Artist Lecture: Creative Media and Black Visions of Liberation by Terry Marshall

             Storytelling is a powerful medium to bring out concern on social justice. In this lecture, Terry Marshall presented the importance of storytelling in the projects he had participated in. Marshall believed social injustice came from various stories, and gave the example that how slave’s songs referred to their stories of moving to the U.S. In 2008, he moved to New York City and worked in the Healthcare Education Project. The project cooperators tried to figure out what healthcare could exactly help people. Inspiring by the participation of young people in Tea Party election during 2008, Marshall decided to organize the young generation and made them to share their own stories on healthcare. He showed the 6 minutes proposal video during the talk and described the result came out in a very successful effort.

            The effect and action logic were also important when using social media to tell stories. Marshall explained it meant about how you created an atmosphere of changing and examined the actions to see if they fitted into the problem(s) you wanted to relate with. In the respond to the shooting of Antonio Martin, he cooperated with Intelligent Mischief, a hack lab, to create a work called the Black Body Survival Guide.  The project presented in a humorous way but also filled with satire at the same time. The survival tips provided suggestions such as "always be happy", "only wear hoodie at home", "hands up all the time", etc. These tips were taken from people's experiences on police brutality and racism issue. 
             In conclusion of the talk, Marshall summarized that the essential of organization and storytelling was to identify the target audiences, understand the possible effects, and think about the atmosphere of changes. Marshall gave a truly fluent lecture, providing the main points followed by his personal stories. I think the suggestions he gave for the focus of storytelling is very helpful, and also can be applied to any kind of artwork that related to activism.

the Black Body Survival Guide

Exhibition Review: The One Year Performance by Tehching Hsieh

            Tehching Hsieh was from Taiwan and has moved to the U.S since 1974. From 1978 through 1986, he had completed five One Year Performance pieces. The primary piece in this exhibition was one of his One Year Performance pieces, the Time Clock Piece, done by 1980 to 1981.

            Hsieh believes that "life is a sentence". His works explore the meaning of time and freedom. However, when performed in suffering way, he tended to show the irony of freedom throughout a person's life. In the Time Clock Piece, he had to punch a time clock every hour for an entire year, indicating the struggling with time. This piece was presented by all the time cards and the photographs that Hsieh took when he punched the time clock every time. In addition, the photos were collected to make a 6-minutes long video. The cards, photos, and video were all displayed in this exhibition.

Besides holding an exhibition, Hsieh also gave an artist lecture to introduce his other four performance pieces. To me, the Outdoor Piece (1981-1982) is the most interesting work. In this piece, Hsieh restricted himself to stay outside for one year and he could not enter any indoor space. Living like a homeless person, the Outdoor Piece is easily recognized as a respond to social issue by the audiences, even though Hsieh has declared that the work only focused on how we spending the time.

Tehching Hsieh is truly an amazing performance artist. He questions the meaning of existence in time. In most of the One Year performances, Hsieh shaved his head before starting, emphasizing the passage of time. The audiences tend to view his works in an aspect of social concern because we are extremely sensitive to things happened around our lives, such as environmental problems or social issues. But the One Year performance pieces also allow audiences to have a different look on individual existence and the meaning of consuming time throughout our lives.

Artist lecture: Joel Swanson

Joel Swanson, an artist currently lived in Colorado, gave a lecture in the end of January. The primary theme of his work focuses on technology and language. During his graduate years, he enjoyed to create experimental electronic literature pieces, and demonstrated them as digital narrative. However, after graduating from art school, he became more interested in word itself, the materiality of words, and how the structures of words affect the words meaning.

Swanson enjoys using neon light and blinking effect to explore homophone, which means words with the same sound but differ in the meaning, and words formation. Series of works here/there (2011), t/here (2014), Homophone (right, write, rite) (2014), un/non (2014), and NO/NOT/NOTHING (2014) are all the neon installations playing with the connection between structure and definition of words. He wants to tell the audiences that words are embedded to each other.

Another topic Swanson is interested in is indexicality. His piece Untitled (cursor) (2014) is an animation with a simple rectangle blinking on the upper-left corner of the white screen. Although the title does not provide any clue the content, the audiences have the superior connection with it, knowing the rectangle relates to some kind of technological purpose. He also explores linguistic questions in symbols. Logic Only Works in Two Dimensions is a fantastic piece. It is a large floating greater-than symbol. When smoothly rotating, the symbol frequently changes its own meaning.

