April. 5 – Tattoo Party!!!

Tattoo Makeup

Thank you Alexia for being so willing to model these face tats as my living doll. Her face is complete with eyebrows, blush, contour, eyelashes, glasses, and of course some big juicy lips!

More Photos!

March. 29 – Tattoo Proposals

Permanent makeup is a type of tattooing where people get their daily makeup permanently added to their face so they never have to worry about getting ready again! I wanted to play with this idea of permanent makeup, as it shows how pervasive beauty standards are in our society. Women in particular often feel immense pressure to always look their best, and it involves an array of products and time. So wouldn’t it be much easier if we could just stick a temporary tattoo of our daily eyeliner on and be on our way?

I think it’s funny how we’ve all kind of become walking billboards in the age of brand culture and fast-moving trends. People love to adorn their favourite brands or the most popular brands to fit in to a group or just look ‘cool’. But what they are really doing is providing free advertising for the brands they wear. In thinking about the pervasive nature of capitalism and consumer culture, I thought it would be interesting to make tattoos that say ‘your ad here’ to make clear how the body is almost a site of capitalism.

March. 27 – Tattoo Brainstorm

*for people who have glasses already they get a tattoo that says ‘four eyes’ to go above their glasses.

March. 24 – Parent Video Version 2

This version of my parent video includes a different audio track. It’s much more low-fi and raw feeling, as I recorded without a script. It took many takes of just watching the video through and recording myself reflecting on my thoughts about the content. I finally settled on the take I included in the video below. I also chose to leave in more awkward parts of the recording, like clearing my throat and coughing, to retain the feeling of the viewer watching my home videos with me. I wanted it to feel like my raw thoughts and feelings as I watched the videos of my past self and my parents’ past selves.

March. 13 – Parent Video Final

Title: Reflections on Parenthood – From the Outside Looking In

My final video is comprised of home videos and photographs. The narration over top is my personal reflection and thoughts on parenthood and the inevitable heartbreak of raising a child who will one day no longer need you. This idea came about as I was going through the content for this project. As I was going through old home movies, I found myself seeing them through the eyes of my parents and feeling an intense sadness for the loss of that closeness and intimate bond that exists between parents and children. As a result, I wanted to create a video that speaks to the feelings and reflections I was having about parenthood. This video is almost like a diary entry, a capturing of a moment in time in which I am struggling with the loss of my childhood and the guilt of no longer being home all the time and no longer needing my parents in the same ways.

Video Script

My parents didn’t initially want children. An architect and a pharmacist, they thought they would end up in a big city and thus kids would likely not be in the picture. But neither of them are big city folk, and so they chose to stay in the place in which they met.  My mom said that it wasn’t until she was in her late 20s and close to turning 30 that she felt like something was missing in her life. That something missing was my sister and I. From the moment I was born, and then my sister just under two years later, we became their whole entire world. That’s one of many things that scare me about parenthood, the fact that this little creature becomes the centre of your universe and then one day they just get up and leave you. 

I personally have never seen myself having children, it’s not a desire I have, yet my mom has told me that she sees me having kids one day. Who knows, maybe I’ll find myself in the same position she was in, feeling as though something is missing. Right now, I can’t ever imagine that happening. But I am my mother’s daughter, and maybe history will repeat itself and I’ll be watching this video years from now and laughing.

But anyways, as someone who doesn’t want kids and doesn’t see herself having children at any point, the subject of parenthood is not on the forefront of my mind. However, something I have thought about when it comes to the possibility of having kids is the inevitability of heartbreak when it comes to them. It’s impossible to avoid disappointing your kids in some way, in messing up parenting somehow. It’s impossible to avoid the slow tragedy of watching your kids slowly stop needing you and growing up and going away. It blows my mind how anyone can have a child. I believe it’s one of the most torturous things you can do to yourself – to bring this small vulnerable creature into a big scary world – and to care about this creature more than you could have ever fathomed you could care about anything. Having children is the ultimate vulnerability, and I am scared of a vulnerability that big.

