Multiples project

For the final artist multiples project I chose to do an artist book. It is being printed (to be delivered December 8-I will post when I receive) but I have attached the pdf of the book. The format is a 7in x 7in soft cover book and it exhibits a collection of hand painted ceramics from a local ceramic painting and firing shop in Guelph, Play with Clay (note that using Blurb, the inside cover must be blank white on the 7×7 and 12×12 square format). The ceramics are painted by a mix of young and old and have a variety of colours and styles. I focused on collecting and photographing ones that had a fantastical feel about them. In the store, I chose figurines from the “completed” shelf that were awaiting pick-up. Some are picked up in the next week or two while others are left for a very long time, forgotten or unwanted by their makers. The shelf looks like a little village to me. In the artist book, I wanted to give a selection of pieces to exhibit the personality of the pieces and also, vicariously, the personality of the budding artists that painted them. I used coloured background cardboard to complement colours and different types of figurines and positioning to juxtapose them against each other. I picked each one with care and wanted to showcase each one. By their nature, these items only have value to the creator and perhaps the parent of the child creators. Once the creator/owner no longer wants them, they really don’t have a reuse market. By photographing and documenting them in this book, in a way I am capturing their value and extending it beyond the initial situation.

Scan art

I worked with Lily on creating scan art. We foraged for natural materials and she contributed some bones to the project. Here are some of our creations. I love the levels of depth achieved with some of the 3-D objects such as the Swedish Berries and the bones. The black background also adds a goth element with the colour scheme we chose.

Magazine creation

Lots of fun mixing and matching photos from our videos, book stacking projects and miscellaneous photos taken throughout the semester. The editing process with photos on the wall was helpful in pulling together my final artist multiple as well.

Here are the photos I contributed to the final artist magazine.

Week 4, 5 & 6 revisited-reshoot of Nature Feat and Intervention

Wow, I struggled with this project. I know you were looking for something whimsical, but one thing I learned in doing this project is that you can’t force whimsy when you are not feeling whimsical. I went back to basics for my second attempt at this project.

For the feat, I buried myself under a pile of leaves. As the days get shorter, I just want to hibernate. I like how the beginning and end shot look the same with the middle showing me burying myself. The arm coming up to grab the leaves and cover me has an eerie quality to it. A bit of a zombie/Halloween echo (and not a jazz tune in sight).

For the intervention, I went with a simple version of cutting the branch. I chose running water in the background as the “ideal” landscape so that there is some interest/movement in the first part of the clip. The cutters remove part of the tree that would obstruct a viewer from seeing all of the stream, “interrupting” the tree from just being, for the benefit of the viewer.

One more video. I have done several iterations of conversing with a tree and this one is the closest to what I picture in my mind. Rather than communicating with the tree, it is more of an acknowledgement. (Still a bit on the cheesy side, in my opinion, but approaching what I was picturing.)

Week 4, 5 & 6-Nature Feat and Intervention

My initial thought around an intervention was something I still want to do when the conditions are right. Water colour painting in the rain. The weather did not work for me. There was one torrential downpour with wind, which would have been perfect, but it was at 2am and would have been in the dark. I then was going to talk to a tree, but it just didn’t feel authentic, and really, I don’t think the tree was interested in talking back to me. I did some research on latest thoughts around tree communication and there was a study in Israel that has garnered a lot of attention around how trees, and plants in general, scream, tick and squeal when they are under stress, such as drought and injury to their limbs and roots. They were able to measure these vibrations but humans cannot hear them because they are at an ultrasonic level. There are several species of animals that also can communicate and hear at this level, namely beetles and other insects, bats, moths (and the related caterpillars) and worms. (Surprisingly, not birds.) The latest thinking is that the plants, when they are screaming, are communicating with other plants and animals that can hear at this ultrasonic level to either aid the plant or to feed on the plant so that the plants death can at least give back efficiently to the ecosystem.

My first video is probably a bit more edited than what was asked for, but the tree branch being cut and the final shot at the end of the video are the parts I took in one shot. I then added ultrasonic bat sounds that have been lowered to be heard by human ears and I edited in videos of animals that could understand the tree sounds, ending with what can be heard by human ears.

https://youtu.be/zXsWA_Th6jY

For the second video, I “walked across the earth”. I found a big mound of earth at the arboretum and it was loose so it recorded all my footprints as I went across in. I used different shoes and different ways to get across and examined the prints I left behind. The approach looks pseudo-scientific, but it is obviously casual as well. I first tried having the different approaches on different screens but found the effect too confusing. Also, the approach being somewhat linear and “scientific” came across better as one timeline. I added part of the jazz tune Footprints as the background. It made the viewing more interesting and also alluded to the topic of the video. I think it could work as no sound as well depending on how it was exhibited.

https://youtu.be/gT2JdIQmrU0

Week 3-Artist discussion: Terrance Houle and Trevor Freeman

Terrance Houle is an Indigenous interdisciplinary media (film/video/photography/performance/music) artist and a member of the Kainai Nation and Blood Tribe. He studied art at the Alberta College of Art. He lives and works in Calgary and has exhibited globally, winning awards for his films and as an emerging artist. His work often focuses on colonialism and Indigenous history. A powwow dancer, he also works as a youth mentor teaching video production and art at Métis Calgary Family Services in Calgary, Alberta. More recently, Terrance presented an individual exhibition called Ghost Days. This work presents an experimental art adventure, bringing together film, video, performance, photography, and music. Initiated in 2015 this project conjures the spirits and ghosts of colonial and non-colonial history that exist in the light of night, as well as in the darkness of the day. In one piece of work called “Remains” He photographs a chair over a series of time and watches it be reclaimed by the earth as it disintegrates. He is also well known for a series called “Urban Indian” depicting himself in traditional clothing performing everyday urban tasks. His work often involves visuals of things or people in places that are not expected.

Trevor Freeman is an environmental sculptor from Calgary and is a member of the Métis Nation. He studied art at the University of Lethbridge. He is friends with Terrance Houle and was brought back into the art scene with the performance of Portage ‘007.

Together, Terrance Houle and Trevor Freeman are known for a performance piece they did called Portage ‘007. Originally performed in Vancouver, they have reperformed the piece in different cities across Canada. The objective around the performance was to stage and subvert the typical illustration of portaging one finds in a vintage grade school classroom textbook. In interviews, Houle explains “it’s usually a staged photograph with the stern-faced native hoisting the canoe with his friend the Métis voyageur.” In the performance, the two dress up in stereotypical “traditional” Aboriginal and Métis garb and traverse the populated urban terrain of Vancouver’s metropolitan centre. Terrance is dressed up in a loincloth and moccasins and Trevor wears early fur-trapping attire and a Metis sash tied around his waist. They pose with a canoe in front of the Hudson’s Bay Company store on Granville. They pick up the canoe and place it on their heads, one man in the front and one man in the back. They begin their ‘Portage’ through the downtown core of Vancouver. Along the way, they interact with people and occasionally stop to talk, or eat, or rest. The ‘Portage’ endurance performance takes approximately 2-3 hours and they need to deal with weather elements.

