MADT202 diary

Timeline

Sept 13 – Introductions. Animations starts. Photoshop Image prep overview. Bring mags/paper for next class, if you want additional material. Scanner in back of room is available outside of class time during the week. 

Sept 20 – After Effects Introduction. Work period for animating, scanning, questions. 

Sept 27 – Animation work period continued.

Oct 4 – Animations due. Short screening. Experimental film project (Collab) starts. Camera review, 2 groups formed, scheduling of shoot days, other prep details. Workshop exercise for film shoot.

Oct 11 – Studio shoot day for booked group times (everyone helps out)

Oct 18 – Film footage returned, editing in Adobe Premiere.

Oct 25 – Film Projects due - screened in class. Crits/Discussions. Soundscape Project begins. Intro to Audition/Ableton Live (limited licenses). 

Nov 1 – In-class tutorial on compression, EQ and FX. Work period with individual assistance. 

Nov 8 – Sound Projects due. Video Loop Project (Collab) begins. 4k cameras explained (limited access). Bookings for studio access (Rm 595) should be made with Alex Moon (A/V suite) & instructor. 

Nov 15 – Premiere overview, Proxy Media explained. Shooting in 595 (see schedule). 

Nov 22 – Shoot day (see schedule) – In-class work period. Check-in with instructor. 

Nov 29 – Final check-in/Work period. Consultations with instructor regarding project (schedule a time). 

Dec 6 – Final crits for Video Loop Projects. Wrap up.

Assignment 1 - Animation: Cut-out Animation Histories, Theory & Practice

Overview:

In this section we will explore various histories of experimental and cut-out animation through the screening of films, discussions and hands on practice with various tools related to the production of animated films. This approach will embody principles of traditional animation techniques (the animation stand) with contemporary uses of digital software (post-film techniques, use of the Adobe Suite).

Technical Resources:

Photoshop tutorials

After Effects Tutorials

Control Speed tutorials

ASSIGNMENT 2: Experimental Film Loop 

Make a 30 sec. video loop, from the 1-minute film material, that documents a group performance driven by rhythm. These movements will become the basis for your film. Think about the emotive qualities of common or unusual expressions, as well as elements of choreography in order to take the viewer from one point/location to the next. Your group must have the following roles assigned before shooting. 1 Director 1 Assistant Director 1 Director of Photography 2 Production Assistants/Grips The loop will require: - 1 close-up shot - 1 medium shot - 1 wide shot For this assignment you will be asked to think about techniques related to cutting on motion, as well as conceptualizing a relation to gesture through the use of the body.

Examples:

Turtle Dreams

Songs Of Ascension

Hand Movie

Hand Catching Lead

 Assignment 3: Soundscape Compositions via Sampling & The Use of Voice

Create a soundscape composition that is approximately 2 minutes in length that uses human voice (your own, another? multiple?). The composition should include other sampled sounds, but the use of the voice should be the primary element of the work. The criteria for this project will involve you accessing the technical resources provided during class time to sample edit and manipulate sounds.

Articles:

The Art of Noise

The Sound Object, and the Acousmatic Reduction

Assignment 4: Project Description & Outline 

Look at the assigned video screenings and consider the different methodologies and approaches to studio-based experimentation and practice. The topics covered are widespread: 

Sexuality, Gender, The 'Average Person', Humour, Art making, Process-Based Phenomenological Investigations in the Studio...(the list goes on) 

Though each work takes a unique approach to topics that are wildly diverse within these categories, their primary connection is the way in which these artists use the controlled studio environment as a space for performance. These are works that are made for an audience. They confront us with the physical presence of another person (or persons) as a way of exploring subjects and topics that sometimes use humour as a strategy for criticism. Other times, the direct acknowledgement of the audience (the 'breaking of the 4th wall' in cinema) can also be a way of broaching topics that otherwise might be challenging to discuss. In some instances, this is a direct engagement and acknowledgement of the audience through the documentation of a process-based exploration (Donegan, Nauman). In other instances, the presence of the audience is more implicit in the medium like a public access cable television show (Rosler, Silver, Baldessari). 