My gratitude for my parents is overwhelming. It becomes even more heightened when I hear stories from my friends about their own boundary crossing, emotionally immature, narcissistic parents. Even more so when I see the way my grandmother treats my mother and her two siblings. The amount of guilt and pain my mother experienced in her relationship with my grandmother for years makes me all the more thankful for my relationship with her. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not perfect. She picks on my outfits and complains about my hair, I make jokes at her expense and am never home like I used to be. I spent most of my childhood battling obsessive compulsive disorder and the subsequent deep depression that followed. The stress this put on my mother was immense, although she did her best to hide that from me. Even so, I know she struggled with her own mental health in being my sole supporter and confident. In my shame for struggling with my mental health, I made my mother promise not to tell anyone else, even my dad. For years we had this secret between us, and looking back as an adult I can’t even imagine the amount of pain my mother would have gone through. Even more painful is probably the fact that I no longer rely on her for my mental health and as a result, no longer share such an intensely close bond. I no longer really even talk about anything super emotional with her, largely because of the guilt I carry for burdening her with it for years but also because as an adult I somehow along the way convinced myself that I had to take care of myself now. 

The parent-child relationship is interesting, because it is a relationship in which one party is usually going to be giving more, the other taking and taking and taking. I didn’t realize as a child how much I took from my parents, and from my mother especially. There’s no boundaries with children, no days off, no vacations. But the time you get with them is shorter with each passing year, from being together constantly to having them move out and possibly far away. Growing up, I don’t think I really took into consideration how my parents felt or how their experiences and emotions may have been impacting them. I didn’t think about how I may have been impacting their feelings. I don’t think I thought of my parents as real people in a way, and it wasn’t until I moved out that I realized that they are just as vulnerable, imperfect and damaged as the rest of us. Now as an adult, I feel immense compassion for my parents. I worry about them. I feel guilty for what I put them through when I was a child. I see my parents on a more equal playing field now, no longer perfect people who are all knowing, they’re just as real as I am.

I used to often rewatch old home videos, relishing in the joy of my childhood and yearning to return to it. Now, as I was rewatching my home videos for the purpose of this project I found myself tearing up and feeling a lot of sorrow for myself and sorrow for my parents. I am now the age that it would be acceptable to have a child, and I see these videos through the eyes of my parents. I feel the pain of watching someone you are so intimately tied to grow up and struggle and be sent into the big scary world. I find myself feeling a sadness on behalf of my parents for the loss of their children. And a sadness in myself because I can’t stop myself from growing up. I can’t stop myself from no longer needing them in the same ways. I can’t stop myself from breaking their hearts in all the ways that a child can and will.

I am no longer a child, but there is comfort in knowing I will always be my parent’s child. I have my childhood home to go back to. Although it’s changed over the years, it will always bear the same comfort it gave me growing up. I am grateful knowing I have a place to come home to where I feel safe. So here’s to my mom and my dad, the two people that made my very existence possible. This is an acknowledgement of the absolute heartbreak that raising a child can be, but also of the beauty that exists when two imperfect people come together to try and raise someone to be better than they ever could be. That, I think, is the essence of parenthood, and in my opinion my parents did a pretty damn good job.

Feb. 26 – Parent Video Ideas

Initial Ideas

Test Video – Lunch Time

I unfortunately didn’t get as much time as I thought I would to record content of my actual parents, but I do thankfully see them all the time so I will be able to record more of them.

For this first ‘test video’, I sneakily recorded my parents from behind my laptop to create this hazy effect which also acts to hide their identities a bit (my parents both hate being photographed, although they have been taking a lot of travel selfies in their retirement!). I think my parents have an interesting dynamic, as they’re both very antisocial but have a very symbiotic relationship as they are together all day every day.

