This video was almost stressful to watch! There are parts that are arduously slow as you wait for a thing to stop spinning or the foam to spill over already. It’s also kind of infuriating that the film stops without showing the end of the machine, and that the credits roll as you STILL HEAR THE MACHINE GOING.

Then I thought it might just be a metaphor for life about how one thing leads to another and some of it is frustratingly slow, some of it is burning, some of it is stagnant for a long time where it seems nothing will happen, then it’ll get launched or something.

I was a bit bothered that the film had cuts, which implies takes, which implies that the machine didn’t work smoothly all in one go (it is precarious after all) or that the cameraman messed up, but looking up if it had multiple takes led me to find more stuff that resembled that Rube Goldberg machine. So they thought about creating this machine inspired by how precarious their arrangements of objects were for their photographic series “Quiet Afternoon”

They were also inspired by Roman Signer’s work where convoluted actions led to a simple result.

They then threatened to sue Honda in 2003 for using ideas from “The Way Things Go” in their commercial “The Cog”

(The commercial was then disqualified to win an award)

And after all that…I thought about how it would be cool to create a machine whose actions caused sounds that told an obvious narrative (buttons pressed which then in turn play dialogue, the sounds of pans banging because there was a fight etc)
And then I remembered this Ok Go music video where the machine is timed EXACTLY to fit with the music, its inflections, and its tempo:

(really all their videos involve doing extremely convoluted and intricate stuff. I love it)

So I guess it’s how it all relates to each other. One thing happens because of the nature of the actions of the previous event. That’s the way things go.

It was really interesting to hear all these theories about time and the different ways people decide to understand time, some in a more conceptual sense and some in a more concrete sense.

I’ve definitely heard of the theory that time isn’t linear, that everything you’ve done, that you’re doing, and that you ever will do, you are doing forever all at once. I saw the theory described like a river, the water is flowing but that place in the river is still the same. I feel like a clearer metaphor would be a comic strip or something of the sort. You have the panels laid out, and things are happening in a chronological order, but the panels themselves don’t change. The character is doing the same thing in that panel as they were before, and they’re doing it at the same time they’re doing something else in a different panel.

I honestly felt as though McDermott was a bit more than just eccentric. You don’t need to constantly keep up with everything new that happens, but you don’t need to go to great lengths just to stay in the past. Isn’t that as much work as keeping up with the present?

the part that I felt was the most interesting was where they talked with Michio Kaku, who tried to explain time on a quantum view. The idea that every time you make a choice, there are parallel universes where you made a different choice is something I used to talk about with a friend of mine, so I thought it was cool that this was a valid quantum theory. Also the question of “if you choose chocolate over vanilla or pistachio, where do those other choices go?” and that you can’t know anything until you make a choice, sort of like Schrodinger’s cat (though that was a quantum thought experiment, so I suppose that makes sense). Talking about it now, it gets jumbled up in my mind, which is unfortunate because it made total sense to me when Kaku was speaking about it!

I don’t think that time not being linear doesn’t mean we have no free-will, yet at the same time it does. And even if you didn’t believe time is linear, it’s hard to argue that we have genuine free will. When you think about it, your choices are based on your upbringing, and that upbringing is based on your parents’ philosophy on child-rearing, and that’s based on how they lived and how they were reared. Your choices are based on what you’ve seen in the media, read in books, what negative and positive experiences you have. Your consciousness isn’t forced to make choices, but the choices you choose are all based upon the world that has shaped you, and that goes back to the beginning of time…or “time” I guess. So in a sense if you believe time isn’t linear, it makes sense that all the choices you’re going to make have already happened, because the world has shaped you into a person who would make only THOSE decisions.

But that’s not too appealing of a thought I suppose.

In this video, David Blaine explains how he was able to hold his breath for 17 minutes, beating every previous breath holding record.
He speaks about how he first tried to find a trick to create the illusion that he held his breath for so long, but then decided to actually do it. After going through months of arduous preparation, failures, and obstacles that seemed impossible to overcome, he did it.

He studied how other people hold their breaths for uncanny periods of time, the recorded limitations of the human body and how long it can be deprived of oxygen before it undergoes brain damage, and tried out multiple techniques based on scientific research. Even though outliers had shown that it was possible to survive without oxygen for long periods of time, he was still warned by doctors not to do it. However, he decided to take it all as a challenge and work hard to accomplish what others said was impossible.

What I think is even more remarkable, is that when he actually broke the record, he did it in a situation where many things didn’t go as planned. He had hoped to be completely relaxed so he would not have to spend oxygen on his muscles, but was forced to do so in order to stay submerged. He had also trained to lower his heart rate, making his metabolism go slower and therefore his heart and brain needing less oxygen to work once he slowed down his heartbeat. However, the heart monitor he was hooked up to was not planned, and the beeping of every heartbeat made him extremely nervous raising his heartbeat. He also started panicking when his body gave him signs of a heart attack. Even though his thoughts were ultimately “I’m going to fail, but I won’t quit” instead of “I can do this”, the “I won’t quit” thought kept him through it and he accomplished his goal.

