Hemispheres

Hemispheres
3 min. single channel video

Video consist of abstracted shapes of warm light pulsating in and out of each other. The audio track is built of chimes played at different pitches and coincide with the changes of the shapes. The warm light and sounds are a meditation on the body.

Abduction of Europa

Abduction of Europa
Two channel video projection
3 min. video loop

The concept behind this piece is based off a myth from classical antiquity. According to the myth Europa was abducted by Zeus disguised as a white bull and taken to the heavens where she became a moon goddess. The video loops display the natural elements as they appear to our everyday orientation (i.e. sky projected above, earth projected below) and slowly transform into each other causing a sense of disorientation.

Video channels are projected opposite each other; one channel projected on the ground, the other channel projected on the ceiling. Showing the video in this manner presents the viewer the inability to "see" the whole piece at once making them take part in constructing how the videos relate.

Bill Viola

Bill Viola
b. 1951
BFA in Experimental Studios: Syracuse University, 1973

Honorary Doctorates:
Syracuse University (1995), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1997), California Institute of the Arts (2000), and Royal College of Art, London (2004) among others, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000

Nantes Triptych, 1992: Video/Sound Installation

The Crossing, 1996: Sound/Video Installation


Catherine's Room, 2001: Color Video on 5 LCD Flat panels mounted on wall

Going Forth by Day, 2002: Five Part Video/Sound installation using 7 projectors and 10 speakers.
"Fire Birth," The Path," "The Deluge," "The Voyage," "First Light"


Ocean Without a Shore, 2007: Video/Sound Installation, Triptych on High-Defintion Plasma Screens


Nine Inch Nails Tour, 2000: Single Channel Triptych
Part 1
Part 2

Sources:
Wikipedia
YouTube
Tate Online
BillViola.com
Catasonic.com
Guggenheim.org

Self Portrait

Arduous Delight (3'53")

This video was created from the stand point of a classical self portrait. The frame and surroundings remain still with the figure being fragmented in his movements. The concept for the piece was to bring the viewer into the experience of practice by presenting multiple slivers of time as a single event.

Blog 4

Compression-Fern (Face), Dennis Oppenheim (1970)

This video consists of Dennis Oppenheim standing in the frame visible from about mid stomach up and in front of a pale green background. He is holding branches of a Fern bush in his hands at mid chest level so that the branches fan out covering his face. Throughout the duration of the video Dennis begins to crumple and compress the branches in his hands until eventually they all fit into his grip and nothing of them could be seen, thus revealing his face behind the Fern.

This piece works on multiple levels both as a video and as documentation of an event happening. I think an important element of the piece is the physical struggle Dennis has trying to wrestle with the branches and getting them to compress. I think this piece also works as a portrait in the sense that classical portraiture allows a subject to be the focal element in contrast to its surroundings. Initially the Fern is the subject for the portrait as its form and color contrast dramatically to both the background wall and to the presence of Dennis, which also acts as a sort of background element. Eventually the Fern is taken out of the frame through the compressing and Dennis is left as the portrait subject.

A brief history...

I am 27 years old and have been living in San Antonio for the last 5 of those years. Throughout my childhood I grew up in the military and that way of life has allowed me to live all over our country. I have lived everywhere from Hawaii to North Carolina and many places in between. Those experiences have instilled in me a love for travel. It also explains why I desire to move on from San Antonio. I love many of the things I've seen from the many places I've been but I also know that so far I have only seen a facet of what our world is. I've always been the "creative" one in my family and have had great support from them in all that I do, no matter how odd. I can’t imagine pursuing a career in any other field than art, if not art than some other art form whether music, writing, even martial arts. Am not sure if a career in arts will be one that guarantees financial security but I know it’s one that will keep me sane.

