Final Paper Assignment

Jacklyn Yamine

Clint Sleeper

Digital Media- Art 245

December 15, 2014

Living Artist Compare and Contrast

Robot musician Jeff Lieberman and installation artist Don Ritter are only two of the many well know digital media artists in today’s world.  Both artists are well known for their works and other groups of artists that they have worked with from time to time.

Jeff Lieberman is an artist who explores the connections between arts, sciences, education, creativity, and consciousness. Lieberman is from Miami, Florida and has a Bachelor’s of Science in Physics and Math, and a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering and Media Arts and Sciences.  Today he is best known as the host of Discovery Channel’s show “Time Warp”.  He has done many projects that relate to the human conscious, and is continuously exploring how the evolution of consciousness can cease human suffering (bea.st).  He is a part of the group Hypersonic, Plebian Design, and Knolls in which he composes music with Eric Gunther.  He has built multiple sculptures internationally in order to explore our “unseen interconnectedness and interdependence” (bea.st).  Breaking Wave is one of his collaboration projects with his group Hypersonic that have helped to further explore this unseen interconnectedness by showing how people search for some sort of meaning in most things, in this case patterns.  Breaking Wave is an anamorphic kinetic sculpture of 804 suspended spheres that move in a wave-like formation (Hypersonic).  These suspended spheres hang from a large rotating motor with 36 rollers sliding on a linear track in order to create the different forms with the spheres.  For the most part if one were to stand in the same room as this cloud of spheres there seems to be no point to the project, but there are two hidden points, one within the room and one outside in which two different images can be seen, a floral design and a maze.  This shows how when someone changes their perspective on something they can find and discover new things, such as the hidden patterns in these spheres.

Don Ritter is a Canadian installation artist and writer who is currently living in Hong Kong. He works mostly with large interactive video and sound installations that is controlled by the audience’s body position, body movement, or voice.  Many of these installations are meant to show human behavior when one is put into an aesthetically experienced situation (“Don Ritter”).  Ritter is best known for his installation of Intersection from 1993, which is an interactive sound installation installed within a large dark room.  It contains the sounds of car traffic on a four lane highway that seem to be rushing across the dark space and the only light comes from a dimly lit exit sign on the other side of the room.  When a visitor steps into a lane and a car comes the sound of the car screeching to a halt will be heard.  The longer one stands in the lane more cars will come and can be heard smashing into each other.  When the visitor steps out of the lane the car can be heard accelerating as it drives away.  Ritter’s message behind this project is to show what technology is doing to us every day.  He’s making visible the invisible force-field of technology (“Intersection by Don Ritter”).  As McLuhan states that the “medium is the message” as well as an extension of the human being itself, Ritter is sort of reemphasizing this statement because his installation is meant to show us that all this new technology is coming at us so fast that it is literally crashing into us.  The setup consists of eight speakers that sit across from each other in order to create four “lanes” of traffic.  The installation is entirely computer controlled and is setup at random intervals for when a car will be driving in the lane.  Inferred beams sit on top of the speakers in order to detect when someone is standing in the lane and reports back to the computer.  This installation has been show at multiple exhibitions, including an outside installation of Intersection.

These two projects of Breaking Wave by Jeff Lieberman and Intersection by Don Ritter are similar in the sense that they are both meant to show and tell us something about ourselves and the world around us.  Breaking Wave shows how changing perspective can open new doors and allow us to learn something new.  The hidden patterns that can be seen each have a different meaning behind them.  The maze shows for a search for knowledge and the flower reminds us of the natural order and patterns found in nature (Hypersonic).  Intersection shows how technology is hitting us fast and hard, as cars would do if we were to stand on a highway with speeding cars.  Although in his installation the cars don’t make the sound of crashing into people, technology of the real world is crashing into us and we can’t always keep up with it so we become fearful of the unknown that comes with using high technology.  Jeff Lieberman has made some very interactive pieces of art but Breaking Wave isn’t one of them.  This particular piece of art runs on a motor and requires no sort of movement or interaction from the viewer.  However, for Ritter the entire purpose of the project is for it to be interacted with.  While Breaking Wave does help to show how people look at things this particular project doesn't have quite the same meaning and purpose behind it as Ritter’s installation.  Breaking Wave is meant to change one’s perspective, but Intersection is meant to make people become aware of something altogether.  People aren't necessarily aware of how all the new technology is affecting them.

Lieberman and Ritter are both well-known artists in the digital art world and when researching them I have also learned of many other great artists who continue to enhance the meaning of art and what is does to and for the world, as well as to us as a society.  I liked both of these works and how they are meant to show something to society as well as teaching us that we can learn something new when we really take the time to look and notice the things around us.

Works Cited

"Don Ritter." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2014. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Ritter>.

Hypersonic. "Breaking Wave for Biogen- IDEC, Inc." Breaking Wave. Hypersonic, n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2014. <http://www.hypersonic.cc/projects/breakingwave>.

"Intersection by Don Ritter." Intersection by Don Ritter. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2014. <http://aesthetic-machinery.com/intersection.html>.

Jeff Lieberman. n.d. Web. <http://bea.st>

Nifty Fifty. "Exploring the Mystery of Human Consciousness With Roboticist and 'Time Warp' Host Jeff Lieberman. USA Science Festival. One Web Company, n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2014. <www.usasciencefestival.org/schoolprograms/niftyfifty/771-dr-jeff.html>.

