Intro to New Media Arts- Brandon Rodriguez

To me art has to have emotion. A feeling is what drives an artist to put paint to canvas. Whether its anger towards current events or to incite fear within the viewer or listener the art should convey passion. Sometimes the thoughts precede the strong feeling or urge you have when creating the art. This is what I hope to include in some of my work from here onward. Though the technical skill or fine art methodology may not be apparent in my work, my work will do its best to compliment this lack of skill with a message or an strong idea. The message may not be told with a straight face all the time, after all I am not the most serious of people, but the words hidden in the message are to be taken seriously. As stated before I dont want my message to be repeatedly hitting on the head of my audience, I’d like them to come out of the piece with their own ideas. To me art should be a conversation with the audience. The artists provides an idea or message and the audience comes out with more questions or thoughts.

I hope to continue my work in the medium I found the most enjoyable for expressing my ideas. I enjoyed the pieces I created in animation and audio the most because these pieces had motion to them which helped to convey my emotion. The pieces allowed me to create beginnings and ends in my head even though the beginnings and ends to my ideas are never really clear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeDF-NXebXA&feature=youtu.be

In my final project I hope to highlight the current events regarding race and police brutality, through  animation and audio. I hope to highlight the fear in which people of color must live in and the struggle of speaking our voice without falling into stereotypes. I hope to utilize audio to exemplify the sounds of frustration and confusion. My visuals will hopefully match this disarray through interpretations of media coverage and use some humor to poke fun at ridiculousness that followed the decision on the Ferguson case.

I am a huge fan of Girl Talk and mash up culture and I found this film to be an interesting representation of defending it . Because media is controlled by copyrights, people are under the impression that these works of art are owned solely by the artist and the labels/companies. What these labels fail to see especially in recent times is that the control of ownership has shifted as the internet advances it’s methods of media consumption. With free sources such as youtube and limewire, people download and stream music at their own leisure which gives them the control to consume. What these powers (labels) assume is that people will try to seek profit off such “illegal” consumption but what I fail to understand is how this would be possible or what example of this exists? Artists like Girl Talk and The Hood Internet take these songs and compile them into their own albums but they have never asked for money with these projects, they are always released for free. Whether this was done by these “mashers” out of respect for the sampled artists or out of fear of the label remains to be seen but what is is seen is that the grounds on which these labels stand on is corroded.

I absolutely agree with this manifesto in the film, the past tries to control the future for some profitable reason but art ultimately is first and foremost for audiences not for control. It would be hard to imagine a world where art exists in a vacuum remains untouched as time moves on and art in the future is forced to pull from nothingness. As the say goes “nothing comes from nothing” everything is influenced by something just some artists are more outright than others. For instance when hip-hop artists starting came out of the dance,funk,r&b scenes of the late 70s and early 80s and  as an ode or nod to these styles they would sample vocals from old soul songs or bass lines from funk songs. At that time artists were using record digging as a way for them to circumvent paying for samples at ridiculous prices. So these rap djs would find the most obscure and out dated samples so that they would avoid copy right laws. This trend would later be adopted by hip-hop artists of today but instead of finding obscure songs they would obscure popular songs through various manipulations whether it’s sped up or slowed down vocals.

My point being is that limiting art to numbers and “rights” is wrong. Though i also am against not giving credit to the original artists. Music is made for the people so when an artist comes around and asks for money after making it available to the internet especially after someone has bought it themselves is a bit hypocritical. So to me so long as the artists being sampled are being given credit and ownership of the newly created project (not monetary ownership) all is fair. Though what i may being saying also is contradictory it should be clear that changes are currently being made as more and more services become available to consume unlimited amounts of music for free or small fees and more and more artists utilize samples in their work.

