Video and Intermedia: Why is video so successful?
The text makes a good point. A lot of times with traditional painting or drawing, the artist draws/paints a mundane image that doesn't hold much meaning for even them. Why? It's because some approach an artwork with inverted priorities. That is, they think "I'd like to paint… I'll paint my cat!" which of course means they are putting the artistic act before any kind of message they'd like to portray, making any present theme trivial and poorly communicated. On the other hand, they might have approached the artwork thinking "I love my cat so much! I take 500 pictures of him to post on imgur every day… I know! I'll try painting him! that will surely properly convey his majesticness!"
All silliness aside, this would be a much more successful approach simply because it is a message-pointed piece; the art would be more infused with whatever it is the creator is trying to say, thus it would be a more successful representation of the artist and his/her opinions/preferences/ideas/etc.
That is not to say, however, that it's inherently bad to create something simply for the sake of doing it. Certainly to master any style of art, one will need technical practice, even if this means that the subject matter will be lacking in personal worth. But for creating artwork that is meant to be viewed and shared by others, meaning IS important, and there is no denying that certain mediums, more than others, have higher efficacy for portraying our messages and ideas. I'd have to agree with the text that video is one of these mediums.
Our two strongest senses are our vision and auditory senses, respectively. Our sense of touch might also be very strong, but at least when we represent experiences in the brain (in dreams, memories, etc.) there is little somatosensory representation, and we rely heavily on our visual and audible representation. For that matter, when we use our imagination, i.e. daydream or make up a story in our head, we mostly keep to constructing the visual and audible aspects. It is no wonder, then, that we feel the easiest way to extend ideas and experiences to other people using image and sound (as the text says). This way, with video (image + sound) things are easily shared because they are relatable; they are relatable because they are easily translated into our own memory and internalized. So what Foster wrote about the idea that video is nearly a neurological extenuation of ourselves is accurate in very realistic ways.
The
video I am posting below is just a short dictation to illustrate my point, as it describes in brief humans' capabilities for imagination. We approach thought with visual construction, and we integrate sound into it. Particularly the narrators mention the idea of schema or prototypes (which they call tokens) within the brain. Basically this means we amass sensory information and characteristics (mostly visual ones) and link them together to make 'prototypes' of something (for example, a prototype of a dog is something that has 4 legs, barks, brown fur, wags tail, etc.) With this in mind, we can say that video easily satisfies our representation of ideas/thoughts because it most easily activates these established prototypes in our memory and imagination, more more easily than does a simple painting. That is, it can look like a dog, but if it looks like a dog, walks like a dog, and barks like a dog, then we will much, much more easily call it a dog; the more information we are given, the more, and more quickly, we can receive and internalize a message.
ON MEDIA
the author makes a good point in the beginning that today we have reached an ultimate peak in the reproduction and distribution of artwork, yet this has not in any way deducted from the effectiveness of an art work. certainly we can find simple creations, or re-creations, on youtube that we value and that speak to us personally. For example, Frozen was one of the most pirated films this winter, and was sold out for weeks in theaters, but didn't enjoy it any less than they would have were available only at a special place/time. Some probably even never saw the movie, but saw and enjoyed videos online of the award winning song "Let it Go" from the movie.
In addition to this, multimedia such as Frozen is enjoyed, and judged, by its "mimesis" as Hovagimyan would say. In the past 10 years or so, we have seen an astounding growth in the animation industry, and the quality has been improving just as much (perhaps in causation?) as well. But how do we judge quality? Just as the author said, we like to see how close to reality we can get artwork like video, so in addition to better lighting and textures in the animation, a huge part is getting all different media to match up, mostly the visual and auditory parts. To do this, dreamworks has been known to ask voice actors to wear special lipgloss so they can film them as they speak their lines, and then use the footage to perfectly animate the lips of the characters in correspondence with each actors' respective voice. A similar technique called roto-scoping is used to match movements of the entire body. And the result, well you can see the video from Frozen produces something that is perfectly lifelike in movement. This is important for quality. the McGurk effect is a cognitive phenomenon that demonstrates how important it is that this that visual and auditory aspects fit together; if things are inaccurate, it can completely alter the experience. this video demonstrates the effect:
On a related note, like anything that makes its way to the internet, the Frozen song was subject to a lot of remixing. Reinterpretations are a hazard of any widely reproduced art, yet they receive the same criteria for judgement. in this parody by Iodine Cerium, you can see she emulates the actual song, though the mouth doesn't match up nearly as well as it does with the original lyrics.
But it gets due credit for being hilarious
Sound Scape
https://soundcloud.com/chloerenee/sound-short
On Performance Art
This article of course raises a lot of the same questions we have discussed thoroughly in my other class, performance art. Firstly we tried to examine what can qualify as performance art. Almost immediately we found ourselves trying to define what qualifies as art in the first place. We came to the conclusion that art can be virtually anything, and made in any medium. The analogy we used is this: a painting is considered art when the raw materials (the paint) is taken and re-arranged with purpose on a canvas; in the same sense, any art (performance art, for example) is art when the raw materials (in performance's case, actions and interactions) are rearranged with purpose on a canvas (or in a setting).
This is vague, yes, but it truly exemplifies what all art is. You cant say its about trueness to reality because most art is abstract; you cant say its all about aesthetics because some art is not pleasing to the eye; you cant even say its about something visual/audible/etc that conveys some message or has some stimulating, inherent meaning because some art is simple not intended to have meaning for certain viewers, yet it is still art. What we consider to be good or bad art is a different story, riddled with opinions. Warhol and Duchamp are fine examples of people's skepticism on what constitutes (good) art. But the good, the bad, and the weird, its all art under our definition. Like actually, really really weird:
On the subject of opinions, I think the author makes a good point that the art should NOT have ingrained, uniform meaning and that the viewer is ultimately responsible for the meaning they get out of a piece of art. That is, while its definitely good when an artist can provide some background and sources for a piece of artwork, they should not have to tell the audience what it is intended to mean; the artist may divulge what they were going for, but the best pieces of art imbue intended meanings on their own, without explication. However if someone views a piece of art and doesn't get what the artist was trying to portray then thats not bad. What is truly important is, even if the viewer misses what it means to the artist, that the art still inspires some personal meaning for the viewer.
