VISA 0120 Foundations Media: Computation + Art

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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A mash-up video of how a person appears via body language may not be coherent with what’s on their mind.

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Relevant Artist: Erkki Kurenniemi

Photo from following article: Zhuang, Justin. “A Look Back at the Future.” Just Ramble <http://justrambling.wordpress.com>. 

Born in 1941, Erkki Kurenniemi is known as one of the great pioneers of the electronic age. A man of many talents, Kurenniemi has been able to blend his expertise as a musician, designer and film-maker in combination with computers and robotics to build a career. In current times, Kurenniemi is continually recording an audio diary, video and shooting photos in attempts to preserve his own life. The collection Kurenniemi is amassing is to be premiered in 2048 as a “virtual persona” merging man and machine in an attempt at immortality.

Relevant Artist: Maya Deren

Photo from following article: ”Maya Deren.” MographWiki <http://www.mographwiki.net/>.

I feel that it is also important to give Maya Derens acknowledgement for particular audio inspiration derived from her film “Meshes of the Afternoon”.

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For Assignment #5 I once again wanted to use the wind, because of the movement it visually either does or does not create, as a starting inspiration point. I played on ideas from Kurenniemi’s obsession with technology and Deren’s “humming” audio. I then combined these ideas with a visual intention similar to that of my “slow” film, where there were almost still frame photographs with only subtle movements that draw the eye. 

“billow”, both in film and audio, creates an interesting juxtaposition between very natural, “human” elements and unnatural technologies with pace adding an extra detail.

Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar, image from: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/jaar/index.html

Alfredo Jaar is an architect, artist and filmmaker. Jaar explores the public’s desensitization to images and the limitations of art to represent events such as genocides, epidemics, and famines. Most of his works are based on his research on real life events such as tragedies that he tries to reflect on. Some of his subjects include the holocaust in Rwanda, gold mining in Brazil, toxic pollution in Nigeria, and issues related to the border between Mexico and the United States. He is passionate about beauty in life and he utilizes this concept in his works to attract his audience. He believes audiences need to be seduced in order to direct their attention to certain issues. (http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/jaar/index.html)

As an architect, Jaar considers space as a major component of his installations. Coincidentally, architecture is one of my passions and it is something I am considering as a career. Although I do not yet have a defined artistic style, I do notice that space in one way or another influences most of my visual works. Something else I have in common with Alfredo Jaar is his approach to art. Like Jaar, I have to be driven by real life events and by valuable visual elements in order to make artistic statements.

In my new video I take the concept of space and try to portray the inside of a church from various angles, utilizing mirror and high contrast effects to create a dramatic mood. The video is meant to show my perception of space as a child. Having the architectural elements of a church gives this video a more personal value based on my Catholic background.

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This time I kept the idea of an awkward moment feeling like a long time but with a different scene and more use of short cuts.

(image source: http://www.ovationtv.com/files/large_image_videos/0000/0026/alfred_hitchcock_372x495.jpg)

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock(13 August 1899 ? 29 April 1980) was a British filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. Hitchcock directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades. He remains one of the best-known and most popular filmmakers of all time.

One of the most powerful elements of Hitchcock’s films is his brilliant mastery of cinematic cut scenes, which might be best illustrated in his well-known film ‘Psycho’. The film’s pivotal scene, and one of the most famous scenes in cinema history, is the murder of Marion, Janet Leigh’s character, in the shower, which in particular draws our attention to the fact of the cinematic cut.

(image source: google image search “hitchcock psycho”)

The entire sequence runs only 3 minutes and is composed of 50 cuts, most of which are very short and extreme close-ups. When the stabbing begins, especially, there is a cinematic cut with almost every thrust of knife, as if the camera itself too murders and dissects.

(image source: google image search “hitchcock psycho”)

We have no choice but to identify with Marion in the shower, to insert ourselves into the position of the wayward subject who has strayed from the highway of cultural acceptability, but who now wants to make amends. The vulnerability of her naked and surprisingly small body leaves us without anything to deflect that transaction. The combination of the close shots with the short duration between cuts makes the sequence feel longer, more subjective, more uncontrolled, more powerful, and more violent than would a seamless narrative would be.

