This guy takes the story line of a really complex and solemn game that I love and turns it into an animated comedy short in what must have taken an insane amount of time. Although most of the humor is in the inside jokes of fans of the game series, the skill that this guy has in animation is amazing and his ability to adapt such complex and serious topics into something so funny is surprising. Although my animations don't involve making a huge amount of drawings, I think that once I do get closer to storytelling with my work that I will be able to take some cues from his style.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9x_koRZ2bA
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This guy literally goes to random art shows with a duffle bag filled with 1 million dollars (pretty sure it is just about 5,000 dollars because he puts 100 dollar bills on the top and bottom of the stacks). The whole idea of his work is that people don't actually care about art, that instead they are in it for the money, and he demonstrates this by getting all of the attention at these art galleries. Where people are supposed to be looking at the art, they instead start taking selfies with him.
He got this idea after people payed no attention to him at art galleries where he was trying to sell his art so he tried something completely different to get their attention. While I won't be doing anything actually similar to this, the idea of doing something entirely different to achieve the response wanted is interesting and something that I might apply to my own work. On senior showcase day, I went to Catherine's presentation on ballet and how it has evolved and continues to evolve. Ballet is often considered a performing art instead of a visual art, yet I feel that it applies in the domain of this assignment as the dancers perform in order to create a certain vision in the viewer's minds.
Catherine spoke a lot about the stereotypes of ballet and how many of them remain in the ballet world even as they would not be acceptable in the social sphere. It is sad that ballet still has such a focus on white emaciated women instead of branching out to more races, genders and body types as many other parts of our society are. Ultimately the fact that ballet hasn't progressed for so long seems to me like a great reason for someone to be the catalyst that makes it progress. Although ballet is an inherently traditional art form, new takes on those traditional ideas might be what will make ballet a more enjoyable and fair experience for both the viewers and the dancers. Because my newer pieces are all done in Max/MSP, the process of making them is more conceptual than visual and, hence, process shots don't work well as a way of marking my progress. I will, instead, detail the path I took and the struggles along the way and include a gallery of examples from the finished product.
My last project used 2D shapes and distorted them in relation to the volume of the music using various filters, for this project I wanted to take that idea to three dimensions. To do this, I used the built in tools to figure out a way to import my own 3D models, and used the program to let those models rotate and scale with the volume of the music. To spice things up, I put various distortion filters over the whole process to make it more visually entrancing. After finishing the 3D visualizer, I thought it might be fun to combine both of the visualizers together on the same screen to make something even more exciting. I did this by putting both of the max 'patches' in a new patch and routing the video to the same output. To finish, I made controls with my MIDI controller that would allow me to turn one visualizer on and the other off and to control both of them at the same time. This article brought up an array of questions that were answered haphazardly by a group of artists that couldn't seem to make up their mind about anything really. Yet there were glimpses of rational thought to be found through some of the responses, primarily the ones that avoided shameless plugs.
At one point, the group began talking about the 'supercharged market' and one of them referenced video art as having 2 main issues: the necessity of projection and the necessity of exclusivity or limited runs. Neither of these claims make any sense, as in modern society everyone carries a screen in their pocket big enough to watch and understand whatever media they want; while a projector may be ideal for certain pieces there is by no means a need for one to view artwork. Furthermore, the idea that the artist needs to make limited runs or keep their video secret is completely the opposite of reality, in the modern day artists can share their works on the internet and make money off of the views that they receive by way of ad revenue, and many artists are thriving by doing this more than they would have had they planned out specific shows and museums to exhibit their work in. What is more astonishing is that the artists then went on to talk about exactly what they ignored earlier, technology in general. Their insights here became reasonable as they identified several trends that technology is causing in the art world, a sea of monotonous content and a lack of meaning entirely. When the entire discussion is focused on sending a message through art, the realization that technology is actually making it harder for us to send our message effectively is a scary one. As artists are put in contact with more and more sources of inspiration, it all seems to blend together into one heaping mess of grey matter. There is no substance to a lot of recent work because there was not one direction for the artist, there were infinite. I think Martinez summed the article up wonderfully with," We have experienced a big bang in the field of art wherein everything means something, and at the same time nothing means anything." My English class visited the VMFA recently to see the play "King Lear" by William Shakespeare. Before going, we had heard and analyzed an audiobook version of it in class and then watched a movie version, but nothing could prepare us for the live version.
In my opinion a play is very similar to a piece of performance art; the main distinction being that for the playwright it is generally about telling a story and for the artist it is generally about conveying a point or an emotion. In the case of King Lear, Shakespeare tells a story of family relations and the madness that comes about from old age, one fraught with backstabbing brothers, Demented fathers, and ultimately a heartbroken audience. My art is trending towards performance, in my new works I push towards interactivity and procedural rather than static art, and seeing a show like this reinforces my feeling that a performance can tell a story much better than a pre-recorded event. I feel that the stress that is inherent in performing can be felt by the audience as well as the performer; as the audience watches on sharing in the terror of possible failure that the performer experiences, they share in the joy of success as well. I started this project by making this visual in photoshop using a variety of images taken from The British Library on flickr, who host a large amount of images taken from old texts. I converted the images to vectors and then resized, colored, and layered them to create this image, then took it to After Effects and made the final product which can be viewed in my gallery page.
This project was done using software that is meant for live performance, hence process shots would be more like visuals of the code that I was using to make the piece rather than actual visuals of what it does.
Over the course of making the project I began with the geometric dreams tutorial which showed how to put a geometric shape on the screen and one way to modify it, but after that point I went off of my own creativity to see what I could do with the Max. Ultimately I came up with a system of 7 switches that would change parameters controlling the different modifications to the shapes appearing on screen, some would change the type of shape, some the geometric makeup of the shape itself, some how it was disfigured, and some how it was colored. Over the course of making the project I learned just how flexible Max is as a system for creating live visuals or instruments and I intend on pursuing it further. Thanks to Niccolo Seligmann for introducing me to Max, here is his website: http://www.niccoloseligmann.com/ Simon's art is fantastic in several ways. Every piece tells a piece of a story in Simon's universe about a version of the 1980s where particle accelerators have caused havok in a swedish town. Many paintings seek to encapsulate a real moment in time but Simon seems to capture moments that never happened in a way that makes one wonder what life would have been like had they been reality. To make things better, he even ran a kickstarter (that was wildly successful) that allowed him to publish his paintings in a book with stories to go with each one. I plan to buy them soon.
If you would like to check out more of Simon's art, see his website: http://www.simonstalenhag.se/ or buy his book: http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Loop-Simon-St%C3%A5lenhag/dp/1624650392/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1460855054&sr=8-1&keywords=tales+from+the+loop I don't normally post so many images, I just can't pick a favorite out of his expansive body of work. |
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