andrewbissell

[andrewbissell]

Project 4 First, my performance has to do with preparation. From laying, for the most part, the materials I would use within the performance space, to having to utilize them in certain ways and in a certain order. I also wanted to focus on the idea of caring for something fragile. In this case, a piece of tempered glass. Had I just set the glass on the ground or not put cardboard in front of the pallet so that an errant nail or some other debris could impact the glass, the breaking would been an accident. I wanted to meticulously clean the piece of glass. I also deliberately wanted to have to exit the performance space to gather additional materials to be able to clean the piece of glass before the end, to draw on resources outside of the performance space. The end is then about taking steps that completely counteract the preceding actions, as in shattering the glass after having handled it carefully and cleaning it. I would say then that overall the piece is about waste. Wasted time, wasted energy, wasted potential, wasted work. But, I obviously knew while planning, arranging, and staging this performance that what would happen when I hit the glass with the sledgehammer was nearly certain. So, was it a success?

[andrewbissell]

Exercise #4 : Verb List

The list of 20 verbs of my own:

The three drawings of three verbs from the above list:

[andrewbissell]

Response to Performance: A Hidden History

What I appreciated most about the article “Performance: A Hidden History” by Roselee Goldberg was her continued focus on the fleeting and momentary “ephemerality” of performance art as a discipline. While the time, space, or materials an artist utilizes when “performing” are all central to the construction of meaning(s), of utmost importance is the idea that it cannot be truly replicated, that it is happening live and in the present moment. Indeed, Goldberg explains that even in the origins of “performance art” as we currently know it, from the Italian Futurists pre-World War I, to Dadaists in Zurich leading up to World War II, to artist enclaves of today in cities like New York, the ever-present core of performance art has been the act of creating artwork that is in direct opposition to the very concept of traditional art in museums.

[andrewbissell]

I think you chose music and video that go together really well for this project. Having not seen the original video that you pulled from, I obviously don’t know what you’ve edited out, but it feels like there’s enough of an abstract narrative present to keep this really engaging for the viewer.

I felt inspired by the reading and the discussions with my fellow classmates.  It got me thinking of the cycles within life such as the phases we go through as we age, cycles of flowers, trees, butterflies, and life and death.  

I recently had a death in my family, and so I was especially drawn to the cycles one experiences throughout life as well as life and death itself.  The idea that while we are here, we experience a sort of vanishing and becoming as we age and become different people in different stages of life, really struck me.  It reminded me that while we are here, experiencing our subjective reality, to become something beautiful and spread that beauty before we vanish into the ether, beyond, heaven, whatever you want to call it.

I fell in love with this portion of the Fantasia 2000 film!  I paired it with a favorite song of mine called, Blessed We Are, by Peia.  My hope is that the film and the song can convey my idea of the cycles within life that destroy and remake us, and becoming/sharing/spreading the love before we vanish.

I tried to be abstract as possible, cutting out parts of the storyline but ultimately feel like some of the events add to the overall idea.  I spent hours editing a 9 minute clip down to about 1.5 minutes.  I hope you enjoy it as mush as I do!  

[andrewbissell]

I think you did a really good job on this, and I agree with what you wrote on my project about it feeling like you and I were each coming at this project in a similar way. I can also completely see where you were coming from with everything you lay out in your artist’s statement for this. I think I’m most impressed with your changing of the speed of the video, of the movement of the colored smokes along with the audio that you edited together.

For my Project #3, I chose to respond to Gorky’s ‘Kingdom of Shadows’. While reading his impression of B/W silent film, I was reminded of winters during my time in Wisconsin: a stormy winter grey sky blending into a grey earth, monotone and colorless. The first half of my video, I have captured images that had an absence of life. For my main audio track, I used NASA’s electromagnetic sound waves of Saturn’s rings as this was the loneliest, most distant and lifeless sound I could imagine.

From here I focused my theme into ‘becoming’. The B/W image starts to move, first monotone, then burst into color. I sampled parts of a U2 song, looping a musical phrase and layered lyrics on top of it, choosing key lyrics that  I thought would support my response to Gorky…”So many ways of seeing, this is no time, not to be alive”.

[andrewbissell]

I like the layers of things that you’ve chosen to have together for this project. I think you edited together the video clips well, and that since the video is of a natural process that was not shot in a natural setting, but in a studio of some kind instead, that it gives the whole thing a surreal feeling that really fits with the points you make about the subjective nature of what we see and hear.