As they carried a canoe through urban settings, we are reminded of pre-contact trade routes and also the early settlement of Canada during which time non-Native and Native porters would map new routes or take old routes to get to where they were going. These were modern day reenactments of old portage routes to celebrate social relations amongst different cultural groups and to acknowledge this unique history in Canadian fareways. The re-imagined Indian and Métis portaging our urban streets offers a sense of the past, and the fiberglass canoe suggests the present, while we ponder the future of trade, commerce and potential for further cultural understanding via historical narratives and practices.

Houle’s favorite comment: “Hey dude, this is like my grade 10 social class.” A shore patrol officer also asked if they had a permit to put the canoe in the water and asked if they had the required lifejackets, paddles, and bailing bucket. They assured him they were dry landers here to portage across the beautiful city of Vancouver. He said that after a while the city just becomes another landscape and the people are like trees. Most people, when they saw the canoe coming, keep their eyes averted and pretended they didn’t see that particular part of the urban landscape. There was a difference between the way people reacted based on where they were from. Tourists were puzzled. Canadians laughed because they “got” it. Once they changed back to contemporary clothing, people on the streets gave them little notice as they were just two guys transporting a canoe somewhere.

Week 2-Arboretum and outside (Circles, weeds and sky)

Circles:

Weeds: A weed is a plant growing anywhere you don’t want it to.

Sky:

Week 1 revisited: book stacks take 2

I re-shot some of the book stacks with significantly less books and like the simplicity of the images and messages. I also added one new concept stack. During my business career, the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, was an incredibly successful book and was forced upon us as must-read material. I decided to have a bit of an intervention and create my own stack of habits, including some referring to weather.

Week 1: Kathryn’s book stacks.

I took a hybrid approach to creating my book stacks. I walked around the University Library and pulled a few books that caught my eye either for the originality of the title, colour or reference to a “weather” event. I also did targeted word searches at both the University Library and the Guelph Public Library to fill in some concept gaps. I found the Children’s section of the Guelph Public library especially good for a few concepts. I first started taking photos on bookshelves or with a black background, similar to Nina Katchadourian, but started playing with accessories or shooting outside to add information or ambience to the story the photo told. I liked these better and found the colours and lighting of the books more engaging. The originals I have are higher resolution and the focus sharper. For some reason, once uploaded to WordPress they become a bit fuzzy.

For the first photo, I followed, somewhat, the style of Nina Katchadourian and approached the word choice as a poem or statement. The resulting stack is quite focused on environment and climate change. I photographed this one with blurred fire in the background, one indoors in daylight and one outdoors at night. My preference is the second one as it has a more violent and catastrophic feel.

Titles that caught my eye were often ones with questions in the title. When seen all together they created some anxiety and tension: Was I supposed to know all the answers to these questions? This led me to thoughts about the popularity of self-help books and how their messages were most often obvious and pithy but explained in a long-drawn-out way how to solve a problem. I had some fun and created a self-help stack with a nature background (a tree stump in my backyard) as an anxiety-calming trope. The questions that start the stack descend (in my opinion) into more and more ridiculous questions. For the weather-related book, I was a bit disappointed that the book I wanted “I wonder why the Sahara is cold at night” was unavailable. The alternative “I wonder why leaves change color” is very thin and a little hard to read (the original is higher resolution and has more clarity).

For the final photograph, I wanted to use the children’s book “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” as it had the weather reference and a whimsical title. I thought about how fun it would be to create a series of posters that had book stacks that could logically lead to a whimsical or unusual saying (almost like a mathematical equation or a riddle) and I came up with this. Aesthetically I thought it would be effective to have some traditional Italian colours and ingredients in the photo to add to the theme.

Environmental Intervention Performance

This prompt was deeply inspiring. I held myself to work simply and essentially during this process. Originally, I assumed I would enact something motivated by props or by creating a scene to act in by manipulating my environment. The more I considered my goals for this performance, the further I understood that it wasn’t fully about me. It was about the nature that supports me in these videos. I moved towards videos that worked in a wholesome and gentle way. These themes reflect the way I feel the natural environment affects my person. Working with Ana and Julianna allowed me to explore the reasons I had for intervening in nature the way I was planning to, we found the process of exploration and brainstorming to push us further into simplistic performances that avoided over-production.

First we made some testing videos, we filmed using ideas that were prompted from exploring to warm up our brains!

These moments were motivation to return to the arboretum with fully formed concepts and a vision for the final drafts we were imagining.

I considered the process of collection and observation in my natural environment making this first video. gently interrupted to shore of a pond to collect my “favourite” sticks as if I was a small creature preparing a nest. The echo of the snapping branches creates a mildly destructive feeling as I take each step. The snapping suggests an invasion of space and disturbance I created by walking over a naturally occurring collection.

The next piece is what I am considering as my final submission. The concept had been my initial want to demonstrate something relating to rest and sleep. I originally planned to use props and include others, but the most effective clip seemed to be one of myself doing to most simple of actions. I put on a nightgown and lay down in the grass that had been pressed down by and animal (or person). I chose to not move and to simply lie in place, in the sun, and meditate on my surroundings. I payed attention to the ambient noise around me, noticing how much noise was being created by visitors is the arboretum.

I wanted to represent sleep and rest because I largely reflects how I feel about my time spent outdoors. Submitting myself to participate in my surroundings in a quiet and gentle sense brings forth the life and sound that occurs naturally when I am not there. It was a reminder to me that I am small and mildly irrelevant, but simultaneously a natural creature who will always hold a place in nature

On our way out, the three of us chose a particularly lush patch of green grass to act out a group piece. One where we enter together and choose a space for our bodies, we pat the grass under us down and curl into the ground for a few moments, listening to the surrounding sounds. The grass groaning under me, the wind shaking the trees above us, then sun casting spotty shadows over us through the canopy. It was a lovely way to conclude our trip and meditate together.

Environmental Artist Presentation – Andrea Zittel

A-Z Administrative Services/Enterprises

One of Zittel’s major works is a collection of sculpture ranging from shelter, clothing, and furniture that all exist in the same artistic experiment. She created a number of pieces all with the intention of examining the necessities of human living and what we feel is essential to our living. Many of the piece strip away excess, and work to fulfill our most simple and essential needs. This re-evaluation also reflects back to us the needs we have place upon us by social structures. A-Z East became the name for a show room in which she would test these designs through her own lived experience.