I was very happy with the quality of the audio, and the effect of the blurry scene. The lighting was very good this day, and because of the colours of the kitchen it made it look very airy and almost dream like.

Plan for Video

Get parents to each film the spaces they occupy on a daily basis. For example, my dad would film a short clip of the couch in our living room hat he lays on every day (there’s an indent of his body now). My mom would likely film domestic spaces as she often alludes to her distaste with her obligatory role in such tasks.

Get home videos and add a third split screen of the way the house looked when i was a kid.

Commenting on the inevitable heartbreak of parenthood in that your children grow up and leave, and you’re left with an empty house.

Feb. 6 – Post-Internet Video Art

Title: These Guys Mean Business

After hours and hours of scowering YouTube for moments in video essays where the person mentions their microphone or makes some kind of reference to it. I noticed that an increasingly common trope in video essay style content was the presence of a microphone visible on the screen. This is in contrast to the typical kind of content on YouTube and in film/tv media in which the microphone and other aspects of production are taken with great care to be hidden from the audience. The only time we see production is typically in News media and journalism, where we see the figure who is stating facts holding a microphone. As a result, the microphone is a signifier of authority over what is being said. It creates the illusion that the person speaking knows what they are talking about or have some kind of qualifications to be spouting whatever they’re talking about.

I thought it would be cool to highlight aspects of these really long form, often serious videos where the creator takes a moment to recognize the fact that yes indeed they are using a microphone. When all these clips are placed alongside each other, it really highlights the ridiculousness and mock importance the microphone yields.

I thought it would be really easy to find clips of people referencing their microphone in some way, but it was actually much harder as most of the videos I found were anywhere from 20 minutes to over an hour. I eventually discovered that most videos allow you to pull up the full transcript, which allowed me to control f and search for the word ‘microphone’ in the video without having to watch it. This sped up the project immensely. My strategy for finding clips was going to a video essayist’s channel and searching for the first time a microphone appears in their videos, which is usually when they will make some kind of announcement that yes they have a new microphone.

Jan. 30 – Work in Progress: Post-Internet Video Art

How does your video document a historical moment – in internet culture, and in the wider world?

• Video essays exploded onto the internet in recent years, bridging the gap between the academia and the general public. This unique format allows the essay, an academic paper putting forth an idea or argument about a specific subject, to be more accessible and palatable.
  • Video essayists often combine snappy comments, humour, media clips and bold text to create an entertaining video.
• The original video essays on YouTube were highly produced videos that had a strong narrative flow and visuals that exemplified it. Now, video essayists are finding new ways to make their content interesting. Some take on characters that relate to their topics, dressing up in costume and using elaborate props and sets. Others take a more relaxed approach, sitting in front of the camera with a microphone talking and occasionally overlaying clips to further a point.
• “In its intent the video essay is no different from its print counterpart, which for thousands of years has been a means for writers to confront hard questions on the page. The essayist pushes toward some insight or some truth. That insight, that truth, tends to be hard won, if at all, for the essay tends to ask more than it answers.”
  • John Bresland on the Origin of the Video Essay: https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v9n1/gallery/ve-bresland_j/ve-origin_page.shtml
• As John Bresland states above, the essay has been around for thousands of years as a format to convey ideas and facts. It makes sense that in this increasingly chronically online world that the essay would evolve to exist in a video format. I’ve even made video essays for Art History classes in the past, which demonstrates how this social media genre has made it into higher education.
• I want to highlight the absurdity, pretentiousness, and over saturation of people on the internet creating lengthy essay videos on absolutely any topic you can think of. They use the same language as you would find in an academic essay, which elevates their words to a higher standard, sometimes manipulating the viewer into taking them as fact when they are often times opinion.

How does what you want to do amplify, deconstruct, or subvert what is already happening on the internet?

