Course News

Historical Remix, Due Date Remixed

So the new deadline for the historical remix/montage assignment is Tuesday Nov. 6.
In terms of thinking about how to construct your images, here are some examples of photo-montage:
An abridged summary of some historical eras of photo-montage
Nicholas Lampert (check out the meatscapes and machine-animal collages)
Martha Rosler (the "bring the war home" 1 & 2 series)
Images:
Top, Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1956.
Bottom, Martha Rosler, Nature Girls (Jumping Janes), from the series Body Beautiful or Body Knows No Pain, 1966–72.

posted by ryan griffis at 12:50 PM Tuesday, October 30, 2007

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Guest Lecture Today at 5:30 - KAM 62

For anyone who happens to check the blog today in time, a very interesting artist, Wendy Jacob will be speaking. I really encourage everyone who can to attend this.
About the artist:

Jacob makes objects and site-based works that are rooted in architecture and domestic space. Much of the work employs movement or temperature shifts and references the presence of a body. For the past several years she has worked with Temple Grandin, an autistic woman and animal scientist, in developing furniture that squeezes or 'hugs' the sitter. Jacob is also a member of the Chicago-based collaborative group Haha. Working together since 1989, their work focuses on the exploration of social positions relative to a particular site. Haha has produced projects incorporating a wide range of media including video installation and broadcast, audio tours, community gardens, live performance and interactive installations.

Jacob has exhibited internationally at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Whitney Biennial, Galerie Emmanuel Perotin (Paris), MIT List Visual Arts Center, Chicago Project Room, Galerie Schipper and Krome (Cologne), among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Artist Fellowship, Creative Capital Artist Fellowship, New Forms Regional Initiative Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship.

posted by ryan griffis at 9:39 AM Monday, October 29, 2007

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Historical Narrative Looking for Similar, Compatible Narrative

We have someone who has not exchanged their historic narrative materials with anyone yet and is in need of connecting with someone who has either not swapped yet, or hasn't begun work on the narrative they have swapped, to trade with. If you meet these requirements, please email Dane at dgaydos2 AT uiuc DOT edu. Thanks.

posted by ryan griffis at 11:32 AM Saturday, October 27, 2007

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For-Educational-Use-Only 7

WEDNESDAY, October 24th:
/Performing For The Camera/

As always, A&D 229, 7pm

Alex Bag
Untitled Fall '95
1995, 57:00, color, sound
In Untitled Fall '95, Bag, at the time an art student, "plays" Bag the art student. In a series of deadpan performances, Bag gathers fragments of pop detritus, fashioning a thoroughly mediated document that is at once a celebration and a record of loss. With the narrative inevitability of a TV serial, the eight diaristic segments trace a woman's struggle to make sense of her experience at art school. As each installment marks the start of a new semester, Bag's character addresses the camera with her latest observations and frustrations.

Peter Campus
Third Tape
1976, 5:06, color, sound
Of Third Tape, Campus writes, "This man tries to abstract himself using age-old methods reminiscent of German Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism. Art issues of line and plane are dredged up. Perhaps to be subtitled: the war between man and man-made objects." Recasting these modernist art historical antecedents, Campus presents a disjunctive sense of identity and self by focusing on the effect of a single action on a close-up of the face.

Paul McCarthy
Sauce
1974, 18:00, color, sound
McCarthy gained recognition for his intense performance and video-based work on taboo subjects such as the body, sexuality, and initiation rituals. In his performative video piece, Sauce, McCarthy covers his entire body in sauce.

Pipilotti Rist

I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much
1986, 7:46, color, sound
Rist's classic video takes on rock music with its own tools, pushing pop's repetitive strategies and representations of women to absurd lengths. Footage of the artist chanting the piece's title (a line adapted from The Beatles' song Happiness is a Warm Gun) is replayed at high and low speeds, with obscuring video effects, blurring into an almost painterly procession of images. Rist's manipulation renders her voice into a parody of female hysteria and her body into a grotesquely dancing doll.

Sip My Ocean
1996, 5:00, color, sound
Her video depicts a world of sensual pleasure with its elegant shots of underwater landscapes, submerging and re-emerging figures and everyday household objects slowly drifting to the ocean floor. Once again Rist appropriates a male singer's song; her whispery version of Chris Isaak’s pop song, "Wicked Game," soothes with its haunting melody, though the song's lyrics speak of the fact that sometimes paradise, love and desire may not be all that they promise.