This re-examination of needs is said to make all necessities accessible to all as she establishes an environment for creativity to thrive without the stress of excessive living. This theoretical planning proposes a more socially-responsible lifestyle regarding waste and conscious consumption.

A-Z East

In 2000 Andrea chose to relocate from New York to Joshua Tree, California where she purchased five acres of the desert to live and work on. She began to create pieces in connection to the A-Z collection, with the same themes and requirements of reduced living. But they interacted much more with their direct environment. Those five acres are now around forty. She continues this experiment of sculptural exploration always evolving her testing with the questions “how to live?” and “what gives life meaning?” as the thesis for the sculptures. The interest in answering these question continuously reveals the complicated relationships between materiality, environment, and consumption.

Both Zittel’s personal home and guest cabin are actually available for renting and can be stayed in. The camping stations/wagon pods (pictured above on the right) are available for stay as well. Visitors are able to take refuge in the desert and immerse themselves in Zittel’s self-sufficient pods and share communal resources. There is a total of 10 pods, included are composting toliets, a communal outdoor kitchen, and outdoor showers. They are described as being a cross between and alien landscape, and regular campsite, a retreat and an old time “do it from scratch” Western horse-drawn wagons.

The pods are collapsible, movable and feature a transparent ceiling.

Book Stacks

Here are some if my Book Stacks, prompted by “Weather”

Note; I haven’t had the chance to retouch them at all so the images are still a bit raw 🙂

#1

The Sun Placed In The Abys – Melting Point (continued) ->>fast forward 2 – What’s Left -The Saddest Place On Earth

This stack ended up feeling very apocalyptic, I imagine a sort of exchange where the Sun is sacrificed and the Earth cannot stand its absence. Perhaps that is too poetic, but I don’t think it is far off from our reality with climate change in action. We already sacrifice the health of our planet in exchange for convenience in our lives today.

#2

The Earthly Paradise – Cities Full of Symbols – The Sex Of Architecture – The City As An Image of A Man – I Am Architecture – What People Want – Queer Space

This combination felt more natural to me. Finding books that were prompting was good way to flow into the next title (What People What). It was really interesting to find myself categorizing books automatically into what felt like different types of titles and how they could be used. Encouraging myself to not be controlling over the narrative created or to practice consciously putting titles together with my artist’s brain.

This string of titles also felt personal to me. Reflecting on societal structure and how it isn’t build with queer people/space in mind is relevant to my personal life. It also led me to think of the inaccessible nature of a lot of city spaces, I found myself imaging what a real “Earthly Paradise” would be like for me.

#3

Make Space – Queer Space – A Sense of Place – Across Space And Time

This last stack felt like a great conclusion. It works as a sort of final statement or thought, something to consider and take forwards. Queer Spaces are infinitely valuable for those who seek refuge or community. I also enjoy how the repetition of the word space and the rhyming with the word place. It repeats with purpose, but is also just satisfying to read. I think my sense of colours with the spines was most successful here as well, there’s a bit of a gradient happening which is pleasing to the eye!

Overall, this assignment felt very valuable. Slightly out of comfort zone, but still calling on skills we all have as artist’s to compose something from pre-existing image/items. Loved it!

Week 1: September 12-15

This past week we were able to begin our school semester in person. Unfortunately, during my first week back, I was exposed to COVID-19 and needed to miss our first meeting. After looking over the blog, I was able to attend our second meeting where we ventured to the library to look at book stack collections and to create our own compositions. I met a friend in the class and as a partnership, we decided to go to the third floor of the library where the Scottish literature is held as we both share this heritage and the knowledge that the Scotts often discuss weather. After looking through the stacks for quite a while, I began picking some books that caught my eye. I noticed a large variety of books pertaining to religion but tried to focus on the areas of geography and travel. I am also quite the fan of romance and any books with poetic language tend to catch my eye too. After some time, I began trying to arrange my books into compositions. As I put an emphasis on travel and travelling climate, I wanted to set that scene and decided to use some geographical photography to assist. When I think of weather and climate, i usually think about the ways in which individuals experience it, how we feel about it and the way that one person could experience something entirely different from another at the exact same time.  I also noticed some maps on my search which i felt could also assist in creating imagery to go along with my compositions. 

Week 2: September 19-21

This week I unfortunately came down with Covid-19. This illness really took me by surprise the level to which I would struggle to recover. Due to this, I was not able to attend this week’s critique or the mute arboretum walk. I hope to be back in class as soon as possible and getting back into the world of experimental studio!

ARTIST MULTIPLES

Growing up, I was very involved in the rock music scene and was infatuated with the self-expression many of the people around me were engaging in. Before u knew what tattoos and piercings wee, I wanted them. When I would go home, I would transform all of my dolls into punk rockers, metal heads and goths and this made me feel represented. As I grew up, I began adorning mysle fin these ways. Now was an adult artist, I wanted to recreate this practice of making over dolls into metal and goth versions of themselves. I think this project while intended to be playful, also touches on concepts such as girlhood, femininity and resistance.

Week One :

First working on this assignment i felt overwhelmed with all of the options in the library at Guelph for potential combinations of words and phrases. So instead at the beginning of my process I decided to gather books simply based on interesting titles, combined with visually pleasing spines in order to create myself a micro selection of books. From the titles I liked and gathered, I then worked in my “mini library.”

STACK ONE | ART THROUGH THE AGES

My first collection of books were found all together in the Art History section of the library. I firstly noticed they provided all the colours of the rainbow before noting that they actually also were written by the same author, Gardener. This piece felt more like a natural start to the rest of the assignment, and encouraged me to not just rely on the title of the books, but what books physically stood out to me. What I would naturally lean towards visually felt as if the selection of books did not just speak about the library’s collection, but also my own preferences as an artist.

STACK TWO | EDEN

My second collection, is quite possibly my favourite. I leaned towards more word play, but still wanted to keep visual aesthetics in mind. This was the resulted in the more blunt appearance with shorter titles, and a more muted colour palette. I loved how these titles reminded me of the creation story in the bible of Adam and Eve, and relates to themes I want to explore in my practice as an artist this semester.

STACK THREE | WAR

My final stack felt the most natural to the original assignment. I had originally gathered this series of books based on the worn look of their covers thinking it provided a lot of visual interest. Nearing the end of my time at the library I was stacking books to put away when I finally noticed the titles of each book. I decided to rearrange them to read the most like poetry, to tell the story of the transitions of peace and war and then hopeful rediscovery.

