Image Practice Fall 07

Thursday Visiting Artist Talk

2007-11-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

Who: Chris Taylor, an educator and trained architect at the University of Texas, Austin where he teaches (with Bill Golbert) a course titled Land Arts of the American West - a program that "examines gestures both small and grand, directing our attention from potsherd, cigarette butt, and mark in the sand, to human settlements, monumental artworks, and military-industrial projects like hydroelectric dams and decommissioned airfields" traveling "upwards of 8,000 miles with fourteen students to live and work for over fifty days in the landscape of the southwest visiting sites such as Chaco Canyon, Roden Crater, the Grand Canyon, Double Negative, the Wendover Complex of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Bonneville Salt Flats, Spiral Jetty, Marfa, Mata Ortiz, the Very Large Array, and The Lightning Field."
When: Thursday, 15 Nov, 5:30pm
Where: KAM 62

For-Educational-Use-Only 9

2007-11-13T14:30:00.000-08:00

This week will be short, contemporary works in video from recent issues of the biannual DVD magazine Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art.

The screening will include:

Marilyn Arsem
Undertow, 2005, 05:00

CarianaCarianne
Bequeaths, Oaths Of Signature, 2004-2005, 12:10

Jamie McMurry
365 Performances, 2005-2006, 10:00

Marisa Olson
Black Or White, 2006, 4:12

Peter Welz
Whenever On On On Nohow On / Airdrawing, 2004, 07:30

Nina Yuen
Don, 2006, 10:00

Sachiko Hayashi
Boop-opp-A-Doop, 2004, 05:16

Christian Jankowski
The Day We Met, 2003, 08:12

Kristin Lucas
Involuntary Reception, 2000, 10:00

Anthony Goicolea
Tea Party, 2004, 05:00

...and others!

For Thursday

2007-11-06T14:07:00.000-08:00

If you're already in class, you've probably noticed that I'm away again - I apologize for having to be away 3 times so close together.
Here's the plan for the future.
We are starting a new section/project that will take us through to the end of the semester, this one on sequence. Look here for details, under project 4, of course.
Today, Bonnie will be showing you a few things that should serve as starting points of inspiration - including video, books and comics. There is also a "virtual guest lecture" that everyone needs to watch, by Lawrence Lessig and some other online examples that you should experience: Chris Marker's "Le Jetée", Animation by Chris Ware for This American Life, Scott McCloud's "The Right Number" + Can't Stop Thinking, Amos Latteier's Model Notes Lecture. I strongly suggest watching these in class, but please use headphones for the examples with audio (you can get some from the check out window if needed).
There is also a reading (Jonathan Lethem's "Ecstasy of Influence" for Harper's) for next week, along with the usual blog post response. We will discuss all of this: the reading, the lecture and the assignment, as well as finish looking at everyone's montage, on Tuesday.

For-Educational-Use-Only 8

2007-11-05T20:16:00.000-08:00

WEDNESDAY, November 7th, you-know-where
/Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint 9/

2005, 02:15:00, film
Drawing Restraint 9 is a feature-length art film by American artist Matthew Barney, dealing with the relationship between creativity and self-imposed resistance.

Shot in Nagasaki Bay, the film is set aboard the Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru. On board is a vast sculpture of Vaseline entitled "The Field", which continually transforms during the film, most representing the oceanic theme of the work. The lead characters, known as "The Occidental Guests", are played by Matthew's partner Björk and Matthew Barney himself.

[description borrowed from wikipedia]

Historical Remix, Due Date Remixed

2007-10-30T12:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Guest Lecture Today at 5:30 - KAM 62

2007-10-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

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.

Historical Narrative Looking for Similar, Compatible Narrative

2007-10-27T11:32:00.000-07:00

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.

For-Educational-Use-Only 7

2007-10-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2007-10-23T14:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Following the Discussion About Sekula's Body and the Archive

2007-10-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

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".

Info For Thursday Oct 18

2007-10-16T13:58:00.000-07:00

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.

For-Educational-Use-Only 6

2007-10-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

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]

More Che, via the New York Times

2007-10-10T08:27:00.001-07:00

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?

Speaking of Image and Identity...

2007-10-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

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.

For-Educational-Use-Only 5

2007-10-05T10:02:00.000-07:00

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]

Things Due Next Week

2007-10-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

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

Assignments for Tuesday Oct 2

2007-09-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

5 analytical descriptions from your 30 images and 5 pictures from friends/family (not personal photos) - see projects section of website for more info.
Reading/blog post: Abbott Miller's Pictures for Rent.

Swastika In Navy's Architecture To Be Masked

2007-09-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

This was picked up by Google Earth fanatics quite a while ago, but it has just recently surfaced in the New York Times, so many more people are now paying attention to it. The Navy is apparently now going to spend $600,000 to camouflage the design.