Building the Utopia

For this 3D printing project I built what I think a general store or building would look like in the future.  It is a two story building where the extra merchandise and any offices would be on the second floor while the main store is on the first.  The colors that I chose to paint this building are darker shades because I think that as cities and towns grown there won't be very many bright colors on buildings on the outside, but when you go inside it's almost as bright as the sun.

Collaboration Building

Complete Utopia

YouTube Mixer

This is the link to my YouTube Video Mixer:

http://digitalart.unr.edu/student/2014-fall-245/jacklyn-yamine.html

For this YouTube Video Mixer I wanted to bring some of the more emotional and powerful songs together.  Like Bastille's "Pompeii" and Florence and the Machine's "Shake it Out".   I also added in songs that I felt contradicted that powerful feeling from those songs such as Fergie's "L.A. Love".  Becasue this project was almost solely working with code I did have some trouble in getting the videos to play.  I was able to get them to show that they were there, but when I went to the preview of the mixer they all said something about the file not being found, so they couldn't be played.

Chance Video

For this chance video I started with two videos that are each a little more than two minutes long.  I then got a deck of cards and would flip over three at a time to create a specific time in the video. Once I had the number I would go to that point in the video and split it.  Once I felt I had a good number of splits within my video I took my cards, got all of the cards from ace to seven and dealt one card at a time in order to randomly move around the different sections of video that were created from splitting the videos.

Video Reenactment- Not I

Reenactment

Original

 

For this video reenactment I chose Samuel Beckett's "Not I" video from 1973.  Reenacting this video wasn't hard but trying to get the same lighting and angle of the video the same as the original was.  In the original video the actress is wearing black makeup around her mouth and a black cloth with a hole is covering the rest of her face so that only her mouth is highlighted in the video.  I don't have and didn't want to use black makeup by putting it around my mouth, instead I taped my video in a dark room with a flash light highlighting my mouth.  It didn't quite work as I had hoped it would, but with the added affects I feel that it did a pretty good job.  In order to get the correct angle from the original video I would have had more of my own chin showing because I didn't wear any sort of makeup, so I felt that I should just keep the camera at a straight shot on my mouth.  Because I'm not wearing any makeup I had to create my own mask in Photoshop to put over the video.  Creating it wasn't hard but putting it on the video and making sure that my mouth still shows was a little hard because it took a lot of adjustments to get it where I wanted it in order to show my entire mouth throughout the entire video.

This Person by Miranda July

I chose to create a video based on Miranda July's story This Person because it seemed a little more simpler in creating the story and it wasn't too long.  I made multiple women the main character because in the story all you know about the person is that they are a girl, but you don't know if the author is actually telling you a story about herself or a friend or if it is meant to be anyone in the world.  I can also relate to this on an emotional level because there have been times when I am excited to go somewhere or do something but then I might see or hear something that makes me not as excited about that thing as I was before.  So when she no longer feels like returning to the party after not receiving any mail I can really relate to that sort of quick switching of moods.  Making this video was pretty difficult at times because of the images that I had found online and by using stop motion and having to bring each photo into Photoshop separately in order to change it to the way that I wanted it to be in the video.  Most of the images I found online had some sort of white background to them that I had to get rid of, some of them I had to alter a bit in order to fit in the video the way that i wanted it to.

Audio Choices 

The audio that I chose for this story is that of a happier more uplifting sort of sounding music which then changes to a more kind of depressed sounding music.  I did this because in the story, This Person, there is a change in mood by the person in the story when she checks her mail and sees that there isn't any mail for her. At this point she isn't in any sort of a partying mood anymore so she goes home and does what she wants until she goes to bed.  I created this video in premiere elements and it came with its own audio that could be downloaded.

Photoshop Animation w/Sound

Audio and Animation 

Audio Choices

I couldn't upload the audio on it's own so the animation with sound and without sound are uploaded.  The sounds that I chose for this animation are a spooky ambience sound, scary forest sounds, and I added in some owls hooting.  I chose these sounds because when I created the triptychs I was going for what scary animals or things you would find in a dark and scary forest.  Some of the noises include a wolf howling, someone whispering stuff, and other more abstract sounds.  All of these sounds are on top of the chalk sound that was given to us for everyone to use.  Finding these sounds weren't too difficult to find, it was more of the matter of finding the right kind of creepy sounds that I wanted to be portrayed in my animation.  Once I had my compilation of sounds, I had no trouble putting them together with the animation in premiere elements.

Triptych Animation

For the animation of this triptych I simply made most of the animals fade out slowly or almost right away throughout the animation while others moved across the screen at a moderate pace for the length of the animation.  There are a few that seem to pulsate by fading in and out.  I chose to make everything disappear except for the main background images and I made the quote as one of the last images to fade.  Using Photoshop's animation tool was pretty simple once I got the hang of it because that was a tool in Photoshop that I had never used before.

Triptych

This triptych is meant to represent anything that can or may be found in a dark forest, actual or mythical, cute or scary.  For the quotes I found online, I felt that they went along really well with my theme of a dark scary forest.  Finding images was probably the most difficult part of this project because I didn't exactly know all that could be found in a dark forest and finding a good image of a certain animal or creature was hard at times as well.  Once I did have all of my images it was only a matter of where to place them on the canvas.  This became especially difficult when I had to create the other two panels but use the same twenty five images.  Working in Photoshop was pretty simple for me because I have used it for other projects in the past, so I am familiar with the program and had hardly any trouble with moving images or cropping or copying and pasting images as needed.