It's hard for me to find the right words to describe things that have shaped my life thus far (i'm sure i'm not the only one). To connect with a part of myself that I rarely talk to others in depth about, I had to go back to the very basic thing that solidifies a part of my identity- food. Specifically, polish food. At first, I wanted to make it broad. Sticking to the niche of my video ended up bottlenecking that homing-voice in for me, and helped to center my focus a bit on figuring how to make the montage reflective of me while also being reflective of to other's feelings about foods that might be true to their cultural experience with food.
After watching it more and more times, and after having critiques in class, I realized that I wasn't satisfied with the message I was trying to bring forth. I was too ambiguous with who the person was starring in my video (Eden, a fellow busser of mine at a restaurant) and the relationship I had to him. I thought it wouldn't matter too much bringing into the video my work relationship to him, but it definitely ended up blurring the line between private and public. My audience could no longer see meaning in what is was that was personal to ME, despite Eden talking about family in the restaurant, and me making polish cookies for my "family" here at school, as a way of my coping with being away from family back at home (in the same way that Eden talked about his association of work family to his real family). It was kind of disheartening to see my message come across as unclear. I feel like I started with a strong storyboard but then led myself askew from it, possibly overthinking it and trying to make it about more than it was. I wish I had cut a lot of the scenes out and edited in some scenes from my personal life at home (my old pictures, mom cooking, etc); just some snapshots to relating my family presence with the work family dynamic I am trying to communicate.
I liked a lot of the shots I took. I think more of them could have varied, especially in the restaurant. I think I could have processed the story of me making the pastries a bit more orderly, timely, basically more chronological. There was room for improvement on many of them.
I'm proud of myself for tackling this personal subject, but I don't think I went all the way that I could have with it. I made it personal but bordering the line of impersonal, my feelings towards the subjects and/or my source of it wasn't relayed through me in the video. As I grow to learn myself better, as well as come to understand how my own familial cultural experiences played a role in how I feel about food and relationships, I think i'll be able to understand better how to put together a vision that is truly encompassing and projective of all the feelings I have had about food throughout my life (good and bad), and perhaps an opportunity to be a reflective piece for others who have also had similar stories to relationships and food.
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
Hito Steyerl
What is a "thing language"? A thing conversation consists of showing the other person who you’re talking to the thing you’re talking about, as it is.
What are some of the "things" that make up the transnational language of documentary? Commerce, general communication, “standard narratives” that are “independent of national or cultural difference”.
How does the "language of documentary" actually make differentiating between real and not real more complicated to figure out? Because now, documentary is able to “conjure up the most spectacular aspects of the language of things and amplifies their power.” They are able to exaggerate one type of event while undermining the rest of the facts. Documentaries today are able to be altered in a way that the past events are conjoined with the present in order to create that visual “thing” language, past and present superimposed over one another to create a new, altered form of visualized documentation. The flow of events in documentaries, mashup of the chain of events timeline, and manipulation of visualized photos, videos, and graphics all make it harder to decipher. “The more extraordinary, catastrophic and eccentric things behave within them, the more everything can stay the same”.
How does the language or tropes of documentary orientate us and isolate us at the same time? “Stereotypical assumptions about so-called cultures can catalyse dangerous social dynamics and align reality step by step to it’s caricatures”. In times of “presumed” conflicts between people, cultures, and countries, documentary is able to play an active role in determining the output, the general face, of the subject in it’s documentary. By pinning the subject of a documentary with it’s conflict, the documentarist is already setting the two subjects at a rift. While it helps to see the rift and understand the events leading up to it, setting this type of material barrier in videos, pictures, words, and recollections can marginalize the subject topic into something basic and lacking of better understanding (because it is so concentrated on the “rift”).
What do you understand a non public public sphere to be? I would consider a non public public sphere to be somewhere that you have your own jurisdiction in within a larger jurisdiction that you have to answer to, perhaps your own office space in a larger space of offices, a doctors office, a closed-classroom, a voting area, etc.
What is a private public sphere? What technologies made a private public sphere possible? Give an example of a private public sphere. A private public sphere is something that is public but is only made available to only certain groups of the public. Technologies that make a private public sphere possible (like a gated community) is financed security systems, safe housing infrastructures, cable channels with privatized shows and movies, subscriptions to media outputs, etc.
What are the different ways that documentaries as distributed to the public in the present day? Documentaries are distributed through many things today. They can be shown in forms of new media and technologies, showcased through exhibitions in museums, or displayed in a chosen public scenery. They can be published through certain online channels, through cable networks, on public/private television or radio. They are sometimes made available online through public sites such as Youtube and Vimeo. Some are distributed through institutions such as school or certain workplaces.
How does privatization lead to commercialism? (Think about: Compare PBS now to when you were a kid.) Privatization, while perhaps gets a better sourcing for finances, is also a controlling force in the sourcing of commercialism. In the case of PBS, which is a publically-funded broadcast that garners support from their audiences, is heading towards a direction of privatization in the form of commercials. Some commercials that i’ve seen in the form of sponsors has been Boeing, an aircraft manufacturer company. I can imagine if companies would begin to take stocks in PBS, that the broadcasting would change dramatically. Since the station would be no longer funded by the public, the channel would need to make money through commercial advertisements. This would change uninterrupted showtimes, and possibly even cut programs to make room for the advertisements.
