The Importance of Auditory and Visual Cues In Film

While watching the iMovie projects in class yesterday, I noticed that the audience's feelings toward them were highly influenced by the filters used in the video.  At times it was easier to understand the mood or situation in the video due to the filter used.  The colors appeal to our senses so it makes sense that the use of color (or lack thereof) helped to create a certain mood.  For example, many students chose to use the dream or romance filter to depict a difference in sense of time and/or reality.  Another filtered used was the black and white.  This lack of color helped to add an element of seriousness to the video and a touch of sadness or emptiness.  Overall, from watching the videos yesterday, I learned that filters are a huge visual clue to the audience because it reveals the situation as well as mood of the video.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that music is a very useful auditory cue to the audience.  The music is what really helps to set the mood and it even sets up the tone of the video.  Sometimes people used just one song, other times they used multiple.  Using multiple songs allows for the viewer to pick up on mood or tone changes; using one song lets the viewer know that there is one over-arching theme in the video.  For example, Kelsey and I both used one song for our videos which helped the audience to understand that while her video was total happiness, mine was total sadness.  In Kat's video, she had an entire playlist because her storyline went in multiple directions, varying from happy to sad.  Auditory cues really help the audience keep track of the storyline and the sounds definitely tell the audience how they should be feeling.

However, Caitlin didn't really use many auditory cues in her video but she still got her point across.  I think this is because she still gave visual cues through dialogue.  Trying to tell a story without auditory or visual cues would be pretty hard to do.  Mike's video lacked dialogue but included music.  I think that without the music it would've been pretty hard to understand his video.  However, the dinosaur was engaging in activities that we have all experienced so the visual cues were pretty clear.  So, in my opinion, every film has to contain at least visual cues for the audience to understand what is going on; music mostly helps to "set the stage" by providing a mood/tone.

Around the World in 2000 Pictures

This is an interesting video I found by Alex Profit.  His video takes the viewer on a tour through Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, and London.

Looking Back

The first half of the semester felt like a lot more reading and learning concepts such as time in relation to space and space in relation to time.  It seems as if our class also spent a lot of time learning how to understand a piece of art and to properly critique it.  The first two questions the class tackled were “What is art?” and “What is time?”.  These are two very important questions to ask an intro art class and the best part about them is that they are open-ended due to their philosophical nature.  The vast array of questions gets the class thinking, exploring different possibilities, almost training the brain to think more like an artist.  Most of the Intro to Visual Thinking course is about understanding what constitutes art and how to go about understanding and critiquing it.

In the first class of the semester we watched and discussed Kylie Minogue’s video by Michel Gondry for her song “Come Into My Wolrd”.  I really liked how he took the cyclical nature of the chorus in the song and visually represented it in such a creative way.  There was so much going on in that video yet the sense of time was not changing, just the events between each start point.  In the second class we watched Cibo Mato’s “Sugar Water” which was another music video by Michel Gondry.  I think that his artistic representation of time is awesome and original.  I personally like how he manipulates time to tell a story a certain way.  This brings me to “Momento” which is a movie that we watched in class.  This too had a unique timeline, making for a different and interesting story.  From the videos and the movie I have learned how to force my brain to view the concept of time in a different way and they have also taught me that time doesn’t need to be represented chronologically or linearly, that’s just the way the mind thinks.  I actually find it to be stimulating to think of time in a non-conventional way.

If I have learned anything from this class, it is how to represent sensory concepts such as time, motion, and sound in my artwork and the type of affect that can create.  Taking a look at Futurist paintings had really impressed upon me that it is possible to simulate motion even in paintings and drawings.  Comic books do the exact same thing.  I never knew the power of simple lines until I attended this class.  Something I truly enjoyed doing was practicing synesthesia.  Not only was it fun but I also felt more emotionally attached to my art by trying to recreate sound rather than motion and time.  This is probably due to the fact that in society today, we are used to constant, rapid movement—it doesn’t fascinate us as it did with the Futurists—instead we feel more of a connection and fascination with music and sound.  Perhaps that is because of the popularization of the iPod.  People are no longer looking up as they commute to and from wherever, but instead they are looking down, generally donning a pair of ubiquitous white headphones.  