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ARTIST PRESENTATION | JAE RHIM LEE

Jae Rhim Lee’s TEDtalk | https://youtu.be/_7rS_d1fiUc

______________________________

Video Art Submission

This video was condensed from a previous art assignment, and is my submission for the Images Festival

_________________

Book Research

For our class’ artist book, I really wanted to play around with editing and morphing images together. During one of our first days, I started with the idea of “men with mushrooms” and started gathering images. I noticed how everyone else’s images looked very similar with rectangles or squares on top of a solid colour background, so I wanted to see what else could be done in terms of making a spread. I did not want to only arrange images, but instead wanted to see how I could manufacture my own.

The first two pages I made for the book were produced by automatically selecting the image and allowing for gaps and holes to occur. Then I would layer images and textures playing with the opacity, and finally making all the images black and white for a sense of unity. I was inspired by zines and the idea of mass production, and wanted my images to almost resemble being layered and layered through a printer. Unfortunately, I got sick shortly after these pages were produced, and that maddest extremely difficult to come in and work. I was disappointed when I returned to class and one of my morphed images had been removed without notice because the last update I had received, “Men with Mushrooms” was still alongside another image I had created to compliment each other.

If we were to redo this assignment, I wish that maybe we assigned a set amount of pages for each student, in order to keep the amount of contributions even. Even though we were sourcing images from each other, I find that there was representation of certain student’s work much more than others and that really restricted the feeling of it being a “class book.” This was especially apparent for me when my final image I had created for the book was also nearly removed last minute due to it “not fitting the rest of the book.” Instead of a solution of maybe adding elements to an additional page to make a spread, I personally feel that maybe we were too quick to just remove pages. When it is supposed to be a class work and none of your own work is possibly represented, meanwhile certain classmates have their images present in nearly half of the book the assignment was really discouraging.

_______

Artist Multiple

For my artist multiple, I was inspired by a 1913 love letter a cartoonist had sent his wife in order to tell her about a museum they were going to visit. I love the attributes of pop-up the original design carried and I wanted to make a multiple that was a 3D object in space rather than just a pamphlet or piece of paper.

For my new artistic interpretation of this piece, I wanted to speak on the inaccessibility of art institutions and how it can be difficult for young artists to even get their foot in the door of these institutions. I included images of famous works I personally like in order to show a bias in the art community. I wanted to capture this feeling of being unable to enter such a closed off space, so decided to remove the original doorway from the inspiring design. I also included a run-on-sentance monologue to cover all four sides of the pop-up. I wanted to the receiver to feel as if they were reading and receiving the same advice over and over again, but not knowing what the advice is wishing to do.

From discussions in class, I think moving forward with this project I would like to have them as a monthly mail-out where people can receive new monthly art history information about different artists, or contemporary artists of all disciplines. I think rather than individually glues pieces, I can easily size the piece to be a single sheet of paper with fold lines for assembly, and then only glue the one edge. The reason I chose to present this work’s packaging as a letter as well, is not just to pay homage to just the original letter, but also to signify the future plans of this project being a mailed form of art. Not everyone is able to go to art institutions, so I really admire the idea of bringing the art to them.

1. Tattoos lecture and video – discuss ideas

1. Workshop in class, worktime, discussions

Status, 2012

Performance by Jordan Bennett 2012
Materials: Tattooing, Technical equipment, film screening of Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance and Is the Crown at War with us? by Alanis Obomsawin 
Performed/Presented at: Eastern Edge Art Gallery, St. John’s NL
Photo: Eastern Edge Art Gallery

Artur Zmijewski:

 80064. Its title is the camp number of a 92 years old Auschwitz survivor, Jozef Tarnawa. The tattoo has faded with the years and Zmijewski meets the old man in a tattoo parlor and tries to persuade him to have it ‘refreshed’.

The old man is not to be convinced easily. He wants to be left in peace. He is worried that the renewed tattoo will not be ‘original.’ In the end, Zmijweski gets his way and the poor man submits his arm unwillingly to the tattoo artist. In Zmijweski’s own words: ‘When I undertook this film experiment with memory, I expected that under the effect of the tattooing the ‘doors of memory’ would open, that there would be an eruption of remembrance of that time, a stream of images or words describing the painful past. Yet that didn’t happen. But another interesting thing happened. Asked whether, while in the camp, he had felt an impulse to revolt, to protest against the way he was treated, Tarnawa replied: ‘Protest? What do you mean, protest? Adapt – try and survive.’ In the film, suffering, power relationships, and subordination are repeated.

About the controversial work the artist says:

“It’s a renovation of the number, a kind of the respect toward the guy, he is treated as a living monument of the past which needs to be preserved and kept in good condition. And the second meaning of it is re-creation or repetition of the act of violence toward this guy. In both movies, I wanted to open access to the past, really open it, not to commemorate it only, but only open access to it, really jump into the past. The very moment when the tattoo was done or the very moment when people were in the gas chamber […] Deifnitely artists should maintain their position and support curators and institutions which presents this exhibition and fight censorship.”

from: https://news.err.ee/115144/polish-artist-behind-controversial-holocaust-video-art-defends-work-on-etv

Michelle Lacombe

90FeminismsAnne-Marie St-Jean Aubre

• Michelle Lacombe, Of All the Watery Bodies, I only know my own, documentation, 2013-2014.

Reading a Body

Michelle Lacombe turns her body into a palimpsest for us to decode, mingling constructed and natural signs and generating a complex image of the tensions traversing it. Each of her works comes about in two moments. The first is the work’s production and presentation, focusing on an issue conveyed by the media and art history, which generate an exterior view of the woman. The second is everyday lived experience, in which bodily signs endure, accumulate, recontextualize one another. Lacombe embodies both perspectives simultaneously; her body, a field of struggle, testifies to this.

Revisiting the historical modes of representation of women through the deconstruction of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1510), Lacombe stands in for the main subject of the scene in The Venus Landscape(2010). The work consists of lines tattooed on her body that serve as guides to the prescribed pose of a reclining, wanton Venus offered up to desiring eyes. The artist denies the prescription by fragmenting her posture in everyday actions, the drawn lines never joining up to render a coherent image of their reference. Nor does she shy away from the tropes associated with women or fear falling into stereotypes: in dealing with maternity, the menstrual cycle, and women’s kinship with nature, her project Of all the watery bodies, I only know my own (2013–16) is an occasion to reflect on the body’s erosion through the monthly loss of its reproductive potential. No longer situated in the landscape, her body becomes the landscape, a terrain that wears down over time, with every cycle.

The voice of women, often devalued, lies at the heart of Italics; Underlining for emphasis (2010 and 2015), which indeed underlines Lacombe’s voice with an invisible line etched inside her lower lip, symbolically marking her agency. She strives for the same goal in all her work: to reveal and explode the barriers that restrain her field of action as she confronts the complexities and nuances inherent to her research.

