Juan P. V.

[juan-p-v]

Good Talk Final Project

After reading "Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations", by Mira Jacob, I immediately related to a lot of the themes that were presented within the story that was told. From talking about the worries of raising a child wrong (I had felt a bit of this for trying to help raise my little brother when we were younger and my father had left our home) to the theme of having people stereotype you based off of race, something that stuck out to me most was around the idea of being ethnically ambiguous with the husband of the author, Jed. In this story, Jed is a Jewish minority who happens to be "white-passing". This was something that I had connected with because I don't look like the average Mexican due to my skin color and American accent. I often surprise people with my Spanish speaking skills, especially considering that it was the first language I learned. I'm a first-generation-born American in the United States (first to go to college, etc.), so it makes sense that I'd be able to adopt a lot of the tendencies of being an "American". But oftentimes, I find myself not being able to connect with my heritage despite only being one generation away from being born in Mexico. Because of that, I have a hard time figuring out what my identity is. I think that it's pretty obvious that I'm not white, but because of my skin color, I think that it's hard to pin down what my ethnicity is. Going from that train of thought, inspired me to make this collage of just a few things I've heard said to me and things that I've thought regarding my Ethnical ambiguity.

[juan-p-v]

Reading Response 2: The Gif

The Digital Canvas: The Odd and Fascinating History of Internet Art

Net Art has been around since the early 90s offering an alternative medium for artists; taking odd and political forms in GIFs, video media,

Going through the many different articles related to the birth and evolution of internet art, it is fascinating to see how drastic the medium of the internet was to the application of creating art. Considering that the birth of the internet created a space that was for the most part "uncluttered" as it might be considered today, It gave plenty of space for art to exist in, and by extension grow into something new that could only exist within the confines of the internet. I love looking at "old" art on the internet and how early forms of Gifs were created (and seeing how it revolutionized into the meme-centric form that is commonly seen in the internet space today).

Here are some examples of Gif's that I had collected together that I thought about when going through some of the articles that I read:

internet loading gif: I liked this gif because it reminded me of the early days of me trying to use the internet at the public library when I was a kid.

email grave: I liked this one because it reminds me of how large my email is with all of the unopened emails I have within it.

Nyan Cat: For some reason, when Nyan Cat was very popular, I loved playing an online game involved with this cat and it is still very fresh in my memory.

Welcome to the Internet: I like this one because it reminds me of the cluster of weirdness that is the internet and how truly it feels of how much of a mess it really is (and I love embracing that!).

Cat walk: I'll be honest, I liked how smoothly this was made and it reminded me of a shirt that I used to own in early high school that incorporated the blue/red lines to create a weird 3D effect.

Homer gif: This has been and will always be a funny gif to me because I like using it to tell friends in the group chats that I'm in that I am leaving the conversation.

I'm a banana: I occasionally get the "I'm a banana" song stuck in my head, so it reminded me of this old gif I saw when I was younger.

Micheal Jackson: This is a classic gif that most people know and is often the first thing that people can recall as a gif, which is why I like it.

Monalisa gif: I always liked the Monalisa gifs because it shows how true the internet is by messing around with historic art and creating something new of it.

Jif vs Gif gif: It's always funny thinking about the war between the pronouncement of "gif", so because of that, I like this gif a lot.

[juan-p-v]

Glitched Gif Part 2:

5. Glitched Lighting Beeswax

6. Glitched Burrito Toss

7. Glitched Cat Pat

8. Glitched Bird Toss

9. Glitched Sandwich Toss

10. Glitched Aggressive Jenga

I didn't mention this in Part 1 but when I was thinking about Gif's and what to do with this project, I was honestly stumped for a while. After messing around with the Gif making process, I came across the idea of "Glitching" a Gif and what different types of glitched Gifs looked like. I liked that the "corrupted" look of a video/Gif is somewhat surprising/uncanny when it happens (especially when it's unintentional). With that in mind, I wanted to try to add some comedy to that theme and came across random memes that I found on the internet. I turned those memes into Gifs and then "corrupted" them by taking the frame of each video and drawing/manipulating them to what I wanted them to be.

