Final Project Review

As I progressed with my project, I learned the value of concept. While I think that my concept was strong and carried through well, I feel as though overall, my project wont be considered seriously because of the drug related nature through which it was conceived. It's the same as with people: there are just certain things that we easily write off based on our own activities and conceptions. While I was working on the video, I began to become very discouraged, doubting my idea's value and relevance to the world of art and other people in general. However, I feel as though doing this project has opened me up to a whole new set of ideas so far as creating art. I don't think of art in the same terms as I used to, that art should be pretty, mostly pertaining to sculpture and paintings.
Video Installation is definitely something that I would like to continue with and take farther. I would love to create more extensive environments and more cohesive videos that come together to mean something more. For a first attempt, I feel as though my hallucinogenic thought process was well portrayed, but I feel there's so much more that I would be able to do with the medium. As well, I would like to learn more about motion graphics and animation. With these skills, I feel as though the possibilities would be endless in regards to what I could create.
When I played the video in class, I took more pleasure in watching everyone's face while they watched it than I did in actually watching the video myself. Artists in general are always striving for approval and nothing makes me happier than when someone smiles when looking at my work or says that they enjoyed it. That is another aspect of video installation that I think I like -- it demands attention. Were I to have simply painted a piece, no one would necessarily HAVE to pay attention to it. However, because the room was dark except for my movie and music, all eyes were on me, per se.

Jeremy Blake

Jeremy Blake's style of work in this music video for Beck is typical of the work he is most celebrated for. He combines still photographs with digital painting and sets it in motion, allowing it all to interact in time, to morph and to change. What I love most though are Blake's colors. He choses bright neon colors but brings them in slowly and in just the right way. Some of his arrangements remind me of color field painters like Morris Louis or Helen Frankenthaller. Blake overlaps is "painting" with photography and often uses it to accentuate certain parts of the photos that he choses. The technique is used slowly to add more drama to the change.

Research

For my final projects in this class, I'm going to create a video installation that will hopefully summarize and exemplify an accelerated hallucinogenic thought process. I will project a video that I have shot and edited against false track lighting and a ceiling vent that are hung on a wall. This is integral to the installation. In a heightened sense of awareness, such as hallucinating, one essentially re-experiences their world. In essence, everyone is re-experiencing things every day. However, in this state of mind, one becomes more aware of the stimulus around them and. New pathways are opened up in the mind and ideas that might not seem related at all begin to buzz based on stimulus from a singularity. The lights and vent will be made of white paper and placed on a white wall. The video will overlap these objects and essentially frame them. The overlapping of artifact and video create the effect of thought -- seeing a stagnant object, or pair of objects, and thinking constantly in an ever expanding and abstracting manner.

Video Art today is narrowed down into two varieties: single-channel and installation. Single-channel video art follows the idea of the cinema and entertainment more closely than installation. Installation works involve an environment, several distinct pieces of video presented separately, or any combination of video with traditional media. Installation video is the most common form of video art today. A successful example of contemporary video art would be the artist Bill Viola. His work deals mostly with the themes of human consciousness and experience - taking additional cues from different cultural lifestyles such as Zen Buddhism or Islamic Sufism. In one of his pieces, Viola projected videos of people walking through a sheet of water. The effect makes it seem as though spirits are re-emerging into the world or something. 

Nam June Paik is another example of a successful video artist. Paik's most memorable work uses multiple screens and videos combined together in a more structural form. In one project, he composes video screens and lights into the shapes of the United States of America and uses different video to represent the heart of each state. In another work, he creates a grid of television screens that create an American flag that vibrates and gyrates through colors and other videos. Through using video, Paik is able to combine many ideas at once and make them all cohesive. The use of multiple television screens in most of his work echoes the American and near global obsession with the media and television in general. 

What really inspired me to take part in video art though was the feeling I got after seeing Javier Téllez's film at the Whitney Biennial "Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See." In it, the artist had six blind people step up to a live elephant and describe what they "saw" as they ran their hand over the animal. Each one describes something completely different. The idea struck me as being interesting -- of all things to include in an art gallery, Téllez chooses blind people as his subjects. This makes the video seem more sentimental and almost voyeuristic. It's shot so beautifully in black and white that the movie becomes very somber. As the viewer revels in the beauty of it all, they're also struck with the sad fact that these blind people still cannot see. The environment that you watch the video in, an art gallery, is an alien one for the blind which makes it even more striking.