Do a Google search on Hito Steyerl. Look at at least 3 videos so you can get a idea of what she does.
What connections did you see between her work online and what you just read? Please be specific when referring to one of her artworks.
I watched three of Hito’s works. They were called “Hito Steyerl about Red Alert”, “How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV file”, and “November, 2004”.
In “How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV file”, there were many connections to what she said in the article. She sprung the notions of public and private, of being visible and invisible. In this she was demonstrating how easy it is for a subject or information to be cut from a scenario, using effects such as green paint to merge herself with the green screen, or dictating through narration that she was going “off-screen”, to which she shows herself physically next to the green screen, after which she evaporates from the side of it. She also used a video within the project that demonstrated a prototype for a developmental secured community, with gates and shopping malls and escalators and everything. She talked about how you can become “invisible” by living in one of these protected environments, perhaps alluding to the fact that security and omission of the outside world makes people comfortable living in their own bubbles and not having to question what is what. After she gives that example of how to become visible, she makes other comedic allusions to what this might mean, like “being a woman over the age of 50” with a very monotone, robotic voice. Through her alteration and exposure of what the audience was made to see versus what was happening off-screen, the irony was not lost. This further upheld the article by stating that documentary is something that can be very real or not real, or something in between that’s alluding to the sublime but has tangible pieces of evidence to point to it’s infinite possibilities. But nonetheless, it made me think of how little people understand what actually makes a documentary, the whole piece of evidence, instead of what is just in-front of the screen.
The other one I watched was called November. It was about many things, but mainly started on Hito’s friend Andrea Wolf, who became a martyr symbol for the Kurdish people of Turkey when she was executed by the Turkish government. It was very moving, definitely one of my favorite pieces ever.
Thursday, November 15, 2018
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Project 2 Reflection
I really fell in love with the process of creating this piece more I did with the other pieces we created throughout the semester. The topic reflected in my shared experience of after-school programs and how they assisted me, and how i've grown to see them as absolutely necessary to have available to all education spectrums, especially of those K-12.
It was really nostalgic for me going to my old grade school and seeing how little it had changed. It also made me sad realizing it had not undergone much revision, apart from the security cameras on the walls. I later realized it was good of me to have visited my grade school and used b-roll from it to uphold ideas for my short documentary. I was able to take the feelings that I regained from visiting my grade school and use them to tell a story that reached far before and far beyond my few short years at Bridge Elementary. I found a lot of parallels when interviewing Jaimin, and he helped me to further explore those connections to ideas we both helped create. Through this we were able to construct a bigger picture that combined both of our experiences, as well as shared experiences of all of those involved and mentioned in the piece.
After this semester, i'm really leaning towards documentary being a main focus that i'd like to invest much more time into. It's a medium that enables me to put forth my ideologies as an individual, but more importantly its a medium to which i'll have to spend much time learning to communicate outside of the medium, between story-maker and storyteller. The more time I spend getting to understand how persons interact with our collective memory as people, the more i'll be able to understand how I can better portray those persons through a series that draws a portrayal from their willingness to engage, and be seen.
It was really nostalgic for me going to my old grade school and seeing how little it had changed. It also made me sad realizing it had not undergone much revision, apart from the security cameras on the walls. I later realized it was good of me to have visited my grade school and used b-roll from it to uphold ideas for my short documentary. I was able to take the feelings that I regained from visiting my grade school and use them to tell a story that reached far before and far beyond my few short years at Bridge Elementary. I found a lot of parallels when interviewing Jaimin, and he helped me to further explore those connections to ideas we both helped create. Through this we were able to construct a bigger picture that combined both of our experiences, as well as shared experiences of all of those involved and mentioned in the piece.
After this semester, i'm really leaning towards documentary being a main focus that i'd like to invest much more time into. It's a medium that enables me to put forth my ideologies as an individual, but more importantly its a medium to which i'll have to spend much time learning to communicate outside of the medium, between story-maker and storyteller. The more time I spend getting to understand how persons interact with our collective memory as people, the more i'll be able to understand how I can better portray those persons through a series that draws a portrayal from their willingness to engage, and be seen.
Citizenship Beyond Sovereignty
Photography is an instrument that shifts across varying paths and borders, thus making itself it's own "sovereign". The use of this universal instrument allows the creation of a transparent collective, and the ability for everyone to become a part of. This is how the idea of collective citizenship can represent a person as a representation of the past, present, and future state of mode in the states they've lived in. We are "entering a dialogue" with a persons photographed, in which their power is often times "both silent and silenced".
Giving up the idea that photography is about "me" and my involvement to the subject opens up the entire word of photography as a communicative medium. By gaining the confidence and trust in order to willingly put yourself into the world of photography, as both the spectator and the spectated, this is enabling a full circle to come around, a relationship to form between the viewer and the viewed. Letting yourself be the witness and only letting yourself be the witness is an ignorance that misses the whole point of the subjects involved in the evolving photo process. Giving equity to one another gives the other a staple of trust, and with it comes communication, and with communication comes beautiful work that is understood through both photographer and photographed.
This equity of understanding allows the audience to delve into subjects much more bigger than the individual. Once given each other the opportunity to honestly communicate, the viewer and the viewed can learn things that span borders and limitations, and be able to empathize and relate to each others stories through this representation of an exchange of information that they created when they made the moment in the photograph.