Ever Is Over All
1997, 4:30, color, sound
Inteded as a double video projection, Ever Is Over All contrasts flowers in a field with a woman in sparkling ruby slippers promenading down a car-lined street. The fluidity of both scenes is disrupted when the woman violently smashes a row of car windshields with the long-stemmed flower she carries.

posted by ryan griffis at 5:21 PM Tuesday, October 23, 2007

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Historical Remix: Project 3 (for Thursday 10/25)

Below are the steps for Project 3, the first of which you should have completed. Step 2, the exchange of your results from step 1 should be done at the beginning of class on Thursday, or before. There are no restrictions on who you exchange with.
Step 3 you will start in class on Thursday, so you need to make sure that you have your materials to exchange, or the materials you have already exchanged with someone. Depending on individual needs, class time will be spent doing digital research, photoshop exercises, beginning production on the final image.

Step 1: Locate a historical narrative that exists in the social imaginary (i.e. something that we can assume has some level of cultural distribution beyond personal geographies) that has somehow had an effect on you that you can describe. These narratives should not be solely biographical or geographical in nature - no stories that are someone's "life story". They should be event-based, something having a more-or-less conventional beginning and end. Bring in 1) an image related to the event 2) an institutional account of the story (encyclopedia, newpaper) 3) a first-person account of the story 4) a description of how this event has impacted you.

Step 2: Exchange your chosen narrative and materials with someone in the class.

Step 3: Create a pictorial montage(as distinct from a collage or composite) that uses these 4 elements, supplemented by additional images and text. This picture should use the images and texts to tell the story of the relationship between the person whose information you received and the historical event.
Half of your text and image sources should be made up of primary sources and be gathered in non-electronic form to be scanned, copied or used otherwise. For information on primary sources - see the UIUC Library tutorial on the subject. The other half can be secondary sources and/or images/text chosen/created for aesthetic and narrative affect, etc.
Details: One 11x14 inkjet print. To be clear, you final work must be on paper and involve some digital image manipulation, but can involve physically manipulated materials (cut up printed matter, drawing, painting, etc) that were not processed digitally.
Due date will be Thursday Nov 1.

posted by ryan griffis at 2:38 PM

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Following the Discussion About Sekula's Body and the Archive

UK's The Independent paper has a story about some comments made by James Watson, one of scientists credited with the "discovery" of DNA. The comments were in regard to racial, ethnic and geographic ties to intellegence:

Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

While some may dismiss Watson as a cranky old scientist with some equally cranky old ideas, the fact that he feels confident making such statements publicly should say something about the persistence of the "absurd" ideas from the 19th Century (end earlier) Sekula discussed in the text. And even more, that such ideas are still considered issues of "science".

posted by ryan griffis at 9:12 AM Thursday, October 18, 2007

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Info For Thursday Oct 18

As I said in class, I will be away for Thursday's class, but class is still meeting - same place, same time.
A surprise film will be screened that will take us into the next project, which involves the techniques of montage and the concept of history. In place of a reading, you will write a response to the film on your blogs. Specifically, you should address the use of codes - as we've been discussing them - within the film. This is due Tuesday. Suggestion: use the time left in class to discuss the film amongst yourselves and write your posts in class.
Also due Tuesday will be the first stage of project 3.
This requires identifying a historic narrative that is not specific to your history (i.e. it could be described as widely known, or at least is significant on a wider social scale), yet one that you believe has significance for you personally. In terms of narrative, I mean an event or series of events, not a person or place more generally - something that is defined by time, with a beginning and end (according to the narrative). Some examples: MLK assassination, the moon landing, 2000 Presidential election, 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, Hurricane Katrina, Larry Walter's 1982 weather balloon lawn chair flight, fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, fall of the Berlin wall, death of Rachel Corrie.
Here's what you need to bring: 1) one image of/related to the event 2) one narrative account from an institutional voice (newspaper, encyclopedia, etc) 3) one narrative account in a first-person voice 4) how this event is significant to you.
All of these should be in material form - on paper.

posted by ryan griffis at 1:58 PM Tuesday, October 16, 2007

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For-Educational-Use-Only 6

As always, A&D 229, 7pm...

Wednesday October 17th:
/Bill Viola/

Reflecting Pool
7:00, 1977-79, color, sound
In this piece, all movement and change in an otherwise still scene is confined to the reflections on the surface of a pool in the woods. Suspended in time, a man hovers in a frozen, midair leap over the water, as subtle techniques of still-framing and multiple keying join disparate layers of time into a single coherent image. Viola writes that "the piece concerns the emergence of the individual into the natural world -- a kind of baptism."

