Cory Archangel

The artist I chose was Cory Archangel.  I like his work because it deals with appropriation which is something I tend to do more often than not.  I also like how he uses and configures various digital mediums in order to create art from something.  An example is the video game mods and the music created for or with pre-made videos.  Another not to add to the modding is the fact that some are really simple like the Super Mario clouds.  Other than that I like his last name. 

My project is to take myself and meld it with game videos.  This will turn me into a screen of sorts to project many images at once as my body is taken over by the games.  Basically the game is actually consuming my life.  It relates to Archangel in that he likes to explore the relationship between culture and technology.  I think it gives a frightening mood with a bit of disgust.  It shows how consumed we are with technology and how it could eventually one day take us over or blur the lines of reality.  This can be seen as the game skin spreads like a plague across my body. As for the game footage I chose to use playstation based games since he used nintendo. The list is God of War 3, Red Dead Redemption, Uncharted 3, Final Fantasy x, Hot Shot Golf Fore, Devil May Cry 3, Star Wars Battlefront II, and Assassins Creed III .

Time Based Artist Proposal

For this project I am going to study Cory Archangel.  I am attracted to his work because it is based around games or in some cases it is the fact that you "play" his art.  My project will relate to his in the fact that it features games, I will not however mod the games into a playable format as it is not in my interests.  I will use games in order to acquire footage that I can edit after I learn how to use after effects on Wednesday.  I will record footage to my computer in order to edit out the player character. After this point I will hopefully use green screening to edit myself into the character's place.  It will be a form of a simulated virtual reality.  I will probably stick to older previous generation games since the graphics are a bit rougher and could not show editing errors out in the open.

So I will be appropriating content from these games, but it will be footage that I have recorded myself.  I will be editing out characters or other elements in order to put the focus on myself as opposed to the game.  Also most of his work involves appropriated content so it would be hard to give a nod to his work if I did not, even though I am doing something similar and not exactly the same as him.  All in all, I am not violating the law since I am changing my own footage of the game and not hacking into the game itself to remove game footage and data.

Performance Piece

So I decided to do a private performance and I decided to tie it into my cumulative acts project.  It basically consisted of recording my face as I karaoked random songs and I choose the best 4 out of the 8 or so I recorded.  This was not a focus on the actual music, but the face and mouth.  I then just tried to divide them easily into the screen.  Songs chosen were based on higher notes, fast tempo, and vice-versa.  I was motivated to do this because Kate said she could never karaoke let alone on camera.  Also I have been told that I make great facial expressions and tend to perform certain songs with body and facial language.  It was a weird experience in itself since I'm used to singing around people and usually only sing out loud to myself in the car.  It was also odd to look at the camera and the screen at the same time and remembering to stay in frame.  I also had to try not and force the expressions for the sake of the performance.

As I mentioned I am discussing the fear of singing or being heard sing and in this case to be recorded and posted to the Internet.  In this case I took away the distraction of the sound and the music in order to focus on the face and the expressions during various points of the songs.  I guess I'm pointing out the whole you are afraid sing, well look at me make a fool of myself and not care less.  I'm just questioning if you need to sound good and look good to have fun.

Cumulative Acts Proposal

I've always enjoyed music and singing.  So for my cumulative acts I have decided to sing a song daily until the end of the project.  At the end of the project I plan to overlap all of the pieces of audio together and create a chorus effect.  It will be interesting to see how close I am to singing the same piece the same way each time, or how I change things up a bit based on how I think I need to improve.  Each day I will use either audacity or one of my softwares at home to do the recording and combine the pieces at the end.  The process should be shown through the amount of sync or lack of sync in the final project.

Abstract Space

I choose my entire home for the assignment because it was familiar and it would be easy to keep track of what I was recording.  I tended to be attracted to lighting and clocks, probably because of the sound and the assignment.  I also liked moving through different environments giving the moving a wobbly feel.  The footage was layered over a clock and set to an opacity of around 25-30%.  Each layer is a different walk through and there are several other items layered throughout.  The flashlight was mirrored to give it an interesting effect.  The sound clips was slowed down to half speed and repeated.  The final change of the video editing was flip the video with the flop effect.