This assignment will be about these relationships to performance, experimental narrative (i.e. scripting, words/text, deconstructing language) and putting yourself 'out there' in the sense of how you want to challenge the audience about the things that are the most trivial to you, or, the most important. 

Video Screenings:

Cheryl Donegan Bio:
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Cheryl Donegan defines a generation of artists, many of whom are women, who burst onto the scene in the 1990s with a new conceptual art practice. Donegan's work integrates the time-based, gestural forms of performance and video with forms such as painting, drawing, and installation. Direct, irreverent, and infused with an ironic eroticism, Donegan's works put a subversive spin on issues relating to sex, gender, art-making, and art history.

In a series of provocative tapes that define a new mode of video performance, Donegan creates exercises in masquerade, role-playing, and exposure. Using her own body as metaphor, she executes performative actions before the camera; these conceptual performances often result in or relate to process paintings and drawings.
Donegan's works draw from a panoply of pop cultural and art historical references, from Jean-Luc Godard to the Beach Boys, from punk music to Barnett Newman's "zips" and Pollock's splatter paintings. In her paintings, performances, and installations, Donegan often refers to the processes of art-making in the context of art history, including high Modernism and Abstract Expressionism.

Selected video:
Kiss My Royal Irish Ass (K.M.R.I.A.) (1993, 5:47 min, color, sound)

In this performance at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Donegan uses her body as an art-making tool, and toys with identity politics as well: She forms shamrocks on paper by squatting in green paint.

Check out Cheryl Donegan's other videos here.

Shelly Silver Bio:
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“To watch the moving-image art of Shelly Silver is to understand that, among other messy civic values on which democracies rely—free access to public space, for instance, and a willingness to transgress comfort zones⎯democracy relies on empathy. And empathy relies on fantasy, and fantasy is always partial, entwined with misperception, unpredictable, perverse. “Being-for-others,” in Silver’s feminist sense, amounts less to the alienating instrumentalization of the individual by a masterful observer, and more to the feeling that civic space is a matrix of hallways, doorways, rooms and streets, glimpses and confrontations, in which to see is to acknowledge and co-create, because everyone is looking all the time.

Silver has been making films since 1980. She works with actors and non-actors alike, and has interviewed extensively on the streets of Berlin, Tokyo, New York; she has a writer’s ear for the idiosyncrasies of unrehearsed speech, and a painterly eye for real-world color. Monologue, voiceover, and onscreen text interweave in her collaged narratives, and the oneiric precision of her editing allows the long take to shatter into split screens, to fold in time to repeat itself from other angles, or to speed into jump cuts, almost without the audience being aware that anything radical has occurred. This visual and verbal fluidity, in which points of view shift constantly into each other—so that no lulling cinematic suture ever captures us, but no traumatic rupture shocks us either—correlates to Silver’s vision of what it means to be a person in a city in the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first. For Silver, living in the existential apartment-house with fellow citizens means looking out the window, scoping on the street, eavesdropping, quoting, meeting strangers and having awkward, excited, unexpectedly candid talks. To look, and to let oneself be seen, is to feel the Other present everywhere, becoming and failing to become the self, and it is not a nightmare. It’s a pleasure⎯and like all pleasures tinged with ambiguity, with risk.” Frances Richard

Shelly Silver is a New York based artist utilizing video, film and photography. Her work, which spans a wide range of subject matter and genres, explores the personal and societal relations that connect and restrict us; the indirect routes of pleasure and desire; the stories that are told about us and the stories we construct about ourselves.

Selected video:
Shelly Silver - Meet the People (1986)

Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, truth and artifice, Meet the People presents fourteen 'characters' who face the camera in talking head close-ups and speak about their lives and dreams. The intimacy and honesty of their fragmented, 'autobiographical' storytelling is illusory; the credits reveal that these people are professional actors, playing fictional roles, reading a script.

The work points to the complicity on the part of the viewer in his desire to believe and identify with the traditions of and characters on TV. The same television that mimics a perfected form of identity of the 'average person' is also in part responsible for creating this identity; it both researches, uses and manufactures this 'average person's' hopes and dreams. And so the question of the existence of a 'real' person becomes 'real' compared to what?

