Post #3

While art is arguably the most subjective creation known to man, an artform that creates a near clear divide on love and hatred is graffiti.  Some people see it as an unsightly blight on suburban and urban areas created by miscreants searching for an adrenaline buzz, while others see it as a daring artform that, juxtaposed with its creation and location, sends a meaningful message to all who see it.

Graffiti is an illegal art, so people caught putting it up can be punished with fines of $500 or more depending on the incident.  However, graffiti is a mostly impermanent type of installation art that holds significance and meaning to people all over the world, and should not be treated as a lesser form of art.

Because graffiti happens in impoverished areas, most people perpetrating it are low-income citizens, often people of color as gentrification works.  As with many aspects of other cultures, America is fascinated by it and uses it in their own cultures, but vilifies its roots and the people who established it.  Currently one of the most well-known graffiti artists is a white man, and many other “well-known” graffiti artists are also white, many of them having never lived in the situations that cultivate graffiti artists.

Graffiti as an art form was born from and honed in the cities, particularly in lower-class areas.  The art form itself acts as a medium to transmit the lifestyle of people living in these parts of town, to tell their stories, their struggles.  Graffiti can be beautiful and intricate, and the lengths people go to put graffiti up in hard-to-reach, sometimes perilous places, prove their dedication to their art is the same as any conventional painters’.

Post #2 – Experimental Sound

If you go to the comments section of any 80’s song on YouTube, you’ll see plenty of people debating on what is or isn’t music – that the previous generation’s music was the only real music, and what is on the radio today is not real music.  But what can define music?  Artists such as John Cage and Steve Reich explore this definition in such pieces as 4′ 33″ and Amplifiers, Speakers, and Performers.

In John Cage’s 4′ 33″, the pianist (or other performer) sits with their instrument before a crowd and is completely silent for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.  This takes the performance away from the performer and instead leaves it with the audience – all the coughs and sniffles and shifting papers and fabric now become the “piece”, and it creates a unique experience every single performance.  While this could be argued to not be music, it is still a performance and it holds and inspires meaning.

In Amplifiers, Speakers, and Performers, several microphones are suspended over and in front of speakers and set to swing before working speakers, creating feedback that eventually joins together and builds when all the pendulums come to a halt.

Now, could either of these technically be considered music?  For what even defines music?  Music could arguably be classified as organized sound, but even some music, such as heavy metal or dubstep could be discordant.  As demonstrated by comedy group Axis of Awesome in their performance 4 Chords, most popular songs throughout the ages tend to follow the same four chords over and over – while using the same backbone, they still manage to make distinctly unique songs.  All the same, saying that the music of one generation is more authentic than the others while they all tend to utilize the same musical structure muddies the argument.  If anything, it suggests that music is music so long as it inspires people, regardless of technique or presentation.  In the following video, performer Bobby McFerrin gets his audience to make notes in ascending and descending order as the backdrop to his “song” and with it creates music, using his body and a group of strangers.

Music can be made anywhere with anything in any way, and its elasticity ought to be celebrated instead of debated.

Glitch

Post #1 – Multimedia Objects

When one thinks of a multimedia object, an animation created with a WWII anti-aircraft computer is probably not the first thing to spring to mind.  But that’s exactly with John Whitney, a pioneer in the field of computing and experimental animation, did to create his video “Catalog”.

While the video itself is merely a composition of all his experiments, making it more of a demo reel than a deliberated piece, the video showcases precisely what it needs to – the use of an unorthodox technology to create art.  Such experimentation is the backbone of multimedia, and Whitney does it flawlessly.  The technology itself was used for warfare, to calculate the positions of enemy planes and use the data to fire weapons to shoot them out of the air.  By combining the technology with simple patterns he painted himself, Whitney created dazzling and unique works that test the limits of the computer as well as art.  When Natasha  Tsakos talks about using technology during theatrical performances, she uses it not as “a special effect, but as a partner on stage”.

Manovich equates all multimedia with algorithms in his essay “Database as a Symbolic Form”.  For Catalog, the algorithm, or process used to reach the end goal in the most efficient way, is limited by what the computer can do with its processing.  However, the program was still able to do things and create things that the human hand or mind couldn’t – when given these paintings Whitney made himself, the result was a collaboration between himself and the technology.  Whitney said of the technology that he “[didn’t] know how many simultaneous motions can be happening at once” with the computer, so everything that was composed, though using the same painting, was still completely new and unexpected.

This method of collaboration is apparent in many experimental multimedia projects – Radiohead’s music video House of Cards used programming along with human art to create an interactive piece that one can access and view from any angle.  While the programming creates the general face of the singer, glitches and limitations in the program create a unique experience to mere filmed video.  The singer’s jaw has a tendency to jump forward during certain mouth movements that works surprisingly well with the haunting music and dark, void of an environment.  The interactivity allows for a different experience every time one accesses it.

Multimedia is a genre that both depends on an generates collaboration between the human creativity and the calculating precision of technology in many ways, small and large.  From the simplest form of meme culture on the internet to larger, more integrated pieces such as Whitney’s Catalog, this relationship continues to generate unique pieces of human creation.

https://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/profile/whitney/motion.htm

http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.5/2.5pages/2.5moritzwhitney.html

http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/rh/index.html

 

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