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Quotidian Project 56

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Quotidian Project 54

Response to Video Artist: Valie Export

I did not enjoy Valie Export's works as much as the others, perhaps because I did not understand them. She had a wide variety of approaches, ranging from experimental film techniques, to interactive performance art, to a strange self harm piece called Remote. She was successful in making me as a viewer uncomfortable because the way she presents visual information was unsettling and grotesque.

Response to Video Artist: Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci's videos were very dialogue heavy. I didn't entirely understand why he made videos if much of the imagery he provides the viewer comes from his dialogue. He was very poetic in how he told a story such as in Undertones where he sat across a table from the viewer and told a story, using repetition to transition from section to section. I just felt his work fit more closely with poetry and spoken word rather than video art.

Response to Video Artist: Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat's work has been different from the others so far because she uses powerful images to tell a narrative rather than leave the message up to interpretation. The handful of her films that I watched are concerned with women's rights, such as Turbulence and Women Without Men. They gave them impression that they were more functional in delivering a message than experimenting with film techniques as the others were. I enjoyed her style the most of the 5 artists I saw.

Response to Video Artist: Nam Jun Paik

I realled liked Nam Jun Paik's video called TV Buddha. It was a short video of a buddha sitting facing a small television with a buddha on a static screen. He made it appear as if the Buddha statue was transfixed to its projection on the screen. It reminded me of Rosalind Krauss's writing on narcissism and medium is a way to project oneself for one's own viewing pleasure. Paik being in the background of the television screen reminded me of government as if they are always watching you watch yourself on a screen.
He also does something different than most artists. He takes a big magnet to manipulate what is seen on the television screen to create a completely unique experience.The light on the screen creates interesting patterns and you can see the static flow along that pattern.

Response to Video Artist: Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas's videos, Left Side Right Side, Vertical Roll, and Mirage were very short and did not have plots. 

Left Side Right Side was a close up of a woman with a mirror held against her face so that it reflection one side of the face to stand in for the other side. After watching I felt confused because she was just stating the obvious with a mirror on her face. It could have some deeper meaning, such as a desire for perfect symmetrical features, but it may be up to the viewers interpretation.

Mirage was shaky footage of a projector playing video in the dark. It was as if someone was struggling or too busy to hold the camera steady. The subject was static, but the view was dynamic, unlike the last video.

Vertical Role was also short and confusing, but it caused me a certain stress that the other two didn't. It was a video of a film reel of a woman's body. The disorienting part was that a metallic banging noise was played each time the bottom of each frame went off screen. It is hard to tell what it was about as well.

Quotidian Project 53

Response to "The Aesthetics of Narcissism" by Rosalind Krauss

Krauss's The Aesthetics of Narcissism was one of the harder readings to respond to because it was difficult to understand beyond the general idea of human narcissistic desire to be projected onto a screen. 

She mentions a number of video installations that deal with the idea of narcissism, such as exploiting narcissism to critique it. I felt the most interesting installation is Campus's mem and dor, where the viewer sees of projection of himself or herself, but it is either out of focus, or in focus, but too close to be seen. Campus seems to be taunting the narcissistic tendency because the desired projection is always close, but never achievable. 

She also brings up the idea of commodity fetishism where relationships revolved around material things rather than social relationships. We've examined the same idea in Intro to Visual Studies where it has contributed to racism and socioeconomic exclusivity. As it related to narcissistic desire for self projection, it can be a desire to sell one's image as an object or brand and to compete with other objects or brands.

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Sketch up Tutorial

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Response to "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin

Benjamin raises a good point in his essay: the concept of aura. He explains aura as the power of an artwork as it is tied to tradition and historical context. Aura is minimized by reproduction because it takes away the uniqueness of an object. The fact that we can now reproduce almost anything takes away the "specialness" of an object.
Building on his argument, there is the constant concern of ownership. Is something worth owning if anyone can own an exact copy? Artists borrow (or steal) and remix each others' ideas and works. While mechanical reproduction can bring the work to anyone, it seems to have taken away some of the security that came with craftsmanship. The human errors and endurance of time used to make an original stand out from fakes, but now copies can be made, effectively doing away with originality of a work.
It was also interesting how he brought politics into the essay. Now that we can manipulate and redistribute images, people are able to use media to manipulate and misinform the public. Today, no image can be taken at face value whereas it was easier to discern any tampering on an image. And with current and future CGI technology, even film is no exception.

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Propaganda Project

Inspiration for the pro smoking poster came from a US Navy recruitment poster. Inspiration for the anti smoking poster came from Tyler School of Art's calendar in the image of a vending machine.

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Rulers in Photoshop

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Response to "The Money Spent Selling Sugar to Americans is Staggering"

Link: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/the-money-spent-selling-sugar-to-americans-is-staggering/407350/

The picture, more than the title, was what really pulled me in. It's what appears to be a Pop Tart cut into the shape of a gun. It was an interesting concept because food is supposed to create a sense of comfort, yet the photograph implied that there is a silent threat disguised as high fructose corn syrup in most of the foods Americans eat.
Moving onto the actual content, Hamblin's statement about "real" food stood out the most. He explained that we have come to associate "real" with the idea of "healthy" when it comes to food. And when a snack is "made with real fruit" the consumer subconsciously thinks that it must be healthier than a completely artificial equivalent, even though the percentage that is "real" is unspecified. This is only one of the many ways marketers get us to buy their products.
In addition, he also brings in how "real" food, like fruits and vegetables, have come to be classified as "specialty crops" by the USDA. In another class, I had seen a documentary on the American diet, which seemed to correlate very closely to this article. It's often not a choice that many Americans eat so much high fructose corn syrup. Because the government subsidizes corn so much, many people can't afford to eat real food, and have to settle for processed, cheap alternatives.
It seems like many of the world's problems can be traced back to money: processed food, climate change, exploitation, deforestation, the list goes on. And the more money is spent on selling cheap, sugary food, the more easily available and accessible it is.

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Personal Logo

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Response to "Manufacturing Consent"

Having already learned some about US foreign policy and censorship of information, this documentary did not completely take me by surprise. Much of public opinion is shaped by available news sources. Those sources are often owned by large corporations whose best interest is to keep the public ignorant of crucial details in a cycle that ultimately results in the corporations staying in power. They do this much like the metaphor of a newspaper receiving surgery in the documentary. It is almost impossible to find an unbiased news source, which is incredibly frustrating.
The part that makes the situation seem the most hopeless is that people have known this for years. More and more people learn about how the social classes interact and why the wealth gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing, but it seems like nothing will change. It's as if one group makes a push in the right direction, but the news outlets controlled by the corporations are able to smother it by just doing nothing.
It really makes one wonder how long the cycle can go before the system collapses and the majority can no longer keep the minority afloat.

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Vector Face

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