• I want to deconstruct and subvert the power of the video essay. Of all the content on the internet, video essays have made a place for themselves among ‘higher brow’ content and inherently claim to be more intellectual content than your average cat video. You can see these video essays almost making fun of themselves, whether intentional or not, by incorporating humour and costumes and other aspects of internet culture to appeal to their audience.
• I also want to amplify the trends, and copy cat nature of these video essays. There’s often video essays that have nearly the same titles, with many people making videos on the same cultural niche topic. The style of videos, editing and props use also tend to be similar. The infamous hand held microphone has become a staple of video essays, which some essayists have made jokes about directly in their videos.

How is what you are doing something new?

• There have been video essays critiquing and/or parodying video essays, but I haven’t seen anyone make a compilation style video using footage from these videos to make something new.
• I think it will be interesting to edit a bunch of clips from many different video essays together to highlight how silly and pretentious they can be, and encourage the video to question the tactics and style of the video essays they’re watching and how that may impact the credibility of what’s being said.

What is the kind of experience you want to create for viewers/users?

• I want the video to be confusing in terms of the dialogue. I want to take the clips out of context and have them kind of relating to the other video clips, so there appears to be some kind of narrative flow but the viewer won’t be able to really figure out what it is.
• I want the viewer to feel inundated with information and big words, but also have clips that expose the absurdity and ridiculousness of some of these videos. I want them to laugh at them too.

What is the ideal way for the video to be presented?

• Ideally the video would be presented on a loop on a laptop and the viewer would be able to take a seat at a desk and watch it as they would an actual video essay on YouTube.
• Alternatively, pretty much all video essayists are sitting in front of the camera, I would have the video playing on a loop projected on the wall to have the human subjects be life size. Viewers would be able to sit on a couch across from the video.

What are some of the technologies, software, or technical experiments and gimmicks you may need to achieve? Do you want to use avatars? Live stream? Rip music and video from YouTube? Prepare your ambitious technical goals for Nathan, and we can design demos to support your ideas.

• I think I want to play around with videos manipulation and maybe overlay videos. I’m not entirely sure what technical experiments I want to do quite yet. I think just a general overview of some of the cool features of Da Vinci Resolve would be helpful!

Work in Progress

I compiled a bunch of clips from YouTube and have arranged them in a way that I felt made the videos flow well together and kind of bounce off each other. I am unsure exactly what I want to do with the clips and what else I want to do, but it’s been a good start to play around with their order and what parts of the videos I want to keep and what parts I want to delete or move around for my own purposes.

Jan. 23 – Post-Internet Video Art Research

BookTube

As a child I was an avid reader. Pretty much all I did in my spare time (and even underneath my desk and school) I was reading. As a result, I started looking up things related to books on YouTube and I quickly discovered the world of ‘Book Talks’, ‘Bookshelf Tours,’ ‘To Be Read Piles’, and of course, Goodreads. My favourite YouTuber was PolandBananasBooks, a super exuberant and bright individual with passion for books.

Christine of PolandBananasBooks also created creative, silly and fun comedy skit videos on a separate channel, but also incorporated her creative side on her book channel as well. Light hearted, skit or ‘challenge’ videos were also a common feature of early BookTube. Creators would make book tags and tag other fellow creators to do them.

I was absolutely addicted to watching bookshelf tour videos for a large amount of time. These videos simply involve people showing you their bookshelf and each individual book on their bookshelf. They talk in detail about the books, about how they chose to organize or display them, purchases they regret, so on and forth. These videos could be up to an hour long depending on how large the collection. This quickly led to my own book buying addiction. I accumulated two full shelves, three floating box shelves and a third, skinny shelf. I also have books piled in my armour and under my nightstand and on top of my bookshelves and pretty much anywhere they will fit. I have since tried to do e-books, for the sake of my bank account.

To this day, book videos are so comforting to me. They brought me so much joy and comfort as a child; I felt like I was part of some community and I think a lot of people who watched those videos did as well. Booktube also featured terminology that was commonly used by those in the community, such as TBR (to be read), OTP (one true pairing), DNF (did not finish), and the concept of ‘shipping’ characters (wanting them to end up as a couple).

