ARTS 1601 :: Section 3 :: Time and Interactivity :: Fall 2007

Critique #4 Final Project

2007-12-20T21:52:10Z

Out of all the projects that I have done in this class; I feel that this one was the most successful in presentation and in concept. Although I should have moved Alan’s stuff out of the way in the installation room, I’m still glad that I presented in that room because that space is a little more professional looking than a normal critique room. I don’t think that by having the curtains blocking people in ruined the presentation, it just interrupted the flow of people moving from one side of the screen to the other. I would like to think that the concept of my project was more important than how I used the space. I’m glad that I got the amount of feedback that I did about how I could use the space in different ways because I have never used an installation room to present anything before. Hopefully someday I’ll be able to use the installation room again because I like how the audience is allowed to be interactive and move around the piece to view different perspectives.
I felt that I was successful with the final project in terms of the product itself and the concept. My original idea was similar to what I finally ended up doing, and I’m glad that I was able to develop my ideas by viewing the work of the artist who incorporated emotion into his work as well as themes of time, and pre-conceived expectations. I liked how the viewers of his work experienced emotional agitation/excitement, which is what I was aiming for in my project by using a hand gently touching a female’s body. I hope that I was as successful in this as I hoped because I was desensitized by the visuals after watching and editing it so much in final cut. I also hope that I got my point across with the music that I chose. To me, each piece sounded radically different from one another, was clear in the stereotypes, and put each piece into the right context that I was aiming for. Apparently some people couldn’t differentiate between the pieces of music, which sucks for them!

Critique #4 Final Project

2007-12-20T21:49:43Z

Project 4

2007-12-20T20:22:13Z

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Repost: Artist response: Lowrey Sims

2007-12-20T03:01:55Z

Listening to Lowrey Sims talk reminded me of an architecture class I took this semester for a couple of reasons. First off, when she sees different meanings in art compared to the artist's intentions. In class we would have many conceptual projects to present and it was often the case that the professor or TA would notice concepts and relations that were not intentional. The environmental aspect is also a subject that is emphasized in that class. We dealt with recycling in that class which made me find the trash truck full of mirrors a very interesting look at the relation between the people who create trash and where it goes. My favorite series of work she showed was by this someone that
took a camera and partially submerged it to show pictures of komodo national park. Even though there wasnt exactly many meanings to these pictures they were very beautiful.

King Kong

2007-12-19T14:12:39Z

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]]> In my final project I tried to incorporate everything we learned in the course along with a new idea. My initial plan for the project was to make a stop motion video with animations, but this idea was dropped after my laptop was stolen. It would have taken to much time to start that project again, so I thought of making a video.
My video is about King Kong. I used the song “King Kong�? by Jibbs for the background music. The song says “I got King Kong in the trunk…�? In the song he isn’t literally referring to King Kong being in his trunk, but rather the subs that are blaring in the trunk of the car. I took this idea and made it more literal by actually putting King Kong in the trunk.
I wanted to incorporate the different lighting techniques and scene shots we learned in the second project. I added my own sounds in the movie and played around with the volume of the sounds that went over the music. I decided to make the clip a short movie trailer for an upcoming movie. The clip ended up being shorter than anticipated, but hopefully it still gets the message across.
Overall I think I did a good job on the project considering the short amount of time I had after losing the original movie. It does a good job portraying how the music these days just doesn’t make very much sense and it’s just funny if you take them into literal sense. I had a lot of fun making the movie and directing the different scenes.

Manu's Final Project

2007-12-19T04:21:00Z

For this last project I tried to stick as much as possible to my original ideas. However, I had to make some modifications to the execution process due to time limitations and some difficulties that I ran into. In spite of these challenging obstacles I still had a lot of fun realizing this project.
My intention for the final project was to demonstrate a child’s sense of freedom from prejudice and their natural behavior of moving freely around space. I sometimes wish that adults would also move and interact with other cultures and people without prejudice. With that in mind I wanted to show a girl that disregards cultural boundaries by being totally comfortable playing in two different cultures. In the installation I included two representations of very different cultures to better demonstrate ideas of cultural boundaries. To enhance this contrast and sense of boundary I decided to include two different soundscapes that are associated with the two cultures. I also mixed two different media - the animation played by two projectors and the outline of two cities on the wall.

