FINAL SCREENING - - CENTER HALL 214, 5-8pm

Monday Screening

Hola all

If you want to be considered for Monday's film screening
please make sure your videos are uploaded to our communal youtube account - 'vis70hermione', password 'cremaster'. 

I will screen as many films as possible within a 30 min time limit. Please also upload films with your full name and indicate assigment 4/ final project.

THANK YOU for a wonderful quarter.

H

fantastic films section 07, congratulations and don't stop.
or if you must, do this instead:

Final discussion - Remix!

Fair Use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use 
Creative Commons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons#Other_criticism_of_the_non-commercial_license

Patrick Cariou wins copyright case against Richard Prince and Gagosian: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Patrick-Cariou-wins-copyright-case-against-Richard-Prince-and-Gagosian/23387
NY Times on Art and Copyright: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/arts/design/06prin.html

Jeff Koons and Balloon Dogs: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/jan/13/jeff-koons-balloon-dog-copyright

Ai Weiwei - political resistance and online support - image as text: http://hyperallergic.com/40669/ai-weiwei-on-chinese-social-media/
...sensorship and online rebellion: http://hyperallergic.com/41010/ai-weiwei-one-tiger-eight-breasts/

"steal this book"
http://www.dextersinister.org/index.html?id=259

Ghana - Internet and Magic. Sakawa Boys: http://www.vice.com/motherboard/mbd-vbs-the-sakawa-boys
Link to an in-depth (better) article on Sakawa by Alice Armstrong: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/silva/anthropology/research/working_papers/082011

Craig Baldwin (Tribulation 99):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Baldwin

How to find CALIT2: http://maps.ucsd.edu/mapping/viewer/default.htm

Craig Baldwin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Baldwin

Craig Baldwin:

"Collage is the contemporary art. It is the most definitive. Yet it runs absolutely against copyright laws. There are certain assumptions about the usage of other people’s material in order to make money from it. Collage artists take a tiny bit of something from your piece and put it together with a lot of other pieces too and make a distinct whole. We’re not trying to steal your audience. The copyright laws need to be updated in order to deal with this art form."

from Michael: deadlines!

1. UPDATE: We'll have the final video screening on MONDAY, DECEMBER 5th,  from 5pm-8pm - - - in a DIFFERENT lecture-hall:  CENTER 214.
*** TAs will pick the best videos from sections to screen (approx 8 per TA).

2. Students will hand-in their written take-home final-exams on Thursday, December 8th at 7pm at the normal lecture hall.

3.Reminder: We're meeting the lecture at Calit2 at 5pm on Monday!
 

all sorts of good things make the BBC...

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15798589

Yes men get taken to court: 
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/10/27/27greenwire-us-chamber-sues-activists-over-climate-stunt-50982.html

"The defendants are not merry pranksters tweaking the establishment," Steven Law, the chamber's chief legal officer and general counsel, said in a statement. "Instead, they deliberately broke the law in order to further commercial interest in their books, movies, and other merchandise." The movie "The Yes Men Fix the World" opened Friday."

(Yes Men... self contradiction?)

Yes Men, prophetic NY times:
http://laughingsquid.com/the-yes-men-distribute-fake-new-york-times-iraq-war-ends/
http://www.nytimes-se.com/ 

images of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon:
https://www.google.com/search?q=panopticon&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=5aL&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvnsb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=YMXJTt3YLeeQiALQu9S5Dw&ved=0CFMQsAQ&biw=1173&bih=556

surveillance geographies:
http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee.html

other interesting links
men in grey:
http://meningrey.net/rfc14.htm / video: http://vimeo.com/30067349

Monday Discussion

Please come to Monday's discussion armed with proposals for the final video project, and contributions to a discussion on the topics of surveillance and public/ activist art practice. We will spend the first half of class talking about this and the Steve Mann reading, and then will meet with you individually in 10 minute slots like before, to go over assignment 4 (sign-up at the beginning of class). Section 07 I also have your marked mid-term grades ready to give back.

See you there

THANKSGIVING

If anyone is going away early for thanksgiving and won't be able to make next Wednesday's lab/critique, let me know - it may be possible to include you in crit this Friday with section 08. It is important that you all make at least one lab, in order to touch base before final project submission.

Wednesday lab cancelled

I'm in bed with a flu-y thing and probably infectious so won't be coming into school to teach today. I'm sorry as I was looking forward to this crit and seeing your 3rd assignments.
We will hold the critique instead during next week's lab, which will even out the two sections (since we all have next Fri off for thanksgiving).
Please make sure the projects are loaded onto our communal youtube account so I can take a look from home.

re/ assignment 4: This is a fairly open brief that allows you to use practical and theoretical material from classes to inform a project that follows your individual interests.
Remain conscious of the debates we have had regarding
1. sound and image
2. abstraction, the senses, close-up shots and formal representation
3. your use of, and interactions within public space - both as content but also eventual context for your work.

We are not expecting your films to overtly address all of the above as central issues, but hope you will display through your conceptual and practical method a critical awareness of these concerns (which underlie and structure a great deal of contemporary media practice).