The individual of subject will always be the focus, but the collective individual community represented by the image of that one subject is a reinforcement for all the other individuals who are living in the same shared experience.
In the ideal moment.
Giving up the idea that photography is about "me" and my involvement to the subject opens up the entire word of photography as a communicative medium. By gaining the confidence and trust in order to willingly put yourself into the world of photography, as both the spectator and the spectated, this is enabling a full circle to come around, a relationship to form between the viewer and the viewed. Letting yourself be the witness and only letting yourself be the witness is an ignorance that misses the whole point of the subjects involved in the evolving photo process. Giving equity to one another gives the other a staple of trust, and with it comes communication, and with communication comes beautiful work that is understood through both photographer and photographed.
This equity of understanding allows the audience to delve into subjects much more bigger than the individual. Once given each other the opportunity to honestly communicate, the viewer and the viewed can learn things that span borders and limitations, and be able to empathize and relate to each others stories through this representation of an exchange of information that they created when they made the moment in the photograph.
The individual of subject will always be the focus, but the collective individual community represented by the image of that one subject is a reinforcement for all the other individuals who are living in the same shared experience.
In the ideal moment.
Monday, October 29, 2018
We Will Become Statues (video)
I thought this piece gave a very intimate look using every day montage sequences in co-op with an audio that was deeply profound in it's vivid use of storytelling. The visuals were pictures of still or moving images, most of which had a still background but had action happening in the foreground, like people walking or machinery moving, or snow falling against the night sky at the end. The stills used their movements wisely and coexisted in time with one another, allowing the viewer to catch up on the split screens as they were listening to Katherine Arline talk about her experiences on the mid-20's New York mental health system scene, working in "State myriads and as a social worker and case supervisor. It made a mark to address the main catastrophes of these people's experiences by sequencing the audio in a repetitive and discombobulated order, reflecting details in the system that are flawed, as well as how they're shaped by the people and their environments, that collectively make it flawed.
One of the patients was picked up on the streets, found wandering alone and through city intersections at some time midday. Katherine explained that he was pretty young, Asian, and apparently was deaf and mute. They picked him up, and he would not say anything to the workers. But, after he was examined by an Asian doctor, the man started to speak to the doctor. This barrier of language, was a big issue present in many of the cases in those early days. I was just interviewing Jaimin for Illini Mentors, and we were discussing how international students here get ostracized at first because of the lack of similar representatives their age, their interests, their willingness to give their time to try and communicate to someone who does not speak the same language, I think that poses a lot of questioning in how we begin to approach integrative service in a social working medium. The representative faces of many institutions do not reflect its inhabitants.
Near the end, there was a mention of patients eventually realizing they held a disconnect for the settings that their environments, shaped by a physical association to precedents outlining the building as a place they would never get out of. This mental feedback that these places were bad only support the notion that they were understaffed and underfunded, leading to a poor execution of their institutional responsibilities as a state mental facility. This matter of fixed environments with unchanging processions in social adaptation to the simplest matter of equitable sustainability for each individual, we cement them further into the system instead of letting them go through a rehabilitated cycle of treatment.
One of the patients was picked up on the streets, found wandering alone and through city intersections at some time midday. Katherine explained that he was pretty young, Asian, and apparently was deaf and mute. They picked him up, and he would not say anything to the workers. But, after he was examined by an Asian doctor, the man started to speak to the doctor. This barrier of language, was a big issue present in many of the cases in those early days. I was just interviewing Jaimin for Illini Mentors, and we were discussing how international students here get ostracized at first because of the lack of similar representatives their age, their interests, their willingness to give their time to try and communicate to someone who does not speak the same language, I think that poses a lot of questioning in how we begin to approach integrative service in a social working medium. The representative faces of many institutions do not reflect its inhabitants.
Near the end, there was a mention of patients eventually realizing they held a disconnect for the settings that their environments, shaped by a physical association to precedents outlining the building as a place they would never get out of. This mental feedback that these places were bad only support the notion that they were understaffed and underfunded, leading to a poor execution of their institutional responsibilities as a state mental facility. This matter of fixed environments with unchanging processions in social adaptation to the simplest matter of equitable sustainability for each individual, we cement them further into the system instead of letting them go through a rehabilitated cycle of treatment.
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Mic Fun
https://vimeo.com/295319246
Shotgun Mic:
Sources:
http://www.shure.com/americas/products/microphones/vp/vp83 https://static.bhphotovideo.com/lit_files/314639.pdf
Answers:
- Dynamic or condenser: electret condenser
- Mic does not have phantom power
- Frequency: 50–20,000 Hz
- Mic has roll off switch
- Polar pattern: supercardioid/lobar
- “The low-cut filter reduces low frequency rumble caused by camera handling and other environmental factors by rolling off low frequencies 170 Hz and below (12 dB per octave).” - was only information given about sensitivity.
- Output impedance up to 171 Ω
- Unbalanced
- 1 kHz at 1% THD[2], 1000 Ω load - Maximum 129 dB SPL
Lavalier Mic - Wireless Lav Mic
- Dynamic
- Phantom power - No, most condensers have that though
- Frequency Range: 35Hz - 22kHz
- Yes - most have low-frequency roll-off
- Omnidirectional/cardioid
- Dynamic range (typical): 102 dB.
