YouTube Remix

Artist Statement- I found this project to be interesting as well as challenging. I am not use to working with code so the challenge increased as the project progressed. I really find this lady's news story remixed into a song with videos ranging from animation, re-creation, to previously developed videos, very creative. I did have a hard time syncing all videos and sound together. I spent a good amount a research searching the net for codes that would mute some of the videos that had similar if not the exact song, but I had no luck in finding a code that actually worked. So, I decided to rearrange the videos so that the other videos sounds would come in at a lower sound and create a background repeat. The volumes of each video must be lower than the larger middle video for the piece to have successful sound piece.

Overall, I choose this initial video as my piece subject because the videos are hilarious. These videos are a sure way to crack a smile.

Video Piece: Click Here 

Digital Currents: Chapter 4 Discussion Question

1.Rosalind Krauss, art critic, termed early video works as “narcissistic” performance. How does works by Berly Korot, like First Four Monitors of Dachan, fit into the idea of “narcissistic performace” in realtion to video art?

 “Krauss describes this narcissism as a kind of psychological strategy for examining the conditions and traditions of the relationships between the process of image-making and the viewer’s perception of it.”(99)

2.Robert Pinaus- Witten said that “video art was ‘deficient precisely because it was linked to and perpetuated the outmoded clichés of Modernist Pictorialism.”’ (106)

What does he mean by “perpetuated the outmoded clichés of Modernist Pictorialism?” What are the clichés? Is he using the term modernist pictorialism to refer to a minimalist approach to a modern media?

Digital Currents: Chapter 3 Discussion Question

1." At the same time, television projected the world of the 1960s directly into the public's consciousness, transmitting dramatic, disturbing images of the Vietnam War Mixed with scaled up images of consumer objects which attempted to hook the viewer into believing that both kinds of images were of equal importance." (64)

Is the author saying that the attempts of subliminal advertising on TV in the 1960s, served as a vessel for "postmodern consciousness?"

2. "'In Conceptual Art", wrote Sol LeWitt, "the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work... all planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.'" (73)

The Medium is the Massage Discussion Questions

1. Marshall McLuhan says, "This feeling is an aspect of the new mass culture we are moving into-- a world of total involvement with everybody else and in which nobody can really imagine what private guilt can be anymore" (61). 

Does this quote have a direct correlation with the massive social networking that occurs every day on Facebook, Twitter or Myspace? These people tend to publish their every action, feeling and thought. Does this combine everyone and erase the boundaries associated with the term "private?"

2. "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land." (McLuhan 75)

What does McLuhan mean by "we look at the present through a rear-view mirror?" Does he mean, technology of the future is fast approaching today? Then, how does that connect with marching "backwards into the future?"              

 

Assignment 2: Animation

Artist Statement: This assignment was my first attempt to animate in Photoshop. I found it very time consuming but fun. It consists of 28 frames at .2 sec each. Since I have multiple areas of animation I worked in each frame separately to achieve multiple movements. In time I am sure I will perfect the timing progressions.

Assignment 1: Triptych and Digital Currents Introduction: Discussion Question

Artist Statement: My inspiration for this assignment came from the upcoming holiday Valentines Day. I mostly used this assignment to explore masking, special effects and selections in Photoshop. Nothing was planned out, it was more of a build as you go type of piece. 

Here are a few quotes from the reading that I found particularly interesting:

1) "Benjamin pointed out, however, that the discovery of photographic technologies from 1850 onward essentially undermined the existing function of art, not only because photography and photomechanical reproduction could provide visual reportage but because it threatened the “aura” and value of the original, the handmade object that relied on the specialized skills of the artist.” (Page 4)

Does this quote imply that “aura” of art’s essence can only be captured by the original work and that any reproduction of a specific piece is only undermining the value of the original? Then how does this so called undermining of the original piece threaten “the existing function of art” as a whole?

2) “When Andy Warhol began silk-screening photo images directly onto his canvases, Pop artists began the appropriation of mass culture, photomechanically reproducing images directly into the field of painting. In doing so they bypassed dealing with the social implications of photography raised by Benjamin.” (Page 6)

Why did these Pop artists that were reproducing their works for consumer consumption, escape the “social implications” that Benjamin labeled photography and cinematography as “threatening the existing foundations of the art establishment?” If we define Art within the terms that art is based on “hand skills” then we are decreasing the scope of art as an institution.