I understand that I have neglected the online responses for the class but due to the obsessive workload I have had this semester as well as my lack of interest in forum type websites, I have decided to submit everything in bulk.
Week 2:
Culture Intercom - Stan Vanderbeek
Vanderbeek’s concept of the “Culture Intercom” is rather an interesting take on the growing, evolutional process of technology and using it to one’s advance for the sake of expanded cinema in many different ways to help better understand the the purpose and effect of the image-flow and image density of the viewer’s subconscious levels of understanding through the art form of moving pictures. He suggests that there are many concepts that are best explained through images alone that are non-verbal and that to help explain these is best done through the work frame of technology and expanded cinema to utilize in ways only videos, computers, and theaters can portray he calls image libraries or “life-theatres”. He proposes the construction of the “movie-dromes” which are pretty much as he describes a planetarium of images viewed on a dome-like ceiling the audience watches and engages in simply by laying on the ground at it’s walls while it’s projection is displayed in a sort of collage effect.
This concept and many of his other concepts mentioned in this excerpt are quite fascinating and interesting. Although we have yet to utilize the movie drome to our everyday viewing, we have built similar designs such as this as well as integrated and improve the integration of technology to our everyday life that is best displayed visually rather than within verbal interaction.
Week 5:
Expanded Cinema: Live Record - Duncan White
The idea of film was at first used for the sake of documenting and rehearsing events within the moment, however, artists have used film and the idea of expanded cinema to record the artistic design of “figures” within a “kinetic theater”. This term was first coined by Carolee Scheemann who saw expanded cinema as a “live image” that captures the essence of the artist’s engagement with the artwork by incorporating the principles of abstract expressionist painting that focused more on socioeconomic concerns, coupling the sense of a collective, physical energy with a re-evaluation of vision and movement.
Scheemann sought to give the media “flesh” by making it visceral and alive. The media became more than fixed product but an experimental filmmaking and artistic activity that emphasized the cultural process of performance that made expanded cinema seem lively, immediate, an emphasis of primary experience and the directness of viewing. Overall, expanded cinema allowed artist to record their art with the help of technology, using it to their own benefit and projecting it in many different ways that allowed for interaction of the audience or for the sake of performance art, making it static yet lively. The fact that expanded cinema is a process of experimenting with different technological media that allows art to breathe and grow respectively without the limitations of the mainstream uses of traditional media.
Week 7
Line Describing a Cone and Related Films - Anthony McCall
In this article, it describes the work frame and environmental space to a few given artistic works. The first being “Line Describing a Cone” which was the first film to exist in real, three-dimensional space. It was an interactive piece of projector light being displayed on a projected surface with the audience playing a key role in interaction as sculptural pieces within the allotted exhibition time. The artist was amazed by the inconsistent interaction with the piece with some audience members staying only briefly while others stayed from start to finish, each interacting with the piece in their own way whether during the performance piece within the light spectrum against the projected surface or afterwards engaging amongst their peers talking about the piece. The artist spent a great of pre-planning when it came to the structure of the piece, the length of the space from the projector to the projected surface, the exhibition room, the timeframe, the little details involving the projector itself and the size of the cone projecting the light. All of these details were worked into the performance to establish some form of control while the rest was simply interacted on by the audience.
Long Film for Four Projectors - Anthony McCall
This next piece entitled “Long Film for Four Projectors” was a much longer piece and designed not so much as a theatrical piece but as an installation allowing the audience to come and go as they please. As the project progressed so did temporal length of the piece, adding a new element to the theatrical experience. As the artist worked with time as a main driven point in his work, he used it to his advantage to extend the piece and allowing it room to grow yet “cease to grow as a performance with a perceivable beginning and end”. The gallery space was a huge factor within the work frame of this piece, a large room at least seventh feet in length. It’s content consisted of an even length of film in each projector, at a constant speed within each where it would project through its light an enlarged image onto the screen for as long as 12 hours as the timeframe of the piece grew.
Anthony McCall’s next two projects continued to show his interest within the projector and the environmental space. His experimentation with the projector with its underlying use as a medium factored in greatly with his artwork. He sought to push the boundaries of film by simply using the projector as a source to project the coded information onto a flat surface. He used the projector beyond its usage as a device and made it part of the art piece itself, using it within the given space and sometimes with multitudes of projectors within the same performance piece. He also establish a new element to the artistic design, time. He used time as a means to help add a factor to the piece, allowing it to expand within length and as an interactive performance piece. Time is something not many artist consider when presenting an art piece with how long it takes to present it to the timeframe of the performance used to engage in it. He revolutionized the idea of both the usage of the projector and the usage of time.
