Saturday, February 9, 2013

Response to the Intro (Zoe)


For me, the section on time art was the most interesting piece of the intro. I believe we’ve mentioned the idea before talking about post media, time and how people think about time in relation to art differs between each medium.The introduction primarily mentions artists and their relation to time after the advent of Photography and the wise words of Henri Bergson (“The essence of time is that it goes by”). However, I am interested in comparing mediums that obviously relate to time such as photography and video, with still mediums such as painting.
A painting, in the end, is a still work. The brush strokes have dried onto the canvas and the rectangle hangs static from the nail on the wall. But, the creation of a painting is not static at all. It could take any where from minutes to days to months to years to create a painted work, and this time is etched into the strokes of paint on the canvas. Some art requires time to admire, others capture movement, and there are even others that are fossils of effort. 
Photography does not convey this same idea, which I find very interesting. Because photography, film or digital, often requires just as much work in preparation, developing, or editing. The difference with photography is that the photographer (in most cases) does not wish for their effort to be noticed, which would most likely indicate a mistake on their part. So photography, although a still moment in time, does not give the viewer the feeling that they are looking at a fossil in the same way as a painting. Rather, photography relates to time because it is a manipulation of time and its properties. The photograph is no less “present” than the moment itself, so the viewer is most concerned with the content rather than the process. 
Film is the next medium in this trilogy, painting is a fossil, photography is a moment, and film is flat out time. It’s relationship to time encompasses both the experience of the viewer who take time to watch, and the experience of the film maker who experienced the material first hand. It’s a culmination of both painting, the experience of the artist, and photography, the manipulation of time. 
Art has the capability of being static, momentous, continuous or a combination their of; but, how one thinks about a piece of art can evoke any number of time related images. Admittedly a weird idea, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. 
To continue with this idea, I've posted a moving sculpture. I's an odd medium because one would expect a sculpture to be still, but this one embodies some characteristics of film. The cogs leave the imprint of the human who combined them while presenting a new and time related experience. 


Other awesome Arthur Ganson Videos

Cognitive Overflow - By Kevin Silverstein

Cognitive Overflow - By Kevin Silverstein

Shyah's Sound Project

Friday, February 8, 2013

Jeff's response to Rush's Introduction

I enjoyed Rush's introduction, but found its brevity to be somewhat annoying. He attempts to summarize the history of a few various movements and ignores much larges influences. He mentions Stan Brakhage's name, but fails to give any information about his work (similarly, he includes him in a list of filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren, neither of which are mentioned more than once). The summary of the fluxists' work is interesting, but their film projects seem so undeniably influenced by Brakhage's hand-painted films that I can't completely understand why he would skip over such an important artist. It seems that he obsesses over a few random avant-garde artists and then mentions a couple more mainstream artists as a counterpoint. The inclusion (and obsession over) Jean-Luc Goddard and Sergei Eisenstein's films, giving them both far more credit than either deserves (admittedly, he does give a brief description of Vertov's work, but he seems to credit Eisenstein with some ideas that Vertov should have been credited with; Vertov, in my readings, has talked much more about technology and industrialization than Eisenstein). He also credits Griffith with the idea of "montage," but he was only one stepping stone in creation of the idea that ultimately came together beginning with Lev Kuleshov's writing in the late 1910s.

From the brief bit I've now read about them, the Fluxists' ideas fascinate me. I particularly enjoyed the idea of Paik's Zen for Film. There's just something really cool about a strip of film being passed around, slowly collecting more and more dirt, debris, and scratches. It becomes, in a way, a very fascinating historical object: a complete blank slate on which anything could be written.

I've included Brakhage's Mothlight, a film that is literally just moths that he collected from a light in his backyard a taped together and perforated to go through a projector.

Zoe's Sound Project

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Soundscape due date

Could someone please let me know if the soundscape project is due tomorrow or if it was extended to next week?