Translated from the French by Ron Ross

Catherine Opie:

JANA STERBAK

Generic Man, 1987-1989, printed of 2002

Santiago Sierra

160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People … is a video documenting an action that took place at El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo in Salamanca, Spain in December 2000. The artist’s text explains: ‘Four prosititutes addicted to heroin were hired for the price of a shot of heroin to give their consent to be tattooed. Normally they charge 2,000 or 3,000 pesetas, between 15 and 17 dollars, for fellatio, while the price of a shot of heroin is around 12,000 pesetas, about 67 dollars.’ (Quoted from the artist’s text accompanying the video.) The single-channel black and white video constitutes an informal record of the event in which the four participating women allow their backs to be used for the tattoo. It shows the women – two fair haired and two dark haired – arrive in the space and take up positions, naked from the waist up and with their backs towards the camera, straddling black bentwood chairs. During the action they move constantly, chatting, laughing, smoking, turning to look behind them, curiously watching the female tattoo artist and commenting on her processes until, finally, she cleans their wounds and covers them with bandages. During the film, two men in dark clothes pass in and out of the frame, holding a tape measure over the bared backs for the initial measurement and taking photographs of the process as it develops.

Wim Delvoye

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38601603?fbclid=IwAR0aPCkP9LqWGba4uRtAnNoQbN1m3w0bHs9AW4PqhqzvJLhDVxjdlQoPrqs

JOHN MURCHIE

 I’m thinking about your relationship to lines, in particular. Can you talk about your tattoos?

JM: They’re still there!

KH: [Laughs] Yes, well, in some ways they are only slightly less ephemeral than your paper cups and napkins, in the sense that you yourself are rather ephemeral in reference to geological or cosmic time…

JM: True. I honestly don’t remember how I began working with lines exactly, except that it began soon after I started working at NSCAD. My use of straight lines is probably another reflection of the fact that I was interested in making works in visual art but had no particular skills or training, and I also had no interest in gaining those skills. That compounded with my background literature and my interest in science and mathematics. As for the tattoos, they are artworks that I’ve had for twenty-two years now. Most of my life I’ve worked in some sort of job where I’m dressed with sleeves covering the majority of the work, so the question most people will wonder is how far up my body they go. There is an implication that they continue.

KH: I’m looking at them now – they are on the center of your forearms, beginning at the wrist and ending at the elbow. I remember you saying once that one was black and the other blue, though of course now the black one is blueing, and the blue one is blueing further, which is also interesting in terms of tracking time. Lines are of course related to a human sense of time as a linear concept, and certainly your continued use of the line connects much of your work through time.

John Murchie, “Black and Blue”, 1996. Photos courtesy of Gemey Kelly.

JM: When I got them done in the mid-‘90s, there weren’t that many people around with tattoos. Those from my father’s generation who had been to war certainly had some, but aside from that they weren’t that prevalent, but were starting to be. I’ve always been interested in how a sculpture can be a painting and vice versa. I still see them as my drawings, basically. On the other hand, I’m obviously a three-dimensional thing, so its sculptural, and also I see it as an ongoing performance, until my last breath. It’s the only way I can give my body real value. I have offered this artwork to the National Gallery of Canada. I told them they couldn’t have it until I passed away. And then, they would have to make a decision as to whether they preferred to see it as a drawing, and skin me, or see it as a sculpture.

KH: And embalm you?

JM: [Laughs] Yes. It’s their choice. I see both possibilities as perfectly adequate and true, but obviously you have to make a choice. Curatorially speaking, I think they would make the better choice than I would. From my perspective, it’s one of my most successful works.

KH: I’m led to think of Santiago Sierra’s 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People from 2000, which of course was done much later and garnered a lot of negative attention for the obvious problematics – paying prostitutes the price of their choice substance to be tattooed across their backs as some sort of unit. Obviously your work is exceedingly different, but I can’t help but bring Sierra to mind. Both works, regardless of their extreme difference, involve an attempt at geometry against the fleshiness of the human body, and demand that the living body be seen as an art object.

JM: Yes well even in my case not everyone has been empathetic with the work either, like my mother, for example. [Laughs] She thought it was the most stupid thing she’d heard in her life. Conversations around their utility come up most often in hospitals when my sleeves are rolled up to do blood work and the like. I guess they look suspiciously like the surgical marks doctors draw when they’re getting ready to cut you open.

Douglas Gordon

Tattoo (for Reflection)

The work of Douglas Gordon revolves around a constellation of dualities and dialectics. Mistaken identities, doubles, split personalities, and such opposites as good and evil, and self and other are thematized as inseparable. Gordon’s films, video installations, photographs, and texts transform differences into uncanny, nuanced pairs.

Gordon approaches film as ready-made or found object, mining the potential collective memory that exists in cinematic fragments, and in the process, disclosing unseen or overlooked details and associations. His installation through a looking glass (1999) features the well-known scene from Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver in which Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, asks, “You talkin’ to me?” while gazing into a mirror. In Gordon’s piece, the scene is projected onto dual screens placed on opposite walls of a gallery space. The original episode from the movie, filmed as a reflection in the mirror, is shown on one wall. The other screen displays the same episode with the image reversed, flipped left to right. The two facing images, which begin in sync, progressively fall out of step, echoing the character’s loss of control and his mental breakdown. These discordant projected images seem to respond to one another, thus trapping the viewer in the crossfire. In its almost dizzying play of dualities, through a looking glassperfectly articulates the dialectical inversions, doublings, and repetitions that are the central concerns of Gordon’s work.

Gordon also uses still photography to capture performative acts, as in Tattoo (for Reflection) (1997). In accordance with Gordon’s instructions, the writer Oscar van den Boogaard had the word “guilty” tattooed in reverse on the back of his left shoulder; the tattoo can only be read via its reflection in a mirror. Gordon revels in the mixed messages found in the tattoo’s various cultural associations, from its use as an identifying mark on prisoners to its current incarnation as a subculture status symbol. In true Gordonian, reflexive fashion—with the word legible on van den Boogaard’s back only when reversed—the photograph becomes an index of an index.

Title:

Three inches, black no. 2

1997

Douglas Gordon Douglas Gordon, Never, Never (white), 2000. C-type digital print. 62 x 76 cm (unframed). © Studio lost but found / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017.

