Art and Media

Bill began the lecture this week by stating that technology progresses in a linear fashion, whereas art progresses in a non-linear fashion. This is because new media doesn’t necessarily mean better art. I strongly agree with this because my work I’d say is not influenced by technology in any way I create art because I want to, not because technology has created something new I have to incorporate into my work. I use specific materials, technologies and processes specific to what I’m making, not the other way around. I believe that technology can influence art, but it’s not always the case. Software can only go so far, to create CGI characters, for example.  There must come a point where the ability to create realistic characters in CGI end, whereby they look 100% realistic.  However, the perception of what is photo realistic, I believe, may change slightly over time. Our perception of what is realistic constantly changes because of new media. As I have found, realism plays a big part in the debate between technology and art. I think this will play a large part in my future career as a modelmaker, because I will not be fulfilling my ideas but creating models set to  a brief and initial idea that’s not my own.  

Animation

Animation, is in other terms, cartoon physics. It has only been around for the past 15 years, surprisingly, and relates well to model making. Animation in practice, I guess, is just movement (changing the form of a character). It relates to model making in many ways. Through stop motion, animatronics and puppets. Stop motion is the illusion of movement, whereas puppets are moved by another and animatronics are self moving. These 3 areas are something that really interests me. I love, for example, Aardman, the creators of Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts and Shaun the Sheep etc. They use stop motion animation and movable puppets (models). My favourite Aardman programme has to be Rex the Runt, however. I believe it’s amazing. I really like the materiality of the plasticine models and how you can tell there not real. It makes it more charming, I think. This is one of the first episodes I found on YouTube. I expect I’ll be watching more of these in my spare time now I have reminded myself of them.

Violence and Media

In the seminar this week we talked about genre markers. Various signs, e.g. objects, characters, materials, authenticity, that correspond to a certain film genre. Violence was the theme this week, so that is what we focused on. Violence, is said to be, the depiction of physical acts and there consequences. It’s not always necessarily graphically destructive. For example, in Action Hero Films, there is always an absence of violence portrayed by the hero and he never gets severely hurt as he can always recover. This is an example of a genre marker.

We then all got into groups and Alan gave us four different characters from different genres to design a dagger for; Pantomime Villain, Spy Hero, Cowboy Good Guy and Sci-fi Bandit. My favourite was the Spy Hero...

It had to be disguised, so we decided on the good old pen. It’s small and sly, and something you would expect, yet does the job just as well. It’s shiny and expensive looking.

We also set up a brief outline of a scene, which the dagger could be used in. We thought that the scene would be set in a crowed space, with the spy acting like everybody else, going unnoticed. He would have the pen in his jacket pocket and would slyly get his pen/dagger out and stab a passerby, without attracting any attention. He then slips away without anybody noticing, until it’s too late. The Spy Hero would be long gone.  

Sci-Fi Genre

Bill began the lecture last week with the topic of death masks. A death mask is a wax or plaster cast made of a person’s face following death, which clearly has a relationship with the person that died. He suggested that all photos are reminiscent of death masks. A moment captured in time, never to be recreated again. I can see how people are haunted by the thought that that moment is frozen forever in time. Digital cameras seem to break down the relationship between the photo and the actual moment.

This made me think about all the photos I have taken through the years and all those moments frozen in time. It is quite spooky when you think about it. It’s strange how photos make you remember things so vividly, like they happened just yesterday. It really makes me want to travel back in time and relive those moments again. If only!

After contemplating this for a while I decided to log back on to my old myspace page... oh dear. I used to think I was so cool!

It made me remember so many things and was quite nice in a way.

Although this blog ended up being nothing to do with science fiction, I think it has been one of my favorites to write!

New Media

New media is a condition we all have to respond to. There is always a constant stream of new media evolving every day. Although there is a pressure surrounding it, because there is always something better around the corner, you can do anything you want with it. It’s exciting to live in a world like this. Everybody now has a mobile phone with a camera as standard, a few years ago that wouldn’t have been the case. I expect that in a couple of years time everybody’s phone will have internet access as standard too.

In the lecture Bill then went on to talk about the comparison of new media in video games and films. Films evolved over time by creating suspense and using different angled shots to make them more entertaining and personal to the viewer. Video games, on the other hand still have a fundamental problem with them. There is only two types of game that work, one that that is a repetitive addictive game and the other that is a narrative. The problem with a repetitive game is that it is all game play, whereas a narrative has limited game play and no replay value. Although video games need a solution, it cannot be a similar solution to films because you can’t interact with a film, that is what gives it more power. A game, I think, would be best if it was just like a film but you have the ability to interact with it, sort of like the Sims?  

Structualism and Binary Opposition

Humans see things in pairs. We all have two arms, two legs, two eyes, two halves of our brains etc. We also consider people who have symmetrical faces to be attractive. This makes so much sense that I don't know why I’d never realised it before. We all interpret the world in pairs.

Structuralism is how we interpret and make meaning out of the world. Binary Opposition is a part of that, explaining why we only understand something if we know what the opposite of it is. For example, how could we possibly know what good is if we don't understand the concept of evil. You know someone’s alive when there not dead. We trust in these beliefs and they are a learned response. Just like seeing a cat play with a mouse for fun, we think it’s cruel because we've learned when growing up that killing shouldn't be enjoyed.

