For week six, our guest speaker was John Park, a Digital Arts specialist whose slide presentation really caught my attention. My favorite part of his presentation was when he showed us the video of the Mortal Engine Dance group, where the lights and animation followed the dancer’s every move. I have never seen anything like this before, and it was one of the craziest and most creative ways of expressing dance that I have ever seen. I thought of what that dance would look like without the animation, and yes it would interesting, but it wouldn’t have taken such a toll on my emotion. My eyes were glued to the screen with all of the colors and flashes, and no normal dance performance keeps me that connected with the movement. It took dance to a million new levels.
Another thing I really enjoyed about John’s presentation was the way he presented the four main questions and problems with Digital Arts. Ty said in lecture on Thursday that the most important question was “where is the art”, but to me, this isn’t the most important. I loved the reference to zombies, and so the question that I asked the most in my head was “where is the humanity?” It takes me to the short video John showed where the cars were being constructed on the assembly line without absolutely zero help from a human hand. Yes, digital arts are created with a person’s own ideas, and I agree that the audience or viewers can watch and interact with the material. But when dealing with works created on a computer, a human hand didn’t make any of it, and I think we are losing ourselves to all of the technology we are provided with today. I have a huge amount of respect for digital artists today because it takes an extremely creative mind to do what they do, but I wish that for a short time I knew what it was like to live in a world without advanced technology, so I could really see art before this period in time.
On the flip side, I think technology is a beautiful thing, especially after seeing the clip of the paralyzed man in the hospital that could continue drawing his graffiti just by moving his eyes towards a screen. I have never seen anything so amazing before, and to be honest, I didn’t even know we had technology to such an extent. After seeing it, I’m not that surprised though. Digital Art has been taken to whole new levels in the past few years, and I am excited to see where it goes from here.
When I watched David Byrn’s video “Playing the Building”, I couldn’t fully understand how his structure involving the piano is in the Digital Arts category, other than the fact that it uses sound, but it was an amazing creation. I really liked when the woman spoke and said that she can’t imagine how the little kids must feel when they play the piano and they “make the room come alive”, because that is what this piece of artwork is there to do. I know that if I played it as a small child, I would have been put into a completely different world. There is this huge space filled with noise, and they get excited because they know that they are the ones making those noises. This is also the point of Digital Arts in my mind. In lecture, Ty said she asks herself everyday if her media is actually art, and in my opinion, there is no question about that. For me, art is something that gets your imagination moving, and makes you question what you see, and Digital Arts does just that.
In the Art:21 video dealing with Paul Pfeiffer, he talks about his inspirations from the 1970s version of The Amityville Horror, which is exactly what we talked about in lecture as well. He really found a connection with the staircase in the movie on a deeper level because that was the contact point between the human and non-human beings. For me, I personally had a connection with this because I have seen the older and newer versions of the film, read the book, and did a presentation in high school based on the true story. I new exactly what he was seeing with this piece and I really enjoyed it. One thing I did not agree with that Paul said was during his observations of the basketball game. He said, “if you’re served literally 500 channels on TV, like, why go out?” I really do love Digital Arts, but I have trouble with people who substitute television with reality. If I were given the choice between watching an extremely action-packed episode of Jersey Shore, or going outside and experiencing life away from a screen, I would go outside. Don’t get me wrong, everyone loves Jersey Shore, but it makes me sick how much we are obsessed with TV and other technology these days. This connects me to the talk Ty had with the class in lecture on Thursday. Those cell phones in our pockets are just so addicting, and we can’t resist checking them every two minutes, but I really don’t get why? To me, this is just sad.
To get a feeling of what Janet Cardiff’s work was about, I took Ty’s advice and watched “Virtual Haircut”. I’m not sure if I watched the right “Virtual Haircut” video because it wasn’t inappropriate like Ty said it would be, but either way, it was crazy how realistic it sounded to me. I don’t know how many people have this same reaction, and I might be totally crazy, but when the man was using the electric shaver around my head, I actually felt a tingling sensation along my scalp. I do have great headphones that might create strong enough sound waves to create some movement, but I was still baffled and amazed by the video all at the same time. It also helped me understand her work more after hearing a girl in class compare the experience people have in Janet’s work to her own experience taking the audio-tour at Alcatraz Island. I have done the same exact tour twice, and just by closing your eyes, you feel like you are there, watching every move in history. I believe this out-of-body experience is what Janet was aiming for with her viewers.
Sorry my video for the week isn't in English, but it's still very similar to what we saw this week. It is shadow-sensitive interactive music. It makes me think a lot of the Reactable that John showed us on Tuesday.
Braden - this is a strong blog post. You go into a good amount of detail even considering there was more to cover this week. If anything, I would have liked to see a specific reference to a Cardiff piece or quote, etc.
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