Down the Electric Rabbit Hole @overki77-blog - Tumblr Blog

Project #5 Word on the street:

For this project I chose to go small, really really small. I wanted to capture the dystopia that is the daily grind and find a funny way to point out the ridiculous nature of having to work, often being forced to spend our time doing jobs we despise. I thought it would be in poor taste to put up signs or billboards pointing this out to people as they file into work or attend a funeral. Therefore, I chose to use our friends arthropod phylum as props to demonstrate my feelings about our culture. I also wanted to leave room for people to come up with their own interpretation of the signs, so I made sure the statements made were a little vague and not heavy handed. I started with searching through Marxist texts and Orwell’s 1984 but settled on a theme of demotivational posters.

So with that in mind I had to make some really small signage...

I am physically incapable of writing something so small myself and the smallest font size in word is way too big. I ended up using the smallest font and then shrinking it another 50% by printing it out and using a nice copy machine to reduce the image. I used tooth picks for sign posts and glue to attach the signs. The problem with this method was that the glue made the single sheet of paper look thin and wet. This kind of broke the illusion I wanted to create. If I did it again I would have attached a backing to the paper and then cut it out with something less screwy than a pair of dull scissors. Also, its really hard to get a live bug to pose for a tiny photo.

#bugslife #demotivational posters #macrophotography #dystopia

Project #4 One Minute Performance Art

Title: The Rubber Bandero

This is my attempt at performance art. I have wrapped a rubber band around my phone and am holding the other end firmly in my teeth. I am stretching it away from myself with the intension of pulling hard enough to eventually break the rubber band and getting snapped comically (fingers crossed) in the face. This is not something I wanted to repeat if something went wrong and I thankfully got it mostly right on the first attempt. I am not an actor but I went through a full range of emotions contemplating what was about to happen or trying to figure out why it wasn’t happening. Like when someone stretches and points a rubber band at your face, it’s really hard (at least for me) not to look stupid trying to sort out if i’m about to get hit or not.

#rubber band original moment

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I chose to chop an onion for my performance piece. Hank Williams’ “Hey Good Lookin’” sets the background as I inefficiently and perhaps dangerously hack away at the onion. This piece ties in a few things that I found interesting. Sometimes at home I prepare for dinner and listen to Hank Williams not in front of the camera. When I do, I’m reminded of the fact that I am 3 years older than Hank was when he died. Tears come to my eyes when I think of that at times, and occasionally, I’m afforded the convenience of blaming in on the onion. Here’s to you Hank.

overki77-blog

Im not crying, are you crying?

desjroberts-blog

Project #4: Performance Art

My theme was literally “to preform” and I think singing and dancing are the first things that popped into my head when thinking “to perform”.

I am in no way a singer, and this is the first time my voice has come out of the shower or jamming out in the car so bare with me people! I took this project as a challenge to push myself outside of my comfort zone and to really partake in performing for an audience (audience being you!) I hope I don’t make anyones ears bleed!

overki77-blog

Really well done! You should definitely not limit your voice to the car or shower, let it out! This was a great choice of music for your voice. Was it perfect? Of course not, but I think that really plays well to performance art in that its imperfect and a one-off piece of art. If you were trained you might be able to reproduce it with some precision, but this was special simply because it was an original moment. Thanks for deciding to share your talent.

Reading and Response #4

A response to: “Performance: A Hidden History” by Roselee Goldberg

It was interesting to read about the history of performance art, though her history only seems to go back as far as the Renaissance. I would offer that as long as there has been a platform for someone to stand up in front of others with something entertaining or important to present, performance art has existed. I think what the author was attempting to explain was how many of the postmodern influences on artistic performances are not widely known but have been precursors to some important moments in more recent art history.

I appreciate that performance art is a collaboration between the performer and the observer, where a performance piece is often a single original event that is not meant to have any permanence. While I appreciate the effort involved to create some of these works, the examples that were provided seem to place the most emphasis on artists collectively getting together and deciding among themselves what is important in performance art, regardless of what the public interest is. I’m sure this moved the art form forward but outside of their niche I’m not sure these events are really meant to collaborate with a layman audience.

Project #3: Vanishing and Becoming

Theme: Abstraction, Duration, Light, Sound

In response to the paper “Projection: Vanishing and Becoming” by Sean Cubitt, I created a video that I felt captured some of the main ideas the he presented. In particular, he discusses how “projection is the medium of perspective in all its forms, and of cartography.” I took this idea and attempted to distill it down into the medium of projection mapping. Projection mapping uses specialized software, and a two- or three-dimensional object to spatially map textures and images on. The virtual program mimics the real environment it is to be projected on. The software can interact with a projector to fit any desired image onto the surface of that object.”[1] This was perhaps a little on the nose with what Cubitt was describing, but after the reading this was the only medium that spoke to me and made sense to use.

After quite a bit of searching I found and appropriated videos of a projection mapped art installation called “Delusion” by Luo Yu. (http://delusion.yuluo.de/) 2011

I deleted all of the audio used in Luo’s installation and instead used sound clips from the Matrix to change the mood and message into something a little more abstract and a little more me. I edited the video to match my theme and included more transitions and color variations, playing off the lack of light and color to produce something entirely different from the original. I also added music from the movie Akira, called “Kaneda’s Theme” (Jonzow edit). I felt it was important to have something underlying the video that served as the glue for all the editing as well as adding a sense of time and duration to the work as a whole.