- Impedance: 1800 Ohm.
- Unbalanced
- Maximum 110 dB SPL
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
Summary of Marta Zarzycka : Showing Sounds
Sound us so pertinent to our understanding of the world around us. Without the collective memory of sound that most people share, we could not translate the many voices, vibrations, and proximity of the events and people happening in them around us. Sound surrounds our 360 senses and elevates our experience, while also centering our direction of understanding through the manipulation of the very same sounds that we recognize/associate with certain sources. Are the sounds disjointed in the documentary video because they are telling of a story thats discombobulated? Or are the subjects in the video trying to extend the notion of being addled by whatever it is thats discontinuing the progression of their daily lives. Either way, the message that the sound interprets can be taken as an additive approach to the experiences on the documentary, or it can become a negative approach that strips away at the focal point of the siphoned unfolding.
The realities of a photograph can reach the audience watching if it makes a connection with the viewers presence in relation to the subject matter of the photograph. Since photographs are something of a hole in the time space continuum (because they are "neither now or later, here or there"), they're a recollection as well as a reminder of what was and what could yet come if the actions portrayed in the photographs are reminiscent of today's times and issues. It was explained in the article that if we allow ourselves to actually witness rather than just observe the subjects and their matters in the photograph, we can restore the accountability and status, which could have been denied in the moment of the photograph, but also could extenuate to other similar circumstances happening right now in the world.
The content and context of the project being showcased can be staged in it's own message. Sounds and rhythms are usually manipulated, regardless of their original form or source. Even interviews straight from a source can be altered in terms of rhythm, continuity, and volume. This can positively change the emotional output of the documented to increase awareness for it, as well as vary the emotional impact of the message to be unlimited from one stoic inheritance of sound. The bumps and grinds and twists of a soundtrack take us to that reality being shown in the documentary, but it also distinguishes our reality from the reality being physically captured on screen. In example of a 4D movie, it can heighten our senses of what it must feel like to be in that scenario captured on screen, rather than just watching it in 2D and relating to it via sight only. With a full body and sense immersement, I believe we become more empathetic to the lived experiences we see on screen, yet we can never truly replicate the way they've unfolded in real time, only interpret.
The realities of a photograph can reach the audience watching if it makes a connection with the viewers presence in relation to the subject matter of the photograph. Since photographs are something of a hole in the time space continuum (because they are "neither now or later, here or there"), they're a recollection as well as a reminder of what was and what could yet come if the actions portrayed in the photographs are reminiscent of today's times and issues. It was explained in the article that if we allow ourselves to actually witness rather than just observe the subjects and their matters in the photograph, we can restore the accountability and status, which could have been denied in the moment of the photograph, but also could extenuate to other similar circumstances happening right now in the world.
The content and context of the project being showcased can be staged in it's own message. Sounds and rhythms are usually manipulated, regardless of their original form or source. Even interviews straight from a source can be altered in terms of rhythm, continuity, and volume. This can positively change the emotional output of the documented to increase awareness for it, as well as vary the emotional impact of the message to be unlimited from one stoic inheritance of sound. The bumps and grinds and twists of a soundtrack take us to that reality being shown in the documentary, but it also distinguishes our reality from the reality being physically captured on screen. In example of a 4D movie, it can heighten our senses of what it must feel like to be in that scenario captured on screen, rather than just watching it in 2D and relating to it via sight only. With a full body and sense immersement, I believe we become more empathetic to the lived experiences we see on screen, yet we can never truly replicate the way they've unfolded in real time, only interpret.
Thursday, October 4, 2018
Summary of Chion Listening
! Late ! Thought we just had to read and we'd discuss it in class with no reflection.
Causal sound is more of a sound that we base off direction, pressure, depth, etc. The causal sound can be relative to something we find familiar, or it's something that's taken out of context even though it has a familiar pitch and frequency, if we hear it somewhere we make an assumption that's what it is even though it may be out of it's own content. In this case we are identifying even unnamed sounds, and putting associations and faces to them. This causal type of listening is also most important to distinguish between human and animal sounds, or between mechanical and nature sounds. The way we interpret these sounds is how we put them into boxes that fit our descriptions of those images/sounds we associate each with.
Semantic listening is more to do with language and how the organization of these noises are varying in pitch, tone, and repetition, etc. It's about how the collection of these sounds creates a story, rather than what the sounds are itself. Semantic listening is the most expanded upon study of listening, because there are so many formulas and variations of communicative language all around the world that it's impossible to pinpoint a singular sound to a meaning unless it is connected with another sound to make a rhythm that is passed down and understood over time.
Reduced listening was the most interesting, because it was the one that most responded to me as an artist. You basically strip the sound of all it's prior meanings and associations and take it as a whole of its own. There are sounds that we take for granted, like the sound of rain or the sound of traffic on a crossing cross walk. These sounds have meaning and they come from somewhere, but sampled in a song or turned into a sample for a project can change the meaning to an individual completely. This is why music is so personal yet so much of a semantic in its own way. Musical artists study the past sounds of greater artists gone, and they take their meanings and experiences and relate it to their own, sometimes even reflecting similar sounds and gestures in their composition. This creates a language in it's own, but it's not stoic in it's meaning. It's constantly changing and being added onto, creating a whole other generation of collective memory to those singling out the sounds they find most resonating.