Revision of Perfect World Video

2007-12-19T03:18:34Z

This is a fix up and improved version of my project three video on what my perfect world consists of. From the moment I confirmed my idea for this project I had my final plan in my head. The difficulty was figuring out how to get the idea out of my head and into an actual production. At the due date for Project three I had a video completed but it wasn't up to it's full potential and wasn't completed how I ideally had wanted it to be completed. The critiques I received on it precisely supported my thinking: the video has good intentions and is going in the right direction but it needs to be finished up with what I had planned on doing all along. My struggle was working with Final Cut in general and learning how to do what I wanted to do. It seemed like a simple idea: split the screen in half, then thirds and possibly fourths to display the world of many Jennas being everywhere at one time. The screen splitting action was not that simple. BUT, in my extra time and effort I have managed to learn how to split the screen and have my video do what I wanted to do. As an outsider I would think my video is just average but personally knowing how much time and hard work I went through to get it to look the way it does makes me appreciate the video more. I am happy with finally completing this video to be the idea that originally was just a thought in my head.

]]> and here it is:
https://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/download.php?file=7083

Visting Artist Response:

2007-12-19T00:20:49Z

Artist Review

]]> For my final artist response i wanted to talk about my favorite artist. Her name is Ruth Thompson, and I have been an avid collector of her art since i was 12 years old! My parents took me to my first art fair where I first saw Ruth's works. A brief history about Ruth: She graduated college in 1990. For a short period after graduation she worked for publishing companies, doing mostly fantasy illustrations for collectible card games, magazines, board games, books, role-playing games. She operated as a free-lance artist for about a year or so various companies until landing a job as a staff artist for SJG (Steve Jackson Games). In 1991 she left SJG to become a self-working artists stating she couldn’t stand drawing what others wanted anymore and decided to paint for her own piece of mind, she left Texas and moved to Ohio. Her boyfriend / business partner and she started her art company called Tarnished Images, a “bootstrap business, with our sales coming from either attending or mailing in artwork to Fantasy and Science-Fiction conventions, and the occasional free-lance job�?
In 1994 she got married to long time boyfriend/business partner and also began touring World Renaissance fairs at that time as well. Her artwork as become a staple icon for a lot of renaissance fairs throughout the nation, and it’s where I first saw her work at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival.
In 2005 I was thrilled to hear that she had officially purchased and opened her own Tarnished Images first retail art gallery in Ohio.

She recently visited Minnesota to attend and Anime/Sci-fi convention in November where I was able to purchase more of her work while being able to take a look at a huge exhibition she had displayed of her more recent series of works. Her art focuses on fantasy theme, dragons, knights and the like. Being a huge fan I really admire how she brings the fantasy to life my favorite collection of hers being her archangel series, in which all of the archangels are depicted alone and together in epic battles.

Repost of Visiting Artist Response:

2007-12-18T21:11:02Z

Repost of Visiting Artist Response:

]]> ---This is a repost of my original Nikki S. Lee review since for some reason it didn’t show up on the blog site--- 12/18/07

Posted- 10/20/2007

Visiting Artist Response: Nikki S. Lee

This was the first artist discussion I had ever attended and I was deleted to see that it wasn’t a stuff affair like I had originally thought. Nikki immediately came off with an excellent sense of humor which I feel set the audience at ease. I really like the way she described herself as Korean-Korean as opposed to Korean-American like its most commonly stated here in the U.S. Since she was born and raised in Korea, later leaving to NY to pursue photography, a lot of her work focuses on an East vs. West theme. What I mean by that is because she was able to relate to two worlds her work reflects the ideals and personalities of both Eastern and Western cultures. Her cut out photography seemed very interesting to me where you are looking at something that isn’t there is very unique in my opinion. She spoke of her recent works and how she took layers of herself making different expressions and so forth I would have loved to see that work. With her focus on self-identity and how it changes with our interaction with others it made her stand out as an artist for me, I really enjoyed listening about her work and herself.

Who is a citizen?

2007-12-16T18:39:44Z

Instead of attending a visiting artist's presentation, I went to the Weisman Art Museum to look at the featured exhibit. This month the theme of the exhibit was "Who is a citizen? What is citizenship?"
This exhibit explores themes about the individual and civic life in thirty paintings, photographs, and prints drawn from the Weisan's permanent collection. Ranging from Lewis Hine's 1905 photographic portraits of immigrants at Ellis Island to Twin Cities photographer Joseph Allan's contemporary portraits of American Indians, these pieces open up ideas about who belongs to a nation or community. Also, they reflect a citizen's rights and how they can exercise them.
There are three respective sections in the exhibit:
Who is a citizen?
-Presents work that questions the exclusion or asserts the inclusion of those who have been overlooked.
Civic life in the city
-Artists show how people share public space, making them members of a community, regardless of legal status of citizenship.
The artist as a citizen
-Where artists are advocates for their own rights and they speak out on social/political issues.