In my video, I tried to incorporate Hitchcock’s cinematic cuts and use short shots from various angles.

Chantal Ackerman was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1950, but now lives in Paris.  Ackerman’s first film, “Saute Ma Ville” (1968), pictured a domestic scene and was her debut as a feminist film maker.  Ackerman is aware of the viewpoint of the spectator and the passage of time.  She uses time to create a sense of monotony and routine.  She uses the camera angle to manipulate the way in which a viewer sees a scene.

Ackerman’s film “Hotel Monterey” (1972) particularly intrigues me. “Hôtel Monterey – is the idea that something is about to happen, or is happening just out of sight…Back and forth the camera goes, a silent walker, a leading character in a movie without a plot.”  Ackerman uses the camera to create the motion of the viewer.  She moves one through the space of her film — through doorways, hallways, and into rooms to observe. The film is silent.  There is no plot, but rather a focus on observation of both people and the architecture and arrangement of objects in a space.  Also, an acknowledgement of what cannot be observed–that which is behind the closed doors.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jul/15/art.film)

Ackerman Photo: http://www.deutsches-filminstitut.de/f_films/fotos/fp3602_06.jpg

Hotel Monterey: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2F9T7IdfiM

Ackerman’s filming techniques are relevant to my own work.  Her use of the camera as the main character is reminiscent of my use of the camera.  Motion is key in both of our films.  I also admire her composition and hope to emulate it more in future films. “Wake Up Swing” is an expansion of my film “Swing”.  In this film, my concept is similar to that of Ackerman’s Hotel Monterey: I want to lead the spectator through the park as if the camera is their person, physically moving through the scene.   However, my film has more plot than Ackerman’s.  I seek to show the life given to inanimate objects by motion–the life of motion.  My film also uses many short cuts in opposition to Ackerman’s use of a fewer, longer cuts.

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This time around I recreated the video that did not address an aspect of time.  I wanted to refocus my project on my body in space, and the abstraction of that through the moving image.  I played with the ideas of editing to creature rupture in a smooth visual narrative but also have attempted to play with editing beyond one take meshing different angles and camera positions to make a fluid work.  I hope it shows progress.

David Lynch-

(born January 20, 1946)

David Lynch is an American mixed media and performance artist.  He has a wide range of work that falls between short art films to a prime time television show.  Lynch has received mixed critical acclaim for many of his films.  He is recognized usually for films such as Mulholland Drive(2001) or many other films that he has received Academy Award nominations for.  His work is characterized by chilling plots usually interrupted by surreal and horrifying experimental sequences.  His work, though much of which remains within dominant narrative practice, foregrounds some of the apparatus itself and also a tendency to move from the narrative.  He is one of few directors to also make large budget films that remains so heavily involved in the sound editing and even credits himself.  His most recent film Inland Empire also marked a shift away from film into a full length experimental feature completely done with digital video.
Many of his early works along with other shorts from throughout his career can be found on a DVD, called “The Short Films of David Lynch.”  I was able to see many of these (you can too, if you have netflix) including some of his earlier work-Six Men Getting Sick (’66) and Grandmother(’70).  He originally began his work from an art background and moved in the mid sixties to practice in film animation and experimental film.  Grandmother  is a little more characteristic of some of his later narrative cinema, and is the story of a little boy attempting to grow a new grandparent.  The animation in this film is astounding, and the mixed dark narrative really complicates a tale of child abuse.  His style and interest in man in relation (post)modernity are large influences on my work.  One of the most interesting pieces he’s done is also an extremely short film done with one of the original Lumiere cameras that can also be found on that collection DVD.  If you can get a chance check out some of the links.  Also watch Twin Peaks.
Grandmother (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VaI1v0CIlA&feature=related)
Six Men Getting Sick  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFo_05hUUcw&feature=related)
Lumiere (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjQ99gMIEM8&feature=related)

Image courtesy of archive.senseofcinema.com “Great Directors”.