2010s Lifestyle and Beauty YouTubers

In elementary school I discovered YouTube and immediately fell in love with the bubbly, upbeat and wildly saturated visuals that characterized the 2010s lifestyle and beauty videos. I obsessively watched room tours, morning routines, back to school videos and DIYs. There was something so comforting about these videos to me as a child, and I think it largely had to do with how eye catching the visuals usually were and how enthusiastic and overly friendly the YouTubers seemed.

I recently watched a video of two YouTubers I had watched back in the day talking about the reality behind the videos they were making in the 2010s. They were talking about how they were making all these videos that were supposed to reflect their real life and who they were, but in reality they were in their twenties trying to be relatable to tweens and teens. It made me realize that the glossy, well put together videos of people I thought were just like me were curating an image that they new would get views. I think the draw of YouTube was the relatability, and how it felt like the creators on the platform could actually be your friend.

I think it’s so interesting how beauty and lifestyle YouTubers took over the internet, and how many young girls found a community within that. Even if my life wasn’t going the way I wanted to, I could put on a room tour video or a morning routine and fantasize about what it would be like to have a ‘perfect room’ or ‘perfect life.’

The obsession with DIYs was also prominent in the lifestyle community. There were so many DIY room decor videos, and one for every season or theme you could think of. I was also obsessed with DIYs at this time as a result, and tried many from YouTube which often did not ever look like it did in the video.

The irony of these videos now is how geared to young kids they were. Even the way the YouTubers spoke was quite childlike, and many of them were making content that wasn’t even relevant to them anymore. The Back to School videos were some of the biggest moneymakers, so even after graduating they had to pretend they were going back to school to continue profiting off their target audience.

What’s funny is that this era of YouTube and this era of style is now seen as nostalgic and people post about ‘the good old days’ when it was only ten years ago. These lifestyle YouTube videos started a lot of the trends that happened in fashion for young girls of this time.

Key Features of 2010s Lifestyle/Beauty YouTube

• Bright colours and over saturation
• DIYs
• Upbeat, bubbly personality
• Bright, upbeat music
• Fun transitions
• Collaborations with other YouTubers
• Bath and Body Works (everyone had a bath and body works candle shrine)

Video Essays

Video essays

Video Essays are another genre of YouTube that I was obsessed with and still really enjoy. Video Essays were mainly about film and tv, but recently I have been noticing more and more people doing hour long video essays on a wide range of topics from things within culture to politics to history.

I have noticed that the video essay format has evolved from a pretty short, snappy take on a topic or movie, often edited in a very cinematic way to a more casual and relaxed format. Now video essays often feature the narrator on screen sitting down in front of the camera to share their insights on a topic. They include cuts to clips or images, but the focus is on the person speaking.

Key Features of Video Essays

• Eloquent, well-rehearsed narration.
• Combining text, video and photos to communicate an argument or idea.
• Often organized or divided into sections, just like an actual essay.
• Typically uses more academic language than is usual on YouTube.
• An even, calm tone is often used to convey a feeling that they know what they’re talking about.
• Humour is well integrated and snappy.

Video Essayists present themselves to the viewer as an authentic, knowledgeable and passionate voice on a topic, and the presentation of a well edited video also serves to contribute to their perception as credible. It seems that video essays are only becoming more popular, which makes sense as our attention spans are so limited why would anyone want to read about something when you can watch someone explain it to you. Watching a video essay allows the viewer to feel smart and intellectual, as they engage with social and political commentary, yet it is still a very superficial way of consuming information on a subject.

Video essays are one individual’s take on the subject, and unlike an actual essay, we don’t often get citations for their claims. As a result, their credibility comes from how they present themselves, and most of them present themselves as very smart individuals. A common critique of video essays is that they can easily spread misinformation, as it can be hard to distinguish between the essayists’ opinion and fact. Critiques of video essays often come in the form of a video essay, which is so ironic in and of itself and just absolutely hilarious. A whole new genre is born from it: anti-video essay video essays.

