VISA 0120 Foundations Media: Computation + Art

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Script for Faunce Arch Day Tours (Historical, Present, Future):

HISTORICAL – Diana Friedman
Today we celebrate Faunce Arch for its contribution to brown’s history since it was built in 1904.
Faunce House was originally named Rockefeller Hall when the west end of the present building was erected in 1904. At Commencement 1930, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. gave $600,000 for the enlargement of Rockefeller Hall, requesting that the building be renamed Faunce House as a memorial to President Faunce who had died in January.

In the early 1980s changes began to return the building to its purpose as a student center, as Faunce House underwent a major renovation, designed by architects Goody, Clancy and Associates.

Faunce Arch has seen many historical events that occurred at Brown University. For example, when the news of Japan’s surrender came in 1942, the ringing of the University Hall bell brought students out of their dormitories to unite with an impromptu band in a parade to the Pembroke campus, where the women joined the procession which went down Thayer Street and stopped at the flagpole for the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” The students proceeded underneath Faunce Arch. Classes were suspended and a convocation called in Sayles Hall, at which Bruce Bigelow delivered a moving speech citing Brown’s contribution and honoring those who had died.

Furthermore, during the general unrest of the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, a student strike in May of 1970 followed upon the announcement on April 30 that Unites States troops had entered Cambodia, and on May 4 of the unfortunate death of four students shot by National Guardsmen during a demonstration at Kent State University. On the evening of May 4, after a speech by Senator Jacob Javits of New York, a mass meeting on the Green was held to vote on a strike in protest of the war. The next day a rally of 1,500 students in Meehan Auditorium demanded that the University take a stand against the action in Cambodia. The procession went through this very arch. This event was exactly 39 years ago today

PRESENT – Rhianna Shaw
Even though the Van Wickle Gates are the official entrance to Brown University, Faunce Arch sees a lot more activity throughout the year.  In fact, when I first visited Brown over three years ago the first piece of Brown property I stepped onto was right here.  I’m sure I’m not alone in that.  If one considers the ends of the Brown campus Pembroke and Wriston (sorry Perkins!), Faunce Arch is pretty central in connecting them.
Today the arch is occasionally used for arch-sings by various a capella groups, particularly at ‘First Friday at Faunce’, a student-run activity that happens on the first Friday of each month.  On the 4th November last year the arch saw masses of students flood through it as they all paraded onto the Main Green to celebrate Obama’s victory and then proceeded to march through it and around campus.
Faunce Arch is also a focal point on campus, with a giant, detailed campus map and bulletin boards displaying posters of events to come and photos of events past.  The airport shuttle runs from it, everyone arranges meetings under it; people even take shelter under it!  Our celebration today is just a way to give something back to Faunce Arch.  Thank you Faunce, and thank you all for coming!

FUTURE – Jina Park
There are currently a lot of new plans for renovations at Brown University. One of the upcoming renovations include renovating Faunce House to create the Stephen Robert ‘62 Campus Center at Faunce House.
A Boston-based architectural firm, Schwartz/Silver has been selected to design and execute the $15-million renovation. The firm specializes in two types of projects – renovation of historically significant structures and construction of modern buildings. Schwartz/Silver designed Princeton’s Andlinger Center for the Humanities, which required dramatic interior renovations of two 19th-century buildings while maintaining their outer facades. Andlinger was hailed as a major success when it opened in 2004.
Together with the student resources and services center located in J. Walter Wilson which was also recently renovated, the new Campus Center will represent the realization of key objectives in the Plan for Academic Enrichment:  fostering a greater sense of community at Brown and more effectively integrating the academic and co-curricular lives of students. The campus center’s construction could result in Faunce being closed for all of the 2009-10 academic year, and, with a host of other projects set to be completed in coming years, will change the daily lives of most Brown students.

When asked about the Faunce House, Schatz said he has been drawn to the building’s iconic arch. “Almost every student who takes a class during the day has to walk through the archway at some point,” Schatz said. “It’s both a gateway into the green and also a focal point for visitors.” Director of Student Activities Ricky Gresh has put together a planning committee composed of administrators, faculty, undergrads and students from the Graduate and Medical schools. Their first meeting included a tour of Faunce. “I’d never realized how broken up the building was,” said Eleanor Cutler ‘10, campus life chair for the Undergraduate Council of Students and a member of the committee. If you take a look around and begin to notice how separated Faunce Arch is to the Faunce house of which it is a part of, you might not be very surprised to hear that, to make the building more connected and accessible, there are plans to make entrances through the Faunce Arch, which will make it a even more public and active space at Brown. Whereas now it is just a passageway that connects the main green with waterman street, it will also become an entrance way into the newly renovated student center after the renovation.
Therefore, Faunce Arch Day is also an attempt for us to recognize and appreciate Faunce Arch as the way it is now, as it will undergo changes starting next academic year. We hope that by having this tour, you have had a chance to think more about and appreciate Faunce Arch. Thank you very much and happy Faunce Arch day!