Fastwurms: See AGYU book

Donkey Ninja Witch, 2010

David Shrigley:

Shannon Gerard: Willy

Tattoos

More References:
Russian Prison Tattoos:

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/9bzvbp/russian-criminal-tattoo-fuel-damon-murray-interview-876?fbclid=IwAR2m4rDisHtm_CV-Abo2c0zXeCwIw_M8UntcicoV_rZwlnEXS5mqpgyQOug

Art Hurts: CBC Series

https://www.cbc.ca/arts/art-hurts-meet-8-extraordinary-tattoo-artists-whose-ink-is-worth-a-little-bit-of-pain-1.5000490?cmp=FB_Post_Arts&fbclid=IwAR1qoLn5jxsXSaRrJ_HlrFUfPr5MJjoSIF_5l5GytcK6UH-LzJeCutu5lsA

Watch Tattoos,

 Leo Zhuoran 2019

As a child, my friends and I used to draw watches on each other’s wrist for fun. Back in the days, a ball point pen is not easy to find for us since everyone uses pencil and only adult and older children can use a pen. To share a ball point pen that was hard to find and draw different watches on each others wrist was a simple mark of friendship. To recreate this childhood memory, I asked my classmates to draw each other a wrist watch with their own design and photographed it then translated it into a printable design. I then printed these “watches” on temporary tattoo paper and shared it with the class.

Matching Freckles, Sydney Coles, 2019

Sarah Hernandes, Embrace, 2019.

Make an Artist Tattoo

RECOMMENDED MEDIA: Tattoo transfer, drawing for the body, performance, video

Due: See schedule for details

______________________________________________________________________

Human beings have been tattooing themselves for thousands of years. For religious and spiritual reasons, for beautification, remembrance, for rites of passage, for sex, as expressions of identity and belonging; of protest, of love and sometimes – of possession and hate.

Artists have explored many of these ideas in artist-tattoo projects, utilizing self-conscious, and conceptual strategies in designing and applying tattoos. The resulting works are sometimes surprising, provocative or difficult, funny, or emotionally moving.

Students will create a tattoo piece. You can use the transfer paper or other print and drawing techniques to make one, or multiple tattoos. You can also consider ways to present your work – on a body, in a performance, or in a video. Finish your tattoo somehow – to present to the class and on the blog as a finished artwork.

**** While your work may be a proposal and sample of a permanent tattoo, I would recommend you do NOT apply a real permanent tattoo/mark on yourself or others to complete this assignment. After critiques you are free to do what you like with your own body – but for class, you will not make a permanent body alteration, please.

Consider artist tattoos by:

Jana Sterbak

Douglas Gordon

Catherine Opie

John Murchie

Shannon Gerard

Artur Zmijewski

Michelle Lacombe

David Shrigley

Jordan Bennett

Santiago Sierra

Alethea Arnaquq-Baril

Students will document finished works for addition to the blog. Include a title, a short description and one to two images or video of your work.

Works must be posted on the blog with a title and description to receive a final grade.

1. Video Crits

1. Video Crits
2. SHENKMAN LECTURE WEDNESDAY

1. Show and discuss CBC Spark, The Power and Provocation of Art
2. Discussion of work in progress, tech adc

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/the-power-and-provocation-of-art-1.6258742

1. Editing time, discussions of work in progress.

The power and provocation of art – from CBC Spark

A special Spark retrospective

CBC Radio · Posted: Dec 24, 2021 1:17 PM ET | Last Updated: December 24, 2021

Spark53:59The power and provocation of art

Over the past 15 seasons of Spark, we’ve done a lot of stories about art that could be seen as impractical, complicated, and just plain, well, weird.

And that was intentional, created to be a provocation, something to make us think about the technologically-mediated world around us.

Art plays an important role in helping us navigate our digital lives, where we’re often bound by the unquestioned assumptions of the technology we inherited. 

Freed from the constraints of being ‘sensible’, artists can ask big questions that can help us see problems — and solutions — in a new way. 

What happens when you let an AI deer run loose in a video game?

That was the premise of the San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam, an AI deer programmed to wander through the video game Grand Theft Auto V by visual artist Brent Watanabe. 

“To see this hapless deer wander in this gigantic environment, none of which is designed for it, I think is kind of sobering,” Watanabe told Spark host Nora Young in 2016.

https://www.cbc.ca/i/caffeine/syndicate/?mediaId=2686541291

Running with the Grand Theft Auto deer

6 years agoDuration1:28Artist Brent Watanabe creates an artificially intelligent deer that roams the virtual landscape of the video game, Grand Theft Auto V. 1:28

It’s mesmerizing to watch, but why?

“The piece touches on very universal themes,” explained Watanabe, “like longing and suffering and on our human relationships with wildlife and farmed animals. And what technology and human progress is doing to other creatures on Earth.” 

See more projects by Brent Watanabe:

What does a computer look like?

To artist and professor Irena Posch, it’s a two-metre-long, golden embroidered fabric. That’s right, Posch designed an 8-bit computer using historic patterns of gold embroidery and beads. 

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1454651459915/

How to make an embroidered computer

3 years agoArtist Irene Posch explains how she created the ’embroidered computer,’ an 8-bit computer made of cloth, beads and gold thread. 0:39

The computer opens up space to question the design of computers in particular, but also our technologies in general. 

“I understand The Embroidered Computer as an alternative, as an example, but also a critique of what we assume a computer to be today, and how it technically could be different,” Posch told Spark host Nora Young in 2019. 

“If this is actually what we want is a whole different question, but I think it’s interesting to propose an alternative.”

See more of Irene Posch:

What do computers, knitting, NASA and 18th century China have in common? 

For mathematician and technology historian, Kristen Haring, the answer is in the story of binary systems. If you thought an embroidered computer was fascinating, if not a little out there, what about knitting Morse code into sweaters?

Haring did just that, associating the ‘on’ pulse of electricity in Morse code, with a purl stitch, and the ‘off’ with a knit stitch. https://www.youtube.com/embed/hdYEMs6nkA8

This whimsical exercise in translation between Morse code and knitting, was a way of playfully thinking about binary systems themselves, but also about the culture of binary, through our common history. 

“I think we have the sense that binary is very much 21st century, and I think it’s a very good lesson in not being arrogant about our present technology, to become aware of the fact that people for thousands of years have been analyzing things in this binary method,” Haring told Spark host Nora Young in 2012.

“You can make really great computers and mobile telephones out of binary systems, but you can also decide what time of day to pray or how to make beautiful poetry in Sanskrit.”

See more Kristen Haring:

What if you could convert pollution into something useful?

Engineer Anirudh Sharma was walking around Mumbai when he noticed that air pollution was forming a dark pattern on his white shirt. And that gave him a really big idea.

What if he could somehow collect the soot — mostly carbon — and convert it into a usable ink? And AIR-INK was born. https://www.youtube.com/embed/MqOplj2HSdE

His company, Graviky Labs, built special scrubbers to extract the soot from car exhausts and chimneys, and, through a special refinement process, turn it into ink which is then donated to artists to make murals or silkscreens.