So, to wrap this up, I think that the most valuable aspects of the class so far are:  learning that art and time have no true definitions, it is possible for motion, time, space, and sound to be visually represented, and that critique is necessary in art in order to improve upon your skills.  Therefore, presentation and discussion of artwork in class is an extremely important concept to force onto the class because it's the part about being an artist that is more of a challenge than one would think.

On a completely different topic:  our next project for class involves researching an artist for a research paper and presentation.  I have found three amazing artists that interest me a lot.

Jackson Pollock:  Inspired by Indian sand-painting, Mexican muralists, and Surrealist automatism, this abstract expressionist used action painting (coined later than his time) to create very unique works of art.  I like that every gesture on his canvas is a "liberation from value" (Harold Rosenburg).  I wonder if his excessive drinking is the reason that his paintings are so charged with energy.  This is a piece of his that I really enjoyed:

Piet Mondrian:  One of the forerunners of the De Stijl (Neo-Plasticism) movement, Piet managed to express the concept of harmony and order in abstract ways.  However, aside from his most popular work (pictured below) I also like some of his early work where he is inspired by cubism but is still using representation in his artwork.  As an additional note, I'm confused as to why he uses colors like red and yellow which signify anxiety to me when this piece is supposed to be representing harmony. 

Alexey Brodovitch:  A designer, photographer, and teacher of rebelling against convention and embracing the unknown.  He produced many successful artists.  His popularity came from the magazine Harper's Bazaar.  The works that I'm most interested by him though are his ballet pictures that he published.  He went against the documentary-style pictures of his time and kind of did his own thing.  I admire that.  I wonder if Brodovitch ever felt that his work was cheapened because of it being so commercial.  I think that I would definitely feel this way.  Maybe he enjoyed the mass exposure his artwork got.  This is one of his pictures from "Ballet":

Hopefully choosing an artist for my research project won't prove to be too difficult!

Public Art: Community and Politics

On Monday, February 21, 2011 at 4:40 pm, I attended at collaborative art lecture about how public art plays a huge role in community and politics.  The four panelists that spoke were Diana Boros from the Political Science Department, Lisa Scheer and Billy Friebele from the Art and Art History Department, and Katie Ganz from the Languages and Cultures Department.

Diana Boros discussed how politics is prevalent in public art.  She defined politics in this setting as a multitude of unwritten rules and interactions that affect the way people interact with the world around them.  Politics affects the public because it beautifies spaces, creating pride within the community, it is a direct political critique, inspiring protest, and it is a demonstration of new ideas a viewpoints, introducing new concepts to others to share. 

Lisa Scheer then discussed what makes public art public, sharing with us her various sculptures that she had been commissioned to make for the public.  To her, public art usually incorporates the environment and identity of the location as well as the people living in it, making this piece special to the locals who come to feel as if the artwork is also theirs.  Lisa personally adds abstraction to her work.  In her opinion, abstraction is evocative and has many meanings due to latent imagery (i.e. her sculpture outside of the New York courthouse that resembles a flaming torch but also has helping hands which were inspired by the aftermath of 9/11).  When viewing public art, Lisa states that the viewers are not the audience, but instead participants.

Billy Friebele went on to discuss his experiences as an artist, getting his audience to become participants, as Lisa had discussed.  He had his viewers explore the site itself as an artwork.  In doing this, the entire landscape becomes public art.  Another project he did was site-specific mapping in Washington D.C. which was projected onto a library wall.  This is a new age for public art because up until now, that wasn’t something that could be done.  Another interesting thing to note is that public art doesn’t have to just be outside anymore, it is virtual as well.  It truly is a new age for public art.