I was hoping it would give almost a cult's  hypnotic video feel or a video that shows images of the mind.  The message is conveyed using sound and video for several reasons.  The sound increases and decreases and is warped creating a nostalgic yet confusing feeling.  Several images are played on top of one another in order to create chaos and mind flashes until it combines into a circle at the end.  The image of the clock is flipped and as such gives an odd sensation to the viewer because it is displayed in reverse in both numbers and the movement of the hands.  This leads to the title Time Tells Lies, which was created because of the phrase Time Tells No Lies that seemed to be in my head throughout the project.

Sonic Space Project

The piece was created in audacity and each piece of audio was recorded of various things from my household.  When collecting sounds I was attracted to creaks and squeaks the most.  I also however, enjoyed lasting "white noise" like sounds, along with a few random bumps here and there.  I used a single piece of audio and repeated it over and over to create a base or rhythm for the project.  From there I systematically added sounds at certain points according to the pieces of audio above it.  Some pieces I decided to play in either the left or right ear to create directional sound and keep the listener paying attention.  There are some sounds that seem random, but were still placed in a certain area to break up the continuous beat.

As for the meaning I wanted to create a sense of rhythm and focus.  I wanted to show sounds interacting with other sounds of various origins that are not normally heard side by side.  Some sounds have a human element while others have a machine aspect to them.  I also was targeting the continuous sound of hum and drum.  The sound is constant and almost unchanging, aside from the random sounds, change in sound, or change in the rhythm variation.  The piece displays that anything can break up the hum and drum of life and yet, become a part of the flow in the end.

sound cloud practice

wrist crack

Deep Listening

As for my deep listening exercise, I decided to just sit at the kitchen counter late at night after everyone was asleep.  There were a few sounds that were constant such as a fan in the upper rooms and the clock in the kitchen.  In the kitchen sounds were created mostly from the fridge.  It rumbled once at a low pitch with about a medium amplitude.  It did snap on, with a loud thud and proceeded to hum at a low pitch for the rest of the session.  I could also hear noises from the basement like the furnace that consisted of low amp and low pitch rumbles.  There were also several low amp, high pitch beeps that lasted for about a second that probably originated from the softener.  Other sounds were low pitch, low amp rumbles from the house due to wind or just noises that originate from the house settling.  These usually took the form of snaps though.  They came from the walls, the doors, and a few from the outside.  Overall, most of the sounds did not overlap aside from rumbles or sounds that were constant throughout the session.  The beeps seemed to go off every minute or two so time could be followed.  The sounds usually carried associations with machines, nature, or wood.  Finally, the mood of the house was just the quiet of the night creating a peaceful mood with random interruptions breaking through the stillness.

Stop Motion Project

The piece, I called "Kitchen Kick Out!", was constructed using myself as a living model and the kitchen.  The pictures were taken on a tri-pod that was moved for the various different scenes in order to show the illusion of motion in the scenes.  The scenes were also not taken in the exact order and thus, were reordered in Bridge.  The title and ending were shot last on a separate day and thus do not exactly follow the continuity.  The frame rate was set to 10 fps, due to the fact that I could not set it to 12 properly in the program I use at home.  At 12 fps it would have been ended at a little over 31 seconds so I still would have fit the requirements.  Other challenges I faced was with the brightness and flash.  My house even with the lights on is dark so flash was needed in order to light the room.  There was no problem when shooting the intro, but the other scenes had different brightness levels or the coloring was off so the light seems to flash in a few of the frames.  I tried to fix it in photoshop, but I had to eyeball each picture because each required a different editing.  I did try changing the video to black and white to see if it reduced the light flashes, but it did not work and I left it as is.

The conflict in the video is the Kitchen versus me.  The kitchen is given a life of its own and it does not like people trying to take food out of it.  So in order to defend itself it smacks me around a bit and ultimately out of the kitchen.  The kitchen resolves the conflict by the pan to the face at the end as its final act of defiance.  There are various meanings that could be taken from this.  An example meaning could be a creative way to diet where the kitchen forces you to stay out so you do not get any extra food.

story boards

practice stop motion

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