Video Project: Narrative Outline

Intro: Stop action photography scene of a young woman with wet hair and a bare face standing in front of a white wall with fluorescent lighting. As the scene progresses, the woman's face transforms into a full face of makeup, and her hair is done. She transitions into a softly lit room.

Transitions: I've decided to use clips of female dancers performing traditional dances I'm going to film at the Cherry Blossom Festival this weekend as transitions between my vignettes as an expression of female roles.

Vignette 1: The main character is observing another female interact with various characters. The female is pantomiming with a girl she is close friends with, a boy she is interested in, and a girl who has crossed her. Her pantomimes are accented by the Queen song, Body Language. Her actions are a caricature of how females act and change instantaneously with the change in characters she is interacting with. The characters transition within several frames, giving the illusion of popping in and out of the scene.

I originally was going to film the as a static shot, but I've decided to cut between close up shots of subtle body language and wider shots of the interaction between people.  The last shot will be wide and include the main character observing the background.

Vignette 2: The main character enters and exits a room changing into wildly varying outfits that suggest the role she is setting out to play for the day. She exits a room wearing a business suit, a going out outfit, an outfit she would go to class in, and outfit she would wear to do dirty work. As she exits she carries herself differently representing how the outfit makes her feel. The scene is sped up as to create a different dynamic and give the illusion of a hectic busy lifestyle.

Vignette 3: The main character navigates her way through a busy quad and student union. She is observing the women around her. As she sees one exhibiting a specific female role she is highlighted, drawing attention to her. The soundtrack transitions from ambient noise, to music, to chaotic sounds that are overwhelming to the main character and the audience.

Vignette 4: The fourth vignette, to be viewed either first or last is a collection of television and media clips that exhibit the different roles women are shown to play. They range from female politicians effectively speaking to an audience to women being shown in overtly sexual roles. The screen will transition from the video clips to the main character gazing into a television screen.

Does Interactive Media Make Video More Personal?

Lynn Hershman makes a direct and surprising statement when she writes, "Television is a medium that by nature is fragmentary, incomplete, distanced and unsatisfying, similar to platonic sex." But does creating a video piece that is interactive create a sense of control and emotion for the audience? Lynn Hershman's example, Lorna, was a series of life choices the audience could make for the main character via buttons on an interactive video. Although an audience can affect a narrative, does that reduce the fragmentation and distance of the story? The story, remains mainly in control of the artist, and if anything, delineating from the story line may make the story more fragmented and removed from reality. In my opinion, unless an artwork is totally dependent and reacts in real time to audiences there cannot be that connection between audience emotion and involvement and the artwork.

Video Project Ideas

I find myself playing many different roles throughout the day, student, intern, work study, friend. Many times transitioning between roles requires drastic changes in clothes, behavior, and the way I talk. I would like to do a video project on the roles females play in society and how they can be drastically different. I live with three uber-feminine girls and I find that they play quite different roles than I do. I think vignettes that explored the ideas of playing roles through wearing clothes and makeup, body language between females and males in different settings, and cadences in conversations between females and females and males and females would be an interesting concept to research and think of ways to express in video.

Piggy backing off this idea I also thought about doing a gender spectrum and creating vignettes that highlight or caricaturize masculine males, feminine males, masculine women and feminine women through same themes of physical actions, clothes, presence, manner of speaking, etc.

Hyper Essay: Liquid Architecture

Self- described 'trans-architect', Marcos Novak, explores the idea of liquid architecture, in his article Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace. He describes liquid architecture as a totally fluid environment contained only by cyberspace that reacts and changes to interaction and time. In his work, science and art merge without any restrictions and without abiding the rules of nature. Novak explores this theme in his digital work that portrays architecture and design in a completely cyber environment. He incorporates time into his pieces making them truly four-dimensional.

In his words the definition of liquid architecture:

"I mean involving the total but rigorous variability and the idea that form can be driven by both data and presence, both when we are immersed in information and when information is everted on to the physical world."- Marcos Novak

Novak extends his definition to include art that is dynamic and changeable by both time and audience interaction or art that is variable and based on an algorithmic system. He bases his idea of liquid architecture on three pillars: reference, delineation and modulation. His idea of reference means that liquid architecture is only defined by artist created boundaries. The extent to which the environment is artificial is defined by its modulation. Delineation the most interesting pillar is defined by audience particpation. Novak suggests that a space that can be observed by the audience is sculpture, a space that can be inhabited by the audience is architecture and a space that can affected by the audience is liquid architecture.

Liquid Architecture In His Work:

His still images demonstrate building with new and innovative forms that are not constrained by the physical limitations of our world. The only constraints on his structures are those of cyberspace. He explores the idea of structure and form in time with video works. His website disclaims that the videos have no music, because you are able to "see" the music in the movement of the forms.

This concept of "seeing music" emanates in Vibeke Sorensens's work, particularly Temple. Sorenson explores the idea of data driven visuals. Her animations were created via the inputting of data, in the form of sound waves through an analog computer. They explore the connection between form, space, time, and music incorporating Novak's notion of new dimensions.

