Filmmaking today

Filmmaking today can be everywhere. We no longer are confined to film stock, digital video can be sent almost as fast as an email. Digital editing makes the process faster. It feels that films are less art and more governed by money. Green screens, blue screens, what happened to the image that was beautiful by itself.

Blogs part 2 (act 3)

The article I chose was from the back section of this month’s frieze magazine about Charles Avery, by Chris Fite-Wassilak. This article talks about Charles’s imaginary place on the world called, ”The Island.” “The Island” is a place where the boundaries of reality and imaginary cross and create a place where living deities can be found. The article goes as far as correlating these works with the 1904 World Fair where you can find towns that are, “…replica villages of the indigenous people of Congo or New Guinea, or the tribes of the new American territory of the Philippine.” This created world is governed by a number of theories, with clever names for places like, “The Analitic Ocean” or “Cape Conchious-Ness.” The article goes on to create the way we would encounter Avery’s work via paintings accompanied by wall text explaining the different attractions of “The Island”

I really liked the idea of creating a imaginary destination and how the author tied it to some of the early explorations of the 1900’s and how they were exploited. I found it very similar and tasteful. What are we exploring in this imaginary world, what would I want to see in this “metaphysical ant farm.”

I also like the way we are invited to an imaginary place that is born from society. Mr. Impossible is one of deities that is explained as, “a small creature called Mr Impossible, who resembles an aristocratic, duck-billed version of Guns ’n’ Roses guitarist Slash.” “The Island” is not a place of finding new and exciting discoveries; it is a place where we discover our land and ourselves. A drawback in using text to fill the viewer in is that the painting loses meaning. The article mentions that it feels as if this place was not real, as if “The Island” could not exist. But unless proven as a real place, wouldn’t pictures of Africa and even other parts of the globe I wasn’t familiar with feel fake and unreal. Take for example the lunar landing; was it real? I wonder how similar were the feelings of seeing a replica village to the imaginary paintings of “The Island.” How resistant to new findings where the people at the 1904 World Fair when they encountered the new information about our world.

I personally can believe in the world that the paintings suggest. I can believe in “The Island” because I believe in the power of perception. I believe that people can perceive a situation differently even though they are together when it happens. Charles Avery is depicting a world that he sees and he interacts with, and just like the fair he is showing it to others. Whether you can believe it or not.

Blogs part1 (act 3)

I want to explore two pieces of art from the Haggerty Museum of Art. First being Burt Barr’s Roz and second being Anri Sala’s Naturalmystic (tomahawk #2).

Roz, I felt out of place when I stepped into the room with a giant head. A female lip-syncing to male voice, in this case she was singing with the song in the audio, with her head underneath a showerhead. The act of singing in the shower or the lip-sync was not weird to me, it was my presence there watching that made me uneasy. As soon as I stepped into the room I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there, watching, waiting. After a brief time I noticed she wasn’t really singing the song, it was another voice. I later noticed that the shower was running, not visually but acoustically in the audio. And while I sat there waiting for something to happen I also noticed the light bounce in her while she kept the rhythm with her body movement; she bobbed in four-four time with the song.

As I waited I noticed that my thoughts moved from what is going on visually to the sound. I stopped starring at her avoidant gaze and her projected head on the wall and really listened. I closed my eyes and drifted to and from the audio track, often getting lost in other thoughts and then coming back. It hit me then, I felt like I was in the shower. The picture reminded me of how a shower feels. I often stand with water running on my face and just pondering. Random thoughts, music lyrics, jobs, girls, everything can be found in the shower, often singing a tune of my own. The installation reminded me of this while I had my eyes closed, drifting to and from conscious thought.

The second piece, Naturalmystic, was like a gem hidden in the ruff. I listened to the recording before I read the description and at first I couldn’t pin down the actual sound. Was it a kettle or an airplane? I tried to use visual clues to interpret what he was trying to achieve, looking at his lips as he puckered them during a popping sound and blowing air to imitate a rocket. After I read the description I learned it was not an airplane, but it was a close. He was imitating a tomahawk rocket flying and exploding. This sound is repeated over and over varying between in take. There definitely is a reason it was recorded on video and presented also with the audio, but I want to focus of the sound.

I thought the silence in between the different human imitation was as important as the sound itself. At first, when I was deciphering the sound, I perceived silence as an airplane distancing itself from me. But after learning it was a missile hitting the ground, signaled by a small pop made by his mouth, it changed my thoughts entirely. Silence, after every pop followed a silence. I really don’t think there is a silence in theory. Imagine a missile hitting our country, can you imagine a silence following it. You may for a second, but not for long. It will be in newspapers, the news, and, if bad enough, on everyone’s lips for weeks. Hearing only a small pop for an explosion made me feel like I was far away from the area. Like a kettle, I thought of it as building pressure and finally exploding.