Causal sound is more of a sound that we base off direction, pressure, depth, etc. The causal sound can be relative to something we find familiar, or it's something that's taken out of context even though it has a familiar pitch and frequency, if we hear it somewhere we make an assumption that's what it is even though it may be out of it's own content. In this case we are identifying even unnamed sounds, and putting associations and faces to them. This causal type of listening is also most important to distinguish between human and animal sounds, or between mechanical and nature sounds. The way we interpret these sounds is how we put them into boxes that fit our descriptions of those images/sounds we associate each with.
Semantic listening is more to do with language and how the organization of these noises are varying in pitch, tone, and repetition, etc. It's about how the collection of these sounds creates a story, rather than what the sounds are itself. Semantic listening is the most expanded upon study of listening, because there are so many formulas and variations of communicative language all around the world that it's impossible to pinpoint a singular sound to a meaning unless it is connected with another sound to make a rhythm that is passed down and understood over time.
Reduced listening was the most interesting, because it was the one that most responded to me as an artist. You basically strip the sound of all it's prior meanings and associations and take it as a whole of its own. There are sounds that we take for granted, like the sound of rain or the sound of traffic on a crossing cross walk. These sounds have meaning and they come from somewhere, but sampled in a song or turned into a sample for a project can change the meaning to an individual completely. This is why music is so personal yet so much of a semantic in its own way. Musical artists study the past sounds of greater artists gone, and they take their meanings and experiences and relate it to their own, sometimes even reflecting similar sounds and gestures in their composition. This creates a language in it's own, but it's not stoic in it's meaning. It's constantly changing and being added onto, creating a whole other generation of collective memory to those singling out the sounds they find most resonating.
Project 1 Reflection
I actually really enjoyed making this introductory project for class. Once I started to mind map and storyboard my ideas, then came the technical difficulties of realizing how I was going to piece together the visuals with the mechanics of Premiere. I knew that I wanted to overlap, or juxtapose, the two conflicting ideologies of the way appliance advertising presented woman in the early and late 50's, as well as show a correlation of its continuation into today's media outputs. I struggled with what effects could most clearly communicate that thought so that the order of events in the video would match up with the message goal at the end. I also struggled with some technical issues around the sizing of the video. Every time I imported it the video would zoom out the screen to about 200% without any prior editing to the clips/frames themselves. I was upset because the end product of the re-re-sized frame ended up grainy, as opposed to the really sharp imagery on the camera. Overall I had a really fun time experimenting with the literal and metaphorical interpretations in my video. At first I was startled that my video didn't look a lot like everyone else's in the sense of dialogue and a somewhat clear chain of events, but in the end I began to realize that I did end up getting my message across for the most part and was happy to find how my mind mapping came together on screen.
Monday, September 24, 2018
Summarize Whitechapel 180-197
This section of our book talks about the realities of documenting history through the addition or subtraction of editorials, the software, reenactments/replica, rendition, and any other action put forth on a documentary thats allows the viewer to reminisce about the subject, enabled to remember and contemplate it. Stallabrass uses these interviews with the creatives to further uphold the notion of the need for inclusivity in individual voices that comprise a collective fantasized community outlook. But the way the creator of the documentary makes the documentary, the way they edit, the history during the time they're filming, the context, the subject, the editorial, the effects; these all are constantly changing as time moves forward and history continues to be alive in the present moment we find ourselves in.
Stallabrass uses examples from creatives that infuse all kinds of materials and timely aspects into their works to relate them through the public, hopefully making it's way into individuals homes and mindsets and fostering positive connections between them and future generations to come. A big factor in this is how we learn to perceive and interpret media. One example is that all the editorial software available to us today is manipulating our ability to distinguish between reality and dream. It can also be an editorial technique used to center a viewers attention on the time, place, and quality of the video. In the jihadist videos that came out after 9/11, the quality of the video was made to seem as if the terrorists were not to strike again, transcribing this through screen by rendering the quality of the video to be of VCR quality. Another quality was described in the As Sahab videos in which all features of the camera were utilized; the night-vision, the bluetooth audio, etc. This allows the consumers of these videos to be fully immersed in the experience, and perhaps unwillingly coerced into being their visual consumers, creating a force by audience number and attention.
Another artist talked about reenactments and renditions of old media and history. The issue with this was that this dramatized the experience of the people who actually witnessed it. Recreating a witness of an event is still dramatized, no matter if you only get material from the persons who were there in the first place. The real reality is living in the present moment of the history of the people who know the in's and out's as much as they can in reality to the time difference of the event and the reenactment.
This leads into our main idea of factuals and how they change in accordance with time, culture, geography, people, presenter, audience, platform, medium, etc. etc. The way we present an argument or vision changes in the period we are in, and depends on a lot more factors than just straight facts to present. In an age where media is conditioning to the ways in which we percieve and accept information, I think the media of documentary has the power to become something so multifaceted that if done right, it could be the basis to a majority of our media references and relations in the future.