I feel that video art is an ultra effective way of communicating ideas in a cohesive manner. As Americans develop and grow even more technologically addicted and concerned, it seems as though video seems to grab our attention. In video art, ideas can be more easily combined and edited however you chose. Video art moves and changes, much the same way as the human thought process, and perhaps that is why I like it. Through video art, the viewer gets a condensed view of what you are trying to get across which to make makes it a great vehicle for communicating. 

I hate Red

I hate red. It's my least favorite color. I don't look good in red. I don't like red cars. I don't like how red fruit punch stains the carpet when you spill it. I don't like how blood is hard to remove from the carpet. When I think about red, I generally do think about blood. The image of my bathroom covered in it before I rushed to the hospital and almost had to have emergency surgery stays with me. I thought that I was going to die. Red is an intense color, and I think I'm too laid back to enjoy that kind of intensity. Red is associated with energy, war, danger, strength, power,. determination, as well as passion, desire, and love. 

All of these are things that I generally push into the corners of my life -- those are not at all things that I concern myself with most of the time. Red acts on more than just an emotional level though. Something about the color enhances the human metabolism, increases respiration rate, and raises blood pressure. Why is this color SO intense? I think it's a primal association -- a conditioned one that is ingrained in the human subconscious. Because blood is red, and we know that blood is one of the most essential keys to our lives, we place a high reverence on the color. 

Light red represents joy, sexuality, passion, sensitivity, and love.
Pink signifies romance, love, and friendship. It denotes feminine qualities and passiveness.
Dark red is associated with vigor, willpower, rage, anger, leadership, courage, longing, malice, and wrath.
Brown suggests stability and denotes masculine qualities.
Reddish-brown is associated with harvest and fall.

Color Changes

I think these colors really reflect my change in attitude and personality in the past four years. The first photo I took in 2004, when I first got a digital camera. The second photo, I took a few days ago in my apartment. Both of them are photos that I still like, and I feel like they carry through the same sort of photographic idea or style -- photos of still objects interacting, whether separated or together. The colors from the first one are bright with lots of contrast. At the time, I lived in Florida. All the lighting in that photo was natural, direct from the window in my room. The colors of those objects all remind me of Florida too. The light browns remind me of sand and palm trees, and the bright blue reminds me of the summer sky and the beautiful beaches where I was born. I was fifteen when I took that picture. 

The later picture's colors really reflect where I live now though. The colors are a little darker and more industrial. Purple, blue, teal, and a light neutral color all come together to give a calm yet unexpectedly exciting feeling to the picture. The colors work together in ways you would not expect. I think this is a real reflection of where I am right now. Moving here from Florida was not something I wanted to do, but as I've lived here, good things have happened. I never used to like any of those colors, especially the purple and teal, yet now, as I've matured, they've come to really fit into my life. As I've gotten older, I've experimented a lot and moved away from the bright, more simple colors that I used to be drawn to (like in the first photo), and am now trying to put colors that I would not expect together to see what happens. 

Color Changing Sidewalk

France's Eurovia is developing a temperature-sensitive varnish that changes color to provide a visual indication to all road users that the pavement is freezing. Once it warms back up again, the varnish returns to its default hue. Durability trials are underway in several areas of France that experience severe weather, and if the coating holds up well, we could all be watching out for pink stripes in the winter. 

I think this is an awesome idea -- what better way to put color to use than to warn motorists. It's difficult to tell when the pavement is iced over, or even just if the temperature outside is cold enough for it to be, so having a visual reminder of that seems like a completely logical idea. Hopefully, this idea doesn't become too expensive though. Eurovia may have created a product that has the potential to save a few motorists; whether or not they make it readily available for the use of the public by not gouging governments exorbitant prices simply because it's the government. Regardless though, it's an interesting idea, and I hope to see it on the streets. 

Color Blindness

I've always wondered if people see color the same way. Not in the exact sense of color blindness, where there are definite color receptors that are hindered, but instead that they have a full range of color reception, but what they "see" as red might be what someone else sees as green, but because they have grown up with a full range of color, they can see everything with contrast and thus have just been conditioned to see that green as "red." Or maybe that is crazy. 

Either way, the concept of color blindness in itself is a complex one. According to Color Matters, Color-blindness is the inability to distinguish the differences between certain colors caused by an absence of color-sensitive pigment in the cone cells of the retina. Most color vision problems are inherited and are present at birth. Approximately 1 out of 12 males and 1 out of 20 women are color blind.

I wanted to see what a picture might look like to someone who is color blind, so I used the charts on Color Matters website about color blindness and recreated an image in photoshop.