Jan. 16 – Make Your Own GARLAND BANNER

A Page from Dirty Words by Tammer El Sheik

Our Eyes Bleed

The above image features an excerpt of text from Dirty Words by Tammer El Sheik, “our eyes bleed”, which was taken out of the full sentence: “Besides gathering an awful lot of cultural material in their nets, these terms warn us about the ill late capitalism: accumulating endlessly, smiling on command and scrolling, sorting and bookmarking, until our eyes bleed.” El Sheik is talking about the overwhelming constancy of information that we are constantly consuming and being exposed to in our current late stage capitalist society.

I decided to use the colour red for the text to emphasize the word ‘bleed’ and also the idea behind the words that we are being inundated with information until we get to a point where we can’t take it anymore. I put a news clip on the tv featuring a story about a study claiming that social media increases depression. This is a common story that we’ve all likely seen in media and online, as society is becoming increasingly chronically online and more isolated than ever. I chose to distort the visuals on the tv to convey the idea that we are so overwhelmed by information that our brains stop absorbing it and it all essentially becomes a meaningless onslaught of content.

Our Eyes Bleed Re-Photographed

After class today I went home and re-photographed my banner, this time I took two separate photos (one with the tv on and one with it off) and overlayed them to fix the issue of the white balance I had with the first attempt. I definitely like this one a lot better, and also added in my hand holding the remote to fill up the bottom of the image a bit more.

Senioritis is Hitting Hard: my eyes are bleeding, not sure about yours.

I decided to hang my garland above my desk and stage a little studious photo shoot to encapsulate my senioritis. I am graduating this semester, so schoolwork definitely feels like my eyes are bleeding a little.

Jan. 11 – Definition of a Hypocrite, Guerrilla Girls, 1990

Who Are the Guerrilla Girls?

The Guerrilla Girls are a feminist activist group comprised of anonymous artists who employ headlines, visuals, and statistics to expose gender and ethnic bias in art, film, politics, and pop culture. They are defined by an intersectional feminist lens as they advocate for the rights of all people through their disruptive projects. They also often utilize humour as a way of grabbing the attention of viewers and making their message more accessible to an array of audiences, as they have expressed that humour is an “effective weapon.”

They adorn their gorilla masks to remain anonymous, both as a way to protect their personal art careers and also as a way of ensuring their message takes centre stage. Each member also takes on the name of famous artist, such as Frida Kahlo or Käthe Kollwitz, which were the pseudonyms used by the founders.

The work of the Guerrilla girls often confronts the viewer with a headline or statement that exposes a social reality/injustice and seeks to engage the viewer in their complacencies.

Their work, Definition of a Hypocrite, meets the viewer with a flashy headline and a definition that calls out the inequality that persists for women and people of colour in the art world. They are pointing out the hypocrisy of wealthy art collectors who often only support white male artists that have long passed on. As more diverse people enter the art scene, it is hypocritical to continue to only purchase and support the art of white male artists.

This work was a part of a collection of 30 posters for the Guerrilla Girls’ project titled Guerrilla Girls Talk Back. They combined flashy and graphic design akin to advertisements, placing their poignant messages on posters to be pasted around the city. Instead of being sold a product or service, viewers are presented with startling facts and statistics that expose the dark realities of the inequities that still exist amongst different genders and ethnicities, specifically in the art world.

Art as Activism

The Guerrilla Girls are important to both the art world and the world at large, as their practice focuses on questioning and bringing light to social injustices and inviting the viewer to confront them head on. Their use of posters, billboards, and other interventions into public spaces bring their messages to the average viewer who may not have access to art institutions.

Their work is activist in that it confronts the public with disruptive messages that invites the viewer to confront the dominant narratives in society. For example, their work on billboards using text and imagery to reach the public calls attention to injustices in society