Stallabrass uses examples from creatives that infuse all kinds of materials and timely aspects into their works to relate them through the public, hopefully making it's way into individuals homes and mindsets and fostering positive connections between them and future generations to come. A big factor in this is how we learn to perceive and interpret media. One example is that all the editorial software available to us today is manipulating our ability to distinguish between reality and dream. It can also be an editorial technique used to center a viewers attention on the time, place, and quality of the video. In the jihadist videos that came out after 9/11, the quality of the video was made to seem as if the terrorists were not to strike again, transcribing this through screen by rendering the quality of the video to be of VCR quality. Another quality was described in the As Sahab videos in which all features of the camera were utilized; the night-vision, the bluetooth audio, etc. This allows the consumers of these videos to be fully immersed in the experience, and perhaps unwillingly coerced into being their visual consumers, creating a force by audience number and attention.
Another artist talked about reenactments and renditions of old media and history. The issue with this was that this dramatized the experience of the people who actually witnessed it. Recreating a witness of an event is still dramatized, no matter if you only get material from the persons who were there in the first place. The real reality is living in the present moment of the history of the people who know the in's and out's as much as they can in reality to the time difference of the event and the reenactment.
This leads into our main idea of factuals and how they change in accordance with time, culture, geography, people, presenter, audience, platform, medium, etc. etc. The way we present an argument or vision changes in the period we are in, and depends on a lot more factors than just straight facts to present. In an age where media is conditioning to the ways in which we percieve and accept information, I think the media of documentary has the power to become something so multifaceted that if done right, it could be the basis to a majority of our media references and relations in the future.
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Monday, September 17, 2018
SUMMARY 9.18.18
In addition to becoming it's own art form, reality created a new scope of vision into the reality of a romanticized medium. The way that documentaries were made were presented in story form rather than reflected of a real chain of events. Early documentaries followed formulas and had scripts with beginnings, middles and ends. While this is the standard formatting for any storyboarding, the beginning, middle, and end lays itself out as the story of reality progresses. The collector of the media, the director, takes time to assemble the pieces created and style them in a way that they think best represents the story.
The key word here again is "style". This is still the main argument of what documentary presents when we present it through our eyes. The vision of a good reality is to not be bound by constructions of what should happen, or what we think played out despite seeing something completely different. While it may be tempting to tell the story from our point of view, it's important to think about the subject of the film as the topic involved, not through the vision of the person or topic becoming involved by immersing themselves in the situation. Not arguing that one's immersion in the topic or situation being filmed is bad, it's just that their presence can become too overbearing in the context of the film. A good documentarist takes the piece for what it is and doesn't manipulate it to their liking, but looks at it from a whole, all the good and bad, and tries to piece it together coherently and simply, replicating the order of events and reactions similar to what the raw chain of events was when it played out.
This form of art is one of the purest. Or it should be. If done right, documentary should be the purest form of communication and inception. Purest doesn't mean clean or exceptional or divine, it just means that it accepts all forms of documentary, the ugly and the pretty. Mostly the ugly. The documentary should aim to fixate on the respondents to raw materials, which can be anything and everything. The idea is to have meaning behind every image shown. Every clip and material and person being shown has to relate back to the environment of the films meaning itself. Documentary should be kept to the most minimal stylistic appropriation possible, but show all the qualities of real life coherently and with meaning.
Monday, September 10, 2018
Summarize "Night and Fog" 9.11.18
This film presents footage from the stoic aftermath of the Holocaust. The story is told through the narrator, the only voice present in the entire movie. Even though they had no audio to match the video, it sorta plays into its own metaphor that the victims of this massacre had no voice. This helps establish that this is more than a documentary; it signifies that it is a pertinent moment in our history and that we should pay attention to the fragility of the human cycle.
The movie was juxtaposing moments of peacefulness with moments of gore, as well as showcasing them in the same shot to show their inevitable inseparability.
The images of life and growth in the beginning of the film was represented through shots of families, children, city scapes; normal life. These clips only appear in the beginning to signify normality, the beginning of where it all began. Only in the beginning of the movie, before the war erupted, could we see the stability that was once these people’s lives.
The movie also went half and half with this idea of life and death. Throughout, shots of meadows and still-life in the green made you think of a tucked away farm or factory on the outskirts of a larger, populated centrum. In the middle of a nature centrum, these death factories were kept a secret between the hierarchy for nearly the entire time they were operating. The buildings were designed to be as plain as possible, using the basic architecture to transcribe normality, a smoke screen for everything that was hidden behind. These jump cuts from meadow to human body to overgrown railroad to shutting doors; they all stem from the physicality of the place itself. The way the earth was used, the way it was walked on, the institutions and formalities that were built on it. This concentration camp was contracted, built from nature, and then filled with its occupants. The film does a brilliant job at disclosing the origins of the site as well as the progression of the use of it.
But the movies visual focus wasn’t solely mimicking the natural cycle of death, it wanted to foremost highlight the human-imposed death that made the whole cycle start in the first place. Without the man, there would be no idea. Without the idea, the action of constructing the camp would have never sprung to life. Without the construction, the victims would never have filled it. The film goes into action and reaction sequences, and before and after shots. The explanatory or filler action scenes are usually followed up by gruesome reaction scenes of bodies being thrown limp or people looking empty at the camera, prompting the viewer to react immediately to the information being visually presented and audibly described.
Sunday, September 9, 2018
Project 1 Proposal
Women have always been objectified in media, but the image medium for this objectification has been made ubiquitous in our every day thoughts, actions, and experience. Advertising is a form of communication and creation, but it also serves as an exploitation tactic to the idea or image that it wants to sell. The Capitalistic commodity of advertising sells as a portrayal of itself, working both sides of the coin as it distributes it's business incentive while simultaneously conforming it's image to embody societal norms and cultural values, which are of course stereotyped, and do not actually reflect the cultural reality of today.
