11 posts tagged “art”
micronarrative videos created as animated text with sequenced audio.
the choice of sequenced audio refers to the inner necessary logic of story present in each narrative fragment.
I produced 6 of these to be sprinkled throughout the night at the Slumber Party film screening put on by the Matchwood Festival in Braddock on Friday August 22.
I expect to produce more. They point to the joint-like structure of narrative content. Created between-fillers, like putty, which is what a great deal of language is to story -- language provides the timing of dissemination of information, the pacing of 'plot', the power of the moment of delivery of content to the audience. the timing of a story as part of a seduction of the audience, as it were.
When Language Can Hold the Answer in the NYT extrapolates upon the scientific reinforcement of the knowledge that the act of naming things makes it easier to learn about those things; and then runs right over to the paintbox.
The traditional subject of the tug of war over language and perception is color. Because languages divide the spectrum differently, researchers have asked whether language affected how people see color. English, for example, distinguishes blue from green. Most other languages do not make that distinction. Is it possible that only English speakers really see those colors as different?
Then they walk through several language use and color sorting tests to discern how the mind approaches dealing with color. Interesting stuff.
I'd love it if they'd visit the museum every once in a while. They'd learn what artists - or at least, painters - know -- color perception's dependant on the acuity of perciever's senses, on environmental qualities (light quality, time of day, relative humidity, latitude & longitude). Color lives outside of a place of names until a work of art is completed. Actual color perception is relative.
Sidebar: Favorite oil painting assignment: Mix a black.
Now mix a black that's different than the first black. Different how?
Now (pointing) That's the warm, that's the cool. Now mix one that's in between.
We do not percieve color independant of other colors. Color does not exist without relating to another color. Color may be isolated on a little card but the card rests on a table, or, held in the air, there is a color perceived next to the colored card. There is always an adjacent color for the eye to percieve, off the page, from the environment. That adjacent color shapes our perception of the color-shape. Light changes everything. Fluorescent? Incandescent?
Joseph Albers demonstrated convincingly with his Homage to a Square series of prints, paintings etc.
Sidebar I love this image because of the traces of his process, his planning, his consideration of color. His hand, which disappears in the finished Squares.
from the manual for wayward angels, an ongoing multi media project ...
last night was film kitchen at pittsburgh filmmakers. buzz miller organized it, had a bunch of us video people who collaborate with other artists screen documentation of our artwork(s).
buzz is so fantastic. his technical problem solving and inventiveness helps create some amazing theatrical experiences for audiences here in pittsburgh. he's developed a particular vocabulary of projecters and bodies on stage that creates visual symphonies of information for the audience to get overwhelmed in. and he's more than willing to share his love for problem-solving and theater-making with the audience.
anyway the thing i realised during the q&a for the rest of us at the end of the night is that i'm basically most interested in layering languages when i do collaborative work. working with images is less conscious than working with text/word but very close to text/word, as it is symbolic. then there's the language of images in musicians lyrics, then there is the un-conscious or less-conscious language of music (rhythm & pitch arranged over time) ... when dance is an element, there is the un-conscious language of gesture .. so my video needs to fit in with these other languages, and video is an easy read for the audience. recognition or reading images (think: television, internet) is something we are more adept at, culturally, than reading gestures (dance). the audience may be more comfortable reading the video. i have to always keep this in mind as i shape the video to nestle in with these other languages ...
time-based or performance-based artworks function like a language - there are complex sets of signs communicated to the audience over time; and the audience listens with eyes/ears/bodies, sometimes dances as an expression of resonance with the music performers ... still art (paintings, sculpture) to me end up being read like static words or iconic carriers of single meanings ... bound books live in a place between painting and performance, because the icons (words/sigils/referents) happen in a particular ordered series for the reader to digest, the reader sets their own tempo or pace for the consideration of symbols (where a music performer sets the tempo or pace & the audience is subject to the rhythm of icon/symbol/soundinstance presentation in sequence as determined by the performer ... )
i remain committed to moving images because of my fascination with (as i wrote for my master's thesis) the word standing outside of the sentence (the icon or single symbol) and its meaning, and then it is in the sentence, and the meaning shifts. figure and ground relationships with encoding and decoding meaning.
the individual has a relationship to that single iteration AND THEN we put that iteration in relationship with other things (in constellation - Duchamp's portfolios, Cornell's boxes) AND THEN we make them move over time (my symbol-series films, David Lynch/eraserhead, any plot-driven novel) AND THEN we juxtapose symbol-series (my symbol-series films/visual iteration + symbol series poetry performance/verbal iteration + soundtrack/sonic symbol iteration) (really well-made film, with controlled verbal language, color language, language of gesture of the actors all meshing together/or not) ... and the audience takes correlations and makes relationships between them, makes them causal or otherwise linked in a language-like way. we make related meaning out of parallel symbol systems, we create relationships between symbol-systems ... like we make meaning between words, like their relationships make meanings ... our perception of color shifts depending on the color it is next to. the same can be said for words. for many other things.
From the website:
"The streams come from webcams dispersed all over the world and are captured by a server. A fictional landscape takes form and continually evolves in function of what is capture by the cameras. While this projected landscape evolves, the viewer's image is also captured by a webcam located in the exhibition space and incorporated into the landscape one sees. In addition, a monitor allows for the consultation of ephemeral archives presenting the last 24 hours of the currently visible landscape."
http://b-l-u-e-s-c-r-e-e-n.net/streamscape/show.php?lang=1 will take you directly to the shifting landscape itself.
