Back to the Futurists!

This week we worked more on sketching/switching sides of the brain, sketching a live model, and began discussing "Futurist Art".  Tuesday we experimented with different types of charcoal and paper as we also tried different techniques in sketching the model.  I think I liked the newsprint and charcoal, with quick sketches best.  It's not that I don't want to take my time, but I have found the longer I allow myself to work on something, the more mistakes I find, and the more I alter it--so for Tuesday's purposes I think the faster approach was best for me.  
Thursday we started by discussing "Futurist Art".  It was a bit of a challenge at first trying to pinpoint specific features of the works, in attempt to determine what was going on.  However, the more we looked at, the more they seemed to make sense (to me anyway)...by "make sense" I do not by any means, mean  that they looked more realistic....I mean that it was easier to approach the works to "guess" at the subject, and so on.  However, the car one kind of stumped me...it took me longer to see what was intended.
our reading from "Ways of Seeing".  The article as a whole was very interesting, but a couple parts in particular spoke to me.  I know we already talked about these points in class, but I suppose to "re-cap" my thoughts:  The points about photography not being as mechanic as we think, how the photographer's choice of subject, among other things, can alter how we see the scene, how market value can affect a pieces popularity, and reproductions can alter a piece --I found these aspects most compelling.  Again we also brought our questions up in the discussion, but I really liked the concept of how replicating a photo might differ from replicating a painting-how the quality/size may affect this, etc.   
Next we played a few of the instrumental pieces the class had brought in, and experimented with Wacom Bamboo Tablet©.  Listening and trying different colors and lines in Adobe Photoshop© we got used to drawing on a flat surface with a pen and it showing up on the screen...having never used one of tablets before, it took me a little while to get used to it, but once I did it was really cool to create on the computer without using a mouse.  
For my research this week, I was still curious about "futurism" in general.  My research took me across a variety of pieces, some of which we had seen in class.  One that particularly grabbed my attention was Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911) by Carlo Carrà.  This piece is described as Carrà's most famous work, and that it is a good example of futurism as it, "embodies Futurist ideals with its portrayal of dynamic action, power, and violence."

Resource 1 - Resource 2

I am not sure whether it is the use of reds, or the overlapping of shadows, but this piece just left me trying to follow all of the motions--however, every time I tried to move off of the center figure I was drawn back...the rest feels so chaotic, but this figure seems to stand out, while still blending in(colors are the same...).  Perhaps this is just me...I suppose I can always come back to looking at it after a break, and that might also change how I see it?
For my two questions, I suppose it would help to point out that these ideas were affected by the beginning parts of the article we read last week:
-If the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe, would it be ideal for everyone to know and believe the same things to "guarantee" in a sense a universal reaction to something?  Or could that be a dangerous thing to not have different interpretations?  (Not for everyone to think the same way, but to evoke the same emotional reactions....)
-The article also states, "Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen."  This made me think of little kids-'if I can't see you, you can't see me', and peek-a-boo, etc.  What if we never developed the sense of being seen? Again, this requires explanation...What if we understood that we can be seen, but never got the sense that we could...would that change how we looked at others?  I am not really sure if I can put this thought into very clear words...I will work on this one...

Karly Klopfenstein!