Since I won't be there to meet with you about this today, please email me with a project proposal before beginning to shoot.

H

From Cecelia

I found a small clip on youtube about "Moses Pendleton
Presents Moses Pendleton". Just want to say a couple of things: he speaks
in third person and talks about his performance and being the performer,
and the camera does focus more on long takes but does close up shots of
certain movements. The movie itself is pretty interesting (I saw it during
a stage movement class).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVEoMsAQp_c&feature=related 

Final Video Project

FINAL VIDEO PROJECT:

Consider discussions of SOUND, ABSTRACTION and PUBLIC SPACE as material to inform your final video project.

1. propose an experimental video idea to your ta before you begin production.

2. your video project should be experimental in nature.

3 running time should be between 2 and 3 minutes.

DO NOT INCLUDE shots of:
alarm clocks
stuffed animals
running through the eucalyptus grove on campus
masculine self-awareness at la jolla cliffs
menacing stalkers (with knives or hoodies)

taste, abstraction and a 'hierarchy of the senses'

TASTE

The bodily sense of taste has historically occupied a low position within the hierarchy of the five human senses. Aristotle's classical hierarchy of the senses deems "sight" the highest of the senses, followed in order by hearing, smell, taste, and touch (Jutte 61). Philosophers have privileged the "distance" senses such as sight and hearing over the "bodily" sense of taste due to notions that distance from the object perceived yields objectivity (which in turn might lead to knowledge), and proximity to the object perceived yields subjectivity (which implies the risk of self-indulgence) (Korsmeyer 361). This sense hierarchy is not uncontested. Theorists have argued that this hierarchy is not a universal "given," but a social construct influenced by philosophy, human evolution, and technological progress (Jutte 61). Certainly, taste's place within the hierarchy of senses is prone to change as aspects of culture and forms of media change. (http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/taste.htm)

ABSTRACTION

Abstraction begins with action, with lines drawn and a cleavage made.  It is commonly used as a quantity that can be possessed--we can speak of abstraction in painting, in poetry, in thought, in any number of media--yet fundamentally the term necessitates a move, and one with direction.  The OED includes several variations on "abstraction," but all of them involve "withdrawing," "separation," or "removal."  In a specifically philosophical sense, it is defined as "the act or process of separating in thought, of considering a thing independently of its associations." This sense of striping away the context applies to all instances of abstraction.  We should then ask--what is being removed?  If we take seriously the word's etymology, which is to "draw away" or "move away," then abstraction becomes a more oppositional term. It cannot be pinned down to a universal definition but must be thought of in terms of what it is working against. Therefore, it will not do to simply locate abstraction, to speak of abstraction in something, rather be must also consider its origin, in other words, abstraction from something.  Any definition of abstraction will necessarily be a binary one for we must address what is being moved away from.  Abstraction in painting and abstraction in thought will obviously be different because they work within different contexts; they are removals from different locations.  Abstraction will always take a different shape according to the binary it opposes, however, regardless of media, the move will be away from a particular and toward a universal notion.  [see specificity]  That element of the particular which is common to all situations will be lifted out and examined in its reified form.  Contained in all abstraction is the sense of removal, of paring away, of purification.

Clement Greenberg, art critic and champion of abstract painting, saw art's natural course to be a purification of medium and the elimination of the influence of other media.  [see purity]  In his essay "On Abstract Art" (1944), he declares, "Let painting confine itself to the disposition pure and simple of color and line, and not intrigue us by associations with things we can experience more authentically elsewhere" (Greenberg 203).  In Greenberg's hierarchy, abstract art is the pinnacle of the medium because it has succeeded (according to Greenberg) in stripping away other media.  Art that is representational too easily suggests narrative and thus panders to literature.  Such mixing of media Greenberg dismisses as "kitsch," palatable for the masses but not the "pure and simple" form that he would like to see.  The art that Greenberg prized was the Abstract Expressionist work being done in New York, especially that of Jackson Pollock.  Looking to Pollock's work for an idea of abstraction, we first try to name what it moves away from.  His paintings react against the figurative tradition.  There are no recognizable images in his work after 1948, no replication of reality, no constructions from the imagination, but only paint.  For Greenberg, Pollock's work is abstract precisely because it is so involved with its own materiality.  Divorcing itself from the figure and implicit narrative, the paintings move away from literature.  Pollock's work can then be seen as abstract in two senses, moving away from representation and moving away from other media, both based on slightly different understandings of abstraction's binary.

http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/abstraction.htm

link to next week's reading - Steve Mann, "Reflectionism" and "Diffusionism" - for Nov 21st

http://wearcam.org/leonardo/reflectionism.htm

Janet Cardiff (collaborating with Geroge Bures Miller)

Contemporary artists working sight-specifically. Sound as medium. Audio walks. 



http://www.cardiffmiller.com/index.html

Missing Voice, case study B: http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/missing_voice.html 
Mallins' Night Walk: http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/mallin.html