Out of all that, I gathered this:

1- It’s good to prepare as much as you can
2- Even if you overcome all other obstacles, you ultimately never know what’s going to happen when you actually attempt it, and you have to get over those too, which might be even tougher
3- Sometimes it’s not about telling yourself “I can do it”, it’s about forcing yourself to keep at it and not quit.

And a healthy dose of stubbornness doesn’t hurt.

Joe might not be happy to hear this, but I didn’t actually take that many photos. I definitely took under 100, and I’d be surprised if I even reached 50. I didn’t know what I wanted right from the start, but I did know what I didn’t want and that helped me narrow down my images.

Alex did mention that some of my images stood alone well, and others not so much. I do have to agree with that, especially with this pair:

The rusty one was originally a bigger image of multiple bars:

However, I only had the one tree in the photo, and no more than that. Perhaps if there had been many trees in a row, then I could have zoomed out on both of them and had gotten a better impact.

As for what else I could fix, there wasn’t really much said about what I could have done technically or otherwise. Joe liked the metal ones, and I do agree that by themselves they tend to be more interesting, but that’s also why I paired the nature ones with them, for that contrast.

To be honest, I would have liked a little more critique.

This video is largely a critique of Western consumerism and the idea that everything needs to be perfect for us to feel peaceful. Dan Phillips shows that the houses he builds are artistic, quaint, and even attractive even though they’re made from unconventional materials and imperfect conventional ones.
He also states that we put our vanity over our necessities, feeling that things need to fit a standard others have created in order to feel complete. Therefore it’s also a sort of ode to individualism, aside from being about thrift and getting back to real basics.

I definitely felt inspired and I agree with his views. In fact, I’ve often suggested to close friends that we don’t buy into the housing market, but instead find a lot and build our own homes. There are posts of houses built out of those huge storage bins they use on ships, as well as other gigantic things that are simply thrown into landfills later on. He argues that our nature isn’t to be pretty, but to be comfortable, so why should we put on a mask of perfection every time and try to fit into an image that’s harmful to us (high mortgages) and to the environment?

Definitely makes me want to build things.

What I got out of the reading and the listening was mostly that new technologies affect art and how it’s presented and what new things mean. For example, songs that you only heard in the radio are now different when you can also watch them as music videos. What they also said is that art tends to then adapt the technology to suit its own needs, an example being film, which started out as people recording stuff they saw, then became people putting it together in sequences, then became people using it to tell stories.

As for how it relates to the second project, the entire book is laid out in a collage of text, quotes, and images. Some images are juxtaposed with other images, and text as well. It really affects the way you experience reading the book, and also affects what you get out of it.
Some pages are harder to read because they’re backwards or upside down. Some are literally blank, and a bunch are just photos. I don’t really know why the authors decided to make it this way (wikipedia says visual metaphor, but of what?), though I suppose the way you want us to relate it to the project is that the placement of everything and the orientation have different effects on the viewer and perhaps we should take advantage of that.

GESTALT PROJECT

When I started taking photographs for this project, I didn’t have any themes in mind, but I did give myself the following guideline: no photos of other art. After a while, however, I saw a pattern forming in my photos and honed in on that. I thought about the psychological concepts of the Ego (logic), Id (animal instinct), and the Superego (the mediator of the two), and how our relationship with nature seems to sort of embody the decisions we make based on our Superego. There are times when we are more logical, but we still take our sentiments into account, though there are also times where we act more on our desires, yet are still mediated by societal rules.

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Containment + Proximity + Repetition + Grouping + Continuity

Grouping + Repetition

Repetition

 
Containment + Grouping

With all the images, I made similarity a primary focus. I did my best to unify the artificial subjects with the natural ones using perspective and shapes thus bringing about the principle of closure: the pairs to each other, and the subject of the photos to each other.

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Here are my keywords in Bridge:

and here are the collections:

Here are the keywords in Lightroom:

Because I didn’t use Lightroom until I’d decided on my final images, I don’t have separate collections in Lightroom. The keywords were imported from the Bridge metadata, I imagine.

Here are the folders I kept the images in:


My external drive cannot store data from Macs unless the drive is installed, but seeing as I do not have administrator privileges, I was unable to install it. Instead, I had to resort to uploading my files to google drive on multiple occasions.

I found this video rather interesting. At first I didn’t know what to make of it, but it did leave me with a few initial impressions:

1- It reminded me of the covers done for Radiohead’s album “in rainbows” by Stanley Donwood

“Donwood experimented with a photographic etching technique, putting prints into acid baths with various results, and throwing wax at paper, creating images influenced byNASA’s space photographs.”