This past Monday I attended the visiting artist talk.  (In my opinion)Karly Klopfenstein has a very interesting and amusing(in a good way) art style.  Graduating from Saint Mary's in 1997 Karly soon found out (the hard way) that graduate school was not for her, and moved to Florida where she began creating large scale temporary art in an outdoor sculpture group.  Her first works involved a large, red, satin ribbon-- "The Gift", "Red Tree", "Red Tide".  While I think it is interesting that she reused her material, I thought the idea felt a bit repetitive, three times in a row.  However, of the three I think the "Red Tide" was the most striking--I think that one had the best message behind it (of the three).  Which is actually a point that stuck out to me- she seems to have a good general message behind her recent works.  Her idea about naming things with puns/play on words gives her already creative ideas an extra dash of spunk. "Carpet Bomb"-- her hand made replica of "Fat Boy" that she covered in hook rug, seemed to me the perfect example of Karly's general thought process.  Taking an object/icon/idea that is associated with death/destruction/other bad things and cover it with  a soft rug, or something else that one might associate with comfort/home/other good things...a contradiction, with a name that is a play on words...it seems like a very affective approach.  
Her Macrame Guns are amazing!  They may not be covered in elaborate patterns, but the attention to detail she puts into her works is astonishing!  She appears to put lots of research into all of her projects as well.  The fact that she would attempt a tank of any size is impressive, but the scale that she decided to model hers upon is both impressive, and maybe a tad insane.  The fact that she also decided to incorporate the "war rug" idea again connects the tank with her other works, and makes it stand out for the scale on which she is using the technique compared to what she has done in the past.
I can not say I have ever built anything as impressive as a tank, but I did attempt to build a fountain with a friend out of cardboard and duct tape for a middle school event one time.  It looked much better once we had spray painted it of course, needless to say, cardboard is not one of the more impressive construction materials--which is why I found Karly's explanation of how she combined a wood frame, with cardboard, plaster and fiberglass, keeping her tank both sturdy and portable very interesting.  I also have done "crafty" things, like hook rugs for example, from a young age, and still enjoy making things that I can look at later and say "I made that."   I think this contributes to my appreciation both of why the tank is such an undertaking and why she might be driven to do such a thing in the first place.  
I like that Karly is trying to get her (to extremely generalize) anti-war message through irony and pieces that obviously take a lot of time a effort.  I am not exactly sure how this may be similar or even differ from "my ideas", but I love the idea of changing how someone might think of something through irony!
I also had trouble coming up with one artist in particular that  Karly's work made me think of, I can't say I've ever seen anything like it, but I do remember seeing some pictures of some hook rugs that were rather intricate and each unique, as I could remember.  It took a little time, but thanks to Google, I found a couple pictures I recognized that eventually led me to the artist's website.  Deanne Fitzpatrick (http://www.hookingrugs.com/index.html)
makes bold and unique hook rugs that she says are inspired by everyday life...I guess I never really thought of hook rugs in the sense that they were "art" before, but looking at Ms. Klopfenstein's and  and Ms. Fitzpatrick's I definitely have a new appreciation for the form.  I can't wait for Karly Klopfenstein to finish her tank, I'd love to see it some time.  I hope those who do see it, or any of her pieces, can appreciate her message of thought and responsibility for our actions, or at least take something similar away from these impressive piece of both thought and handy work.

Memory all alone in the electrical brain light...

This week we continued our discussion of Whitrow's "What is Time".  Part one proved to be even more interesting as we took it apart as a class. I was surprise by how many people were irked by the statement about animals living in a continual present; apparently most pets show more of an understanding than Whitrow suggested?  Then we tested our speed-sketching and imaginations with "Win, Loose, or Draw Game"(?).  Some of the ideas were genuinely neat, and some were genuinely confusing ( I really id not understand what a "sheeple" was or how on earth to draw such a thing until Ashok explained his idea).

Thursday we started with a warm-up in our sketchbooks, in which we drew "how we got here".  I split my page diagonally, and drew a detail oriented map from my dorm building to Montgomery Hall, and on the other half,the path I take through Montgomery Hall to actually get to the class room.  Then we started watching the movie "Memento" directed by Christopher Nolan.  The main character (Leonard) has not short term memory and is living his life through his tattoos and Polaroid pictures (I was curious when this movie was made/intended to take place because I haven't seen Polaroid film almost anywhere for a while now...I used to use it all the time until I got my own digital camera in 9th grade.)  Next catch to the movie?  The plot is not linear.  Bouncing back and forth between color and black and white scenes, the story weaves in and out, overlapping events until the audience feels almost as lost as Leonard does (waking up in strange "new" places all the time).  I cannot wait to see how it all ties together in the end(or rather, the beginning?)