Sweet Light
9:08, 1977, color, sound
Using a camera moving along a predetermined path to create the effect of a simulated zoom, Sweet Light refers to the seduction of illumination, focusing on the phototropic vision of a moth. Writes Viola, "A moth emerges from a discarded letter as the spirit of a dead thought and -- after an attempted flight to freedom -- an individual appears, is inexorably drawn into the source of light, and consumed."

Ancient of Days
12:21, 1979-81, color, sound
Ancient of Days is a remarkable series of "canons and fugues for video" that comprises Viola's most sophisticated structural and metaphorical explorations of time. Mathematical notations of precise time-code editing were applied to construct illustrations of temporal symmetry, duality and transposition -- time-based equivalents of musical compositional principles such as counterpoint and serialism.

Anthem
11:30, 1983, color, sound
Anthem is a post-industrial lamentation, structured on the single piercing scream of a young girl as she stands in the vast chamber of Union Station in Los Angeles. The original scream is extended in time and shifted in frequency to produce a scale of harmonic notes that comprises the soundtrack, to which Viola juxtaposes images of materialism -- industry and the worship of the body, giant oil pumps and the beating human heart, cars streaming along a freeway and blood flowing through veins, modern surgical technology and tree branches in an ancient forest.

Chott el-Djerid
28:00, 1979, color, sound
Viola writes that "Chott el-Djerid is the name of a vast dry salt lake in the Tunisian Sahara desert where mirages are most likely to form in the midday sun. Here, the intense desert heat manipulates, bends and distorts the light rays to such an extent that you actually see things which are not there. Trees and sand dunes float off the ground, the edges of mountains and buildings ripple and vibrate, color and form blend into one shimmering dance. In this piece, the desert mirages are set against images of the bleak winter prairies of Illinois and Saskatchewan, where the opposite climatic conditions induce a similar aura of uncertainty, disorientation and unfamiliarity.”

Migration
7:00, 1976, color, sound
Migration is an analysis of an image, a metaphorical exercise in perception and representation, illusion and reality, microcosm and macrocosm, nature and consciousness. Viola writes that this work is "a slow continuous journey through changes in scale, punctuated by the sounding of a gong…. The piece evolves into an exploration of the optical properties of a drop of water, revealing in it an image of the individual and a suggestion of the transient nature of the world he possesses within."

The Passing
54:13, 1991, b&w, sound
The Passing hauntingly travels the terrains of the conscious, the subconscious, and the desert landscapes of the Southwest, melding sleep, dreams and the drama of waking life into a stunning masterpiece. Viola, placed at the center of this personal exploration of altered time and space, represents his mortality in such forms as a glistening newborn baby, his deceased mother, and the artist himself, floating, submerged under water.

[All descriptions are borrowed from Electronic Arts Intermix]

posted by ryan griffis at 10:10 AM Sunday, October 14, 2007

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More Che, via the New York Times

The NYT has a story on the commercialization of the Che likeness:

In fact, 40 years after his death, Che — born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna — is as much a marketing tool as an international revolutionary icon. Which raises the question of what exactly does the sheer proliferation of his image — the distant gaze, the scraggly beard and the beret adorned with a star — mean in a decidedly capitalist world?

posted by ryan griffis at 8:27 AM Wednesday, October 10, 2007

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Speaking of Image and Identity...

A note from Graphic Design faculty Eric Benson about the class he co-teaches with John Jennings, "Edge":
We welcome you to come visit the work of our EDGE (Ethics of a Designer in a Global Economy) class at the Krannert Center lobby for the Performing Arts this Thursday during the Krannert Uncorked 5-7pm. The work is in response to three plays appearing at KCPA as part of the Approaching Africa series. The plays are entitled:

1. The Syringa Tree
2. I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda
3. In the Continuum

Our students are a mix of GD/ID. Also later this week more EDGE work dealing with race/discrimination will appear in the Krannert Art Museum as part of a dialogue with the Bernie Searle exhibit.

posted by ryan griffis at 10:03 AM Tuesday, October 9, 2007

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For-Educational-Use-Only 5

I really encourage people to check this one out if you can. Harun Farocki is an extremely interesting filmmaker who did a lot of work for German television that is hard to imagine ever playing over US broadcasts. His work combines documentary, poetics and polemics is very intriguing ways.
Wednesday, October 10th, Room 229 (A&D):
/Harun Farocki/

