This interactive piece is 7354 cubic meters. Its purpose is for the audience to bring their body into this studio to watch and feel what they see. They are allowed to treat it as their own space, to sing or dance if they please. In the middle of this studio there is a circle of couches and in the middle of them are speakers. Along the walls are projections, that consist of many blues, greens, and reds. Their overall theme seems to be connected with nature. The video projections include one human, one pig, a snake, and worms. The videos seem to have been recorded in a choppy way as if they were recorded for filler parts of a film, focusing on small elements like the worms or grass with a steady hand moving slowly along the images. The music and video have a slight surreal type of feel to it mixed with nostalgia.
Rist VS Tiktok
Rist shows a lot of self-expression in her pieces. Both her and modern videos on Tiktok align with the idea for the audience to explore their theme of identity exploration, to see and feel things that they typically would not experience otherwise. They also both have a sense of community, for TikTok, it consists of things such as trends and shared experiences through videos. While for Rist it is about bringing a crowd to experience her work. For example, the piece Pour Your Body Out creates a sense of community by bringing all of these different people to experience the visuals, music, and overall vibe of her work.
Experiment
I wore my shirt inside out for a whole day. Feelings of insecurity and anxiety filled me as my brain tricked me into thinking that everyone was looking at me. As if they knew that something was off. In reality, many people did not tend to notice, they did not even bat an eye. Even if strangers did realize they did not act on it, they probably had better things to do with their time. I met up with 4 friends that day. Out of the four only one noticed and told me so I was aware that my shirt was backwards. I guess that it would also make a difference in what type of shirt I would wear backward, the one I had on was a plain black tee, so it may have been hard to tell that it was on the wrong way as the only indicators were small seams and the tag on my back. What I got from this experiment is that even though you may feel embarrassed about what others think of you, you should not really care as you will only see them for a part of the day and perhaps never again.
Meet Friday 9:30 at Bus Loop! See itinerary for details
*Reading notes due on blog
Sal and Ava – 2023
Assignment: One Feat, Three Ways video project
Video Art: One FEAT, Three Ways*
You will work with a partner to make three videos less than 2-minutes each in length each.
Your videos should be shot at the studio in controlled, illuminated conditions.
Pick your FEAT. You will repeat variations on your “FEAT” in each video below.
Your FEAT should be an everyday gesture or activity that you can push to its limits. Push yourself to your limits. Push a material to its limits. Do not take ANY risks with your safety – subtle, quiet, funny risks are better and more interesting anyway. Just watching someone smiling as long as they can as hard as you can is fascinating and even painful to watch for its duration.
Examples of gestures from past students include: Eating something, Juggling, Kissing, Blowing up a Balloon, Smiling, Holding an Awkward Pose, Reaching for Things out of Reach… etc.
It might be an absurd thing – something pointless, or an impossible feat that you can’t actually do
The object is to try to do the thing, not to “act” – and what happens… happens!
You, your partner, or someone else may perform. Maintain your concentration and explore how a simple gesture becomes interesting when performed with commitment and intention.
NOTE: Add a title to each video, and videos should be approximately 1-2 minutes in length.
Video #1: The One-Shot
The video will consist of “one shot” – there will be no editing, other than a black screen to mark the beginning and end of the video. You may focus on camera function, unusual points of view, and framing. You will also add titles and end credits to your videos.
Video #2: The Sequence
The object of this video exercise is to shoot a series of shots with the intention to edit them into a sequence. It may require 5 minutes, an hour, a day, or a week, and you can show it in a series of stills or a time lapse. Edit your footage to be less than two minutes.
Video #3: The Loop
The object of this video exercise is to create a video that is meant to be played over and over again indefinitely, without stopping. Consider the content of the video when you are shooting your feat, and use looping to complete the meaning of the work. Don’t make a short GIF type video – think of a longer loop – something that could play in a gallery on repeat without end.
Edit your loop footage to be less than 2 minutes long, and then play on a loop for the critique.
Videos will be graded by the degree to which students demonstrate:
Understanding of the key concepts in the assignment
Clarity and originality of ideas
Investment of time and contributions to the group
Focus in performance and intentionality about everything in the frame
Technical success using lighting and professional camera equipment in works, and technical success using editing software and exporting gallery-quality video
Presentation and openness to feedback during critique
Students are also expected to post a final work (including any revisions after critique) to the class blog with a title, artist names, and a short description of the work within ONE WEEK of the critique for final marks.
Videos will not receive a grade until a work is posted on the class blog.
Video Artist references:
Yoko Ono
Bruce Nauman
Adrian Piper
Pipilotti Rist
Michelle Pearson Clarke
Lee Walton
William Wegman
Jon Sasaki
Camille Turner
Marina Abramovic
Kelly Mark
Euan MacDonald
Wood and Harrison
Erwin Wurm
Maria Hupfield
Student examples
**Be safe and respectful to yourself and others at all times! Talk with me if you have any questions about your project. Never perform unsafe activities for your projects in this or any class in Studio Art.
Describe the habitual movements/unconscious gestures, tics etc. of 3 people you know well. How do individual body parts move, and how does the whole body interact? What about facial expressions, and emotional valence of the movement? How does body type inform the movement?
WARM UP EXERCISE all together – breathing, bouncing on knees, shaking it out, breathing together.
Teach your partner one of the choreographies. Rehearse, and record 30 seconds of video of each performance.
