Dear Megan

Dear Megan from michelle lee on Vimeo.

Final project: combine audio/sound, storytelling, and painting and drawing.

For this video, I decided to experiment with animating simple drawings with an audio recording of a story. The story itself, in the beginning, had been a typical narration of a memory. I chose to break it down into phrases that were concrete but also abstracted in some way. It references a memory of the games my sister and I played during the summertime - imagining places and stories that only we knew. The drawings are meant to illustrate the simple symbols and meanings within the audio, but I did not want them to be direct, concrete references.

Make up Class: MOMI

I went to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, at the end of February. While I was there, I was able to see an exhibition on Jan Svankmajer, as well as I think their permanent collection that included the history of film, costumes and props/make-up through the ages, and an different arcade games, as well as a lab where you can make stop-frame animations. There was an abundance of old film paraphernalia that was really interesting to look at now - as well as funny things, like make-up from the set of Sex and the City. I also was able to see the exhibition on Jim Henson and his career. The exhibition outlined his start as a printmaker to his eventual interest in puppets - they also many of his sketches on display as well as some of his experimental films. When you think of Jim Henson, the first thought is obviously muppets, but the exhibition really lent itself to see the breadth of his work, and the talent he had for so many different things within the arts - especially with his experimental films, all the drawings, even his earliest posters it's easy to tell that from the beginning he was an incredibly creative person.

4. Printing in the Classroom

Thoughts on printing:
As I already said in class, it was a pretty rewarding experience and it puts your images in a different context. It also makes it easier in some ways to see mistakes in your images, or things one might need to correct. Because so many things exist on the screen, it's been a while since I've actually printed anything I make images of on the computer, so it was, in a way, an eye-opener. Colors are different, textures appear differently, and it makes you rethink how you might want your images to be viewed. The idea of lightboxes came up, as well as size - if it were a large print, if it could become a wall paper, many things change with digital printing in mind.

Lesson Plan:
Students will make prints of their photographs from the year and make mock-ups of a proposed monograph of their year's work. In what order will the images be in? What text might you include? Sketches and thoughts? How much of your process is exposed? Will multiple images be on one page? Even in the digital age, many photographers still work with physical layouts to get a sense of how their work will look on a page. After working out layouts, students will go back and create their layouts on indesign, culminating in a printed monograph of their final works.

3. New Media - What next?

What might be missing: Real exploration of artists who work in these mediums. Although we did some exploring on our own, I feel that artists who use new media really use it as their real medium - I know we are inexperienced (some of us) in this field and I would have really liked to have been able to think of a project that incorporated new media into our own work, as part of our process. Our final project addresses it in some ways, but it still would have been nice to see some new media art in the flesh, or explore artists more in depth. It also would have been nice to work with a projector, but I guess that would be too complicated.

What I would like to take a step further: Making a video, making sound, putting it all together. I want to continue to experiment with both of those mediums - I know what I've been shooting isn't the highest quality but I'd like to continue to see where it takes me. I've been making short videos on my phone of flickering lights in places around the city, and I like the idea of viewing them very small, online, in the middle of a blank page, or something. In terms of sound - after doing the teachable moment video for the other class - I'm a little more interesting in audio storytelling, and creating narratives for still images. This is something I'm exploring for the final.

1. Media Art: Context?

image source here.

Last week, I posted a sound file, Attempts at Whistling, an experiment with the amplification of the sounds my lips and mouth make mixed in with my whistling (note: I can't whistle.) If I were to place this work in a context, I imagine it paired with images of mouths and lips moving, in a room with a projector. This actually already reminds me of an existing work by Amanda Long, titled "Mixed Messages" - a wall created by hundreds of mouths moving and breathing, causing the wall to look as if it is breathing together. A bit different, but I imagine a similar effect in a way - I would like to have the visual of the mouth smacking, blowing, making gross noises. I wonder if being in a highly enclosed space, with no visual, and complete white might work as well.

With the video project, I imagine the context to simply be in a video room - I think some of the elements of the window and the light/line might make it interesting to project upon a geometric surface, or something angles, but I think it would be superficial to project it onto a surface that mimics the video, or in a space that replicates what happens in the video - the context would really have to enhance the viewing experience in some way, or become inseparable to the video as part of the project. In that sense, I can't imagine any other context than a black video room. Although it may be interesting to play with size - perhaps on a small LCD screen. If it was cut even better, I would put it on multiple small LCD screens, only showing the clips of the window and the train itself, leaving out the faces. Or perhaps the faces would be at the ends, creating a narrative about 2 different people on the train, on opposite ends. 

2. Sound Art Piece: Attempts at Whistling

For this work, I decided to use the second lesson of my post last week about recording "everyday sounds" - I thought it might be weird and interesting to record body sounds - gross stuff like smacking lips and scratching and nails and teeth. Then, the sounds were too gross for me to work with, so I decided to record my attempts at whistling too. After going through the sound clips, I thought it might be interesting to use only sounds I made with my mouth and experiment with amplifying them through audacity, as well as layering them. Even though the sounds make me slightly sick, I think it might be really awesome to be able to hear these sounds in an empty room quite loud - the chattering of teeth, licking of lips. I also can't whistle at all, so I liked the idea of "attempts at whistling" - recording ones lack of abilities to make sound. 

4. Software Art: Michael Takeo Magruder

Data Flower (Prototype I) - an internal view of a digital blossom

Michael Takeo Magruder is an artist and researcher based in the Kings College Visualization Lab. His work and research is devoted to exploring digital media, networks, and cultures. Data Flower (Prototype I) is an internet-based work, that take images from Flickr that have been tagged with 'flower' and then applied via algorithm to the modeling software that then creates this cycle of artificial flower growth and decay. 

The work Data_Plex(economy) uses real-time data about financial markets to construct three-dimensional renderings of data via geometric shapes. It creates a realtime landscape and visualization of the flux of capital, the stock exchange,  active during trading time and then silent when the market closes.