Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Today's Art World....
Today's art world is utilizing recent advances in technology to it's fullest extent offering completely new and interactive ways of dealing with the art.
Journal Reading #2
For my second article report from the on-line journal I’ve been following, “Vector Magazine”, since there wasn’t a new issue, I went back to an older issue called, “Perception.” One project stood out in particular from this issue and that was “The Virtual Window Interactive” By Anne Friedberg and designed by Erik Loyer.
The main idea of this project was to show the development of visual stimuli over the past 8 centuries or so by allowing viewers of the project to create different viewing scenarios by bringing up a tab of different ways the scene can be altered. When a scene is created, say a family on the couch watching a T.V., keywords that are derived from the scene start scrolling across the bottom of the screen allowing you to click on them and learn more about the subject. There is also a timeline allowing you to narrow what era the modules are available from.
After interacting with this article, I honestly got hooked and couldn’t really stop experimenting with different ways of combining modules. For so long have I heard the terms used in the project but never really took the time to understand their meanings but this project allows you to do that while seeing them in a more relatable and personal scene created by you the viewer. An example of this might be the different aspect ratio’s that are possible when creating the size of the viewing window. After dragging it to a certain size, you can click on the aspect ratio keyword to see why it’s used and what it’s used for, two things I would have never really spent the time to learn.
The main idea of this project was to show the development of visual stimuli over the past 8 centuries or so by allowing viewers of the project to create different viewing scenarios by bringing up a tab of different ways the scene can be altered. When a scene is created, say a family on the couch watching a T.V., keywords that are derived from the scene start scrolling across the bottom of the screen allowing you to click on them and learn more about the subject. There is also a timeline allowing you to narrow what era the modules are available from.
After interacting with this article, I honestly got hooked and couldn’t really stop experimenting with different ways of combining modules. For so long have I heard the terms used in the project but never really took the time to understand their meanings but this project allows you to do that while seeing them in a more relatable and personal scene created by you the viewer. An example of this might be the different aspect ratio’s that are possible when creating the size of the viewing window. After dragging it to a certain size, you can click on the aspect ratio keyword to see why it’s used and what it’s used for, two things I would have never really spent the time to learn.
Art Encounter: Haggerty Mueseum of Art
For this round of blogs we are to write about two pieces or events that we’ve encountered and explain and interpret how they use sound (or silence). To start off, I’d like to talk about a piece I saw at the Haggerty Museum of Art, Mircea Cantor’s single channel installation Deeparture, made in 2005. The piece is a silent piece which may make it difficult to understand how it’s sound, or lack of there of, really is involved with the piece as well as others.
In Deeparture a deer and a wolf are shown in an isolated white room, walking around together while minding their own business. At the exhibit, the piece was projected onto a large white wall so that the ratio of the picture size was about equal to that of the size of the animals in real life granted this was not the same for the close-up shots. The silence of this piece however was what really made this piece allow the viewer to become so involved. As I watched the piece, I was forced to create the sounds in my own mind. This is where I found the empty space the animals to be in to be quite provoking. Since there were no external noises or ambient sounds from the empty room containing the animals, it became very easy to focus on the individual sounds that the animals could only create in that space, allowing me to hear every little detail in my own head giving many more realistic characteristics to the piece.
I thought this piece related well with one of the points made in the writings of Aaron Ximm saying, “Composition is (tautologically) constrained by the range of sounds (and their properties) that we can produce, control, or affect, and by the limits of our ability to transfer or encode (inscribe) those things” (page 42). I found that when you applied it to this piece, that when you take away everything in the piece that does constrain our inner ability to hear these sounds, it becomes much easier to produce them, allowing the installations to be silent like this one.
I also want to talk about Aaron Ximm’s The Quiet American and how many of his pieces can relate to another point in Ximm’s writings. Ximm says, “Doors opened as I discovered what my tools could do; they closed according to what seemed the natural source of judgment: my ears. What pleased them I kept; what displeased them I discarded.” If there was one thing that I noticed right away was the steady progressing and layering of sounds. In the track titled “Malaria”, I think Ximm’s style of composing was very apparent. It seemed as I listened to the track I could sort of tell where Ximm was going to add a new sound or change all the sounds completely which I think is due to the underlying rhythm Ximm creates when making these compositions.
In Deeparture a deer and a wolf are shown in an isolated white room, walking around together while minding their own business. At the exhibit, the piece was projected onto a large white wall so that the ratio of the picture size was about equal to that of the size of the animals in real life granted this was not the same for the close-up shots. The silence of this piece however was what really made this piece allow the viewer to become so involved. As I watched the piece, I was forced to create the sounds in my own mind. This is where I found the empty space the animals to be in to be quite provoking. Since there were no external noises or ambient sounds from the empty room containing the animals, it became very easy to focus on the individual sounds that the animals could only create in that space, allowing me to hear every little detail in my own head giving many more realistic characteristics to the piece.
I thought this piece related well with one of the points made in the writings of Aaron Ximm saying, “Composition is (tautologically) constrained by the range of sounds (and their properties) that we can produce, control, or affect, and by the limits of our ability to transfer or encode (inscribe) those things” (page 42). I found that when you applied it to this piece, that when you take away everything in the piece that does constrain our inner ability to hear these sounds, it becomes much easier to produce them, allowing the installations to be silent like this one.
I also want to talk about Aaron Ximm’s The Quiet American and how many of his pieces can relate to another point in Ximm’s writings. Ximm says, “Doors opened as I discovered what my tools could do; they closed according to what seemed the natural source of judgment: my ears. What pleased them I kept; what displeased them I discarded.” If there was one thing that I noticed right away was the steady progressing and layering of sounds. In the track titled “Malaria”, I think Ximm’s style of composing was very apparent. It seemed as I listened to the track I could sort of tell where Ximm was going to add a new sound or change all the sounds completely which I think is due to the underlying rhythm Ximm creates when making these compositions.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)