The perspective I took as the bomb exploded is from somewhere far away. In contrast to Gary Ferrington’s article “On A Clear Day I Can Hear Forever” I didn’t hear anything but a bomb and silence. Gary refers to the traffic as the seasons go by, specifically how it slows in the winter. He can hear the bustle of the city, pedestrians, and all local sounds to him. His mood seemed light a gay as he explained the sounds he heard and the reason I bring up this article is to imagine the same perspective of local sounds, but with a tomahawk missile at the center of your thoughts. Gary could tell you that at 6:10 am the Denver to Salt Lake flight was doing it’s daily routine and I couldn’t help but to wonder how a daily 6:10 am tomahawk to backyard would sound like? Like I mentioned before, I cannot imagine a silence after the missile drops; my thoughts always focus on the havoc that would be unleashed. Turning light and happy emotions into chaotic extreme sound, I’m tempted to call noise. This sort of sound imagination reminds me how lucky we are to be safe, to not know what a grenade sounds like or how it feels when you stop cringing at the sound of explosions or guns.

Frieze, from front to back.

On the topic of what Frieze is:

Frieze discusses a number of aspects of contemporary art. It is published eight times a year and is formulated by artists, curators, and writers.

In Frieze Magazine, the viewer can look at current art, events, reports of art and speculations, and is not limited to visual art, but also music. This magazine is an all around art tool to the public. This is one of the reasons I picked this magazine; its direction seems to be various. It is looking at a number of different works, but is not limited to interviews or a set number of journalists and authors.

Unfortunately, some of the articles like, “The book of dreams” were not available to a non-subscribers, but I WILL NOT BE DISCOURAGED!!!!

The article in the October issue that caught my attention is by Jennifer Allen, “Unsung Heroes.” This article talked about a secret life, a secret life that I would love to live, that the Gallery Assistant undertakes while in that position. Secret life as in the sometimes-enormous undertaking they have to endure by themselves that will never be revealed to the public eye. Allen references something that you might have asked yourself in an exhibit, “How did they get this in here?” The answer lies in the Gallery assistant, Allen has been observing and prying at people in this position over years and has written about her findings.

Her findings were various and varied from “killing mosquitoes” to “trying to figure out if the ceiling will hold the weight of a sculpture.” Other aspects of the assistants can also lead to travel into other countries or accommodating artists or showings.

This article was chosen based on my interested but also stresses the variety of authors that are included in the magazine. Allen is critic living in Berlin. Her article is also part of the variety of articles included in the magazine. There is no reference to specific art, direction, or focus. The article consists of just a thought, a living, continuous dissection of “hero’s.” Of course we may not feel, as a viewer, that this job is heroic at all. But in the same way, that is our thought.

The next article caught my interest with having Cuba in its heading. I recently viewed, “I am Cuba” a film about the perceived utopia Cuba was made to be and the realities of its people. The article is “Tania Bruguera” and is written by Jonathan Griffin. He write about how Tania Bruguera, an installation artist was influenced from where she came from, Cuba. She created many dichotic installations over the years, some about Cuba specifically and others about similar subjects such as Auschwitz. These subjects include the dichotomy of good and evil, light and dark. Influences on crowds by people in power or other aspects that contribute to conformity in groups and how crowds respond to these aspects of pseudo-dictatorship.

Personally I find these installations very interesting because I am studying similar subjects in other classes here at UWM. Her goal is focused and is direct, to bring an understanding to the past in a living sort of way. The people in the installation are not shown the complete image until they have ventured through the work of art. And recently she is focusing on re-enactment of her own installations by other people. I see this as a hands on approach to show that a person can conform to environments they believe despicable. An example of this would be putting a member of the audience in the shoes of a Nazi German that is executing prisoners of war. Do you think you could do it, do you think you could justify your choice, and finally do you think you could understand far better the emotions that might have been involved in such a real life decision. As an artist she addresses these issues.

This article shows that there are also many serious parts of this magazine. The online magazine consists of a front, middle, and back section as in a tangible print. I would imagine that the middle consists of current issues and has a more serious tone, but I will discover this as my research continues within Frieze.

Act React, looking at interaction on both a concious and unconscious levels!

ACT !!!!!!!! React


Act-react. The idea of being able impact authored work has fascinated me for a long time. Video games were the first interaction I consciously made on a piece of authored work.