For my video art project I used footage from 3 different time lapse videos of flowers opening and closing that I found on archive.org. I used instrumental music by the Piano Guys and I recorded myself reading a poem I found online. My goal was to use the flowers and their opening and closing process as an interpretation of vanishing and becoming. As the flowers are closed this is the state of vanishing and as the flowers open they are becoming. The poem is about a woman who is escaping reality and leaving her physical body and discovering a new world made of her inner desires and dreams. I felt that this poem and the flowers transformation, which all occur in one minute, shows how abstract reality really is. Even when we have an empirical sense of reality we immediately question it. I think it is hard for us to understand what is real or believe something is real unless it is our own reality. After completing this project and reading Vanishing and Becoming I have decided that reality is totally subjective.

[andrewbissell]

Project 3 - Becoming and Vanishing The historical research and discussion in the reading we were to use as a prompt for this project, Sean Cubitt’s “Projection: Vanishing and Becoming,” was very intriguing to me, but the part that stayed with me the most was his coming back to and reinterpreting the story of the Corinthian maid drawing the outline of her soon-to-be-gone lover. In the original telling, she does this so that she may have an image (of a sort) to remember him by, but in a later telling, informed by “History of the Shadow” by Victor Stoichita, he explains that what she’s actually captured and is displaying is a reminder of her lover’s absence. So, for this project I decided to keep in mind both the idea of light being able to illuminate objects and that objects blocking or obscuring a source of illumination is equally capable of triggering emotions and memories, even if only abstractly. I took the video I’ve edited together while travelling through Southern Oregon and Northern California in the winter of 2010. I chose to use it because of the contrast between the amount of light being reflected by the snow-covered mountain and the passing trees in the foreground, as well as the positioning of the cloud and the shadow it’s casting on the mountain beneath it. The contrast between the stillness of the mountain scenery and the rock walls along the road, that are passing by so quickly at the beginning and end of the video that they’ve become a random pattern of passing shapes, is also very interesting to me. I wanted to further highlight this contrast by slowly bringing the color back into the video the longer the mountain is in view, before removing it again when the mountain fades from view. I recorded the music for the video after coming up with my final edit for the video using a device called the Grendel Drone Commander and a tenor guitar run through various effects.

[andrewbissell]

I really like everything you did with this, from the Animal Collective-ish music to the way you cut between filming the actions with the hands to the more abstract shots of light reflecting off surfaces and the image being bent by the glass ball. I think the jumpiness that you mention wanting to improve on actually fits in this, especially with how quick and rhythmic the music is.

For this project, I wanted to play with the idea of light as something that can be captured, redistributed, and transformed. The reading talked about light and projection as being one of the first media. I wanted to tell a small story about the way light can bounce and shimmer in the natural world. The narrative I tried to relay was a hand grasping the light from the sky and distributing it onto various surfaces and then putting it back up into the sky. Making the light vanish, become, and vanish again. I struggled with filming as my hands are not super steady. If I could improve anything in this it would be to fix the filming so that it was less jumpy.  The music I chose is from a recording I took of a friend playing the keyboard. I thought that it mirrored the bouncy energy of light and especially glitter. I spent so many hours editing this together and still have a lot to learn but I am somewhat satisfied with the result. I think it has the dreamy quality I was going for. 

[andrewbissell]

I think it’s really interesting, and amusing, how in sync this is, especially when the singing fully starts about halfway through.

This is Project 3. The Lollipop Guild, timed pretty darn perfectly over this ridiculous Gucci Gang song.

[andrewbissell]

I think that the visuals pair really well with the song that you chose. It’s almost like you’ve made your own intro for some kind of animated, underwater James Bond film or something.

Exercise #3-

I had a lot of fun with this exercise and it really got me thinking about the relationship between images and sound. There were several ideas swimming around in my head but when I saw this video, it was perfect!  Next, I had to think about what kind of music would flow well and project a different feeling than the original. This beautiful piece from Fantasia, had more of a shy and subdued feel but I wanted to make it sassy and sexy.  This classic song is by Sarah Vaughan, “Whatever Lola Wants.”  I paired it with the Fantasia clip while splicing and adding a few clips here and there to add to the tempo and fill in boring gaps. I also added a color adjustment.  Enjoy!    

[andrewbissell]

Even though I haven’t seen the movies that you used to make these, I think some of your gifs work really well with the change in speed, with the slowing to quickening of the movements making them even more interesting than they might be at their normal speed.

Project #2

Movie 1

Movie 2

For this project I chose two different movies that I really enjoy, both are French films, for this I wanted to show the expressions of people during various acts and situations. For example the last one, it is after he has taken a shot of this very nasty alcohol, while his wife has just passed out. The first movie is Taxi (1-4), the scenes represent the absurdity of these cops, and the crazy things they do. This should be significant because most of them are basic human reactions, its a daily life event with which we pay little attention to, as well as the absurdities like the flying cars, and the ninja scene of the movie. Although I doubt a lot of us jump into a trash collector from a highway, but I thought the scene was funny and the GIF made me laugh. For this project the hardest thing was trying to slow down the gifs, they are much faster on Tumblr then on Photoshop, and I couldn’t figure out how to change them. My original thought was one movie, but I couldn’t find enough clips that I would have liked to use for these. 