Week 9:
The Invention and Early Years of Cinema, 1880s-1904
During the 1880s when the idea of cinema and moving pictures first came into existence, it helped establish a new technological revolution within the industrial era, providing a mass-production of easier, simpler ways of providing entertainment to the masses. The preconditions for motion pictures were the scientific and biological discovery of the eye’s capabilities to perceive motions at a relatively rapid rate. After said discovery was established, several optical toys were marketed to give an illusion of movement by using a small number of drawings, each altered somewhat. called the Zoetrope. This was one of the first hand-drawn animation loops provided, all for the sake of optical research. In a sense, this was the first considerable form of the now modernized, digitally rendered form of the GIF.
Other productions that helped mass-produce the use of moving images was the invention of “magic lanterns” to project glass lantern slides. The reinvention of photography was then establish to be presented on a much flexible strip to insert within a projector or camera rapidly. This help revolutionize both photography and filmography. This also helped with the intermittent mechanism for cameras and projectors, providing a place for each frame to stop and be exposed while being run, such as a shutter passed behind the lens while the filmstrip moved because of the hand-cranked motor. It also help utilize the condition of movement and the idea of motion blur, adding even more devices on cameras to help readjust the quality of the movement for a much clear shot. All of these inventions help revolutionize the way cameras and projectors are used in the future, the production a fast-growing, mass-produced and ever evolving system of moving images.
More precursors to motion pictures was the idea of using rapidly produced photographs and using them as motion pictures such as taking multiple photographs of a horse running to analyze the movement of their gallops and each picture providing a different frame each but ever evolving into the next.
Further along in this article of Bordwell’s Invention of Cinema, we look at the ever-growing international fascination and contributions of Europeans also taking a part within the this new media of cinema and motion pictures. This helped produce some more inventions such as Kinetoscope, a peephole device that ran the film around a series of rollers and activated when viewers inserted a coin in a slot. The Lumière Brothers and their contribution to the filming industry, providing a few amazing works of art and most famous invention the projection system that helped make the cinema a commercially viable enterprise internationally and was commissioned to create much smaller, affordable devices than Edison, elegantly designing a little camera, the Cinématographe. The Lumière Cinématographe, a small, portable device used to record everyday movements into films and place on a stand for a much stable performance provided a much easier development of film and camerawork than did many other inventions into play. These contributions each unique and vastly different but ever evolving onto the next helped revolutionize the filming and photography industries that we now thrive on today. The evolutional process of these works help many growing artists and with further technologies make it much more easier and affordable for the viewer. We have grown since then as a society now using film as a means for movies and movie theaters allowing the artists and actors record the movements of images and cinematic, theatrical scenes and stories while the masses or the viewers pay to see. And with the production of digital devices and computers, we have come a long way from hand-held pictures in a Zoetrope or Magic Lanterns and hand-held animations to digital, more easily developed and more affordable 3D animations. We have come a long way since then and within only a little over a century.
An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and The (In)Credulous Spectator - Tom Gunning
This article looks at Lumière’s “Arrival of a Train at the Station” and explains the palpable, dangerous affect the cinema’s realism has on its audience. The new artform of cinema not yet experience by the mass viewers, were ignorant and naive when coming into the theater, being introduced for the first time cinema in the making. They faced a physical trauma and undeniable fear as they watch a moving train coming at them as it arrives at the station. Many audience members coward and scream, taking a fight or flight action in their primitive response, fleeing from the auditorium as they watched horror how realistic the cinema can be.
It further analyzes the spectator to its cinematic experience, Metz believing that the naive viewer, “is still seated beneath the incredulous one, or in his heart.” He further looks at the idea of the spectator wavering between the credulous position of believing the image and the repressed, anxiety-causing, knowledge of its illusion. An inner deception among the mass of spectators still believing in myth and fantasy as part of reality and yet newly introduced to this idea that cinema can achieve far more realistic and frightening representations of everyday perspectives without the intentional harm of the viewer. It intends to help better the spectators well-rounded perspective by allowing them within situations that does not always accomplish positive outlooks. It expands the mind and opens the eye to new experiences without every having experienced them.
