As promised, here is the sample code, including the class Spot, that we worked up in class today. It will help you figure out how to create your own classes of objects for your pieces.
Publication excerpt
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999
Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the “trance film,” in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted “to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.”
Made by Deren with her husband, cinematographer Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon established the independent avant-garde movement in film in the United States, which is known as the New American Cinema. It directly inspired early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and other major experimental filmmakers. Beautifully shot by Hammid, a leading documentary filmmaker and cameraman in Europe (where he used the surname Hackenschmied) before he moved to New York, the film makes new and startling use of such standard cinematic devices as montage editing and matte shots. Through her extensive writings, lectures, and films, Deren became the preeminent voice of avant-garde cinema in the 1940s and the early 1950s.
via MoMA.org | The Collection | Maya Deren. Meshes of the Afternoon. 1943.
Since 1996, Claerbout has explored the boundaries and overlaps between video and still photography, blurring the line between the still and the moving image. He digitizes found photographs and then introduces moving elements, and with them, time. He also uses digital video to create mini-narratives set in buildings or urban spaces that play on the changing light and passage of time to interrogate “the substance of time.”
Influenced by phenomenology, David Claerbout has developed a body of work that challenges our habitual perceptions, testing the limit of all forms of visual reproduction in his endeavor to transport reality. “I belong to a generation of artists that has problems with the aura of the art object, and that’s why I work in a medium, digital video, historically associated with mass culture,” says the artist.
Caption: David Claerbout, Sections of a Happy Moment, 2007, Yvon Lambert, Paris/New York; Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Anvers; Hauser & Wirth, Zurich/London; Johnen/Schöttle, Cologne/Berlin/Munich
Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1940)
Electronics in the World of Tomorrow (1968)
via U B U W E B – Film & Video: Erkki Kurenniemi – Electronics in the World of Tomorrow (1968).
Martin Arnold was born in 1959 in Vienna. He studied Psychology and Art History at Vienna University.
Paul Sharits was a film maker whose experimental work came to define the structuralist film movement.
Viking Eggeling’s “Symphonie Diagonale” (1921) is an early experimental film animation that balances abstract visual form and sound. Viking Eggeling is a Swedish filmmaker.
Martha Rosler Photo Op From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, new series, 2004 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin/Cologne
Many of you (Lissa and Daniela in particular) would benefit from looking at Martha Rosler’s work. The following is an excerpt from the text associated with Media Burn, an exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2006-7.
Rosler is one of the most influential artists of her generation and her work frequently compels the viewer to rethink the boundaries between the public and the private, the social and political. During the Vietnam War, she produced Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-72), a series of photomontages assembled from the pages of Life magazine, where news stories featuring images of the dead and wounded shared column inches with glossy adverts for consumer products.
The work shown here, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, new series (2004), is a reworking of that project. A critique of the current war in Iraq, it draws an immediate comparison with Vietnam. Re-connecting the reality of a distant war with the living rooms of America, she underlines the relationship between the spoils of war and a consumerist society.
Wladyslaw Starewicz was Russian born Polish filmmaker who is famous for his stop motion animations using insects and animals as his protagonists. Here is an excerpt from Ubu.
Starewicz’ childhood passion for entomology led his career: he began producing short documentaries in Moscow around 1909-1910, beginning with a documentary about insects in Lithuania. In his spare time, he experimented with stop-action films using beetles, which he articulated by wiring the legs to the thorax with sealing wax! This, of course, led to his big breakthrough, released by the Van Kanjonkov Studio of Moscow: “The Battle of the Stag Beetles”, the first puppet-animated film.