Joel Swanson's works are accessible and give the audience a new way to have a look words and symbols. As art is usually practiced to refer some ideas, Swanson uses the language to build a stronger connection between art and conceptual language.

Untitled (cursor)

Logic Only Works in Two Dimensions

Exhibition Review: Pink Elephants on Parade By Nick van Woert

            The exhibition Pink Elephants on Parade was hold between February and March. Nick van Woert tended to explore the meaning of objects. Growing up in Reno, Nevada, Woert had surrounded by the architectures built with imitated materials, which meant a sculpture was no longer made by natural substances; instead, the material was synthesized from chemical matters. Pink Elephants on Parade presented the similar idea. The installed works were all large sculptures made from artificial materials to represent natural landscape, implying the fakeness of material use on architecture.

            The materials Woert used for his works are usually various and unlimited. Additionally, most of the presented works were named as Untitled. Because Woert is interested in the meaning of word and how it connects to material, the name Untitled may refer to a particular purpose. In Pink Elephants on Parade, I was interested in the sculpture Untitled. Although Untitled shared its name with other sculptures, it contained the most materials among the displayed works. The materials contained many kinds of granular substances such as cat litter, coal slag, plaster, pulverized plastic, steel, and bronze. Other materials like base coat, joint compound, and Plexiglas were also used to support the sculpture structure. To me, Untitled was really attractive because it strongly presented Woert's opinion of the material use on modern architecture. If the materials of Untitled had not been listed, the audience might have thought it was simply made from colored sands. 

            By using the title Pink Elephants on Parade from the Disney movie Dumbo, I think Woert tended to emphasize the illusion of modern architecture. In the scene of Pink Elephants on Parade, Dumbo sees a series of illusion after being accidentally drunk. Similarly, Woert's exhibition reveled the imitation of architectural material, replacing the substances from natural sources with various chemicals.

Project 2: 3D Vignettes

        This video is a technical practice of stop motion animation. Materials include 3D model for the dog house and white clay for the puppy. The background was built with a green hand towel and a piece of painted paper. In this short story, I tried to mimic a puppy's motion in real life. I think the sounds are successfully corresponded to the actions. Overall, the video achieves the technical effects that I want to make, but the part I think it lacks for is to create a conversation to the audiences.
        The green screen method was applied to make the clouds float on the sky. Before creating this 3D vignettes project, I made a green screen video as a practice.

        The green screen video questions the overuse on touchscreen device. It is more common now that people use smartphone or tablet to record everything instead of just seeing through their own eyes. So I want to emphasize this problem in this video exercise. The absent of sea lions represents seeing things through a lifeless medium.
        I lost the files of original footages, but the background footage was filmed in San Francisco during my spring break.Then I filmed the the front footage with my hands moving across the screen and combined the two footages together. The sound of sea lion was originally from Newport, Oregon. It was also filmed during my spring break.

The barking from sea lions

Sea lions in Newport, Oregon

The photograph of the site where my background footage was filmed

Project 1: Responding to Heidegger

Technology has changed people's lives a lot. But as technology is more important in our society, we become to rely on it more often and sees everything through its eyes. Heidegger said technology is a mode of revealing. The techne means activity (technology) and aesthetic, implying technology may have a strong connection to art. How was art developed in the beginning? I think it started from the appreciation of nature, as we know many ancient crafts were inspired by things in nature. Therefore, in "The Question Concerning Technology", I think Heidegger was trying to give the idea that technology is just a way to reveal nature. But because we tend to figure things out based on technological concepts, we ignore and show no respect to nature. So to be aware of this problem, art is a way to question it.

My idea to respond to this article was biotechnology application on DNA codons. As being biology major, I want to connect Heidegger's idea with biotechnology. DNA is consisted with the small molecules called nucleotides. There are four types of nucleotides: A, T, C, and G. Just like computer codon, they are the codon coded for all genetic information of an organism. The work was built as an interactive sculpture. I made the sculpture as a human's heart and placed a green light bulb inside of it. Reason of using green light was that the fluorescent green is a common dye used for viewing DNA sequence. The light bulb was set in a DC circuit with a switch that could turn it on or off. When an audience switches the light on, the four letters ATCG are shown on the surface of the heart. I used paper towel for my sculpture building because it was an accessible material. Before putting the last layer on the sculpture, I cut out the letters. So this is how those words can only be seen when turning the light bulb on. 

Having a base under the sculpture, the work can be just installed on any flat surface (such as on a table) to allow audience to interactive with it. The heart sculpture means a creation of Nature and the codons are the invention of human technology. To allow the audience view my work more easily, I also wrote the words Nature and Technology on each side of the switch. However, it seems to make the work has a too simple meaning. A further consideration of finding a good balance between abstract and simplicity is needed.

