behind something. Everything in this next sequence is not tangible, but at the same time there is a strong light that looks like the sun in the background in relatively the same place. This image of the sun grounds the viewer in something, making him or her feel buried in this mess of scratches and non-tangible images. It makes the viewer feel lost in a sense, wanting to get out into the light and grab hold of the sun.
Andrea also sprinkles in many images of people in the background. These people, I feel, also ground the viewer in something. There are many other images of windows and of rooms, all very similar, all making the viewer wonder about the connection between them. It makes the viewer question “What is the significance of this room? Who are these people in the distance? “ The viewer, again, has to fill in the gaps that the maker (Andrea) put in there.
This movie is by far my favorite that I’ve seen in class. A lot of the films we’ve seen seem to me much more like an experiment. Like What the Water Said, Mothlight, and Suspension. These films are very interesting as experiments, and have very interesting results, but I don’t feel like there is much emotion in them. I am left thinking “that’s pretty cool.” But with Bear Garden I really felt like there was a story to it, chalked full of strong emotion. She did a good job of really rooting me in something tangible, even though the film was in many ways just as abstract as the others.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Art Encounters of Sorts : On Field Reports
Handmade Film Workshop with Robert Schaller
I encountered art here, in the darkroom on the fourth floor of the Kenilworth building. I signed up for this session with my friend Kurt because it was free and the sound of making your own film sounded interesting to us.
One thing I learned is that making film is fairly simple. There are a lot of complexities to it, and a lot of variables, but to make a light sensitive material and put it on something that can be displayed through a projector is really not that difficult.
It was interesting to go to this session, and it’s really good to know that if I have trouble getting a certain effect out of traditional film I can always go this direction. But after working with homemade film, I feel the work is not really worth it. I guess it’s not really my passion. I thought it was really cool though how the first guy who came in there exposed the homemade film through some negatives of some buildings he filmed. I think that’s a really cool concept that I may implement sometime, and I think it would have some great effects.
I like to distort things. I like to take reality and twist it a bit to get my point across (or just to make people look harder). A lot of the stuff we were doing in the workshop didn’t seem to have any kind of tangible grounding. We were exposing random things (sugar, salt, sticks, leaves, bubble wrap) to the light to get interesting images on the film. The problem I have with this is that it’s just making things look “interesting.” As an experiment though, it was very interesting. If I did the same thing and exposed it though a filmstrip I’ve already shot of something tangible, I think what I’d come up with would be something much more interesting.
All and all, I learned a lot of things I may use for the future as a media artist. A large part of me really wants to stretch the bounds of what media, especially film, can do, and I think the newfound knowledge of what I learned at this workshop, even if I didn’t see it as very practical, taught me new techniques and opened my mind to new things I never really knew much about.
I love to slide!!!
Vectors Journal
I chose it because on the website you can draw. I thought that was sweeeet. I know nothing about the journal. But I'm sure it's awesome.
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