#larice my beloved

[psikind]

ummm. my first thought was greencloak but if not gc then uhh. larice. *cogdis-es you back*

I could talk about mr dnd sexy man here for a while I think like I think even over a month after wraith has ended we at least mention him once a day

LARICEEEEEEEEE LARICE MY BELOVED <33 disclaimer of I do in fact like things about him that are canon I just also have/absorbed a Fuck ton of headcanons about him and the applechasers as a whole (your fault btw /pos)

[theneulithium]

2020.12.08 - Renaissance TV + SAIC’s Film, Video, New Media, Animation and Sound Festival

// Nicky Ni

This past weekend, my party was to feast on the Renaissance Society’s 24-hour online screening program, Renaissance TV, which coincides the institution’s benefit auction, RenBen: Wildcard 2020.

Without doubt, Renaissance TV was an ephemeral TV renaissance. Selecting artworks that straddle between critically interesting and cleverly easy-to-digest, Renaissance TV put together a 24-hour nonstop program that was meant for incomplete viewing. Of course, it was only so unless you would binge watch on gallons of coffee or tailor your bio-clock to the program schedule in order to watch in full videos in which nothing much happens. This exciting threesome involving the film festival (where works are screened intensively within only few days), the television (which has a 24-hour air time), and the Internet (where many works come from and are meant to be shown on) has given birth to a new curatorial format, let’s call it for now the “Internet-TV-Film-Festival Complex,” which emphasizes less on presenting each individual work than on how these works as a whole speak about this specific medium of presentation. It flirts with the viewer’s insatiable desire for a holistic viewing but in reality offers works that, how should I put it, you only need to watch absent-minded. 

Just leave your computer screen on the whole time. We have legit TV programs for people like you who have a short attention span, for example, an episode from Cécile B. Evans’s mock TV series Amos’ World, another one from Liv Schulman’s TV show, Control, and Carolyn Lazard’s A Recipe for Disaster that’s based on Julia Child’s popular cooking show The French Chef. May we interest you with some Friday night party music? There is 132 BPM by Torbjorn Rødland on repeat for three times followed by an hour-long electronic music set by Lawrence Abu Hamdan (aka. DJ Business Class). After that, you could fall asleep on Oliver Laric’s mesmerizing animation, and wake up to have your Saturday brunch and zone out on some absolutely bored, off-duty animals from the Jungle Book in David Claerbout’s The Pure Necessity. 

It is brilliant. 

David Claerbout, The Pure Necessity (2016). Nicky Ni’s screenshot.

***

The second half of this week’s roundup is dedicated to some of the noticeable student works in SAIC’s virtual FVNMA and Sound Festival this year, which is programed to make sure that you take time and watch attentively and fully. 

Fragmentation, banality and self-reflection are some of the key elements that I observed in this year’s  festival. Affected by the pandemic or not, many works seem to be very introspective and contemplative. Like how painters turn to themselves as the most convenient and cost-efficient models, it is natural for film and video makers to investigate their own memories and the genealogy of their family for one of their first major moving-image projects. 

In The Dependents, Sofia Brockenshire quilts together a beautiful essay composed of family photographs, interviews, radio archives and newly shot footage that evokes a sense of transition and displacement. There are scenes where the camera tracks an airplane in the sky or slowly pans across the photograph of a desert, like how the finger moves over a map, tracing the lines of the rivers and the ridges of the mountains. We learn that Brockenshire’s father is a geographer, and that his family, including the filmmaker herself, travelled with him from one country to another, as migrants, as guests, but also as dependents. Beneath the quiet, dreamy images, there’s a lurking disquiet and unease, where the filmmaker carefully alludes to all the imaginable sacrifices that one family member has done for the other.  

Sofia Brockenshire, The Dependents (2020). Nicky Ni’s screenshot.

The Dependents has glitchy sound scores, which vividly speaks to the aesthetics of works by Nat Wood and Jada-Amina. Deeply self-reflective, both works also turn to home videos and family history as main sources of inspiration. Wood made Forever Bound Together (By the Experience We May or May Not Have Shared) entirely by editing together digitalized VHS footage. Beginning by a recording of a young mother singing a lullaby to her new born son (or Wood’s older brother), Forever Bound Together follows a loose storyline from before the filmmaker was born to her later childhood. However, as the video progresses, the images become increasingly glitchy, preserving the inevitable imprint of the recording device and how such unpredictable technological interventions will also be forever bound together with her own memory. 