CHANGE PARTNERS. Repeat – Teach another partner another choreography. Rehearse, and record 30 seconds of video of each performance.
CHANGE PARTNERS. Repeat – Teach another partner another choreography. Rehearse, and record 30 seconds of video of each performance.
At the end, you should have three, 30-second videos of other students performing an archive of movements. Use this footage for your editing workshop.
WEDNESDAY
Field Trip Reminders: Make a short blog post describing and reflecting on TWO artworks you were interested in from the field trip including images. Please pay for your trip on the Field Trip Eventbrite Link.
More examples of student videos:
(SEE DESKTOP for 1 minute examples – lemons, hugging, denim…)
A portrait of a fish: a bowl of water. Something a fish sees every day, it is ubiquitous with “fish”. A very common pet but potentially one of the most difficult animals to read; we can hear the noise from a dog playing and guess that it is happy- we can not hear a fish swimming and understand it’s mood.- it also conveys how we can never understand what it is like to live as another human, let alone another animal. – maybe two containers, what we see everyday; air & what a fish sees; water
JFK Goes to Candy Mountain
With this piece I wanted to Explore a fusion of internet content to create a inspirational journey. I took from two iconic sources JFK’s Inauguration speech and the Youtube video “Charlie The Unicorn” to create a new story where the characters intersect. This piece is about the absurdity of internet culture and the amount of context needed to identify internet “comedy” videos. It also explores the flattening of history, as
Challenging the classic structure of karaoke, this video depicts the performance of a song I had never heard of before. I attempted to sing and through this action, we approached ideas of fitting in and trying your best. This piece is the least accented, with no added music or effects, forcing the viewer to struggle through the performance alongside the video. Messing up words, changing speeds, and creating a melody change what we expect from karaoke, adding a difficulty to something that is otherwise meant to be enjoyable.
This video deals with concepts of anxiety, stage fright, and stress. Starting slow and ramping into a series of fast paced cuts, this piece explores the tense moments of karaoke. Being paralyzed in fear, frozen and unable to sing, this is emulated through different angles and lots of close footage. The song choice relates lyricaly, but the lyrics are never heard, creating a wall of droning guitars that the subject has to face, losing track of the song structure and adding to the tense atmosphere. The lack of visual effects places the piece “on stage” without any hope of salvaging the performance through green screen effects, and at points some of the lighting equipment is even shown to give a sense of scale.
This was our most edited video, and it borrows heavily from classic karaoke visuals. This video centers of themes of delusion, as the subjects give a grand performance which is undercut and grounded by opposing unedited footage. With this, we hoped to show what it means to give it your all in something so fleeting and vulnerable as karaoke, where a disposition between confidence and perception is displayed. The effects and outfits make the performance larger than life. However, in line with the song choice, the subjects are only pretending, and when the unedited footage is shown the glamor is washed away.
pictured on the left, Flatbread Library by Sameer Farooq really held my attention. I was so enthralled by the dichotomy it presented. A collection of different cultures and a collection of one humanity. Every culture is so different but at the same time, every culture has a type of flatbread. It also speaks on immigration and the emotional power of connection as all of the bread was collected from the GTA. To me it represents the vast amounts of culture and knowledge around every corner, as well as a sense of unity that can cross cultural bounderies.
Pictured on the right, Interface Remix was the gallery installation by Tishan Hsu. On the top floor of the Moca I walked in circles and Hsu pulled me to an alternate future filled with bio-technological horror. Tishan Hsu’s exhibit played with form, flesh, and machine, combining the natural and unnatural to create something new and futuristic. Hsu explored the rapid growth of technology, as well as alienation and abstraction of the human form. Although most of his work depicts “the future” it couldn’t feel any more relevant or present than right now.
In this Video art piece by Pipilotti Rist titled “I’m not the Girl who Misses Much”, the viewer is invited to question reality and the female body. The video depicts Rist dancing around in a black dress, singing. However, the quality is grainy, the speed fluctuates, and the subjects movements are erratic. The piece is filled with digital artifacting and glitches, as well as changes in colour grading as rist just and spins around eerily. Alongside the objective, the strange video, there is the subject of the video to consider as well. The full, collected piece asks questions about perception, what we are seeing, reality, as the video quickens and slows, Rist hopes to emulate the subjective passage of time and how it can seem longer and shorter. The subject of the video calls into question the outside gaze, as we watch her dance, her body is revealed as her dress slips away. This to me showcases the societal pressure women face as they are constantly viewed in a sexualized manner, especially on television and the internet. Rist’s strange behaviour separates herself from a image of sexuality, perhaps a comment on the effort required to escape the gaze of others and to be accepted as a human. Rist continues this theme of femininity throughout many of her pieces, often subjecting ideas of a “traditional woman” and forcing herself to be viewed outside of sexuallity. Through this window of violence and bizarreness that Rist portrays, she is allowed to expose herself, a fact that reveals more about our society than about her.
The scale of a kilometer varies based on the measurement. Walking a kilometer is not difficult but visualizing a kilometer is. My idea allows for the visualization of a kilometer through sound, as the listener hears the accumulation of noise from one thousand guitars. One singular guitar is one meter long, meaning that one thousand guitars measured together would be one kilometer at length. The audio of my piece shows the magnitude of measuring a kilometer in objects, subjecting the listener to the chaotic wall of sound that would be created if all one thousand of those guitars were played at once.
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