Artists have been engaged in depicting citizens since the days of ancient Greece, when the concept of a citizen as a member of society with rights of self-governance first developed. These concepts of citizenship have changed over time, differing with location.

Examples of artists and their pieces displayed:
-Lewis Hines (1847-1940) uses gelatin silver prints in 'Italian Family Looking For Lost Luggage,' showing Italian immigrants with distraught looks on their faces as they are on a pier surrounded by many bags.

-Joseph Allan (born in 1964) uses color type-C photographic print in 'Phillip Chaltas (Rosebud Lakota/Navajo),' showing a young man sitting on his workbench at Jiffy Lube, looking upset.

-Robert Gwathmey (1903-1988) uses oil on canvas in 'Nobody Around Here Calls Me A Citizen,' showing a dejected African-American man with a symbolic number 2 next to him, connoting the inequality of segregation and the impact of racism in liming civil rights and rights of citizenship.

Lowrey Sims

2007-12-15T06:40:30Z

I found Lowrey Sims' talk to be a very engaging discussion with some excellent points regarding museum art, environmental art and functional art. My favorite part of her talk was her discussion of some of the environmentally functional pieces. Traditionally, I am used to seeing art made solely for a viewer's senses. Many of the pieces Sims showed at the beginning beared the same aesthetic elements but had environmental impacts. The first things I recall are the gardens and ark layouts she showed. I find this departure from traditonal art to be very thought invoking, especially when displayed by an art curator such as Sims. I was also drawn to the series of Native American works that she showed. They depicted Native American towns with cultural images covered in gas masks and mutations. These works were extraordinarily eerie and depicted some of the images I would have had in nightmares if nuclear weapons had been tested near my hometown. I feel her discussion about environmentally fucntional versus traditonal museum art was spot on. Creating a piece with functionality adds another aspect to the work to be admired and questioned.

Project 3 Re-edit

2007-12-14T21:35:39Z

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In this new version, I have added sound effects, a song clip ('It's Getting Better' by The Beatles), and a drum-roll soundtrack that I produced using Garageband. I thought that the drum-roll seemed fitting seeing as how alot of the imagery of the clip showed slaying using guns/militar-type violence. Also, I added simple sound-effects such as footsteps, crackling flames, and straining voices. I wanted the audience to feel a bit more involved with the video so now they can experience both a graphic scene, while listening to its audio counterpart. Also, I sped up some of the scenes in order to give the clip a more flowing rhythm.

Creation

2007-12-13T00:49:20Z

For project four I wanted to continue on my use of a biblical themes like the one from project three about the Garden of Eden. I always enjoy reading articles on several interpretations of the creation that part from the traditional view. For instance some Christians believe that God created continents in there current place but the bible says that the land formed in one area. Besides showing a different view of creation I also tried to solve certain problems that certain people in the science community point out in creation such as the starlight problem. I am not sure if I conveyed theses answers clearly to the audience but I believe the animations were presented well. The main reason why I made this piece was because I was a very tired of the media being biased towards creationism, and being more favorable towards evolution and I just wanted to share that there are scientific principles in creationism. Towards the end of my animation I used a video provided by NASA which shows the solar system I just wished I could have managed my time better to make one of my own. Another thing I wanted to include in my animation was humor perhaps in my videos of animals section.

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Laura's Final Project: Reversed Roles

2007-12-12T22:34:45Z

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For my last project I chose to comment on how men and women in society are reversing roles. Unlike many years ago, when women were forced to stay at home to watch the kids, today more men are staying home and letting the wives bring in the money. I thought it would be funny to take this observation to an extreme and make the men be the ones to get pregnant instead of women.

How I did this was I filmed the man and woman in my project and then used a filter to make the film look older. I thought it would be an interesting effect to use because obviously men and women did not change roles that early on in time. But what if they would have? How far would women be in the working world today?

I also liked the emotion old silent films give off. With the music being light and airy, it makes the situation seem normal, yet funny. I found it hard to find music that I could use for my project, but the music I did find did an all right job setting the tone.

Overall, I was happy with the outcome of my project. I tried to apply different techniques I learned from the previous projects such as changing angles for the scenes and starting the scenes not just on the faces of the actors but on objects as well. It made editing a little easier. Hopefully, what I have learned this semester is evident in the outcome.

Check out the NEWS!

2007-12-12T19:32:48Z

https://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/download.php?file=6896.mov