http://bfpa.dreamhosters.com/nma2050/brandon/

Now I should get my bias out of the way now by stating that Sigur Ros is one of my favorite bands of all time. I discovered them at an age where my mind was grasping for sounds that evoked feelings of heaven (if such a thing truly exists) or that had a quality of beauty that could not be understood but can certainly be felt. When listening to their ep “Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do, I went in with the ears of a long time fan and with “the art of noise” as my eyes. This soundtrack piece adds an interesting facet to the idea of reaching for new sounds that our ears may not yet be familiar with, as noted in “the Art of Noise”. To use the vocabulary provided by the six categories of noise, Sigur Ros manage to touch upon 3 of them. Aside from the various delicate, moody keys being plucked and the constant drone of what sounds like xylophones, one cannot allow the other noises to pass by. At one point during “Ba Ba” one can hear what sounds to be a disembodied voice of a human but the its pitched so high and integrated so quietly in the mix that one would hear it as another instrument. As the piece fades to the next movement, one can hear all these “voices” stand out on their own alongside these various twinkles of keys. In the second piece “Ti Ki” this progression of keys build and transpire to what eventually becomes more whispers and rustling from a disembodied voice. As the manifest states, these noises must not be watered down to mere imitations of noises that we have already been exposed to. Sigur Ros definitely combine recognizable keys and chime instruments with these various rustling, hissing, whirring, and winding noises in the background. Sigur Ros make it obvious that they seek to explore and introduce unique sound-scapes to recognizable and emotional worlds.

http://www.ubu.com/sound/sigur.html

I’ve always stereotyped Hackers as being these creeps who “troll” people from the safety of their computer screens in an attempt to amuse or benefit themselves. After reading Wark’s manifesto, it became apparent to me that his idea of a hacker is a little different than mine. He perceives the hacker as one who betters those around him or those who are in lower in  class than those who are in control. Upon reading this I could not help but think of the hacker groups like “Anonymous” and how they attack high authorities and spread information for the masses. But there are also groups that terrorize and harm in case of the Sony servers attack from Lizard Squad a few years ago.

To Wark Hackers seem to exist without a knowing purpose or suffer a “crisis of identity”. He paints them as these lost souls who lack a consciousness when in my opinion hacking arises out of a demand for control or change. For instance in gaming culture, hacks tend to arise out of either selfish acts (invulnerability in an online shooting game) or bringing freedom or information to others (such as expanding on a games maps or mechanics).

I think when someone decides to hack they have a intention in mind and its not so mindless as Wark seems to make it. Hackers tend to find others that are like them as opposed to discovering a “collective interest in discovering a relation among hackers”. Hence why hacker groups and forums exist like Anonymous and Lizard Squad. These groups are individual hackers who come together with similar ethos and ideas but may not have an “an open and ongoing future”. Not having a in sight future, for any niche group, that welcomes collaboration is not an uncommon factor though. Of course you will have hackers competing for higher recognition or stakes but that can be said about any fledgling anti-establishment movement. It must be given time in order to see its true intentions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tISAf7L80-U&feature=youtu.be

I found the section of the reading that talked about Disney and the “realness” behind animation to be very interesting. In analyzing animated films nowadays one does not take into account the realism of the world. As the reading states we expect the characters to act and sound as they would in real life but they lack the physical look of realness. What really intrigued me is how Disney’s earlier films started out as almost experimental films, testing the line between realness and fakeness. The fact that Disney himself strived to move animation in the direction of realism astounds me. He felt the need to adopt the same aspects that go into a live action for his animated films. What would have been interesting to see in this passage or shown in the article someplace is the difference between eastern and western animation. Since anime has been such a big medium for so many years, its interesting that some genres within anime reject any notions of realism. While yes they do act and move like people, sometimes the characters will contort their bodies or widen their eyes in a very unrealistic manner to further display emotion. Since Disney was moving towards realism it would be interesting to see who was spearheading the movement in the opposite direction.

What I also wondered was when animation first started to move to realism were audiences accepting of this or were they thrown aback? Because I know that when documentary film was first introduced, people believed they were getting the truth but felt cheated when it was revealed they were not. So I wonder if people felt cheated that this new form of visual art that was all about not looking real was all of a sudden being pushed towards looking more and more real.