The Production of Creativity (Lecture Today)

2007-09-26T10:25:00.000-07:00

The Production of Creativity: An Artist's View of the Rise of "Creative Work"
Kevin Hamilton
Wednesday, September 26, 4:00 to 5:00 p.m.
2405 Siebel Center, 201 N. Goodwin Ave., Urbana
Why wouldn't any of our practices be improved by being more creative? Yet as a conveyor of added value, creativity serves a broad and necessarily conflicted range of purposes. For example, my "creative" (original) solution may not be "creative" (innovative) enough for one fellow researcher, and not "creative" (productive) enough for another.
Within and across our disciplines, are our different approaches and uses for creativity made more or less apparent by the quick deployment of the term? What are the promises and perils of research where funding and recognition are tied to creativity as a value? This multimedia presentation will seek to provoke discussion and debate through a survey of current approaches, conflicts, and opportunities.

Independent Film Making Discussion

2007-09-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

If you're interested in film making, documentary film maker (New Media MFA-candidate and Assistant Professor in Journalism) Jay Rosenstein will be discussing his experiences. The talk is Wed Sept 26 at 12 Noon in the Temple Buell Architecture Gallery in the Old Architecture Building.

For-Educational-Use-Only 4

2007-09-21T21:45:00.000-07:00

September 26th : 7pm : Rm 229
----------------------------------------------------
Women on Camera: Performing in Persona

Dara Birnbaum
Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman
1978, 7 minutes

A stutter-step progression of "extended moments" unmasks the technological "miracle" of Wonder Woman's transformation, playing psychological transformation off of television product. Birnbaum considers this tape an "altered state [that] renders the viewer capable of re-examining those looks which, on the surface, seem so banal that even the supernatural transformation of a secretary into a 'Wonder Woman' is reduced to a burst of blinding light and a turn of the body—a child's play of rhythmical devices inserted within the morose belligerence of the fodder that is our average television diet."

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Alex Bag
Untitled Fall ‘95
1995, 57 minutes, 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.

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Kevin Blechdom + Lucile Desamory
Countdown to Nothing
2004, 13 min. 25 sec., DV (shot on Super 8), color & b/w

COUNTDOWN TO NOTHING is a collaboration with the musician Kevin Blechdom. A musical starring two women meeting in a tree. One cannot touch the ground, the other is stuck. A hypnotic voyage through their psychedelic subconsciousness will relieve them from their troubles.

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Miranda July

Atlanta
1996, 10 minutes
A 12 year-old Olympic swimmer and her mother (both played by July) speak to the public about "going for the gold."

The Amateurist
1998, 14 minutes, b/w
A short, captivating video about surveillance, identity, watching and being watched, The Amateurist slides along the edges of horror and satire to create an unsettling portrait of a woman on the brink of a technologically-driven madness.

Nest of Tens
1999, 27 minutes
Nest Of Tens is comprised of four alternating stories which reveal mundane yet personal methods of control. These systems are derived from intuitive sources. Children and a retarded adult operate control panels made out of paper, lists, monsters, and their own bodies.

Getting Stronger Every Day
2001, 6 min. 30 sec.
Getting Stronger Every Day captures the experience of being lost, then found, from moment to moment, and over the course of a lifetime, in mundanely poignant tableaus in which the spirit realm is manifested in low-tech effects and remembered TV movies.

Beginning Semiotics

2007-09-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

The next section of the class is Semiotics, a methodology that builds upon the framework explored in iconography/iconology, but introduces some significant differences. We will start this section with an introductory reading from Daniel Chandler's Semiotics for Beginners(the chapter on Codes). The reading, and a blog post that addresses it will be due Tuesday, 9.25. In your posts, I would like you to consider how semiotic methods (through the concept of "codes" presented by Chandler) differ from those of iconography/iconology as we've discussed them in class and in the readings. There is a shift in how meaning is understood that is crucial to understanding semiotics.
The first part of the second project will also be started this week, and will be due on Thursday 9.27. This project will continue our initial investigation of images through self-awareness, resulting in a "constructed self-portrait" that will be very different from those created in project 1. The assignment, as explained in the project section, is to collect 30 images from mass media forms that you find yourself identifying with - i.e. that reflect something of how you perceive yourself. These images can be collected from cinema, literature, advertising, television, art, historical narratives, etc. You must have a minimum of 30 distinct images, and half must be from a source other than the internet - your sources should reflect the diversity of media you actually consume. If it is a literary source, you should isolate the scene or character, using the vocabulary in the text to describe it (passages from a novel, for example). Bring these in some printed, or otherwise physical, form (no digital files).

For-Educational-Use-Only 3

2007-09-19T09:51:00.000-07:00

In 229 as always...