Time and Movement

For this project, I used the Processing program to once again work with the idea of time and change of movement that I explored in my last video piece in the series ”Time, Body and Perception”. The pace and pattern of triangles’ movements change their pace and pattern of movement as one clicks on the mouse, which signals a change in time. The “body” of triangles (like my body in my video piece) moves in different ways and in different paces through mouse clicks just as the video “Time, Body, and Perception” showed different paces and movement of my own body dancing.

 

For this project, I will look back upon the third video I created among the three series of videos I titled “Perception, Body, and Time.”  Moving around time and creating a certain sense of confusion by manipulating time in different ways were something successful and interesting in my piece, and I would like to work further with that concept using processing. I would like to have a central figure which will be moving in a certain way(either walking around, jumping or doing something). By clicking on the mouse or dragging it, I hope to change the pace of the movement of the figure to create the alteration of the pace of time.

 Dispersion

For my self-portrait piece using Processing, I started working with my name. My Korean name(Jin-Ah) in Chinese 振我 means “spreading myself” or “throwing myself”, etc (can be interpreted in different ways).  I referred to some of the monsters on http://www.processing.org/ and worked with the program to create this piece.

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3Ps. (Passing of time, Perception, and Perfect weather..)

Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono Lennon, born in Tokyo on Feb 18, 1933, is a Japanese artist and musician. She is known for her work as an avant-garde artist and musician, and her marriage and works with musician John Lennon.

Ono was an explorer of conceptual art and performance art. An example of her performance art is “Cut Piece”, performed in 1964 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. Cut Piece had one destructive verb as its instruction: “Cut.” Ono executed the performance in Tokyo by walking on stage and casually kneeling on the floor in a draped garment. Audience members were requested to come on stage and begin cutting until she was naked. Cut Piece was one of Ono’s many opportunities to outwardly communicate her internal suffering through her art. Ono had originally been exposed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories of existentialism in college, and in order to appease her own human suffering, Ono enlisted her viewers to complete her works of art in order to complete her identity as well. Besides a commentary on identity, Cut Piece was a commentary on the need for social unity and love. It was also a piece that touched on issues of gender and sexism as well as the greater, universal affliction of human suffering and loneliness. Ono performed this piece again in London and other venues, garnering drastically different attention depending on the audience. In Japan, the audience was shy and cautious. In London, the audience participators became zealous to get a piece of her clothing and became violent to the point where she had to be protected by security. An example of her conceptual art includes her book of instructions called Grapefruit. This book, first produced in 1964, includes surreal, Zen-like instructions that are to be completed in the mind of the reader, for example: “Hide and seek Piece: Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies.” The book, an example of Heuristic art, was published several times, most widely distributed by Simon and Schuster in 1971, and reprinted by them again in 2000. Many of the scenarios in the book would be enacted as performance pieces throughout Ono’s career and have formed the basis for her art exhibitions, including one highly publicized show at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York that was nearly closed by a fan riot.

( Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, performance, Japan/England, 1964-1966 ) http://artintelligence.net/review/?p=529

John Lennon once described her as “the world’s most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.”

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Ono)

 

A paragraph on my piece

I chose to work off of the third video of from last time, which played with the notion of time. I wanted to further explore how the visual (without any sound) and certain images provoke the thought of time moving in a certain direction. As in Yoko Ono’s “cut piece,” I use myself as a central subject(placing myself in the middle).   On crucial difference between My video and Ono’s, however, is that unlike Ono’s Cut Piece which focuses more on the interaction with the audience, my piece focuses more on my personal space and time.

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Slow Time
Through this video, I hoped to explore the fact that time seems longer when in a boring situation. Showing this video, I want people to feel as if this one minute is more boring and longer than usual.

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Fast Time
I explored the opposite idea for this clip by showing a more intersting film(dancing) so that the audience would feel as if time is passing faster. However, while filming and screening the video, I began to think about another effect that might affect the video- more information within the same minute. Would that mean this video might feel longer?

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I explored the link between perception and time by altering the video.

3rd floor list art bldg.

10am-noon Wednesday
3pm-5pm Thursday

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My first thought about time was its never ending repetitive quality. Through this video in which a boy travels and gets caught in a plant cycle, I sought to reemphasize the theme of the “timelessness” of time. The continuous death and births of all living things is apparent but also mysterious, mundane but also very interesting at the same time. There is no real end to things because in one way or another they continue to live on through different means. For example, the seeds from a plant blooms another plant, a person passes on the values of life and lives through his/her children, etc.

Through several images of nature – of mother and her children, of new fruit and old withering fruit from the same branch, and of a duck and ducklings- I tried to convey the continuity of time. After something disappears or dies in the world, there is always something else that comes to replace and continue its life. Like a river, time continues to flow, and continues on in a neverending loop (Hence the pictures of loop and river in composition). The key image of my composition is in the top left corner, a sign of a registrar’s office for reporting birth and death. This image and its ironic juxtaposition of birth and death captures the essence of what I am trying to convey through my composition, which is the endless continuity of time. The ribbon-like strips drawn across the piece reinforce my concept once again.