You may be wondering what I mean by consciously. George Fitfield’s article Act/React dealt with personal interaction across several mediums of art across many decades. He starts this discussion by referring to the interaction of the viewer on a two-dimensional painting. Fitfield described this in his article, “The artist operates like a medieval God, creating a deterministic world in which the receiver’s route is ordained.”

Back to my point on consciousness, looking at a painting and following the “ordained” path is unconscious. You may not know what the path is, which can lead to different interpretations of a work, or there may be multiple paths to take in understanding an authored work. These paths can be brought into consciousness when they are talked about with another person or in a group, but in a personal individualistic environment, at a young age, many aspects of viewing art were driven by personal thoughts and perception; not by knowing that a artist was striving for a specific reason or other conscious technicalities.

At this young age, somewhere between five and ten, video games was an art form that I could have an effect on. Not only was this a conscious effect on that environment, but also the effect changed the picture as a whole. Both forms of art though, paintings and video games, still had a path that led you to final interpretation or conclusion.

The difference in viewing a painting is that we are making an unconscious inferences onto the meaning just by looking at the medium, and in video games we are moving into a conscious direction, but also has no meaning in a single frame or still. Both forms are subject to incomplete or distorted meanings similarly, you could give up on the finding the true meaning of abstract painting or just put down the controller.

Further, in age and perception of our world, we could come to make conscious inference on a piece of art. Whether this be empirical personal interaction, or group discussion were we are verbalizing our reactions to a medium and thus growing in realizing the multiple paths of the author or possibly the singular path of the author.

This brings me to another point that Fitfield made of interaction and the evolution of interactive pieces of art. The second part of the quote above is the way we interact with interactive mediums, “In interactive art, the artist can give the visitor free will, freedom to explore a world of the artists imagination, and to find (or miss) all the wonders that might lie within it.”

Along with many video games and many of the interactive art in Fitfield’s article stilled followed a path or multiple paths. Pressing buttons to direct a film will always end in the same way(s). Fitfield was right in saying that interacting within an interactive medium will put the viewer in the authors world, but until recently this has been limited by both our imaginations and our technology.

This, finally, has brought me to our recent interactions with some of the most recent pieces of interactive art. Interaction was based, in the past, on using a controller or interacting with an object to manipulate the medium. With past interactive art and the furthering of technology artists are able to imagine a world with an endless number of possibilities.

Take for example the 1999 piece by Daniel Rozin, The Wooden Mirror. A person or an object is placed in front of hundreds of wooden spheres and is reflected by those spheres. This is another conscious interaction, we need to think about what is going on to experience this piece, a single frame of the work by itself will not bring any meaning to it. These conscious inferences are infinite and thus can create an infinite number of possibilities of what can be reflected, limited by each viewer’s imagination. The one thing that remains the same is what is projected. We are now switching the roles of author and viewer, the viewer become the artist. Though we are still in the author’s imaginary world, we create the image both to accompanying viewers, and ourselves but also take an image with us as we leave. In this case of interactive art we are the controller that has its own buttons that are pressed, one may start jumping around while another may just stand there.

Another piece is part of the evolution of interactive art though technology and imagination is Camille Utterback’s work with painting through body interaction. Once again we see the infinite possibilities in being a author within a thee author’s world. This time it can be more personal like a video game, a single person can create the infinite possibilities. As like recent work in video games, a mechanic is being manipulated by the viewer and thus creates the final image or conclusion. One of the aspects of focus by recent video games is multiple plots, paths, and conclusions that could be created by the player. Games have been created that lead you to be able to explore every environment in the first minutes of starting the game. You can skip parts of the story, you can complete it at your own pace, you can align yourself with good or evil and thus changing the final outcome, and many recent games have combined many of these aspects or focused on a single “ground breaking” creation. Like Camille’s art piece, we are involving much more when we interact with these new forms of art. Not only are we consciously identifying the mechanics of these mediums we look for how we can manipulate it to our own ends.

Film Report #1 (blogger)

Images of watchtowers flooded my mind; it was like I was entering through the “Death Gate” once again. Memories of the place where millions died were vivid in my mind; Auschwitz crept into my vision like a bad dream. What I saw when I watched The Bear Garden will be different from what the person sitting next to me saw, and even more different than the person next to him. What I believe Duchamp is saying in the quote at the top of the page is that everyone is different in his or her interpretations when coming into contact with a “creative act.”