Appropriation, Fair Use and Barbara Kruger

"You are not yourself" Barbara Kruger (1982)

Barbara Kruger is an artist who uses appropriation freely throughout her body of work. All of the materials in the piece presented were taken from some other source not originally of her own creating. Though she did not create any of the materials originally, the way that she brings the parts together, she does not break any laws by presenting the final piece as a work of her own creation. She is able to do so by adhering to the four factors of fair use.

1. The Transformative Factor: The Purpose and Character of Your Use-- The materials that Kruger takes from are various editorial publications (newspapers, magazines) and the end product that is created is not of the same nature or functional use. By bringing together type from different sources along with imagery that are not originally together Kruger is able to create new context and meaning to be visually read
2. The Nature of the Copyrighted Work.-- Since the original source materials are taken from objects that are published in mass media and are open and freely abundant in the public, it becomes nearly impossible to pinpoint any one editorial that Kruger takes from.
   
3. The Amount and Substantiality of the Portion Taken.-- Kruger is definitely following the idea that less is more. The text that constructs her words and phrase are built from letters taken from different sources. Not only would it be hard to identify where she maybe taking a particular word from a particular editorial, but it becomes impossible to pick out a single letter from a single editorial. The image being used might be easier to track down but by displaying it in its new context it is not a direct plagiarism.
4. The Effect of the Use Upon the Potential Market-- It is pretty unlikely that the piece will effect the profit or income of the original published materials as it does not compete with the publications and works for a different function.
   

Handyman!!

First exercise for video class was the, always fun, blue screen assignment! It's interesting that with this particular exercise every group tends to go down the humorous path. Our group was no different.

The scenario in our story takes place in a wood shop. While sawing some lumber a worker "clumsily" mistaken's his arms for the wood. "OH NO! not again" he thinks to himself. Quick on his feet, the wood worker walks over to grab a tube of wood glue from a near by table to reattach his limb. On his walk from the saw to the glue we can see multiple detached heads on shelves in the background from other "accidents" of the past.

Everyone in our group enjoyed the experience and learned a lot. The blue screen is a great first assignment that gets everyone excited and motivated to jump right into the video editing process.

It's Calling back Again

This project is a single channel video that was part of the New Media Department screening which took place on Friday April 24, 2009 at the UTSA Downtown campus.

The concept of the piece is based on how retail spaces work on the mind in a sort of unconscious or subliminal way to get the consumer to spend as much as possible. The video depicts an anonymous figure sanding in a trance-like state in various parts of a super-market. At various moments of the video attention is brought to the multiple hypnotic elements at work within the store.

Just one more thing...

For the final project of the semester I am planning to do a single channel video. The concept of the piece is on over-consumption. The sequence will consist of several shots of a figure standing in various retail stores. The scenes will cut from one to the next but the figure will be in the same area of the frame in every shot. The audio track will include various sounds heard in shopping stores i.e. shopping carts rolling, cash registers beeping, announcements on the intercom. As time progresses in the piece the audio and shot cuts will start to occur in a faster and faster tempo.

Sleep Over

This two channel project consists of projected video onto two objects.  One channel projects the 'sublime' dream state onto a pillow and the other suggest the environmental surroundings of where the sleep over is taking place.

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian artist who currently lives in New York. She was born in 1957 in Qazvin, Iran where she grew up until 1974 when she left to study art in Los Angeles. It was about this time that the Iranian Revolution occurred.

About a year after the revolution, she moved to the San Francisco Bay area and began studying at Dominican College. Eventually, she enrolled at UC Berkeley and completed her BA, MA and MFA.

After graduate school, she moved to New York and began working for Storefront Art and Architecture, a non-profit group . During this time she did not make any serious attempts at creating art.

In 1990, she returned to Iran where, after the revolution was over, the Iranian society was restructured as a traditional Islamic nation. In order to reconcile the current Iran and the one she grew up in she began her first mature body of work, the Women of Allah series.

Her work refers to the social, cultural and religious codes of Muslim societies, and the complexity of certain oppositions, such as man and woman. Neshat often emphasizes this theme with the technique of showing two or more coordinated films concurrently, creating stark visual contrasts through such motifs as light and dark, black and white, male and female.