"The fictions of the self overtly concern Shelly Silver in her tour-de-force Meet The People. In video verite style, she swiftly intercuts what appear to be her interviews of 14 individuals representing contemporary New York types: a cabby, a waitress, a housewife, a stripper, an Italian construction worker, a black army officer. At the end the credits reveal that all 14 are actors and all were apparently reading Silver's script.... Silver wittily questions the very idea of the authentic - ultimately she implies, 'personal truth' is a momentary and collaborative invention, a triborough bridge between actor, author-director, and audience - on TV and on the street." Anne Hoy, Curator, International Center of Photography

John Baldessari Bio:
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A major figure in contemporary art, John Baldessari has been termed "one of the most influential artists to emerge since the mid-1960s." From his phototext canvases of the 1960s to his composite photo collages and installations of the 1980s, Baldessari has contributed to the definition of postmodern art. His ingenious application of certain art-making strategies — including appropriation, deconstruction, decontextualization, sequentiality and text/image juxtaposition — was prescient, as was his cogent and witty integration of semiology, linguistic systems and mass media.

As one of the seminal figures in the language-based Conceptual Art movement of the early 1970s, Baldessari produced a series of videotapes in which he conducted ironic investigations into perception, meaning and interpretation. Rendered with deadpan, often absurdist humor, these droll conceptual exercises make use of cultural artifacts, from film stills and magazine photos to art historical in-jokes, as frameworks for irreverent philosophical inquiries into art and knowledge. With a cunning reliance on misrecognition and misinformation, Baldessari uses irony and incongruity to exploit the gap between what is heard, what is seen, and what is understood. His wry investigations of representation and sign systems succeed through strategies such as the ironic juxtaposition of photographic or video images and written or verbal texts; the use of appropriated material and found objects to underscore the embedded meaning of pop cultural genres; the construction of disjunctive narratives and surreal conjunctions from re-contextualized words and images, and the indexing of objects of actions.

Many of his exercises take the form of parables, allegories, or "art lessons," as Baldessari the performer assumes the role of teacher or storyteller. His fascination with jokes, dreams, aphorisms, sight gags and linguistic pranks, which are linked to Freudian notions of unconscious associations and verbal and written "slips," evoke the visual puns and word games of Dada and Surrealism. Pervaded with reference to art-making and art history, and responding to the tenets of minimalism, performance and Conceptual Art, his tapes question the very limits of art, and form an irreverent critique of modernist practices. Baldessari playfully compels the viewer to question not only the system under investigation — language, representation, narrative, art-making — but also the tools by which the interrogation is being conducted (photography, video, cinema) as conveyers of truth. Ultimately, Baldessari's idiosyncratic, often absurdist logic questions the very process of perception, from vision and meaning to cognition and knowledge.

Selected videos:
Teaching a Plant the Alphabet by John Baldessari (1972)

[A] rather perverse exercise in futility,” this tape documents Baldessari’s response to Joseph Beuys’s influential performance, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Baldessari’s approach here is characteristically subtle and ironic, involving ordinary objects and a seemingly banal task. The philosophical underpinnings of Baldessari’s exercise are structuralist theories about the opaque and artificial nature of language as a system of signs. Using a common houseplant to represent nature and instructional flashcards to represent the alphabet, Baldessari ironically illustrates this theorem. That language is the structuring element of the tape—the length of the tape was determined by the number of letters in the alphabet—enforces the connection between language and art, a recurrent theme in Baldessari’s work.

For some context, here is a video with a brief clip of the Beuys piece & a longer conversation with Beuys on his intentions behind the work:
Joseph Beuys - English Subtitles - How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare - (Performance - 1965) Interview

Some complimentary strategies to our previous investigations into subversive narrative/storytelling. Great ideas for studio based prop/object setup as well:

Title by John Baldessari 1972

More John Baldessari video links here.