Nat Wood, Forever Bound Together (By the Experience We May or May Not Have Shared) (2020). Nicky Ni’s screenshot. 

On the other hand, Jada-Amina’s video I’m Not Going to Die, I’m Going Home Like A Shooting Star splices and sews back together stories of three generations of matriarch and footage of beloved Black cultural icons. With images that are decades apart, this video is not only an oeuvre by an avid family genealogist and empowered feminist, but also inevitably that of a media archeologist who delves into the messages that the mediums bring. 

The festival’s switching to virtual screening this year due to the pandemic would undoubtedly have upset many cinema purists; however, it certainly works for the benefit of other computer-based artists. Vesper Guo’s ******.com, an enigmatic video-performance of which the title shall not be pronounced finds your computer screen the ideal place for viewing. Taking off on a fictional journey to a darknet website bearing the URL ******.com,  an anonymous user, presumably the artist herself, manages to access various surveillance cameras located in unspecified places in different parts of the world, noticeably Japan and China. Scrolling through a series low-res, moiréed out video footage of empty hallways, offices, and parking lots, the voyeuristic user gradually becomes an omnipotent puppeteer who can somehow orchestrate at the click of a mouse the humans and animals that are unknowingly under surveillance, as if it were a computer game in real life. 

Vesper Guo, ******.com (2020). Nicky Ni’s screenshot.

The voyeurism, eeriness and tension found in Guo’s video murmurs with the short, mostly black-and-white animation, What are you doing?, by Qiyun Kang, a story in which the protagonist tries to hide a yellow envelope from another person of the household. The gender and age of neither character is visibly specified, allowing bifurcation of meaning and interpretation. Borrowing cinematic tactics such as surveillance camera angle, manga-style close-ups, and deploying classic montage techniques, Kang dexterously visualizes anxiety, stealth, and control that can be seen as a metaphor for the censorship that is happening at a national scale in China.

Last but not least, and in the form of a confession, I have only watched the intro portion of Ben Creech’s SELF & other Early Works and it seems very promising. 

[nicoleign]

ART5135

After the launch of ART1535 and a chat with my group, we were about to pick an object to explore and study in semester 1. After debating and counting all for and against arguments, we decided to pick Oliver Laric's video 'Versions', which explains how materials, objects and art pieces have life and agency and can be reused. The topic does not seem very broad at first sight, but after doing some mind mapping I came up with the key words that I want to explore and relate my artwork to. 

Authenticity is a concept in psychology (in particular existential psychiatry) as well as existentialist philosophy and aesthetics (in regard to various arts and musical genres). In existentialism, authenticity is the degree to which an individual's actions are congruent with their beliefs and desires, despite external pressures; the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces, pressures, and influences which are very different from, and other than, itself. A lack of authenticity is considered in existentialism to be bad faith. The call of authenticity resonates with the famous instruction by the Oracle of Delphi, “Know thyself.” But authenticity extends this message: "Don’t merely know thyself – be thyself."

Unique - being the only one of its kind; unlike anything else

Real - having objective independent existence, not artificial, fraudulent, or illusory; occurring or existing in actuality. Existing as a physical entity and having properties that deviate from an ideal, law, or standard.

Fake - an object that is made to look real or valuable in order to deceive people

If being authentic means to be one of it’s own kind,not changing the concept due to surrounding impact, being made of the original, primary materials, does that mean that architecture loses its authenticity after the renovation?

On the 15th of April 2019, one of the greatest symbols of European civilisation Notre Dame de Paris, which was almost 1000 years old was destroyed by a fire. According to the architects, 15 years and one billion euros are required to completely restore the building. Architects that are currently working on this project contacted ‘assassin’s creed’ creators in order to get all the measurements and scales rights, because they spent over 2 years building Notre Dame in ‘assassin’s creed’ in order to make it as close to the real one as possible. Also, the architects collaborated with engineers and with the help of special lasers scanned the cathedral to the nearest 5mm and created a 3D model which is extremely accurate. But is this accuracy truly required? If Notre Dame de Paris is going to be fully renovated, France is going to restore its authentic look, but not its authenticity. Does it lose its history then? Also, considering that Notre Dame was renovated several times already, when did it lose its authenticity?