/Text and Language/

Tony Cokes
We'll screen several works for video by this active artist. From the EAI site:

"In a series of videotapes and installations produced since the mid-1980s, Tony Cokes engages in cogent investigations of identity and opposition. His works question how race influences the construction of subjectivities (personal, cultural and historical), and how race, gender and class are perceived through what he terms the "representational regimes of image and sound," as perpetuated by Hollywood, the media and popular culture.

Cokes' analytical strategy is one of reframing and repositioning. His critiques are informed by contemporary cultural studies, poststructuralist theory, and popular texts; he quotes from sources ranging from Louis Althusser, Malcolm X and Catherine Clement to Public Enemy and William Burroughs. His works are often assemblages of archival footage, images from Hollywood films, text commentary,
voiceover, and popular music."

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John Smith
Associations
1975, 7 minutes

By using the ambiguities inherent in the English language, Associations sets language against itself. Image and word work together and against each other to destroy and create meaning.

Gargantuan
1992, 1 minute

"To master the one-minute time span requires considerable discipline, and few pieces, if any, had been shaped as genuine miniatures—most having the appearance of being extracts from larger works. The notable exception was John Smith's Gargantuan, which was not only the right length for the idea, but actually incorporated a triple pun on the word Ôminute.'"
—Nicky Hamlyn, "One Minute TV 1992", Vertigo (Spring 1993)

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William Wegman
We will screen several video works by this artist spanning the years 1970-1978.

Wegman began producing short, performance-oriented videotapes in the early 1970s, which are considered classics. Many featured his canine companion, a Weimaraner named Man Ray. These tapes are dead pan parodies of "high art" using sight gags, minimalist performance, and understated humor. Recorded as single takes in real time, Wegman used portable video's intimacy and low-tech immediacy to create idiosyncratic narrative comedy.

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Shelly Silver
1
2002, 3:15 minutes

1 is a short tape about longing, threat, power and seduction, with the camera functioning in turn, as aggressor, mediator and confessor. The split-screen image as well as the eerie sound track, made up of two versions of the same Miles Davis song run simultaneously, underline Silver's ambivalent take on the controversial subject matter, as well as calling the work's title into question.

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Plus works by Young Hae Chang Industries, John Baldesaari and more!

Posts and Comments: a couple of things

2007-09-11T20:20:00.000-07:00

One quick comment about the reading responses... generally, everyone is on track. But, please, please, keep in mind the expectations. These posts are the best way for me to assess that you are reading and understanding the texts outside of classroom discussions. I am not expecting creative writing at its best (not to discourage it), just a short response that tells me what you thought of the text and makes explicit references to parts of it that correspond to your comments. If you're doing this, you're good, if not, you should rethink your approach.
On another matter, I've noticed that several of you have received comments (well, the same comment) from some followers of a "symbologist" (if it's even more than just the one person) that I will leave unnamed here for the purposes of not giving them any more credit or attention. This is one of the "benefits" of blogging... responses from people who see your blog as another link in their drive for attention and fame on the WWW. You, of course, are free to respond to the comments if you would like, but I would urge you to be cautious in who you engage or attempt a conversation with.
I would be happy to discuss the "arguments" presented in those comments with anyone interested in such a discussion.

For-Educational-Use-Only 2

2007-09-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

(another chance for extra credit)
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12th:
/MEDIUM AND MEMORY: Video, Time, and Personal Recall/
(As always, in room 229 at 7pm)

Rea Tajiri
History and Memory
1991, color and b&w, 32 minutes
Framed by the haunting facts of the post-Pearl Harbor Japanese
internment camps (which dislocated 120,000 Japanese Americans during
World War II), Tajiri creates a version of her family's story through
interviews and historical detail, remembering a time that many people
would rather forget. This video surveys the impact of images (real
images, desired images made real, and unrealized dreams) on our lives,
drawing from sources such as Hollywood, U.S. Dept. of Defense films,
newsreels, memories of the living, and spirits of the dead. Relics of
the camps, contrasted with human efforts to forget their existence,
create a sense of taxonomic insistence that these camps were indeed
real.

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Shigeko Kubota
My Father
1975, b&w, 15 minutes
In this classic personal elegy, Kubota mourns her father's death and
recounts the last days of his life. Reflecting on Kubota's use of the
video medium, the television emerges as the link between Kubota and
her father, with the melodramatic crooning of Japanese pop singers
providing a backdrop for Kubota's real-life tragedy.

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Wim Wenders
Notebooks on Cities and Clothes
1989, color, 35mm film, 79 minutes
This documentary about fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto is also an
examination of the differences between video and film, and their
different capacities for enabling understanding of time, craft, and
the body. A filmmaker tries to understand a form he never works in -
fashion design - as he explores a new instrument in his own toolbox -
the Sony Handicam.