While I was visiting Poland I took a tour of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. While talking about those images in The Bear Garden, I not only experienced memories of the camp but of other parts of my trip in Poland also. Based on my experiences I saw several different aspects of the film past what was presented, I added personal insight and meaning to the creation. In this way I was completing an aspect of the film to get a more vivid picture.

The variety of images in this film was calling for the audience to fill in the gaps, whether they were faded images of people who we completed in our minds or to decipher a stopped image for the brief second we had. I imagined a bear getting attacked by a dog, I watched for frames that I could associate that image to. The group of people standing around and looking at something together was one of the images I thought was very similar to what I was thinking about. People letting their dog attack an un-armed bear is definitely a spectacle I would be watching along with the gang.

Not every image was crystal clear to the viewers and could create a need of more information. Paul Chan’s Film Baghdad in No Particular Order was a mesh of several different real life documentations in Baghdad. Here, our way of completing the images we saw was available through a different medium, the Internet. Paul’s website gave the viewer the option to further our experience by reading some of the backgrounds of the people in his film and other related topics (in no particular order).

Of course, this is contingent if the viewer wants to complete more of the image past on what he or she saw originally. We can stick with the interpretation based on our previous experiences in the world or seek more knowledge. This can be obtained through several mediums, from Paul’s website to asking questions in class or discussion. This newfound information can change the view in which we view aspects of the film. I didn’t know the towers in The Bear Garden were part of Auschwitz until it was brought up in class discussion, thus adding to my experience. Similarly, I deciphered 5:10 to Dreamland and Valse Triste differently after I had the idea of a sexual orientation of the film. I tried to flesh out the instances where it did seem to be specific to a sex.

Duchamp’s quote at the top of the first page brings something important into light. We cannot complete the image without adding to the act presented. Combining our experiences and interpretations opens up further understanding in our views. One person may think the film we just saw in class was worthy of applause and another student may think its worthy of a sarcastic addition to it, both valid responses in their own right. It is how our experiences interact with what we watch that create the final cut of the films we view.

WHAT ARTICLE?

This article, of the list given to us I really enjoyed the frieze magazine.

Frieze On Line

http://www.frieze.com/magazine/

This magazine has a lot of different aspects to it, it should make a good read monthly.

Field Report 1

Robert Schaller: A living Experience


Robert Schaller’s work is very similar to the work we saw in class. We saw several various handmade works, ranging from water-thrashed images to bear gardens to leaves and moths on the filmstrip. Robert’s style was very similar in how the work looked compared to the screening we have seen. His “My Life as a Bee” was very similar in style to Stan Brackhage’s “Mothlight”; both looked awesome. But my main point in this field report and an extreme similarity between many of the, I think, best films we have seen in the last couple of weeks is how they dealt with life.

Take Brackhage’s film “Mothlight.” This film was based on the life of a moth; it dealt with how a moth flies into light blindly and what aspects make up its life. Breeding in leaves, nesting in trees, and anything that surrounds moths in their short life is depicted in this film. Robert took the same aspect of showing the life of a creature, in this case a bee, and depicted what surrounds that life. Jittery camera, beautiful flowers, and flying around invaded the screen and took us as the viewers along for the journey of this living thing.

I really enjoyed Robert’s triple threat, with three projectors running at the same time on their side. It’s portrayal of movement and life, in this case a woman’s life, in an obscure fashion sent shiver’s down my spine. Her movements captivated the audience and the degrading image expressed the fragility of her existence. For me, the use of three women proved to a hard image to decode and understand. On one hand I perceived the women to a like family, toward the end only one woman was left on the screen and the others faded with time as they do in real life. Yet, I can also be thought of the collective life of the dancers in a troupe. In time, each one will fade away and only the memories of the life they lived will remain.

Finally, I would like to correlate Robert’s triple threat with Adriana’s “Bear Garden.” Both had soundtracks and these sounds definitely changed the way we viewed and interpreted the films. Both had dark moments in the sound as lighter moments, this created a different interpretation than it would have been in an absent sound environment. We, as the audience, thought of the characters life differently. In Bear Garden, when the sound went dark you could imagine the pain of the bear or WWII captives. You could almost feel a dense lump in your chest watching Robert’s film also. And when the sound cut out, it left you waiting and holding your breath for the next moment. Who knew basic images of our life could enact such sensations on the audience.

I think, out of the films we have seen, when a living thing is portrayed or examined it was more interesting than not. It gave meaning to the audience, something they could imagine, relate to or follow. Though films like, “What the Water Said” were interesting in their own right, I would much rather watch any of the other films mentioned in this report. I will leave off with something that I believe in, a quote if you will, “Live until life stops you.” (anonymous)