2- For some reason, some of the images made me think of human intestines and bodily fluids (maybe it gave me the same unsettled feeling that medical stuff does), but then it made me think of how we are created of the same elements as stars and that made me wonder if there was any intention of that in it.

3- It reminded me of the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey when Dave is travelling at the speed of light and space seems to move towards the viewer and turns into a set of abstractions.

When looking up more about the film, I saw many people comparing it to another of his films, Black Ice, which I certainly found to be along the same vein. I’m trying to figure out exactly what the intent of the films are; is it to just represent some emotion, or is it more along abstract expressionism in the sense of taking it to the base of the emotions one feels without the frivolities of symbolism and representation?

At times a dense read, but very informative. Certainly cleared up a lot of confusions and questions I had about many art movements, specifically modernism.

I looked up every artist mentioned. William Morris’ intricate books and wallpapers are fascinating. Not everything is within my taste, but whether or not I like it has nothing to do with the level of detail and work he put into his work. From the Bauhaus movement, I really enjoyed the works of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky. A notable thing is that I felt that Morris’ work was more connected with the art nouveau movement, and Bauhaus inspired art deco. Both of these are art movements I really love (in spite of their great differences) and I find it exciting that they seem to be so closely related to artwork that was created as sort of a protest of the cheapening of design.

I immediately fell in love with Sottsass’ and Olivetti’s work. The most appealing thing to me about their work and about the Bauhaus movement is the deceiving simplicity of their designs. They go back to basics, the shapes are what are considered basic shapes, but through their creativity, they arrange them and deconstruct them in such a way to make something totally new out of the old, as Kenya emphasizes. Bauhaus furniture and architecture are things I really like too. The cleanness of the designs. Even though Kenya mentions how detail signified power, I feel like we’ve moved on to an era where detail matters not if the design is cluttered and illegible. Bauhaus takes out all that’s unnecessary and presents it in a way that’s appealing to the senses.

I really enjoyed reading about the Dutch approach to technology and art. They’ve really got the right idea using technology to serve art instead of the other way around. As someone who has recently become fascinated with Dutch and Scandinavian design, I was glad to see a mention of them. I had of course heard of Piet Mondrian before, but not the other artists mentioned. I rather liked Piet Zwart’s photography (I hope we have a chance to create something to that effect!) and Rietveld’s Red and Blue chair is something I’d love to have.

As for the message the article tries to bring about, I do believe that it’s necessary to take from what we have to create what we need, and design definitely is the driving force behind this. In a connection to the Pink article, I do believe that design will be more and more involved in the advancement of the world today.

“High Concept, High Touch” is an article I found fascinating, innovative, and full of foresight.
I went to a high school that focused mainly on science and math. Many of my classmates asked me why I was there if I wanted to be an artist, and many others would just comment “okay, well, I’d like fries with that”. I’m obviously not the only one who goes through this, but it made me really think about myself and my goals. I was in a school that valued “L-Directed Thinking” 100% above “R-Directed Thinking”. Our art program had suffered severely and my classmates’ spitefulness towards the artists ended up pitting us against each other instead of bringing us together. I couldn’t see why one couldn’t love science and art.

I considered merging these two loves of mine by studying biology and becoming a scientific illustrator, though I knew this wasn’t something I really wanted to do. It certainly helped in my classes though, as my teachers praised my diagrams, clear posters, and my classmates owed their non-failing grades to the illustrated study guides I shared with them.

The notion that artists aren’t here just to make the world pretty is something many people reject. They don’t see us as something functional and useful. The only thing of worth to them is something that doesn’t fulfill our humanity.
Reading this article reminded me of what a friend of mine who graduated art school a few years ago told me. Everybody went into STEM degrees thinking it would lead them to money, but they were wrong and now many are still unemployed. All the candidates for hire have the same qualifications, which is sad considering the entry level jobs are outsourced. The ones that stand out and that can bring something new to the table are the only ones that will ever rise in STEM fields. What a lot of people don’t realize is that you stand out and you bring in new ideas by having creativity, vision, and good intuition, all of which Daniel Pink says in this article.

That Ivy league schools are having their med students work on their empathy and attention to detail is fantastic, and something I feel would be logical. Our society has been built to think that only L-Directed Thinking will produce results, and I’m glad that research is now proving this is not the case. I was also really interested in how the retiring boomers are now turning to art and seeing the world for what it’s really worth. Solely being in an L-Directed Thinking mode all your life doesn’t bring happiness because the emphasis is on “money” and not on feelings or meaning, as Mr. Pink puts it. Humans are not machines, we cannot live without empathy, compassion, and creativity, so why is our society structured against it?

I feel like Mr. Pink is right and that it is a great time to be an artist once again.