I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts
25:00, 2000
"Images from the maximum-security prison in Corcoran, California. A surveillance camera shows a pie-shaped segment of the concrete yard where the prisoners, dressed in shorts and mostly shirtless, are allowed to spend half an hour a day. When one convict attacks another, those not involved lay flat on the ground, arms over their heads. They know that when a fight breaks out, the guard calls out a warning and then fires rubber bullets. If the fight continues, the guard shoots real bullets. The pictures are silent, the trail of gun smoke drifts across the picture. The camera and the gun are right next to each other."
—Human Rights Projects (Bard College, 2001)

Workers Leaving The Factory
36:00, 1995
"Workers Leaving the Factory - such was the title of the first cinema film ever shown in public. For 45 seconds, this still-existent sequence depicts workers at the photographic products factory in Lyon, owned by the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, hurrying, closely packed, out of the shadows of the factory gates and into the afternoon sun. Only here, in departing, are the workers visible as a social group. But where are they going? To a meeting? To the barricades? Or simply home?

These questions have preoccupied generations of documentary filmmakers. For the space before the factory gates has always been the scene of social conflicts. And furthermore, this sequence has become an icon of the narrative medium in the history of the cinema. In his documentary essay of the same title, Harun Farocki explores this scene right through the history of film.

The result of this effort is a fascinating cinematographic analysis in the medium of cinematography itself, ranging in scope from Chaplin's Modern Times to Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Accattone!. Farocki's film shows that the Lumière brothers' sequence already carries within itself the germ of a foreseeable social development: the eventual disappearance of this form of industrial labor."
--Klaus Gronenborn, Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung (21 November 1995)

An Image
25:00, 1983
"Four days spent in a studio working on a centerfold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it's like with a paper-doll. The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living! (It's impossible to either look or film into the sun.) One can well imagine that the people creating such a picture, the gravity of which is supposed to hold all that, perform their task with as much care, seriousness, and responsibility as if they were splitting uranium.

This film, An Image, is part of a series I've been working on since 1979. The television station that commissioned it assumes in these cases that I'm making a film that is critical of its subject matter, and the owner or manager of the thing that's being filmed assumes that my film is an advertisement for them. I try to do neither. Nor do I want to do something in between, but beyond both."
-Harun Farocki, Zelluloid, no. 27, Fall 1988

Eye/Machine I
25:00, 2001
The film centers on the images of the Gulf War, which caused worldwide outrage in 1991. In the shots taken from projectiles homing in on their targets, bomb and reporter were identical, according to a theory put forward by the philosopher Klaus Theweleit. At the same time it was impossible to distinguish between the photographed and the (computer) simulated images.

The loss of the 'genuine picture' means the eye no longer has a role as historical witness. It has been said that what was brought into play in the Gulf War was not new weaponry but rather a new policy on images. In this way the basis for electronic warfare was created. Today, kilo tonnage and penetration are less important than the so-called C3I cycle, which has come to encircle our world. C3I refers to Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence - and means global and tactical early warning systems, area surveillance through seismic, acoustic and radar sensors, radio direction sounding, monitoring opponents' communications, as well as the use of jamming to suppress all these techniques. Harun Farocki explores the question of how military image technologies find their way into civilian life.

Interface
23:00, 1995
"Harun Farocki was commissioned by the Lille Museum of Modern Art to produce a video about his work. His creation was an installation for two screens that was presented within the scope of the 1995 exhibition The World of Photography. The film Interface (Schnittstelle) developed out of that installation. Reflecting on Farocki's own documentary work, it examines the question of what it means to work with existing images rather than producing one's own, new images. The German title plays on the double meaning of "Schnitt", referring both to Farocki's workplace, the editing table, as well as the "human-machine interface", where a person operates a computer using a keyboard and a mouse."
--3sat television guide, September, 1995

[All descriptions are borrowed from Video Data Bank]

posted by ryan griffis at 10:02 AM Friday, October 5, 2007

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Things Due Next Week

Tues October 9: 2+ visual ideas for each of your 10 personality references, 2+ composition sketches (ideas for the realization of the 11x14 photo) that address setting, objects/props, body language.
Thur October 11: Reading and blog post - Alan Sekula's Body and the Archive
Later Deadlines: final photo due following Tuesday, October 16

posted by ryan griffis at 12:23 PM Thursday, October 4, 2007

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Previous Posts

| Historical Remix, Due Date Remixed | Guest Lecture Today at 5:30 - KAM 62 | Historical Narrative Looking for Similar, Compatib... | For-Educational-Use-Only 7 | Historical Remix: Project 3 (for Thursday 10/25) | Following the Discussion About Sekula's Body and t... | Info For Thursday Oct 18 | For-Educational-Use-Only 6 | More Che, via the New York Times | Speaking of Image and Identity...

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