Since the middle of the 1950's, the media image representation of women has evolved dramatically. What was once a magazine filled with commercials of vacuums and stovetops created for stay-at-home moms became a platform, calling for the "normalization" of women to wanting to have to better themselves. To adhere to present times and to apply their image to the new feministic wave, advertisers urged their female consumers to value self-appreciation and freedom. This would have been nice, if only the advertisers reinforced that shifting cultural value and reflected it by realistically portraying images of women being self-appreciative in every lifestyle, not just the one that seemed culturally fit.
Presenting the value of self-appreciation as an image crafted to encompass societal expectations of the "average" American woman persona has has major effects on women who don't find themselves being represented in that media persona. Over the decades, the media has white-washed representations of beauty in almost every major advertisement dedicated to women's beauty and cosmetics. Today, these major Eurocentric media outlets are continuing to culturally appropriate the exact same groups that they fail to represent in their media exemplars.
The focus of my project is to show how the media devolved from objectifying women through conservative portrayals and traditional images, to rapidly transforming it's focus to the image of sexualization and total exploitation the woman's body in the name of creating an image to sell. If sex and sexual liberation were going mainstream on the front pages, so grew the now-omnipresent sexualization of women as objects rather than subjects.
Since the middle of the 1950's, the media image representation of women has evolved dramatically. What was once a magazine filled with commercials of vacuums and stovetops created for stay-at-home moms became a platform, calling for the "normalization" of women to wanting to have to better themselves. To adhere to present times and to apply their image to the new feministic wave, advertisers urged their female consumers to value self-appreciation and freedom. This would have been nice, if only the advertisers reinforced that shifting cultural value and reflected it by realistically portraying images of women being self-appreciative in every lifestyle, not just the one that seemed culturally fit.
Presenting the value of self-appreciation as an image crafted to encompass societal expectations of the "average" American woman persona has has major effects on women who don't find themselves being represented in that media persona. Over the decades, the media has white-washed representations of beauty in almost every major advertisement dedicated to women's beauty and cosmetics. Today, these major Eurocentric media outlets are continuing to culturally appropriate the exact same groups that they fail to represent in their media exemplars.
The focus of my project is to show how the media devolved from objectifying women through conservative portrayals and traditional images, to rapidly transforming it's focus to the image of sexualization and total exploitation the woman's body in the name of creating an image to sell. If sex and sexual liberation were going mainstream on the front pages, so grew the now-omnipresent sexualization of women as objects rather than subjects.
Thursday, September 6, 2018
Sept. 6th Sergei Einstein
The way I understood it, the montage being spoken about in the article is the actual piece of work itself, however long, made up of shots (individual cells). The way that Einstein describes the art of montage is how it grows from individual cells. The whole of the montage is realized through devotion to the baselines of the work. The effort of organizing every cell so that it's lighting, shape, style, stillness or speed coincides just enough and not too much for the contrast to go overboard. It keeps the pace but switches from shot to shot to show a changing and forming film world, but not enough to lose a watcher in the midst of the collisions. Good montage sequences do exactly that. Artists use auditory and visuals in pair with one another, creating a rhythm by using the two senses are reflectors of each other. The synchronization is something that we've managed to achieve today when it comes to sound and visual performance, and I can only image all the tools we'll be seeing in the enhancement of montage.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
The Corporation; Tuesday, 4th September 2018
This documentaries job is not just to simply define the interactions that happen between corporation and humanity. This film shows the hierarchical processes by which certain images find themselves at the forefront of a persons apperception. It also tells us how these corporation powers have managed to falsely fold over the public, the government, the FDA, college professors, and research/facility funding. Widely talked about in the feature is the idea that a business should be seen as a group of persons in power enacting the collective corporation's wishes, not as one person making all the calls. These power cells in the anatomies of these businesses can be made up of the nicest people you've ever met, but together, they have the ability to bring down entire communities, cities, and even greater parts of the Earth.
Privatization of the public and rain waters in Bolivia's third largest city Cochabamba led to a total destabilization of pertinent services in community infrastructures. The water laws prevented people from collecting this water to survive, and used their unpaid bills to evict people out of their lands. These infrastructures of education, public health and sanitation, and employment were uprooted and further demolished by the Bechtel vs Bolivia's Water War in Cochabamba. When the people asked for water, they got teargassed. When the people had to pay for water now, they stopped affording sending their children to school. When water and basic services are held in the hands of a corporation that owns however much of a percent of fresh water reserves, that percent of water owned doesn't reflect the number of people who would be affected if those reserves were to cease existing, to which they'd be left in the instruction of the corporations. And I don't think those corporations have any training in dealing with emergency water shortages.
"Transnational corporations have a long and dark history of condoning tyrannical operations. Corporations in Germany led to the upheld of Fascism". Today, the boycott of the once Nazi drink Fanta created for Germany so that Coca Cola could keep their operations running and flowing into Germany during WWII, would do no good or harm in the grand scheme of things. Corporations like Coca Cola are able to disregard any major cataclysm, as long as their effusion of monetary funds keeps circulating from public to public.