Overall, I think I was able to capture the idea of abstract, anamorphic projections and still retained a bit of fantasy and fun. I was unable to procure a copy of Adobe Premier so I was stuck with iMovie again. The project lacks the polish I was hoping for and the transitions leave much to be desired, but I was still happy with the end the result.

[1] "What is projection mapping". Retrieved 7 April 2019.

#Projection mapping #abstraction #light #sound #vanishing #becoming

deborahson4d

Project #3 “La Table”

This is my final product for project #3, inspired from Sean Cubitt’s essay, “Projection: Vanishing and Becoming.” Out of Cubitt’s writing, what stood out to me the most was his theory on the universal core purpose of art as a “kind of memento mori.” The suggestion that perhaps all art is created in hopes to capture a moment and preserve memories inspired me to document this important moment of my life. I am blessed to live with my family at the moment (my mom, dad, and my younger brother), but I know that this chapter of my life is coming to an end. It is my wish to cherish every precious moment I get to share with my family.

An essential part of our family life is the kitchen and the table. My mom and I often cook meals together and amidst the luxury of a Saturday morning, all four of us share the table for the meal. All of the footage that appears in the video is of my family and they were all shot by me. If it weren’t for this project, this moment too would vanish through the force of time. But through this video, the memory can now last a bit longer in our minds.

overki77-blog

I love the clean edits and camera focus, its easy and fun to watch.

taylorcozart

I cheated the system! Here is a screen recording of my video!

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Super clever!

hadtomakethisforclass

Exercise #3:

Instead of going the serious route, I decided to have a little fun with this exercise.

I love the show Chef’s Table on Netflix and I was watching it the other night and laughing with my boyfriend about the concept of an episode set in a McDonalds when this project hit me. So, I downloaded the opening credits to Chefs Table and isolated the audio, then I downloaded a ton of Arby’s commercials and simply cut and edited little clips to match up with the music.

The most difficult aspect by far was figuring out the exact lengths needed to match up with the audio but in the end I think this was the most fun I’ve had making art in a while.

overki77-blog

Love it.

Exercise #3 Music Video

One of my first experiences with amateur music videos such as the one I just did here, had an anime theme. So, I thought for my first venture out into the land of YouTube and video editing, that I too would upload an anime music video in homage to that content pioneer.

The anime clips are from one of my all time favorites called: 5 Centimeters per Second (秒速5センチメートル) 5cm per second is the apparently the speed at which a cherry blossom petal falls to earth. Anyway, its super dramatic and moody and directed / produced / written by Makoto Shinkai, who is my all time favorite anime director.

The music is a song called, "Runaway" by: AURORA. album: All My Demons Greeting Me as a Friend. This song is super moody and wraps around the imagery in an interesting way. It didn't sync up the way I wanted but it came out better than I thought it would using iMovie for the first and maybe last time. I really need to get to know the Adobe suite better, iMovie is not going to cut it if I continue to do these sorts of projects. I believe I could drastically improve the overall effect and quality of this project with better software... Though that may be a little optimistic as well.

Vanishing and Becoming. Reading and Response. #3

It was interesting to read about the various origin stories of painting based on the culture telling the story. To the Greeks it was a tracing of a projection that captured a silhouette, highlighting the actual negative space as well as emotional absence. In the East, it was a lesson in trying to capture the visage of a living god that could only be gleamed through a reflection in the water, as the artist realizing that the act of painting what his mind was directly perceiving was in itself reducing the god to human imperfection.

It was clear from reading that Cubitt approaches art from a philosophers perspective, where the creation of art and the consumption of life can be distilled down to a perception / projection loop. A seemingly simple function that changes with every iteration, constantly recreating and reevaluating itself. From cave paintings to modern VR, the outcome and future moves as quick as our tools allow us to evaluate, accept, and disseminate ideas of what our collective minds desire to experience. Cubitt seems to spend a lot of effort attempting to decide which part of the process is more important, or which came first and to who the credit might belong. This however, is irrelevant in my opinion and detracts from the more Freudian like path the human psyche has been on since we learned to reflect with the evolution of our frontal lobes.

As humans we use our vision to spot danger, food, or a suitable mate. It is this ability, called “pareidolia” that Leonardo da Vinci notes, "If you look at any walls spotted with various stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms." (Read)

This phenomenon has been further explored by a computer vision program called Deep Dream. As an example, you can feed it a picture of Vincent Van Gogh’s famous self portrait and ask it to recognize birds in patterns and you get something that looks like this:

Or feed it a picture of slug and ask it find patterns resembling a dog:

These are clearly exaggerations of the pareidolia principle, but a perfect example of what I believe is the origin of the human painter. As romantic a tale as the sailors wife or the clever painter trying to capture the image of god, the reality of the painters origin is perhaps far more basic.

Da Vinci, Leonardo (1923). John, R; Don Read, J, eds. "Note-Books Arranged And Rendered Into English". Empire State Book Co.