Even a single marker can contain many tons of pollution that would otherwise be going into the air. “Or into your lungs,” Sharma told Spark host Nora Young in 2017.

In addition to art supplies, AIR-INK is used today in the garment industry and in packaging. 

Unlike top-down regulation, Sharma believes grassroots, ground-up solutions, like his, may go a long way to cleaning the air in some of the most polluted cities in the world.

“What we’re talking about is retrofitting so we can capture whatever pollution is being emitted right now,” Sharma explained. “And it can be recycled into a form that will incentivize the polluter to capture the air pollution.”

---

Written by Michelle Parise. Produced by Michelle Parise, Nora Young and Adam Killick.

?

1. Discuss proposals for Internet-Video Art projects and collaborations

1. Demo on ripping images, video and sound from Youtube with Nathan
2. Ongoing discussions of work in progress
3. Work time in class
4. Listen to The Power and Provocations of Art- from CBC Spark for homework

Listen to the podcast – for discussion next week

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-55/clip/15886292

Artists who shape, respond to, and re-make popular video culture

Pipillotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist (Swiss) talks about her first work of video art “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much” from 1986 – barely art – that they submitted to a festival just to get a free ticket to see the shows. Before MTV, before YouTube the artist – like Joan Jonas or Bruce Nauman or Nam June Paik and others – was performing simple gestures, improvised performances, and performing herself in footage that was rough, poor quality, chaotic and spontaneous.

Did artists invent music videos? You Tube?

Kelly Mark

Or cat videos? See Kelly Mark, Toronto based artist in 2002.

See the video here: http://kellymark.com/V_MusicVideoSeries1.html

–

“Faced with the awe-inspiring popularity of web-monoliths like YouTube, contemporary art risks becoming nothing more than a quaint relic of the 20th century.

It’s probably not fair to compare contemporary art practice with YouTube; yet there is evidence to suggest that somewhere in the ulterior of its collective brain, the art world does just this, and finds itself lacking. How else to understand the ongoing assurances given in art exhibition press releases and catalogue essays about the important role the viewer plays in the construction of meaning – and the intention to facilitate it with this very exhibition?

If artists once played a leading – avant garde – role in providing a complex and forward-looking framework for reflection on the contemporary world, it now seems most comfortable bringing up the rear, providing explanations for developments already intuitively understood and widely enjoyed by the culture at large. “

Rosemary Heather, From Army of You Tube

–

Ryan Trencartin

https://vimeo.com/24322738

“Ryan Trecartin’s videos depict a vertiginous world I’m barely stable enough to describe. Watching them, I face the identity-flux of Internet existence: surfing-as-dwelling. Images evaporate, bleed, spill, metamorphose, and explode. Through frenetic pacing, rapid cuts, and destabilizing overlaps between representational planes (3-D turns into 2-D and then into 5-D), Trecartin violently repositions our chakras. Digitally virtuoso, his work excites me but also causes stomach cramps. I’m somatizing. But I’m also trying to concentrate.” From Situation Hacker: The Art of Ryan Trencartin, Wayne Kaustenbaum

Maya Ben David

Biography

Maya Ben David (MBD) is a Toronto-based Jewish-Iranian Anthropomorphic Airplane. Working in video, installation and performance, she creates worlds and characters that aid her ongoing exploration of anthropomorphism, cosplay and performative personas. Ben David presents the origin stories of her characters in the form of video and performance, and expands on them via her online presence. They often inhabit alternate universes accompanied by nostalgia, such as the worlds of Pokémon and Spiderman. In addition, Ben David also plays a character called MBD who is known for having multiple feuds with her many alter egos as well as the art world. Most infamously, MBD has ignited online feuds with artists such as Jon Rafman and Ajay Kurian.   Bio from her site Maya Ben David

Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani, 2 Lizards: Episode 1, 2020

2 Lizards: Episode 1, 2020

Artforum is pleased to host this Instagram video by Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani, made while self-isolating because of COVID-19.

Beautiful moment of communion through sound waves in Brooklyn despite social distancing—the virus’s protective membrane is very sensitive to soap and heat but also bass. These two lizards are lucky they work from home and can afford to stay inside. This is the first collaboration between Yani and me; we made it over the weekend to take a break from editing and animating for work. —Meriem Bennani

This is what it feels like to live
presently in a historical moment.

“2 Lizards is an artistic time capsule that fuses genre—part documentary, part fiction—using cartoon animals to represent the artists’ community. The resulting absurdity and realness channel humor and sincere emotion to explore the societal fissures that formed around the pandemic, and its intersection with systemic racism. Each episode explores a specific quarantine mood: dreamlike detachment, anxiety, impassioned protest. Melodrama is notably absent. Instead we see cool emotions and “affect management.” Daydreaming, scrolling, and distraction abound. In addition to physical confinement, there is an emotional confinement that manifests as out-of-sync-ness: the lizards move with a particular cadence, slightly slower than everything else. This, the videos seem to say, is what it feels like to live presently in a historical moment.” From MOMA

2 Lizards joins a rich history of diaristic video art, including Gregg Bordowitz’s episodic Portraits of People Living with HIV or George Kuchar’s performative video diaries. Like Bordowitz’s and Kuchar’s footage of the mundane, 2 Lizards focuses not on the crisis as an event but on its daily effects. (It isn’t until episode four, when the lizards visit a friend, a healthcare worker, that we hear stories about the coronavirus tragedies.) As an event, contagion is invisible, but the ripple effects are evident. This is reminiscent of cultural theorist Lauren Berlant’s term “crisis ordinariness,” whereby “crisis is not exceptional…but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming.”[1]

2 Lizards

This series speaks to the changing methods of image consumption that aim increasingly toward smaller, more portable screens and user-generated content that seeks to comfort through humor. Like memes, the lizards are an opiate for our precise moment of extreme social disruption. Much of the value in these videos is their format (the Instagram video), as they inextricably tie the work to the platform and its users. 2 Lizards is a feedback loop: it reflects the Internet by incorporating new modes of image technologies related to the constant stream of pictures, which are then distributed back into the world through those very feeds. During lockdown, in the context of isolation, social media became a place where many of us channeled our pent-up communal and emotional need to connect. It is where we received information about the world and began to watch a new one unfold.