Authenticity question was a big topic among philosophers of antiquity, who gave it a name of paradox of ‘ship of Theseus’. According to the legend, a Greek character Theseus went to Crete and fought a Minotaur. When he came back to Athens, locals decided to keep his ship as legacy, however, the vessel began to rot and people started replacing the vessel board by board and over time there was no original detail left in the ship. The question is, is it still the famous Theseus ship or is it not? If not, when did it lose its authenticity: when the first detail was replaced or when the last one was? The situation gets more confusing after considering the fact that all old details were put together to create a similar ship. Which ship is the original, authentic one: the one made from original details or the one made from new details? If they both are authentic are they equal? If yes, there are two absolutely similar ships, which sounds like a paradox.

In 1945, the city of Dresden was nearly destroyed by the soviet aviation who was throwing incendiary bombs on the city from above, which created a firestorm with the temperature of 1500 Celsius degrees. The city was almost destroyed, however, the Kreuzkirche temple is still there, even though it was burning 5 times, came crushing down due to the downpour and suffered from Prussian and soviet shelling. However, every time it came crushing down people would collect the damaged bricks and put them back where they used to be. Those that were completely destroyed were replaced with the new ones. By doing that, German architects solved the paradox of the ship of Theseus in their own way; since the building now consists of both authentic and new bricks, it is morally equal to what is was back then in medieval ages.

The holy bible is another example of this paradox. In the very beginning, it consisted of tanakh, then, the Old Testament books were added to it, then the New Testament with all its gospels, later some apocryphas.

The very first Hulk comics was about a man who was extremely strong and grey, but the latest Hulk comics is called ‘World War Hulk’ and shows him as a massive green beast.

People spend hours upon hours and loads of money to get the new yeezy boost shoes, even though they can get the fake ones easier and cheaper. Copyright and authenticity are extremely important in fashion and art; if a random person created a sculpture similar to Andy Warhol’s ‘money hat’ it probably wouldn’t be considered as an art piece. One of the most famous British artist Damien Hirst was accused of using assistants to create works of art, to which he said that the idea and the concept are important when it comes to authenticity, not the physical work.

Another example could be the Tin Man from the wizard of oz, who used to be an ordinary lumberjack before the witch cursed his axe and it started chopping his limbs off. Afterwards, the blacksmith replaced them with the mechanic ones. In one of the books, the tin man finds his first love, however, he soon finds out that she married a guy sewed up from his limbs, head, torso and everything else.

Nowadays, many people live with artificial limbs. If such person gets 95 per cent of his body replaces, is he considered to be the same person juridically?

Epithelium of stomach and bowel are updated every five days, liver - every 300-500 days. Over the time, almost every body part and cell is regenerated and replaced with a new one. Does it mean that we lose our own authenticity every other month/several months/years? If yes, how can we sentence people to several years in prison, chose world leaders and even trust each other? But how do we solve the paradox? It fully depends on our view. If we believe that changing a single detail leads to losing authenticity, it means that every person becomes a new person over some time, which is illogical. On the other hand, every single copycat cannot be considered as an original, because it makes the definition of ‘authenticity’ itself worthless. Ancient Romans tried solving this paradox by creating such definition as ‘legal person’. Roman legions conquered a lot of territories including the Great Britain, however, during the battles many warriors died and got replaced with new ones. The composition of the legion was constantly changing, however, the legion itself wasn’t and became a legal face, which retains its power even when its elements are changed or replaced. This phenomenon speeded all over the world and is still very accurate in our days. People agree to call things authentic if their legal face has the authentic concept, idea. But why do we care about authenticity of yeezys and nikes so much? Scientists have made several experiments on those who still trust their instincts the most - kids. They convinced the kids that they had invented the copying machine that clones whatever you put into it and offered the kids to try it out. Kids happily cloned forks and spoons, not knowing that scientists just replaced those objects with the similar ones from the same ikea set. Once kids were convinced that the machine worked, they were offered to clone real hamsters, however, after ‘cloning’ them kids didn’t want to play with a clone, because, according to them, it was a different hamster a had a different ‘soul’. But the most interesting part began when kids were offered to clone the toys that belonged to them. Kids refused to do that, because, as they claimed, they wouldn’t be able to distinguish the toys later and wouldn’t know which one is their beloved one, the original one. Kids were infusing their toys with invisible essence and consciousness. Lenin’s hallows, architectural legacy, t-shirts with bands signatures, Supreme, Nike and other brands are essence empowered with value by us.