VISA 0120 Foundations Media: Computation + Art

Marlee Bruning – Han Yang Lee – Lissa Mazanec

‘You are the master of your fate.
You are the captain of your soul.’

WE CONTOL TIME!!!

Cyclical Transformation

The cycle: Mouse clicks, a tree grows.  The leaves continue to fall — products of the trees they have fertilized.  This processing piece shows the cyclical transformation occurring in nature. Interact.

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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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.

Paul McCarthy - Born 1945,  Salt Lake City,  USA.

Cover of Lisa Phillips’ biography, “Paul McCarthy”

An artist relevant to my work is Paul McCarthy, a contemporary artist, from Los Angeles, California. This painter, sculptor, video, performance and multi-media artist often uses the body as a paintbrush or canvas. McCarthy explores themes of family, childhood, violence and dysfunction, as he incorporates bodily fluids and food into his pieces to create elaborate and grotesque critiques of cultural icons. (www.vdb.org/) 

McCarthy aimed to test the limits of the viewer, and ultimately wants to repulse them. In a 1974 video, Painting, “Wall Whip”, he painted with his head and face, “smearing his body with paint and then with ketchup, mayonnaise or raw meat and, in one case, feces.” (Roberta Smith, May 1998, The New York Times Art Review). Another video of his in this vein is “Class Fool,” his 1976 piece in which he throws himself around a classroom splattered in ketchup until he becomes dizzy and vomits. He then inserts a Barbie doll into his rectum.

 “My work is more about being a clown than a shaman”- Paul McCarthy (Petersen, Magnus “Head Shop/Shop Head”, Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, 2006, p.20)

My video, “Chewing 2.0”, relates to McCarthy’s work. My concept is to create a video where time appears to be changing. “Chewing”, or eating in general, can be a leisurely activity or a rushed necessity. Food is needed to be consumed in order to live, and needs to be included on a daily basis, whether one appreciates it, or dreads it. “Chewing 2.0” is a second version of the concept. I used the same idea of filming people chewing, but added a few elements. Like McCarthy, I decided to make it more graphic and grotesque, to highlight the inherent barbaric and gluttonous nature of eating. This time, I both sped up and slowed down the footage. I also decided to focus on sound, as I added the ugly sounds of chewing and swallowing. The eaters listen to Jimmy Buffet’s “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” to highlight the significance of food as a means of attaining a sense of fullness, pleasure, and fullness (physically and mentally).

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oliviaweb

This video stems (however obliquely) from my “slow-moving-time” exercise, Breathe. I maintained my use of cross over and additive transitions and also my use of slowing down the clips to evoke a lazy, calm feeling. Here however, the character has changed (well, for starters, there IS a character) and is of a more personal nature: my relationship with my twin sister.

The short film was influenced by Brian Eno’s “Thursday Afternoon” – a part of his 14 Video Paintings (1981 & 1984)  @ http://ubu.com/film/eno_14.html –  in which he films a female  friend (also blonde) of his in extremely slow time. The piece is reflective and calm, drawing on the abstraction of the human body and the observation of female beauty. His music is a piano track – very simple yet beautiful. It is, as the Ubuweb review writes, “a nostalgic diary, a musing on the life of a person now departed”.

Naturally in my piece the intention is a bit different, though much aesthetic value remains true to Eno’s intention. One might also argue that Olivia too is “now departed” (ie. no longer by my side, sharing a room, etc.) and that the video records her like a ‘diary entry’ (ie. an afternoon together in NY).  

In blurring Olivia towards the end of the piece I hope to also allude to some of German artist Gerhard Richter’s paintings of people in his life, who he famously depicts in a similarly hazy manner:

In my view, the effect creates distance from the subject, in my case Olivia – someone I love very dearly but am separated from in our present situations.The prominent cyclical element in my film furthers this idea, stressed through the repetition of the roof-top chimneys, two at the beginning but one at the end.

I increase opacity towards the end, layering images of carnations – some of Olivia and my favourite flowers – and then just in the final moment, with an empty chair (the one that she had sat in).

I tried to stick to yellow and pink hues in the piece to create a warm, loving ambience for viewers.

I created the music with a keyboard-synthesizer and aimed to create a fluid but expressive emotion that flattens with the ‘loss’ of Olivia towards the end.

I’d love to know what you make of it all.

Isabel

BRIAN ENO: Artist Background

Brian Eno was born in 1948 in Suffolk, England. Already noted as a student at Winchester School of Arts for his questioning of contemporary perceptions of an artist’s role, Eno has become a primary figure and promoter of cultural criticism. He joined in eaerly with the 1960′s discussion of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture (think ICA, Warhol, Rauschenberg, etc.) Largely influenced by the minimalist movement of art, his own style is largely defined by what is known as “ambient music”. He has performed in various groups and bands, worked solo, produced records (ex. Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, composed for video games (Spore), and even developed video software. He is a famous collaborator, working with the diverse names of David Bowie, David Byrne, Microsoft, and Peter Jackson. Within the context of this class, I have observed a few of his more famous videos that incorporate his music, and have tried to analyze what it is he values in video art. His use of colouration, particularly in “Thursday Afternoon” is sensual and vibrant, and the pairing of music to image seems extremely (well)calculated.

The following sources were consulted:

Brian Eno

http://www.enoshop.co.uk/

http://creativegames.org.uk/MA_CreativeTechnology/input_output/Pop/pop_eno.htm

Richter:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/artexhibition-20653712-details/Gerhard+Richter:+Portraits/artexhibitionReview.do?reviewId=23654511

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This film (the film of my choice) utilizes a repositioning of sound to play with expectation. The sound used with each clip attempts to represent the reality of the experience of each activity rather than the actual physical reality. The juxtaposition of a “sermon” over top of clips of skateboarding and moving through traffic attempts to point out some of the dangerous absurdities of religion, which become further emphasized by the loud stressful noises used in the chapel scenes. 

Note: When exporting this video 30 some seconds of black space where added to the end of the video. I am not sure why or how this happened as I did not add all that space myself. The film is meant to end after the roaring noise of the skateboard fades out.

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This film depicts time moving slowly through the manipulation of anticipation. I wanted to make a film that was almost excruciatingly slow and borderline annoying to watch. The viewer waits for something exciting to happen, but nothing ever does. Time always seems to move slower when one is anticipating something, so I utilized the anticipation of getting to the top of an escalator to make time seem to move more slowly. The audio for this film is an attempt to recreate the impression of the repetitive and irritating elevator music that is constantly playing inside malls.

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This film juxtaposes religious and commercial imagery to represent the overwhelming and fast paced world of consumerism. Consumerism has reached something of a religious status in modern society and I wanted to draw attention to this. The film compares and contrasts stained glass windows with advertisements, preachers with mannequins, and churches with malls. The audio enhances the sense of overstimulation with fast paced rhythms and strange traces of distorted music.

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This is a piece that, as you can tell from the name, is about oversleeping. Nothing is as frantic and hurried as someone when they are late, and I hoped to embody that in this film.

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To me time moving slowly is embodied in boredom, which is what I hoped to portray here. I altered the sound to give the effect of time becoming slower and slower as boredom becomes more and more extreme.