Research Video

Three things I learned in class:
1. After hours of critiquing, you run out of things to say.
2. Having good video footage does not guarantee a good project.
3. Relying on music too heavily can result from poor video footage, or result in overall poor project quality.

Final Project Ideas:
1. Martial arts battle, a la chop-socky Kung Fu movies
2. Performance art involving martial arts
3. Video/Image sequence of a kata (predetermined set of movements)
4. Compare media martial arts vs. real martial arts
5. Sparring/Fighting soundscape

Image sequences

For the most part, I liked the image sequences. With the exception of a few that didn't really show enough variation in image timing, selection and subject matter, most were very interesting. One of my favorites was probably Bleu's piece - I loved the ambiguity at the beginning of the sequence which was later explained by the microphone shots later. Also his syncing of the rhythmic sound with the images was very effective. Despite using my research sound piece, I think i did a pretty good job. After comparing both my images and my research sound, I concluded that they matched up pretty well, and thus I could use them together and have an effective piece. I only wish we could have talked about the sequences in class - I felt that certain people's projects stood out, to me, and they deserved praise for it.

Performance Art

Wow, that was amazing. I didn't think I would enjoy doing that performance art as much as I did. Just seeing peoples reactions and comparing them - witnessing the moment when they realized what was going on is priceless. Being reported by DPS just goes to show how uncomfortable people can get by being reminded of what they look like. I only hope the audio and video can sync up and we can watch it, or even pull it together into some kind of documented video.

Looking back upon my blog, I have definitely improved my knowledge of listening and hearing things, and applying those skills to new works of art I experience. My answers, for example, on the 'Speed' reading seem much more articulate and organized than those for the Scott McCloud reading. After seeing Maya Lin, I understood much more how and why those pieces were effective, and saw them in a new light, so to speak. The knowledge I have acquired from this course with undoubtedly help me become a better computer artist and indeed a better artist in general.

Koyaaniquatsi

Three things I learned in class:
1. About different graphical relationships that can be formed between film cutting.
2. How to budget time while shooting a video.
3. Sound can make a slower piece seem faster.

I thought the video Koyaaniquatsi was very interesting - I'd heard the word before, but had no idea what it was. Rather than having a cohesive plot, it was more of an art piece that explored how a message could be expressed by different cinematic and auditory techniques. Maybe when I have some free time I will watch the whole thing, along with the DJ Spooky video, if I can get my hands on them.

Maya Lin lecture

I really enjoyed seeing Maya Lin in Hendrix. She seems to be intimately concerned with many different aspects of how an art piece or installation interacts with the viewer. By blurring the line between art and architechture, she makes people question whether to view a space as art or to view it as an architechtural form. The piece I liked the most was probably the wavy hills in front of the Aerospace building; I like how from far away they look interesting and from close up you can sit in them and relax. Her manner of lecturing really conveyed the emotions she was feeling at the time of making her works and what her overall philosophies towards them are. It was reaffirming to see that one can be a successful artist without being strictly confined to one medium, which has been a problem for me in the past.

Three things I learned in class:
1. Sometimes pieces which appear ambiguous in their meaning have deeper messages and connotations that are not conveyed well.
2. iMovie can be a bitch when youre strapped for time.
3. DJ Spooky is black.

I did not enjoy the DJ Spooky video clip in class that much, but once I learned that it was a trailer rather than a finished piece, I understood why. Trailers are generally just a hodge podge of images and audio relating to a movie, with little coherent structure at all (although some are set up so that they reveal the entire movie, in effect spoiling it, which I think I hate even more.) I can understand how it would be difficult to make a coherent trailer with the subject matter though. I would really like to see the finished product; being familiar with both W.D. Griffith and DJ music would give me a good perspective to evaluate and critique it.

Speed questions:
1. Slow motion is an elargement, a microscopy of time, whereas speeded up motion is a foreshortening, a telescopy of time.
2. He was able to catch a bumblebee mid flight by the use of a high framerate camera, and could watch plants grow through stop motion photography.
3. One can either take frames very fast so that when they are projected at mornal speed, time appears to slow down; conversely, one can take franes at a much slower speed than they are projected, so as to speed time up when they are viewed.
4. Near death experiences, for the most part, make time seem to slow down to a crawl even though it is moving at lightning speed. WIllian James speculates that our judgement of time, our speed of perception, depends on how many "events" we can perceive in a given unit of time.
5. Concious perception is not continuous but consists of discrete moments, like the frames of a movie, which are then blended to give an appearance of continuity. By maniulating this idea in our videos, we can change how the viewer perceives the passage of time.
6. See question number 4.
7. By paying intense attention to what is being done, in a sport or piloting a jet, for example, our minds can start working faster than we can even realize, so that we do things subconciously which we are not even concious of until long after they have happened.
8. It reminds me of the 'Einstein's Dream's' reading involving still images, where so much attention is paied on just describing the details of the life which consists of still images, still moments in time.
9. Michaux compares the perception one experiences on a mescalin trip to a dream in that bath are not an accumulation of exact literal details but rather a series of overall impressions, dramatic highlights. Dreams can be largely ambiguous, as the series of events or places of a dream can be all mixed up and confused, thus being an amalgam of things rather than specific elements.

La Jatee

I thought this was a very interesting work. It was different from normal films in that the story was told through a collection of still images, which changes how we perceive and interpret the film. At the end I got the sense that the movie was similar to the film 12 Monkeys, and found out that it was indeed a remake. The individual shots themselves reflect the directors attention to lighting, symbolism, framing and what he is trying to specifically convey. While it was apparent that it was a lower budget film (indeed maybe it was more of an art piece than a film), it still was fairly well orchastrated and organized.

It was interesting to see the parallels between student work and the real movie. The classis general tendency to pick the most interesting frames seemed to coincide with the most important frames in the movie. Many of the relationships student's saw also matched up with the relationships in the movie. To me this says that the students are improving in their ability to think about time and movement, which will immesurably help them for their image projects.

McCLoud Reading Questions
1. The spaces in between panels, the size of a panel and the number of panels a moment in time occupies affects how long we as viewers perceive that space to appear to be.
2. McCloud describes closure as the mental process by which motion is produced BETWEEN panels.
3. Single images can have a duration if some indication is made for movement, as explored by Futurist artists such as Giacamo Balla and Japanese manga artists.
4. The duration and dimension of a panel or sequence of panels can be defined by various types of motion lines and the effects used to link or separate frames from one another.
5. Time can be suspended by either presenting a frame with no clues as to its duration or by 'bleeding' a panel off the page, making it escape into timeless space.