Katie Ganz brought a new perspective on public art by describing public art in Paris, France in the past and in the present.  She spoke about how Napoleon III hired Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann to put an end to Paris’s identity crisis and create a new sense of pride and community between citizens and government officials alike.  The Baron created new and efficient roadways with monuments at each end, creating a sense of symmetry the city had lacked beforehand.  He also made it so that treelines were even with the sight of a building, again adding that layer of symmetry.  Because he increased the aesthetic beauty of Paris, he relinquished some of the unrest that the city was experiencing at the time period.  Fast forward to now:  direct political critique is rampant in Paris.  There artists have placed all kinds of statements on these 19th Century monuments.  One of the more popular ones that people really enjoy interacting with is the invader art (pictured below).  However, there are more radically political statements seen around the city such as "Je ne veux plus [I don't want any more of...]" which are little pieces of paper in which people write what they don't want any more of in the city.  Also, artists in this day and age do not put their art up in the air but closer to the ground because this is where the modern day viewer is looking.  In these ways, Paris's art is extremely participatory.

After this lecture, I found myself wondering if my art that I consider to be public is interactive.  I made a postcard for class which in its own way is public art because it isn't meant to be hung on a wall or plopped in the middle of a room.  My postcard is meant to be something plain on the outside, but as you open it up (in an unconventional manner) you are forced to view each part of the picture separately.  Also, the motion of opening this card is meant to emulate wind because my card is about how windy it is at St. Mary's. Although the visual aspect of my card didn't come out as nicely as I would have liked it to, the concept still made sense and it still forces the viewer to participate in my work of art.  Going to this art lecture has given me some more ideas about how to present my artwork next time and it has given me a much better perspective on public art.

Artist Talk With Ryan Browning

Artist Ryan Browning visited our campus last Wednesday, February 9, 2011.  He presented his artwork from 2006 to 2010 and some of his plans for 2011.  I found it interesting that Dungeons and Dragons as well as the emergence of 3-D graphics in video games had influenced a lot of his artwork. 

In 2006 the first piece of art that he had been truly proud of was a map that he had cut up and pasted back together.  He said he really liked the idea of crossing boundaries or eliminating them completely.  This got him thinking about spaces in proportion to where they belong.

In 2007 a game called EverQuest came out that changed Ryan’s perception of space.  He said he liked the idea of spending time with others in an artificial world.  He also enjoyed the polygonal imagery and the fact that you could make yourself whatever you wanted.  However, he has chosen to use his digital influence in a traditional medium. 

In 2008 Ryan created a polar bear sculpture to explore the interaction between virtual imagery and real space.  At this time he was also exploring the creation of the persistent world.  This is apparent in his painting, “Birth of an Island” which is like a Genesis story.  This is also where Ryan begins using polygonal shapes to represent his main focus in his artwork.

In 2009 he begins to seriously consider character, using his polygonal figures as human surrogates.  The reason why he chooses to use surrogates in place of humans is because he feels that people in pictures are limited.  The main goal here is to get his audience to interact more with his artwork.

As Ryan moved into 2010 he decided to take his artwork a step further and loosened up his geometric images, flattening out space, and the incorporation of motion.  A very interesting piece he did called “Time Machine”, which also happens to be his favorite, includes many non-geometric images in it but they are more of the background to offset the loosely geometrical time machine that has been defaced with graffiti due to the fact that time travel never happened in the future. 

For the coming year Ryan has some interesting new inspirations.  He is now working on incorporating a moody, romantic darkness coupled with gothic cathedral architecture to his artwork.  I cannot wait to see what he decides to do next; his work is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

After the Futurists PowerPoint in class yesterday I noticed some similarities in that they use a lot of geometrical shapes to represent other things just as Ryan does.  I think that this type of abstraction is appealing because it is like looking at the world with different eyes, perhaps even kaleidoscope eyes.  It forces the viewer to look at the world in a way they never had before, allowing them to absorb the beauty of the artist’s depiction of the world through his or her eyes.

Ryan Browning’s artwork relates to mine in that we both have been influence by similar things.  I have been influenced by video games (as well as the bright colors that I see in them).  I too enjoy the old crappy graphics of the original 3-D games.  What I truly take away from his artwork and artistic experience is that I can include character in seemingly inanimate objects.