Yuula Benivolski

aspacegallery.org

“Scrap Pieces is a collaborative meditation on the physical components of the surface of images. This 4 channel video project borrows materials from the studios of four Canadian photographers: Laurie Kang, Jeff Bierk, Nadia Belerique, and Celia Perrin Sidarous. Filmed in the intimate style of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), Benivolski soothes the viewer using debris and scrap materials such as small pieces of metal, silicone, plaster casts, test strips, seashells, glass, wires and transparencies.” Yuula Benivolski from her site

https://www.archivalaffections.com/yuula-benivolski.html

Traces
2021 / 4k video / colour / sound / single screen / 62’46

“Traces is an ASMR video tutorial that demonstrates the process of forensic fingerprint development on old currency that has been out of circulation for thirty years. With Bridget Moser.

I left Moscow at 10 years old when it was still part of the Communist USSR and made my first trip back home to the “Russian Federation” 28 years later. Curious about the disappeared ideology and citizens of the place I was born in, I purchased 300 Soviet banknotes which went out of circulation in 1993, with plans to lift fingerprints off them.

The fingerprints, once revealed through a chemical process taught to me by a forensic specialist, are photographed using an orange filter on a macro lens, and enlarged 80 times their size, in order to show the last natural traces of a place that has been made to vanish.” Yuula Benivolski

Christian Marclay:

https://vimeo.com/176259496

https://vimeo.com/28702716

Devya Mehra:

https://www.nightgallery.ca/artists/divya-mehra

Brent Watanabe

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/316-wandering-with-a-i-deer-the-end-of-stop-lights-and-more-1.3517509/running-with-the-grand-theft-auto-deer-1.3517513

Artist’s Project page: https://bwatanabe.com/GTA_V_WanderingDeer.html

John Rafman

“Rafman’s skill is taking the bizarre and normalizing it, meanwhile forcing the mundane to become mystical. In the finale of his trilogy he levels subcultures and forces the viewer to reassess the difference between the general and the specific. On the internet, any culture we mass consume becomes our own. “– Mitchell Anderson, Flash Art

https://jonrafman.com

Arthur Jaffa:

Warning about video art below: Contains explicit/violent material, actual footage

“Well my thing was like, first of all, there’s something to be said for just making explicit what is oftentimes implicit—which is black people being killed as if we’re not human beings. How do we introduce something in the space that can cut through the noise? There’s a real problematic around the appropriateness of having an image of a man getting murdered. But this footage is all over the place. It’s everywhere. It’s not like we’re talking about digging stuff out of some archive that’s never been seen before.

It’s literally everywhere so the question becomes: How do you situate it so that people actually see it, this phenomena, as opposed to just having it pass in front of them? How do you have people actually see it? And simultaneously, how do you induce people to apprehend both the beauty and the horror these circumstances? There’s something profound (and magical) to be said about the ability, the capacity to see beauty anywhere and everywhere. I think it’s a capacity black people have developed because not only are we are not authorized, we’re demonized—we are radically not affirmed, so we’ve actually learned not just how to imbue moments with joy but to see beauty in places where beauty, in any normative sense, doesn’t necessarily exist.”

From Love is the Message, The Plan is Death, Arthur Jafa and Tina M. Campt in coversation on e-flux

“It’s both a breaking of worlds, and a making of worlds at the same time….” AJ

“What I try to do increasingly is to try and see the thing with clarity.” … AJ

OPTIONAL READ: From Love is the Message, The Plan is Death, Arthur Jafa and Tina M. Campt in coversation on e-flux

SMILE FOR THE CAMERA: Alexia Castiglione, 2023

For my final, I overlapped all of the clips and displayed them side by side. By overlapping all of the clips, I am allowing my audience to move through each one at a steady pace, while also striping the videos of their humour. I wanted to focus on the cruelty of the parents. I wanted to show the unethical aspect of filming and posting your child on the internet during their most vulnerable moments. I made sure to include some of the parents dialogue to further emphasize this. In the video you can hear some parents laughing at their children or mocking their cries. One parent even says to their child “you are so dramatic!” I wanted to highlight the absurdity of the common parenting choices of this generation. My vision is to have this play on a loop, possibly in a stairwell. I want this video to be displayed in a space where the audience would have no choice but to walk past it and endure the discomfort of hearing the cries of these poor children.

JAZ MOREL, ALL GRWM 2023

For my internet video trend I found myself experimenting with a lot of different subject matter or internet video tropes, however, a consistent theme I was incorporating was ‘animal videos.’ Animal videos have a long history with the internet and appear on all platforms, from YouTube compilations of “funny cat videos” to TikTok’s of “pet meal-prep.” 

Being the animal lover I am, I opted to go the route of using animal videos as my subject matter. A lot of the videos I watch on the internet are light-hearted or ‘filler’ video throughout my day of just scrolling through my social media platform feeds. For this project I wanted to capture the light hearted or for lack of a better word, ‘meaningless,’ videos that I come across daily. Similar to what I originally had in mind of pit bull pampering videos, my work is a video compilation of all types of breeds being pampered or groomed in a human like nature. A lot of what is being performed on the dogs is what human’s themselves are doing in similar “get ready with me (GRWM)” videos, and so I wanted to have the two side by side to act as a visual commentary on the similarities of the two. 

Whether this video is meant to be humorous, a parody, thought-provoking, commentary of the times, etc.; none of that is definitive or a decision made intentionally, I more so wanted to have fun with the videos I commonly consume and play around with the similarity of the two video trends/genres.

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.

ASSIGNMENT

POST INTERNET VIDEO ART*

Using a mix of found footage (video and or sound) from YouTube or other social media video channels, create an original work of video art that responds to aspects of contemporary video culture, intended for gallery exhibition. Videos may be up to 10 minutes MAX. 

Videos will be made in groups of two (or solo if you insist!).

PART ONE: Research presentation and discussion DUE in class Jan 22

Forage through the internet for the tropes of popular video culture you would like to explore more deeply. We’ll discuss possible options in class, so a pair of students can each present a video genre. The presentation should take up to 10 minutes MAXIMUM including video time.

Prepare a presentation on your blog page – of one or two examples of internet videos.

Give a general description of your videos/video genre they are representative of. Consider these questions and others relevant to your selction:

• What are some of the key features that define this genre? What are some weird variations on it?
• What are some of the reasons these kinds of videos are compelling or useful in this historical moment? Use quotes from published sources to back up your arguments and analysis.
• How do you relate to it?
• How is it shot, and framed? Where does the material come from? What is the quality of the footage?
• How is it edited, and does it flow from clip to clip?
• What does it sound like? How are sound or image manipulated and transformed from original footage?

PART TWO: Show proposed samples/work in progress for discussion DUE WED JAN 29th

Together with a partner – prepare some samples of footage and approaches for a final piece to discuss with the class.

Consider some of these questions:

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

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

How is what you are doing something new?

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

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

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.

PART THREE:  Present your final work for critique – FEB 10-12^th.