[juan-p-v]

Photowalk Exercise "The Drift" #1

These are from an exercise I did a while ago, just forgot to post them online! The intent behind it was supposed to be a picture of different moments of my day. The last picture is of me and my partner together. I was really thankful for her help in taking a good portion of these photos for me!

[juan-p-v]

Disappearing Acts Project: "Vacation"

I had a tough time trying to figure out how I was going to "take away" from a photo series. I ended up taking the literal colors away by filling in major portions of the image with Black, White, and other colors. I wanted to make a theme clear with this series and I thought that the way to communicate that was by keeping everything black and white until introducing what the series was about. All of these photos (except the last photo with the outside shot of the airplane) were taken by me during a vacation I had taken earlier this year to Monterey Bay, California.

[juan-p-v]

Performance Art Exercise

For this exercise, I decided to edit together a video of what it feels like to scroll through TikTok for a while. For this exercise, I used the verbs, Staring, Laughing, and Crying to illustrate that idea.

Here is the list of 20 verbs that I pulled together after looking at Richard Serra's Verb List (https://williamlmoore.tumblr.com/image/82015667744):

Communicating

Writing 

Running

Texting

Typing

Walking

Playing

Chewing

Lying

Clicking

Biting

Yelling

Breathing

Cleaning

Staring

Exploring

Laughing

Recounting

Crying

Working

[juan-p-v]

Performance Art Project

*Warning: Some statements read in the video are graphic in nature*

After taking some time trying to figure out what I could do for this project, I landed on trying to do a serious reading on bad statements made about women's anatomy. I got this idea initially when hearing a news story about how the Polish leader blamed low birth rates on Women's alcoholism. He tried to justify his reasoning by saying that for Women it took 2 years to develop alcoholism and that it took men 20 years. Not only was this a baseless claim without an ounce of truth, but all of this was said with him trying to pull statistics out of thin air and trying to pass it off as true. Given this crazy take, I realized that a large portion of the population straight up doesn't understand women's anatomy and it should be something that is normalized knowing. Knowing that, within this video, I took a lot of claims and stories on Reddit's r/badwomensanatomy to show how far the rabbit hole goes in terms of people not knowing basic anatomy.

[juan-p-v]

The first thing that came to my mind when thinking of supercuts were some of the videos & memes that I find online of people doing funny things or saying weird stuff over & over again. I like to make comedy with the work that I do naturally and I try to think about how I can make something comical in nature in my day-to-day life. Considering the opportunity that was given to me, I wanted to try to make something funny that hits that "sweet spot" in short-form comedy. One of the first few ideas that came to mind was how often it's joked about how upset Gordon Ramsey can get in his popular cooking shows. I hope that this delivers on that enjoyment of seeing a quick video to get a quick laugh!

[juan-p-v]

[juan-p-v]

This is the first example of Video Art that I was able to find. It comes straight from Sesame Street which is what makes this even weirder for me.

Here are some other Video Art Examples I was able to find:

This is NoNoseKnows by Mika Rottemberg. After watching it a few times over, I'm still very confused as to what its exact messaging is, but I find it fascinating regardless.

This is a 360 degree video on youtube of someone walking through Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan on September 2020. I found it pretty fascinating on how life was in this area of Japan and seeing someone walking through the city for an extended period of time. It makes me want to look up more videos on this topic and see how life changes month by month.

This is a music video by the group called Crumb. My friend recommended this video to me for how trippy it feels watching it. He told me that "it made you feel like you're high" when you watch it.

Last but not least, we have this music video called PonPonPon by Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. I love the creative liberty that people can have with making video art, especially when it comes to music videos. I know that with any form of media that comes out of Japan, it's bound to be a bit out of the box, but I think that this music video definitely delivers on the creativity that is bursting out of the seems for Japan. It definitely works with the idea of Japan's "kawaii" and "decora culture".