Vibeke Sorensen also explores the ideas of limitless architecture in works like Diamantia. Her work shows architectural forms and movements in a totally fluid environment not confined by the laws of nature.

One point that Novak emphasized in his essay was the idea that liquid architecture has an evolving definition that changes with the advancement in technology used to create it. Sorenson pushes the boundaries of the definition of liquid architecture to include the idea of sharing culture and personal interaction across distances through the use of telematics. She references the Global Visual Music Jam Project as a manifestation of liquid architecture through the interaction of music, visuals, and media arts. She discusses the idea of a human element that is the driving force behind interactive art and experiences that are unique. She also discusses her work, Morocco Memory II as a work that incorporates a cultural aspect to the idea of liquid architecture. She defines the cultural element as a person's identity and thoughts in a specific moment in time.

Leo Villareal's work exemplifies the theory of liquid architecture on its spontaneity and mathematical randomness. His work Multiverse incorporates Novak's idea of algorithmic driven art that includes movement and space. The lights contained with this art work together in order to form shapes and patterns unique to the point and time and angle at which they are viewed, allowing us to observe this idea of a fluid environment.

His other work like Field shows Villareal's acute interpretation of liquid architecture and its ability to work with frozen architecture. His works show a keen and delicate sense of light, movement and color and an understanding of how they affect the audience.

The idea of liquid architecture can be found not only in the work of artists like Sorenson and Villareal, but in the media that surrounds our everyday lives. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, facing serious budgets deficits, decided to integrate advertising into the unique architecture of their metro system. They installed a series of 139 back lit still inside the tunnels. As the train moved past the stills, they created a flipbook effect. The backlit pictures merge into an animation that is dependent on the unique architecture of the space.

This innovative advertising system incorporates the themes of liquid architecture including movement, light, fluid environments and the idea of an interpretation being specific to a point in time and a movement.

The underlying theme with all these works is the idea of incorporating four dimensions, height, width, depth and time into structure and art. These pieces combine art, science, math and technology into a form of art that is only contained by the limitations of cyberspace. In the instances of Leo Villareal's work and the DC Metro advertisements, the art that incorporates liquid architecture works symbiotically with the frozen architecture of its surroundings. These ideas culminate into pieces of art that demonstrate color, form, movement, and music in fluid manner manipulated by both time and interaction.

Liquid Architecture

Vibeke Sorenson's idea of "liquid architecture" refers to the unique way light and sound are experienced in a space. The use of a black box theater to display media art incorporates the structure needed to experience the liquid architecture of piece.

The use of surround sound in a black box theater enables the viewer to experience the sounds of the actual experience recorded as well as allowing the artist to manipulate the experience to invoke emotions and reactions from an audience. The work of Ori Gersht exemplified this technique. His muting and amplification of the noises of trees falling brought out a variety of emotional reactions in the audience.

Also the spaces darkness and seperation from the rest of the museum create the suspension of disbelief neccesary to experience the entire piece of art. Sorenson discussed this in her lecture, the idea of being surround by light, sound and motion in order to get the full experience of the art.

Collectively the space and equipment used in a black box theory helps an artist to utilize the theory of "liquid architecture" and better facilitate a connection between the audience and the art.

Soundscape

This is my soundscape I created from sounds I recorded at a Kids At The Katzen day. It includes the ambient noise of children working on an art project to bring the listener back to the creative days of their youth. It also includes sounds such as a lighter lighting, unzipping and opening doors to symbolize the process of opening your mind to new and creative ideas.

Can You Expect People to Pay for This?

I thought an interesting point brought up in "'Diary: Audience 1966' A Year from Monday" was the quote by Virgil Thomson, "You can't do that sort of thing and expect people to pay for it" This is interesting because the idea of credit and compensation does not refer solely the idea of paying for a radical new form of art but shows how this type of art blends the line between performer and audience.

In traditional senses, the performer is compensated for his work, prior to and during the performance. However, in this new type of performance the audience is the one contributing to the performance. It raises the serious questions of who gets ownership of the art, the person who first conceived the idea or the audience that actually made the idea a tangible thing. The question of who gets paid denotes the new idea of who has ownership over the art.

Multimedia

All of the photographs used in our narratives of the inauguration had a common theme, the photographs were taken in the spur of the moment. They feature hasty composition, weird angles and spontaneous elements.

The composition of these photographs matches the idea behind text messaging as a telematic. Both enable users to send quick, direct messages to another party.

Technology played a vital role in this project. Without the use of Photoshop and Blogger we would not have been able compile our scattered narration or photos. Through Photoshop we edited the composition, angle, and color of our photos in order to bring focus to the emotion and activity that we were trying to capture. In this way we carved a naration from a large volume of information. In this instance, I edited the contrast of the photo so that the focus was on the sheer number of people surrounding me. I then captioned it with "In a large immobile crowd people are starting to get angry" in order to match the picture with a time and place.