Our most recent reading was the second installment of "What is Time".  The "Time and Ourselves" section left me felling very different from the first part.  The beginning of the final paragraph made me pause, "Our emotional life also influences our experience of time."  This idea combined with the closing thought of "social evolution" really pulled a lot of points Whitrow makes together for me.  The repetition of consciousness/conscious auditory experience/subconscious auditory etc. stuck out as I read; especially at the beginning when Whitrow says, "...time is one of the forms of our intuition.  That is to say, it does not characterize external objects but only the subjective mind that is conscious of them."  So time is only partially existent--it is real (only) in the parts of our mind that we use to perceive it?  Whitrow again compares/contrasts people to other animals--this time equating feelings of "fatigue" and our mind power to learn how to characterize "the data of our experience".  Going on to talk about electrical connections in our brains and studies about whether of not these electrical messages can be inherited or absorbed (worms...ew), this section focuses on what memory and our mental perception of time has to do with how we perceive it personally more so than the first section.  If I had to choose one sentence that really made the article for me however, it would not be one addressing the conscious or subconscious interpretation of time, but one on page 25, talking about what memory means to us and how it has been associated with us:"Memory has long been regarded as the concomitant of our sense of personal identity."

I found the discussion we had in class about our "first memories", and the idea about whether or not they were actual memories or just situations that have been drilled into our minds with videos, pictures, and stories, just fascinating!  There are some memories that I have, that I know have not been affected by an external source, because they are just little parts of my existence, that for some reason I have a vivid recollection of living.  Others are clear, but that may (or may not be because I have a physical representation of this memory (I had some pictures on my external memory (Funny, my computer's external memory storage more specifically) so I thought I would use them to help illustrate my point). 

                                 

For example, I do not recall that hug at all, but it obviously happened.  On the other hand, I vividly remember playing piano and singing with Katie (the little blond girl).  These pictures were could have been taken a couple hours apart at most, yet I have no recollection of one of them, and a crystal clear of the other (improve piano is a very intense art, especially for toddlers).  I can still hear parts of the piano, and there is no sound with this picture...so that I credit as an authentic memory, not one that I may "created" with bits and pieces of a hoe video for example.

 

Another thing I found very interesting upon further reflection, was the thought of the realization of our own names.  I think I equated my name to possession almost before I realized that it meant "me".  I named all of my baby dolls after myself, and the color of their outfits.  I remember pushing Blue Mariana and Yellow Mariana around in strollers through the foyer of my home, "shopping", and then taking them back to the family room, and "cooking" for them with my blue, white, yellow, and pink accented kitchen set--plastic food, utensil, dishes, and all!  They were my dolls, Mariana's dolls and I named them accordingly I suppose.

 

Which still led me to wonder if memories can be "created" with pictures and videos, or they can last for decades with out any visual or audio ques, then could they be recovered without the use of the ques?  The article referenced different kinds of memory, and what that has to do with the wiring of the brain, etc.  This article seemed to suggest similar concepts:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11739-lost-memories-could-be-restored-by-rewiring-brain.html

The person being interviewed in this article (Li-Huei Tsai) suggests that if what they were looking into (a few years back now) was possible, that memories that we might consider "lost" are still "saved" somewhere, much like Whitrow, suggesting that we just need to learn how to draw them out.  If this is the case, I still wonder what kind of progress has been made in this field-degenerative diseases are still a problem, so obviously this solution has yet to be perfected...

 

Which leads me to my specific questions:

-Are we ever able to really determine/prove if a memory we pull from our "blocks of wax" is genuine, or if we have learned it through repetition of pictures/stories/etc.  (Or is it just a matter of trusting ourselves, that we have original data running through our head, that has yet to be altered by a current reminder (ie. photos)?

-How much do our emotions tie into how we remember something, how long we remember it, how we look back on something as certain intervals of time pass...we humans are an emotional species, does that change how we are "wired" drastically, say from other primates?  Or do we just use the same wiring a little differently?  Does emotion have nothing to do with the process at all?  Do we just think our feelings have something to do with it?  

