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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