The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace

Shannon McConnell
Reading Response #1
January 16
In the article, The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace, Levy describes telematics as having the ability to break down barriers, provide transparency, and blend the line between transmitter and receiver in communication. A communication revolution that has taken place in the last few years has been the development and acceptance of blogs. Blogs extend to all topics including politics, fashion, music, and food, but do they really provide the transparency and the individual interpretation Levy claims they do?
I attended several state political conventions in high school. These conventions were long, dull and very bureaucratic. I often thought that the most interesting part of these meetings was the area reserved for bloggers. Aisles of bloggers on both sides would attend these meeting for no other reason than to report what was happening. This may appear like an ideal way to make the process transparent to the public. However, there were significant differences in what the republican bloggers would report versus the democratic bloggers. They often used their unrestricted word counts to make jokes, state opinions and editorialize their reporting.
The use of this telematic, blogs, shows that telematics can skew an interpretation of an event for someone who did not actually attend an event. A convention that unexpectedly nominates and underdog after hours of balloting could be interpreted as an exciting, dynamic process that represents democracy as it best operates, or the demise of a well planned campaign by a party. The unrestricted flow of information does not demand any type of unbiased, balanced, or factual reporting, and we cannot rely on the public to seek out all vie ws of an event in order to obtain a complete picture. And in this case of political ideology we can easily understand how we would only seek out interpretations that align with our already pre-formed beliefs.

The Inauguration of Barack Obama

Arrived at the mall @ 730AM

In line to get into ticketed area its over 6 blocks long

Met someone who was at the march on washington amazing how far we ve come


Someones cracking obama jokes and the entire crowd is laughing

In a large immobile crowd for silver area people are getting angry

Just thanked a security guard for thoroughly frisking me


Right behind reflecting pool

There are ppl standing on the statue to see
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People cheering michelle and joe
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Watching bush realize his legacy... Not pretty
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Chanting yes we can i have chills that arent from the cold

Beautiful people beautiful music beautiful day

Mass chaos

Telematics

Telematics play a huge role in my life, considering I'm a student at a school 1,100 miles away from home. I rely on devices that allow me to communicate across distances at each end. Devices like my cell phone and my computer that seemed superfluous and extravagant when I was never 15 miles from home and never in a place containing more than 10,ooo people suddenly became everyday objects absolutely necessary to maintain relationships, employment, and a sense of self accomplishment.

Email via my computer provides a way to keep in touch with people in both places, home and school. Email is undeniably essential in my life in order to obtain my ever changing employment that transitions between school and home. Email is also a requirement to maintain communication with teachers and staying connected with my parents. Email seems to be the only form of technology they are capable of operating.


Facebook, the technology that almost defines my group of peers became a daily habit, almost as pertinent as eating and having conversations. I find it absolutely necessary to maintain contact with my friends from home. I wouldn't remember birthdays or addresses without the site and every return trip home, includes conversations that trail off with "Oh yeah I saw that on Facebook." The social networking site also became a way to brag and a competition between myself and the people I graduated with but immediately thereafter deleted their contact information from my cell phone, knowing I would never speak in real time to them again.

Albeit my massive social cleansing post commencement ceremonies, my cell phone retained quite a few numbers. My cell phone is essential for me to keep in touch with my friends and family. Despite being halfway across the country, my best friends can know the detailed minutiae of my life instantly thanks to text messaging and my father can know that I still think about him often when I call him from varying locales, the bus, the grocery store, the National Mall.

The personal significance of my cell phone is extraordinary. I've often commented that my cell phone is "my life." It's my schedule, my alarm clock, and my only means of communication. My phone number is my identity. My area code represents my home (Minnesota) and the last four digits create a number and an identity that is uniquely my own. My contacts list is a fluid, ever changing record of the most important people in my life. My best friends and family have several numbers-- dating back to my first technological instrument that allowed me to communicate with the outside world-- pictures, and notes listed under their contact information. And when a life altering event occurs, my cell phone reflects that. Ex-boyfriends and estranged friends have all been ceremoniously deleted from my cell phone. Except one friend, who I vowed to never speak to again after a screaming match on a New York City corner. I couldn't bear to give up on our friendship preferring to label his phone number simply as "Do Not Answer This Call" instead of permanently deleting the digits forever. Some of these numbers have been added again or regained the natural born name after a slightly ironic reconciliation via text messages. But perhaps the most significant aspect of deleting a contact out of a cell phone is the emotion you experience when you delete a contact for literally, eternity. Several summers ago my father asked my to delete the name and number of a long time friend that had recently died because he couldn't bring himself to complete a final step in saying goodbye. Along with the increased ability to communicate via telematics comes the emotional connections that those without the technology never had to experience. Sometimes I think our ability to connect with anybody at any time leaves us dependent and infantile in our need for interaction. My grandfather, who I was very close to, died over a year ago and I still can't bring myself to remove his number from cell phone. Part of me hopes that in a time when I really need him I'll be able to look up the number and by some divine intervention the phone will ring and his voice will crackle through from some far away afterlife cell phone tower.