Women of Allah (1993-97)
http://ce399.typepad.com/weblog/2005/12/the_photography.html

Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Fervor (2000)
http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/wy_wy_neshat_csw

Expanded Cinema Group Project

Group:  Robert, Kristen, Marcus

Tech:  Video for two projectors.

The concept behind our project is the sublime dream state.  What we are going to do is project nature scenes superimposed over each other on a wall.  On the floor of the wall will be a pillow that will have scenes of sky and clouds projected onto it.  

Part of my part was to capture footage of sky and clouds.  In addition to this I will be working on making a human silhouette that will be used to mask part of the sky scenes onto the pillow so that the clouds will be seen in the shape of a human head.

New Humans

This piece comments on man in the modern world. The concept refers to how people are taught to think a similar way through a single constructed means.

chris cogburn

Chris Cogburn is a percussionist music performer as well as an educator and festival organizer; currently he lives in Austin, Texas. His biggest interest is in inter-media collaborations that involve poets and musicians from different backgrounds. His largest ongoing project is the No Idea Festival that was begun in the summer of 2003. The No Idea Festival is an annual music festival of improvised music that showcases a handful of Texas musicians working in collaboration with composers from around the world.

Self Portrait'09

This self portrait is an observation of the uneventful tasks done on a daily basis. Things that can be mundane and boring but which still require us to devote some time to each day. The tasks at hand are shown in a Cubist-like manner where multiple perspectives are viewed simultaneously in a single picture plane.

Self

Self portrait in oil. This was a study on glazes to see how light and multiple layers of colors interact with each other.

Stream of Consciousness

Ok so far this first project seems to be coming along pretty well. The 'stream of consciousness' theme appears to be a bit of a double edged sword for me, for one I really enjoy the freedom and openness of the subject matter allowing for anything to come together. But that also turned into a problem in that I am not totally familiar with Final Cut yet and don't have all the tools I need to put on screen what I want. Not a huge problem, this is just that phase I think we go through as artist whenever dealing with a new medium. That uncomfortable area that comes with the learning process, it both frustrates and motivates. Over all I think I would like to revisit this project or theme at the end of the semester when I'll have a better grasp of the program.

Bluescreen

The "bluescreen" exercise that we did in class last Wednesday was pretty neat. I've never worked with Final Cut before but have with other video editing programs and it's good to know there's not a whole lot of difference. Our intent was to layer two clips of footage that would read as a single event taking place. Overall I think it came out successful, our final "idea" gets across but it's not totally believable as something happening in one "reality". I look forward to working further with the function of the blue screed.

"Window Dressing" from the All Ladies Video Review

"Window Dressing" was one of several media based art piece on display at the All Ladies Video Review exhibit at the UTSA Satellite Space art gallery. The exhibit consists of a collection of works from several female artists that express themselves through video media and all happen to be based out of the south Texas region. The exhibit is on display from Jan. 1 – 25, I visited on Jan. 14.

The piece "Window Dressing," by Julia Barbosa Landois, depicts a woman dressing wounds on her feet by an open window.  Nearby a bust of the Virgin Mary rests with a rose draped over. The viewer steps into the females perspective as only her feet and hands enter the picture frame from behind the camera.   Church bells can be heard in the distance along with various sounds of city traffic. 

Initially I thought that the wounds were the result of the woman wearing shoes that were too small for her feet for too long. This, along with the painted finger and toe nails, lead me to think maybe this is a recovery ritual undergone as a result of becoming the “ideal woman” in society. As the piece progresses you notice the bandages are also on the wrists as well, this along with the church bells and the Virgin figurine lead to the awareness of the religious connotation. The wounds reference the wounds of Christ through Stigmata, and the red of the rose and paint referencing the blood of Christ. Here the artist is portraying a study of beliefs, religion, and maybe the personal struggles and sacrifices undergone in the modern world.