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The club I’m in published a Winter Editorial where members of the curation team explored different topics and aspects of Absurdism. I thought that I’d be nice to link the editorial on this blog since my piece, both the writing and the graphic, is heavily inspired by the writings we read about for Intro to Digital Media. 

It was a piece regarding the general idea of life imitating art (specifically popular media in video, image, and written form). It delved into how people’s perception of reality is taken overtaken by these “simulation” of sorts, more specifically the different levels of access people of different socio-economic status have to different “simulations” of varying degrees of manipulation. This leads to the creation of different cultivated “digital gardens” of individuals, and the socioeconomic implication that arises from these differences. 

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Some animations I was looking to for reference when I was thinking along the route of animation

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Project 6 pt 1

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Project 6 pt 2

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Project 5: Wild Card Project Proposal

I created a series of illustrations that convey the start of a story about a young girl that gets transported to a world of Korean mythology and folklore and wants to find her way back home (I’m a sucker for clichés). While I did want to start out with a more comic book format, my self-indulgence got to me and I started to explore digital painting and jumped to doing those instead of continuing in a more panel structure. I will have to say though, of the four pieces drawn, I am only really satisfied with the last one of the series. 

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Ho Rui An, Green Screen Studio, Medan, c. 1898, 2016. Print mounted on acrylic glass with aluminium backing, 40 x 30.7 in (101.6 x 78.1 cm). Courtesy the artist

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Ho Rui An

Ho Rui An is an artist that lingers on the border between speeches and art in his art form. Some may consider it a speech and some may consider his pieces art; I personally believe that if he intends for and created his performances to be an art piece, it should be interpreted as one.

Not only are his works more abstract and conceptual in structure, topic, and concept that normal speeches, it can also be considered to be a combination of video and performance art. I mentioned before that it felt like I was watching a slideshow (albeit a very artistically rendered one) with a narrator while watching La Jetee. Ho Rui An’s performances could be seen similarly, except the narrator is live, you can see their face and body language, and the narrator speaks off of the audience directly. 

That being said, whether a person interprets or believes those to be art is up to the individual. When performing Horizon Scanners, Ho Rui An mentioned that the shaping and molding of information and possibilities relies on who is doing the listening and not who is doing the telling. This same philosophy can be applied to this question as well.

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Final for Project 5; An animation of Girl by Jamaica Kincaid

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Sondra Perry & Hayao Miyazaki

Continuing our topic of videos and films, we learned about Sondra Perry, Wong Kar-Wai, and Hayao Miyazaki. More specifically, I’m going to talk about Sondra Perry and the topic of accessibility and miscellaneous points with Miyazaki’s Spirited Away as those two interested me more (one being video installations which I’ve always liked and one a childhood throwback). 

Sondra Perry is an installation and video artist who believes that art should be accessible and available to everyone, which is something that I agree with! This is also the reason why her video pieces are free and online, not restricted by a paywall or an in-person experience. I think this is possible only because of the medium of videos itself, and its ability to be spread on the internet fully without barriers. 

However I thought it was interesting that installations, perhaps the least conducive medium to wide-spread access and availability, was her second most used art form. Personally, I feel as though I can’t get the full effect and experience of installation pieces (especially if they’re interactive) through photos, videos, or even virtual reality technologies. Though I do understand that sometimes a sub-par experience in online form is better than none at all. 

In regards to Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, I thought it was interesting how our discussion of the distinction between Studio Ghibli films and other japanese films turned into a discussion about the difference between Studio Ghibli films and anime. It was interesting to see how people (me included) think of Ghibli films as separate from anime, when it is an anime itself (animated japanese film).  

Looking at it from that lens, the main difference between those two groups probably comes from that fact that Ghibli animations are produced by an established and large company, where they don’t have to worry about trends and succeeding short term, whereas small animation companies do. Ghibli has no need to sensualize the story or use character archetypes as commonly to appeal to their audience.

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wip pt 3

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May sketch a day #14

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Excerpt from La Jetee by Chris Marker

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Chris Marker & Omer Fast

Chris Marker’s La Jetee is unique in that the movie strings together a series of still images instead of videos to create a film. This characteristic is one of the hallmarks of the film admired by many, and one left a large impression on me as well.

The still images make the film akin to a stop motion; photographs are displayed for a significant period of time with sound effects and a voiceover. This had two effects I found interesting. 

First was that the experience was kind of like looking at a picture book with someone reading out loud for you, or even someone doing a presentation of a story they wrote with a PowerPoint. It seemed to put me in a place where I was the “younger” (in a sense) place, where I was getting educated on something. Second was the as the still frames were on the screen longer, it allowed for more time to take in details and catch stuff I otherwise wouldn’t have. Like mentioned in the presentation, the photo became an excerpt of time, exceeding life and time itself. 

Omer Fast offers an alternative form of film to that of Chris Marker’s, where is the “traditional” continuous sequence of videos. While Marker’s film was unique in that it was a “stop motion,” Fast’s film, The Casting, is unique in that it tells a twofold narrative. 

This, along with his portrayal of depicting the ongoing of how scenes were filmed, challenge the realities of stories and what we see on the screen (and even real life). It fit in well with his idea that identity and actions are performances, and life is just a stage we act upon (a throwback to the ideas of Simulacra and Simulation and a moldable reality). This also goes along with his questioning of overproduction through his films, where portrays how solely the audience has to determine what the truth is and isn’t.

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wip 2 for project 5

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Ernest Biéler 1863 - 1948

Portraits à Grindelwald (detail), 1906

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