The concepts of some of these stories are horrifying. It showed me just how easily it is within the present jurisdictions of businesses to systematically control and organize lives within entire continents. The day that Snowden defected and released those documents was a governmental breach of privacy using web surveillance, a ploy using a medium made possible by the boom of the 21st century interfaces, such as cell phones and online social networkings. Companies and governments alike have been using techniques to track the movements of their public way before Snowden, though. IBM's were German-ordered punch cards used to collect census and death tracks within WWII concentration camps. The same IBM's came from a company that dispersed their regular punch card products to citizens all around, keeping quiet about their productions until the crimes were disowned to the public.
The leverage that a single individual might have against a thriving and expansive business is microscopic. Even governments have become powerless under the gaze of corporations through their expansive globalization process. But, the leverage changes fast if the individual were to have something that the business was scared of revealing, a change of roles in cat versus mouse. These leverages can be created, and the actions of businesses can be exposed when the moral collective consciousness comes together from those who voice their concerns not as individuals, but as a community that wants to take back its claim on this Earth and doesn't want those rights being infringed upon.
Privatization of the public and rain waters in Bolivia's third largest city Cochabamba led to a total destabilization of pertinent services in community infrastructures. The water laws prevented people from collecting this water to survive, and used their unpaid bills to evict people out of their lands. These infrastructures of education, public health and sanitation, and employment were uprooted and further demolished by the Bechtel vs Bolivia's Water War in Cochabamba. When the people asked for water, they got teargassed. When the people had to pay for water now, they stopped affording sending their children to school. When water and basic services are held in the hands of a corporation that owns however much of a percent of fresh water reserves, that percent of water owned doesn't reflect the number of people who would be affected if those reserves were to cease existing, to which they'd be left in the instruction of the corporations. And I don't think those corporations have any training in dealing with emergency water shortages.
"Transnational corporations have a long and dark history of condoning tyrannical operations. Corporations in Germany led to the upheld of Fascism". Today, the boycott of the once Nazi drink Fanta created for Germany so that Coca Cola could keep their operations running and flowing into Germany during WWII, would do no good or harm in the grand scheme of things. Corporations like Coca Cola are able to disregard any major cataclysm, as long as their effusion of monetary funds keeps circulating from public to public.
The concepts of some of these stories are horrifying. It showed me just how easily it is within the present jurisdictions of businesses to systematically control and organize lives within entire continents. The day that Snowden defected and released those documents was a governmental breach of privacy using web surveillance, a ploy using a medium made possible by the boom of the 21st century interfaces, such as cell phones and online social networkings. Companies and governments alike have been using techniques to track the movements of their public way before Snowden, though. IBM's were German-ordered punch cards used to collect census and death tracks within WWII concentration camps. The same IBM's came from a company that dispersed their regular punch card products to citizens all around, keeping quiet about their productions until the crimes were disowned to the public.
The leverage that a single individual might have against a thriving and expansive business is microscopic. Even governments have become powerless under the gaze of corporations through their expansive globalization process. But, the leverage changes fast if the individual were to have something that the business was scared of revealing, a change of roles in cat versus mouse. These leverages can be created, and the actions of businesses can be exposed when the moral collective consciousness comes together from those who voice their concerns not as individuals, but as a community that wants to take back its claim on this Earth and doesn't want those rights being infringed upon.
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
Summary and Response Week 1 08/29/18
My bias tells me that not every picture has meaning, and that not everyone approaches images holistically. Photos should promote and engage viewers in some type of feeling or energy that stems from their experiences, moments, real life scenarios, or scenarios of real life worst fears. Photographs can be anything that reality is made up of, but there is always a chance that there are things within that reality which could be taken over by the personal biases of the artist. Censorship is a grey area that includes anything before or beyond and between the extortion of someone's privacy, to a governments sanctioning limits on media outputs that house international browsing interfaces.
An artist should be able to showcase their political stances in work and to represent their personal views through their lenses, as long as they're being aware and respectful of the audience they're getting views from. As important as the taker of the image, comes the receiver of it. What good is an artist trying to portray an accurate and honest depiction if the viewer doesn't understand the possible implications of the artist leaving out vital pieces of information pertaining to the subjects circumstances? The type of audience that accepts works without delving into their meanings and creations are lost to the collective importance of both artist conscious and personality aesthetic working together, aesthetic of which comes after, to understand that everything shiny and bright is really not as good as it seems on the outer edges of its background, and that even everything gruesomely ill has a natural tendency for realness. This realization develops alongside societies growing ability to recognize, accept, and change it's behaviors as a whole, which usually start with individuals beginning to change society as a one.
An artist should be able to showcase their political stances in work and to represent their personal views through their lenses, as long as they're being aware and respectful of the audience they're getting views from. As important as the taker of the image, comes the receiver of it. What good is an artist trying to portray an accurate and honest depiction if the viewer doesn't understand the possible implications of the artist leaving out vital pieces of information pertaining to the subjects circumstances? The type of audience that accepts works without delving into their meanings and creations are lost to the collective importance of both artist conscious and personality aesthetic working together, aesthetic of which comes after, to understand that everything shiny and bright is really not as good as it seems on the outer edges of its background, and that even everything gruesomely ill has a natural tendency for realness. This realization develops alongside societies growing ability to recognize, accept, and change it's behaviors as a whole, which usually start with individuals beginning to change society as a one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)