 

 

Captain's Log, Blogdate 090210

Thursday we watched another music video directed by Michel Gondry. We then disected it in a way similar to how we examined Come Into My World by Kylie Minogue. These videos mafe me think of some other music videos that I consider visually engaging-they may not have as "deep" narratives as those we watched in class, but they are still interesting:
OK GO
RJD2
FINGER ELEVEN
Then, we discussed our first reading assignment, "The Whole Ball Of Wax," by Jerry Saltz. While we started with the question posed by the article, could art change the world, we also moved onto other thoughts spurred by a variety of art pieces ranging from cave paintings of early man to Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Mona Lisa.

In regard to the reading "What is Time?" by G.J. Whitrow:
Starting with a brief history of the Mayas' (Mayans'?) concept of time being both "magical" and "polytheistic", and the expectation that it would repeat in "cycles of 260 years," Whitrow sets the stage for discussing the current way we view time, and how we (humans) got to thinking of time the way we do today. Whitrow does not just draw on history to construct this article however; one of the first points he makes is, "It seems that all animals except man live in a continual present." This led me to question, what if we did live in a continual present (or the mindset that life is a contiual present)? Our lives, our world, are so centered on/around time that while we probably could survive, life would cease to exist as we know it. Of course that rather dismal thought can easily be tied into Whitrow's next point about man coping with life ceasing in the form of eternal sleep we've come to know as death. Moving forward from burial traditions, Whitrow contiues to compare/contrast various interpretations of time which seem to fluxuate between magically focused and occasionally scientifically organized.
Some of the things that stuck out in my mind as I read were not only the ways in which Chrisitanity has shaped so much about the way time is viewed/measured today, but how much Christianity absorbed from other traditions/ways of thinking at the time its calendars/etc. were taking shape. Another thing that caught my attention was how different the linear and cyclical views of time were. The Stoics belief, "according to Nemesius" that time would literally repeat itself and everything would be "just as it was" reminded me faintly of how time is viewed in Hiduism (to my understanding anyway/he also eludes to this late one)...time/life repeating itself until it has been perfected/corrected, until there is no lonfer a need to repeat itself again. As the article progresses, Whitrow seems to get more technical in his explanations discussing why the "eschatology" (or undestanding of "the end") of the "early Hebrew prophets" was as it was, and further discussion of the rivalry between "magical time" and "scientific time". According to Whitrow the scienetific approach did not overcome the magical one until the "tempo" of everyday life for the majority of people changed-- enter "time is money". As scientific views pushed forward more people began to pursue routes like that of Kepler, rejecting "quasi-animistic magical" (spirits in inanimate things) and ways of measuring this new scientific time became steadily more accurate with the invention of the pendulum. I think it would have been slightly more effective to save the closing sentence of his second to last paragraph for the very end of the section, but wither way I think including James Hutton's conclusion helps to fraw this section together well- "We find no vesitge of a beginning - noprospect of an end."

Two questions?
I was not really sure what to question this week, but I was really grabbed by the "continual present" idea that was mentioned in the article, so I suppose a couple of questions could be drawn from that idea alone...
-If one were to equate living a "continual present" as "living in the moment" can one live in a continual present at times and not at others?  Does it have to be an all or nothing existance?
-As the generally accepted view of time is at the center of international business, among other things of course, would not accepting the popular view on time doom a business, a nation, a people to failure, or exclusion from the rest of the world? (Ref. The aboriginie children not grasping time the same way other children did...)

I spent a lot of my time setting up my new computer and trying to get my internet here to work with my odd virus-protection software, so I did not have much time to just research other things.  However, I did try to put some time into making this blog my own- so I decided to edit one of the basic templates.  I just messed around with the settings for text style, link colors, CSS stuff, etc., for now anyway.  I also made my background with an amusing web page that allows anyone to make electronic Jackson Pollock works! (http://www.jacksonpollock.org/)  Oh, and "callidus" means "clever" in Latin (Yes, I took a dead language in high school, so bits and pieces show up when I write-sorry).