NMA 2050

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw2LnTODAyo

Over the semester I learned new tools to create new media. My inspiration has grown, not only does it come from the art style of anime but it comes from nature as well. I like combining the  real world with my fantasy anime world. My art tries to give off a feeling of daydreaming. Blending reality and imagination is what motivates me to create my work.

For my final project I plan on making a video incorporating the techniques I learned in animation with the techniques I learned in sound art. I will incorporate animation with the real world through photoshop. I plan on adding audio to the animation by making sounds from instruments in real life. I also plan on using sounds from video games.

After watching RiP A Remix Manifesto by Brett Gaylor I was opened up to the true dangers of piracy of songs over the internet as well as how unfair and unjust label records are when dealing with intellectual property. The film is a documentary about the rights to intellectual property but not only for music but for images as well. It starts with the introduction of Girl Talk. Girl Talk is a remix artist. He samples all different kinds of music, taking parts of different songs, editing them and combining them with other songs. What Girl Talk does is called remixing. According to Federal laws, this is illegal and is stealing intellectual property. Intellectual property has two groups of people deciding what to do with it. Those who want to keep intellectual property locked up until it is purchased, and those who want intellectual property to be free for all people and can be used in any matter. The documentary also mentions something called A Remixer’s Manifesto. There are four rules to this. The first one is culture always builds on the past. This is shown in the documentary through the songs of the past being remixed and mashed up in the present. The second rule is the past always tries to control the future. This is shown when the companies that own the songs try to sue people who infringe on the copyrights of songs. The third rule is that our future is becoming less free. This is once again shown when the companies are suing people. They put fear into people and make them unable to mix music or other intellectual property. The fourth and final rule is that to build free societies you must limit the control of the past. This means to stop the suing of intellectual property. The only way for us to advance now is to improve on things of the past without the fear of the past forcing us to stop. I completely agree with the idea of freedom to use any intellectual property. I believe that intellectual property should be shared. Remixes and mash ups should be encouraged. However, I also believe that credit should be given where it is due. So if an artist remixes the Beatles and U2 together he should note somewhere that he uses the songs in his work. Before watching this documentary, I had heard about Girl Talk and had listened to some of his music. I really enjoyed listening to it and it never made a difference to me whether or not the samples he got were legal or not. To me imitation is the greatest flattery. wWhen artists use ideas and things from the past in their present day work, it is like the artist has a great appreciation for the original artist that they want to use some of their songs or drawings. I have no problem with that because I believe that in the present day, there should be no restrictions on creativity.

In Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises it is stated that, “… we get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations of the sounds of trolleys, autos, and other vehicles, and loud crowds, than listening once more, for instance, to the heroic or pastoral symphonies.” This means that people of today are much more capable to listening to clutter and have no problem listening to it. “The ear of an eighteenth century man never could have withstood the discordant intensity of some of the chords produced by our orchestras… on the other hand our ears rejoice in it, for they are attuned to modern life, rich in all sorts of noises.” After listening to “Raiding the 20th Century” by DJ Food I completely agree with this statement from Luigi Russolo. Only we of the present day can take the clutter of sounds from DJ Food’s track and make sense of them. The sounds  produced by music today give us sensations where if a man from the eighteenth century would never be able to distinguish the sounds that they were hearing. They would not have the capability to the drastic switches between the music and the sounds of sirens and people speaking in DJ Food’s track. DJ Food used various sounds and songs of different genres and fused it all together into his work. Russolo says, “The art of noises will extract its main emotive power from the special acoustic pleasure that the inspired artist will obtain in combining noises.” So it is not just the music that we listen to and may be familiar with that makes us pleased with the sounds but it is the changes to them as well. The crashes and roars of other things mixed into the songs is what gives DJ Food his unique style to this mix and what makes it pleasing to the people of today.

You can click here to listen to DJ Food’s track.

This is the link to my haiku site.

In McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto, he talks about who is a hacker and what makes them a hacker. Wark begins by talking about the manifestation of hackers. He talks about how when a hacker hacks codes, they bring forth new possibilities to our world. Wark then talks about abstraction and how hackers have their own class in society. They have this class in order to express themselves to the world. Hackers produce their own form of production. However this production is a repetition of they already produced thing. This creates a production surplus. Wark continues to talk about the hacker class and how they create information from their hacks and how intellectual property. Hackers created the need for private property and the creation of things like patents and copyrights. According to Wark, hackers believe in knowledge. However, they do not believe in education. This  is because to them, education requires obedience. This is something that hackers have no desire for. I found it interesting that to McKenzie Wark, being a hacker means obtaining information and displaying it to the world. Whether the information is good or bad does not matter. I thought that hackers always tried to do bad things And mess with peoples computers. To me hackers always had a negative connotation to them but Wark showed the good that comes from hackers. He explained how hackers only want to share information. Even if the information has a copyright, they still want to share it with the world. I believe that people have a right to whatever information they want to have so I am supportive of this claim. Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto shows how hackers are not necessarily bad. They just want to get all the knowledge they can get their hands on and I do not see any problem with this. In fact, I completely agree with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkLVhOHxlco

In the 1920s Hurd and Barre created an animated show called Soda Jerks. This show featured Mutt and Jeff. Mutt and Jeff were from a comic strip series created by Bud Fisher. The comic was called Mutt & Jeff. In the comics, jokes were usually made with some form of verbal interaction between two character or by a still image of a character getting hurt. However, in Soda Jerks, their gags were mainly created through the animated movements of the characters. Examples of this are when characters would do handstands for joy or some forms of slapstick comedy. The style of the animated show was much different than that of the comic strip. Since the comic strip was not animated, there was no one moving but if they did change poses or were in a different area, it would be in a new frame. However, In the animation, characters were moving freely while on the same frame. Soda Jerks once had an episode where Mutt and Jeff were serving a woman a drink at their soda parlor. Mutt says something to Jeff that angers him so Jeff switches the syrup in a dispenser with tonic. When the woman drinks the tonic she goes berserk and goes into the streets while under the influence of the tonic. This causes a disturbance so more and more people go to see why people are coming out of the soda parlor and acting crazy. So more people become crazy from drinking the tonic. In the show you can see some characters move but, “The parlor and, indeed, many figures throughout the cartoon remain static…”. This is important to show hoe some aspects of animation have no changed from back then till today. Even today there are shows where background characters do not move or even blink, just like this show.