               

Final Project of ART 345

My final project was a short performance video. It was an exploration of sounds created by using various materials to play a violin. The reason I chose violin because I have played it for eight years and I'm really familiar with this instrument. I started it based on my interest, so it has taken a significant part in my life. I always enjoy listening to violin, but I'd never tried to see how many interesting sounds it can make. By having the opportunity from this final project, I would use different objects to explore the music of violin. Two major focuses for my project were to search uncommon sounds from it and examine various video effects.

My idea for the project was inspired by John Cage and his prepared piano. John Cage, a talented American composer, developed many playing styles in music performance. His works often involved using chance, unstructured composition, improvisation, and multiple techniques. His most famous work was 4'33", performed by the "silence" technique. 4'33" was consisted with three movements. When every movement started, the performer would closed the lid of piano, sat in front of it, and kept quite until the whole performance was ended. Although 4'33" seemed like a simple piece, it had applied many music theories. Because the instrument did not make any sound, all the sounds heard were all depended on how they interacted with the environment at that certain moment. In other words, the audience was the performer. 4'33"  could be performed differently every time depended on how audience wanted to react during the performance. It was a typical work that had used chance and unstructured composition. Among many Cage's works, I was really attracted by the prepared piano. He inserted objects between the piano's strings. When pressing the keyboard, various and unusal sounds came out based on which string contacted with which object. Furthermore, he made it as an improvisation piece, so the prepared piano was also a work performed with chance, unstructured form, and multiple techniques. The part I liked about it was its interdisciplinary. It combined a classical instrument with the objects that were usually not considered as a part of instrument, and created a playful way to perform music. A performance of the prepared piano was not the same as what we used to see in a concert, but it was not hard to understand the meaning of it either.

In the beginning process, I was planning to present my project as a live performance. Then I changed my mind to an interdisciplinary video because I wanted sounds had ability to interact with each other. By a video, I could overlay and rearrange the sounds.

Unlike piano, I thought it was more difficult to find objects that could make unique sounds to a violin. I also had to be careful to select items would not hurt my violin. After few days of searching, the final objects used in the video were: two strings tied around the violin, two pieces of a vinyl record, a 12 inch-long ruler, four key chains, two Ping-Pong balls, and a feather which was meant to pay Cage's respects. My most favorite sound was the on created by the Ping-Pong balls when tapping on the strings. Because the hollow structure of the balls, they made a funny twisted sound. Even though my project's idea was come from the prepared piano, nothing was placed on the strings or any part on my violin. The objects were only used for playing note and tapping the backside.

Originally, I wanted to use GoPro as my filming camera, but the one I borrowed might be broken because I wasn't able to turn it on. Therefore, I used my own Canon camera to do the filming. Before starting, I placed a navy blue blanket for the background so the viewer would not be distracted by anything on the back. Without using GoPro, setting camera to place I wanted really became a challenge, and it also limited filming angle. But in order to film from many angles, I tried to set my camera on violin by a stand, to tie it on some objects with rubber bends, and to held it by one hand when performed the sounds by another hand.

I edited my video by Adobe Premiere. I divided the performance into three parts. In the video, the first clip shown as the beat, and the other parts were just showing how I made the sounds. The three clips were not exactly match with each other was to show that it was an unstructured piece. To emphasize that point, I also put various visual effects, changed the size and moved the position of clips around. The problem I had faced was trying to completely overlay a clip on top of the other. I tested every effect in the blend mode of opacity section but many of them switched the footage to a strange color. Finally, I picked Color Dodge mode. Although it made the clip be slightly transparent, at least it did not change much on the color.

I got a lot of responds in the final critique. Most people reacted my video with a feeling of strangeness, even though I wasn't intentional to do that. More feedbacks were like wishing to see a score or to film myself when I was performing. I thought the score suggestion was good. I found out some audience was confused with the sound pattern because there was nothing served as the guideline. Filming myself was also a useful suggestion. But the reason I didn't do it was due to my discomfort of showing myself in front of a camera.

If I were going to redo the project, I would keep searching the perfect effect for the overlay part and made the transition smoother. At 1:37 in the video, there was a gap between the two clips. The disconnection was done on purpose, but the black screen was popped up as an accident. Also, I would make a graphic score so my audience could more relate to my performance.

One way of trying to set the camera

Took almost three hours for one of my sequence to be encoded