Bruce Nauman Bio:
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Born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Bruce Nauman studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin before receiving an MFA from the University of California at Davis in 1966. By the late 60s Nauman had earned a reputation as a conceptual pioneer in the field of sculpture and his works were included in the groundbreaking exhibitions, Nine at Castelli (1968) and Anti-Illusion (1969). He began working in film with Robert Nelson and William Allen while teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. He produced his first videotapes in 1968, describing the transition from film to video thus: "With the films I would work over an idea until there was something that I wanted to do, then I would rent the equipment for a day or two. So I was more likely to have a specific idea of what I wanted to do. With the videotapes, I had the equipment in the studio for almost a year; I could make test tapes and look at them, watch myself on the monitor or have somebody else there to help. Lots of times I would do a whole performance or tape a whole hour and then change it. I don't think I would ever edit but I would redo the whole thing if I didn't like it." Using his body to explore the limits of everday situations, Nauman explored video as a theatrical stage and a surveillance device within an installation context, influenced by the experimental work of Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass.

Selected Videos:
Bruce Nauman - Violin Film # 1 (Playing The Violin As Fast As I Can) (1967-68)

Violin Film #1 (Playing the Violin as Fast as I Can), is one of several 1967-68 films featuring Nauman's violin-playing, in which the production of sound is subjected to procedural strategies that problematize its status as music and performance. In what could be considered a further displacement, the soundtrack to this film was included in Nauman's Record (1969), a limited-edition vinyl-LP. -- EAI

Dance or Walk on the Perimeter of a Square (1967)
For this film, Nauman made a square of masking tape on the studio floor, with each side marked at its halfway point. To the sound of a metronome and beginning at one corner, he methodically moves around the perimeter of the square, sometimes facing into its interior, sometimes out. Each pace is the equivalent of half the length of a side of the taped square. He uses the hip-swaying walk in Walk with Contrapposto. - EAI

Interesting and humorous modern version:
"Walking in a Gamic Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square" gameplay video - a game mod by Andrew McCully

Martha Rosler Bio:
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In her work in video, photo-text, performance, critical writing and installation, Martha Rosler constructs incisive social and political analyses of the myths and realities of contemporary culture. Articulated with deadpan wit, Rosler's video works investigate how socioeconomic realities and political ideologies dominate ordinary life. Presenting astute critical analyses in accessible forms, Rosler's inquiries range from questions of public space to issues of war, women's experiences, and media information.

Questioning the relation of the corporation, the state and the family, media information and the individual, and public and private, she exposes the internalized oppression that underlies such cultural phenomena as the objectification of women (Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, 1977); anorexia and starvation (Losing: A Conversation With The Parents, 1977); and surrogate motherhood (Born to be Sold, 1988).

Densely layered, her tapes merge performance-based narrative dramatizations, documentary elements, mass-media images and factual texts, and often employ litanies of statistics, systems of classification, and enumeration to disrupt the signs of the everyday. For example, of the classic Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Rosler writes that an "anti-Julia Child replaces the domesticated 'meaning' of kitchen tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration."

Writing about her work, Rosler has stated: "I want to make art about the commonplace, art that illumines social life. I want to enlist video to question the mythical explanations of everyday life that take shape as an optimistic rationalism and to explore the relationships between individual consciousness, family life, and the culture of monopoly capitalism. Video itself isn't 'innocent': it is a cultural commodity often celebrating the self and its inventiveness. Yet video lets me construct, using a variety of fictional narrative forms, 'decoys' engaged in a dialectic with commercial TV."

Selected Video:
Martha Rosler - Reads Vogue - 1982
In this live performance for Paper Tiger Television's public-access cable program in New York, Rosler deconstructs the messages in Vogue and its advertising. Rosler looks at the institutional slants of the magazine industry and the fashion industry's reliance on sweatshops.

Paul Woodrow - Cover Up

The password for the video is: cover

Paul was a Calgary based artist who had a significant impact on the Calgary art scene in the 1970s. This is a video he asked me (Carl) to help him digitize (he was my supervisor at the U of C when I did my MFA). This was filmed in the mid 70s at a time when equipment was scarce and hard to access. He made this video at a commercial television studio (CFCN?) sometime in the mid 1970s.

WIllie Doherty - Vimeo Page

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While the content isn't specifically studio based, have a look at Willie Doherty's work as a way of contextualizing an understanding the format of the video loop and the power of duration as a method for creating tension and visual analysis among an audience:

Selected Clips:

Willie Doherty - Non-Specific Threat (2005)

Willie Doherty - Remains (2013)