[juan-p-v]

Reading Response: "Introduction to Video Art by Lea Collet"

I loved seeing how the work, “Ever is Over All”, by Pipilotti Rist in 1997 influenced Beyonce’s song, Hold Up, twenty years later. It reminds me how a lot of old works made throughout time eventually come back and either directly contribute or indirectly influence much of what is created nowadays within the world of art and media. For example, much like how influential Shakespeare was within the art form of Theatre, Many renditions of Shakespeare’s stories are found time and time again in modern retellings of the same story. One such story is the play of Macbeth and how close the storyline is to the more modern retelling in the Disney film known as Lion King. Knowing how art always influences more and more art generationally may come off as an idea of nothing being original, but I believe that it leaves room for having those same ideas and themes to be able to be presented within different connotations and mediums, thus creating a new form of art. Even though the Lion King is based on the same story as Macbeth, because it is told through not only a different medium but was reworked in a different image than the original, it allows it to become its own identity within itself. Because of this, art will never cease to evolve and it allows itself to split off from the norm and create new forms of art all the same.

[juan-p-v]

Reading Response: "Projection: Vanishing and Becoming by Sean Cubitt"

When reading this article regarding the origins of projection and what impacts it had in the world regarding art and redefining its form of it, it reminded me of a few things regarding the use of light within different art forms entirely. To begin, the first thing that this article brought up for me was the concept and application of the “Camera Obscura” which is known within the world of photography. The Camera Obscura overall is a bit confusing, but it’s an effect that happens when there is a completely dark room with a source of light that is coming from the outside through a small hole that creates an “upside-down” (or mirrored) image projection of what is being shown outside. It is a weird phenomenon but it works because light travels in a straight line, so when light travels from the top of the hole, it has to go down, and vice versa with light being projected from the bottom of the hole to the top. And because that is how light works, it shows what’s happening outside of that room upside down. Despite knowing about this though, I didn’t know where and when the Camera Obscura was founded. After some research, I found that some of the first recordings of this came from China, around 400 B.C.E. by a Chinese philosopher named “Mo-tzu” (or “Mozi”). Finding that out blew my mind as to how far back the idea of projection was dated back and seeing how light, shadow, and projections are very ancient constructs.

[juan-p-v]

Glitched Gif Part 1

Gif 1: Glitched Standoff

Gif 2: Glitched Quick Rush

Gif 3: Glitched Perfect Kick

Gif 4: Glitched Happy Dog

[juan-p-v]

Technical Exercise #2

[mschramm1]

 I thought a lot about water being the main life source on earth and the fact that we treat it so poorly (the proverb:“When the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish dead, we will discover that one cannot eat money…”) as well as like the ideas of innocence and the way that we see the world so I combined images of eyes with water. There are a lot of parts even in polluted water that seem beautiful at first and in the eyes of naivety, there will only be the beautiful parts but that doesn’t mean that the ugly doesn’t exist and there are people who will want to fix it. All of these pictures were from the same river at different parts where it pools and holds onto the trash that people throw into the river. I initially went on a walk with my friend who had never been on that trail before. He is quite the optimist and kept talking about how beautiful it was while there were people visibly suffering underneath every bridge we walked under and the water was tangled with old clothes and trash caked in mud. I wanted to work with negative space especially when it comes to eyes and faces but I ended up wanting to fill that space for an intentional message.

[juan-p-v]

In Defense of the Poor Image - Journal #10 November 2009 - e-flux

…

This Journal article gave a defense to the copy/paste phenomenon that everyone sees online with digital art and the internet. While no one (in general) doesn't like knowing if something is an original art piece or not, this article tries to argue that the digital art that is spread around in a copy/paste format helps cement it within a "present" and shows the reality of the current era. It spreads the image like wildfire, thus making it more recognizable to the public eye. This got me thinking about the current era of art and the current debate around whether A.I. generated art could be considered art in the first place, and what it means to create art online on a digital platform.

[juan-p-v]

3 Mixed-Media Artists Share the Secrets of Collage

Need a creative outlet to keep from going stir crazy? These artists share some of their must-have materials and tips to inspire you to make

After reading this article on 3 separate artists and on how they use collages and how it influences their works, it got me thinking about how I've viewed collages in general. Overall, I only saw collages as a way of collecting a theme of ideas and putting them into a single place in order to convey one message. But after seeing other examples and how these artists used their vision to create something new, they showed me how there's a lot more to collages than I initially thought. I particularly liked how Mario Zoots described collages as a way to give new life to art that already exists and find a way to give it a new meaning.