However some opposites are not as trustworthy as we might think, because there is always a grey area in between. How can we possibly say someone is pure evil, for example They can't have been evil all their lives, and even if they have, I’m sure they would have done something nice in their time, and like Ivan said they might have stroked a cat once in a while!

How can we tell when life begins? At a certain stage when your growing in the womb? When the sperm meets the egg? When you’re born? This thought enforces the fact that there must be a bit in the middle that no one really understands. When it comes down to the comparison of light and dark, we know that in the evening the light slowly turns to dark to become night, implying that there is a sliding scale of values between both opposites and that there isn’t just two examples. The anomalous zone is considered the bit in the middle, usually where the interesting things happen.

  

When thinking about these opposites I came up with the idea of smooth and rough. I then looked down at my laptop which has a smooth surface yet has a slightly raised patterned on it making it look and feel a bit rough. I assume this means my laptop is in the anomalous zone.





Intertextuality

I found the lecture last week on Intertextuality a real eye opener. The suggestion that art imitates art rather than art imitating life explains that everything we do stems from something else we have seen, heard or experienced. This relates well to models and model making because a model is intertextual. All models are based on other things.



I found the relationship and link between the things you see and what they remind you of really interesting. For example, when Ivan played the film clip of Madagascar in the lecture, even though I knew why he played it (to show the connection between it and the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes) it immediately reminded me of Cast Away and Ice Age. The Madagascar characters made a football into a face just like Tom Hanks did in Cast Away and Melman (the giraffe) from Madagascar caught on fire and reacted in the same way Sid (the sloth) did when he caught on fire in Ice Age. I think these two references were intentional by the film makers, therefore making them conscious intertextuality. If this was not the case however, and I was reading into the film way too much, it would have been classed as unconscious intertextualtiy.



These are awful photos, but you get the idea.

Going back to what I was looking at last week and Anish Kapoor, I saw something this weekend that reminded me of his sculptures. So I guess that means it was intertextuality at work.

I went to Bristol to see a friend on Saturday and we went for a walk near his University. On our walk we saw a large shiny mirrored sculpture, similar to that of Anish Kapoor's work. I think it was a Planetarium? I thought it was really strange after looking at Anish Kapoor last week and then so soon seeing something that really reminded me of him.

I also took a photo of a Banksy painting I saw their which I thought was quite cool. I really don't understand how he manages to paint what he does without anyone seeing!!

Semiotics

The lecture this week on idea of Semiotics confused me slightly. However, when looking back at my notes I think I understand more than I thought. The fact that all babies can understand facial features and many of their toys include faces e.g. dolls, is really intriguing. Even a basic drawing, including two eyes and a line for a mouth, we all still recongnise as a face. I find it quite strange how our minds interpret things in this way. This helped me understand why Semiotics is the study of meaning and that all humans are natural Semiatitions.

In our seminar we looked deaper into reading the sign. We looked at such words as denotation, connatation and myth. I believe that denotation is what is actually there/what the sign is, connotation is what it suggests/how it is photographed and myth is an explanation of how it relates to the world/what it implies. I'm sure as the weeks go on this will all make a lot more sense to me, once I have applied it in the correct way.

This week John asked us all to look at the buildings and the structures around us. He also showed us a video of a BBC Imagine programme about Thomas Heatherwick. It was really interesting and really relavent to the project we are doing at the moment. It also reminded me of when I watched the one about Anish Kapoor a while ago, which I found really inspirational. I remember seeing some of his pieces at Frieze last year and admiring Cloud Gate, the shiny giant bean sculpture in Chicago. I'd love to go and visit that. The other sculpure is another by Anish Kapoor that I saw in the Tate earlier this year.

Realism and Noise

After looking back at last weeks lecture I began to think more deeply about what realism means to me. The word has so many meanings and explanations that I found it quite confusing to start off with. I believe realism is an interpretation of what we see and something that mimics reality. Although, realism is usually based on a photograph rather than the images we actually see. I hadn't thought about this in this way before, but it really does make a lot of sense. Our perception of the world is usually seen through photographs instead of really seeing it. On facebook, for example, I do just assume everyones photos are real.

Further on in the lecture, I remember Ivan talking about 'Uncanny Valley' and it made me think about this random guy who came into the SFX studio earlier that day. He was wearing a human-like plastic mask that looked really realistic but not quite, so it disturbed everyone. It was really creepy and very strange. I don't like things like that.

In the seminar we discusted the Process Model of Communication. I found this really interesting as I had not thought about things in this way before. The idea that all communication starts off with a transmitter that passes on information to a reciever, depending on certain variables such as speaking the same language and sharing the same channel. This all takes part in the notion that every environment has the potential for noise and that there is always a noise:signal ratio. The signal your trying to communicate is always dependant on the noise surrounding it. This then made me think about Art Galleries and how all the exhibites are always presented in plain white surroundings, so to not create any unwanted noise which could distract away from the exhibits. Following that I thought about the Frieze Fair I had missed this weekend in London. I wish I had gone because I really enjoyed it last year. However, a few of my friend's photos she took I thought were quite disturbing. The one of the stuffed dog was horrible :(

Both the lecture and seminar this week really made me see things from a different angle which I enjoyed.