I Think It May Be Nine In the Afternoon

It’s been a while since our last class but that doesn’t mean I have been up to nothing at all.  Our first assignment was to practice drawing the negative space.  I found this exercise very enjoyable because for once I felt like I could draw!  It’s amazing how your perspective changes from drawing the space around the object instead of the object itself.  This method works for me because it forces me to stop paying attention to all the small details.  The small details are most certainly important but it’s impossible to consider the smaller details when you don’t even have the broader subject drawn yet.  I’m sincerely glad that I was taught how to do this; it feels as if my artistic skills have dramatically increased.

The second assignment was a reading from John Berger about the importance of visual arts.  The very first thing you read is:  “Seeing comes before words.  The child looks and recognizes before it speaks.”  I’d never really thought about the fact that we first see before we learn to speak.  Yet, the words we learn to use to communicate and to describe our emotions cannot even begin to describe the true extent of them.  Love, the obvious example, happens to be one of the hardest emotions to capture with words.  That is because love is such a physical and deep emotion.  It certainly cannot be described by words alone.  The same goes for heartbreak, depression, and despair.  These emotions have plagued many artists throughout history, all of them trying to capture this emotion, their art speaking to many viewers.  The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” comes to mind, now that I think of it.  Visuals truly do speak volumes more than texts have the ability to.

The reading also brought up a good point about cameras.  They destroy a painting’s initial meaning because they take away from the fact that it is unique.  Even if a painting was meant to be transportable, it still was the one and only copy.  It never occurred to me that the invention of the camera could be a bad thing.  I have always viewed the camera as one of our greatest inventions.  I still believe it is, but now I can see why taking a picture of another piece of art takes its true meaning away from it.  Since I was a young child I can remember seeing pictures of the Mona Lisa in textbooks, on televisions shows, and such, which has made me realize that I have no proper appreciation of the painting, which in my opinion is just wrong.  However, I am still split in that I probably would have never seen this picture in my life unless we had cameras that have allowed me to see this painting.  This reading really got me thinking; I liked it.

I really wonder if our perceptions of major artworks would be different if we never had preconceived notions about them thanks to the availability of them due to the invention of the camera?  Also, do you think it is possible to only communicate with visuals or are words necessary for higher level communication?

Our third assignment was to draw a nude model.  I have to say this has by far been the most interesting experience of my life.  I kind of felt like I had no idea what I was doing but I found that I really enjoy drawing torsos, legs, and arms.  Also, I was very thankful that I had learned how to draw negative space because this really helped me to be able to draw the model’s figure.  I will admit that prior to attending the drawing session I was incredibly nervous that I would completely suck at drawing.  However, after the session I was quite proud of myself! :)

For the final segment of this post I would like to share with you some drawings I stumbled upon that I thought were fantastic!  They are all called "Fingerings" by Judith Braun.  I can't even explain why I love them, they just appeal to me.  Perhaps it is because I have never seen anything like it.  She dips her fingers in either charcoal or pastel and then draws in either abstract forms or bilateral symmetry.  Here are some of my favorites of hers:

(Images taken from Google Images)

Stay

Watching Momento in all its confusing glory made me think about one of my favorite movies called Stay starring Ryan Gosling and Ewan McGregor.  It's an awesome movie.  Though the perception of time is not as predominant as the perception of reality and the psyche, the movie still pertained to the subject matter so I thought it would be worth posting about it here.

In short, the movie is about a psychiatrist (Ewan McGregor) that is trying to prevent one of his patients (Ryan Gosling) from committing suicide while trying to maintain his grip on reality.  If you want to know more about Stay you can read this.  Don't read too far into the summary though because there will be major spoilers.

I highly suggest you watch this movie if you enjoyed Momento.  There is a lot more symbolism in Stay, making the movie slightly harder to understand, but after watching it a couple of times you will really appreciate the genius of this movie.