The first projections most likely approached more realistic, life-threatening experiences within its cinematic production, confusing the naive spectator for what is fiction and what is reality. Understandably the realism the cinema provides with such terror can be real to the viewer, offering a sense of being sucked into the experience as many motion pictures do to its viewers. Why even in modern dramas and action-packed battles on the big screen are we susceptible to cinema’s illusionistic grasp. However, during a time where the motion picture experience was still very new to the spectator, the terror of such fiction must have been immense and overwhelming. One can only imagine the terror the viewer must face being introduced to something so new and yet not fully aware of its fictional presence on the screen.
Week 10:
The Emergence of Steina - Gerald O’Grady
The usage of recording and surveillance as a source of art with the use of technology is very experimental. Steina, using devices her husband once created for his work and ingeniously manipulating them in her own to use as part of the art piece is brilliant. However, the written structure of this article makes it hard to understand exactly what is trying to be explained. The best I can get out of it is that the instillation of the camera and the video monitor and broadcasting of the artwork seems rather new and ingenious for its time. The writer, O’Grady, is having a difficult time really getting to the point with each paragraph and all of Steina’s work, barely able to grasp an easy explanation or detailing of how Steina is using technology and video recording to her advantage with artwork. However, after viewing a few of Steina’s works and how she manipulates the video image with the usage of sound such as with a violin sort of captures and visual for what O’Grady is trying to get at but at the same time is having a hard time presenting his words into an easy understanding of the point he is trying to make. I feel as if he was able to explain exactly how Steina is using this new media to her advantage for art’s sake, it would be much more invigorating of an article. I understand the gist of this article but not in full detail what is trying to come across through it.
Expanded Cinema Photo, Post Photo - Jackie Hatfield
In a further, more detailed outlook about Expanded Cinema, the term is better explained as more of an expanded “form” or consciousness rather than something involving film stating, “the current experimental moving image era physically and conceptually transcends traditional media boundaries and artists are evolving new cinematic concepts and intertextual languages, providing an imperative to reconsider and review the under-explored practical histories of the avant-garde”. In this, the term cinema is reevaluated to mean a broad history or to hint at the “idiosyncratic discourses” of practices that also included spectacle. This term can be best described as exhibition pieces or performances that may or may not disengage the audience within the piece. More is talked about the art of experimentation or the interest of new media and forms of mixed media or a multitude of media within a piece. The accessibility to newer technology such as video expands the flexibility for subsequent developments in interactive media and participatory cinema. Cinema has become a form for not just film and video but also for the means of improving and expanding the framework of art itself in many different new media forms. It utilizes technology to its advantage for the namesake of art and helps artists consider new and more open-ended means for art.
Week 11:
Dream Flesh - R. Bruce Elder
Elder looks at Carolee Scheemann and her interests with the body through performance as a conceptual form. Scheemann looks at gender stereotypes and social issues and uses her body as an artform to articulate underline concerns within society. Scheemann focuses on the body quite often with her works of art, displaying her nude body or the bodies of nude women on a stage and performing obscene, considerably deep concerns about how women’s bodies are portrayed within society. She takes note to feminist ideals through the use of her body and flesh through an artistic means. Social nudism had an emerging strain of art that celebrated the body for harboring mysterious, archaic redemptory energies that had a distinctive influence of Germany philosophy of modern social nudism’s practices. It seems that sociology starts playing a huge factor within the 60’s and 70’s of the 20th century, factoring in inequality and the ideal of the male gaze on women’s bodies. The body became an icon for the natural and intended purposes it is pre-designed to do rather than a respective form for living. The body was sexualized and artists felt that further sexualizing it for the sake of art was how one can redefine that line of art and nudity where nudity pushes the boundaries of sex and sexual means. Sexuality and gender start playing a key role within art during this time, the use of art a sort of symbolic medium for gaining respect for the body rather than as a object on display, yet ironically becoming an performance object on display.
Week 12:
Digital Divide - Claire Bishop
Claire Bishop questions contemporary artworks negligence of the digital age with the divide of the traditional uses of artistic media with this new media of the digital world and the beneficial relationship between the internet and mass-production of traditional works through digital means. This article looks at the digital age as both a positive and negative respect to that of artwork whether through its production, dissemination, and consumption to its ubiquitous forms, their omnipresence facilitated by the accessibility and affordability of digital cameras and editing software. As she questions contemporary art has been curiously unresponsive to the total upheaval in the labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution. This question she points out furthers her concerns to digital media to the practices and interactions with artwork and its affects to the art world in general.