[andrewbissell]

Exercise #3:  Journey Through The Past For this exercise, we were tasked with creating a music video. For the music, I selected a live solo version of the song “Journey Through The Past” by Neil Young, from his album Live at Massey Hall 1971. Inspired by the piece “Projection: Vanishing and Becoming” by Sean Cubitt that we were tasked with reading, for the visuals I decided to find old home video footage on Archive.org. I found three separate 10-15 minute long pieces that I then sorted through, choosing small clips to edit together. Coupling these specific visuals from the past with the melancholic subject matter of the song, that comes through strongly in this version, as well as timing the pacing of my edits to the music I think both re-contextualizes the visuals and accentuates the song.

[andrewbissell]

Vanishing and Becoming Response

I deeply appreciate how, in what is a short piece as far as academic writings go, Cubitt discusses his point on the nature of projection in at the very least artistic, historic, archaeological, anthropological, and philosophical terms. I think in doing tracing how the “true” function of art has been interpreted over the centuries, from the depiction and presentation of the “real” to the distorted copying of the “not real” to the creation of the unknown “new” and “future,” his point that the very nature of projection, and therefor how it is used in art, is ever-changing emerges. This is especially clear in his continued return to the story of the Corinthian maid tracing the outline of her soon-to-be-gone lover, which transforms from a story about her preserving his image for continued adoration into one of her adoring the distorted idea of him via his image into one of her sadly capturing and accentuating his continued absence.   In then continuing this logic forward to the near-present and the artistic possibilities that widespread projection via networking presents the artist, Cubitt’s piece is at once explanatory and inspiring in his reminding the reader that these changing perspectives will continue to change and that it is the work of the artist to discover future perspectives.

[andrewbissell]

I think the way you approached this project is really interesting, and it makes for an engaging series of pictures.

Project 1 For my series I collected photos that had to do with the relationship between technology and people. I added a vintage filter to make the photo look aged. The antique filter makes it seem like a the photo was taken in the past even though the content is related to modern times. This makes it seen like time has past. The message behind my series is based around the fact that technology is a huge part of history. It is also something that humans depend on this day and age.

[andrewbissell]

I think this is a really great idea for your gifs, and that you pulled each one of them off well, as each one is interesting to watch see how it develops.

For Project 2 my concept was the “Artist Process”. I created 10 gifs from photos I have taken of 10 different  artworks that I have created within the last two years. I often take several photos of a piece I am working on to document my process and I felt that this was a great opportunity to bring my art to life. So often we see artwork in its final stage and I wanted my gifs to reveal what happens in the art making process. Next time I would want to have enough time so I could create 10 artworks and take photos specifically focused on making the gif, this would allow me to take photos more creatively. I used the time between each frame to create rhythm and repetition and experimented with different sequences of delays in each gif.  

[andrewbissell]

I like that you developed such a focused concept for your series of pictures, and I think you pulled it off well. Each picture looks unique, but fits with what you’ve developed. Well done.

This is a series of oil spills. At the beginning of the series I am showing the beauty of the colors as seen in frame 1 which I create as a landscape. Moving through the series, I begin to introduce how we need and consume oil, primarily by using images of cars. Toward the end of the series I am showing the dark side of oil and how it is contaminating the environment. In the last images of the animals, they are covered in crude oil and dying. By showing this I am facing the abject, uncomfortable side of human nature. By juxtaposing this oily death with the beautiful colors of oil throughout I am using irony and dissonance. By using repeated images in some slides, I am dismissing the originality of each individual photo.

I grew up on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and each of these dying animals depict animals I grew up near. I lived in their habitat. And I drive a car. I am responsible for their demise through my need for the consumption of domestic oil.

The main challenge for me was Adobe Illustrator as I am a beginner. I feel that my narrative could have been more powerful if I knew the software better. I do not think I could have made as impactful images by painting them. There is something about using the raw and real photos from my subject matter that offers something a representation could not.

[andrewbissell]

I think that the variety of clips you chose are spot-on, and that you did a good job of picking scenes that both loop interestingly and look appealing.

For this project I wanted to tell the story of the Wizard of Oz. I picked important moments from the movie to tell the story. I added one additional GIF at the end of the Cowardly Lion jumping out the window since I found that part very funny as a child. I wish Tumblr would allow for larger files to be posted as I think it would make a better impact, but that isn’t how it works.  I also wish I was able to find better clips online that didn’t have the logo or watermark, but there wasn’t a lot of options.